Used Cars with Jason Mantzoukas & Paul Scheer

[00:00:01] Blank Check with Griffin and David Blank Check with Griffin and David Don't know what to say or to expect All you need to know is that the name of the show is Blank Check This movie's got good lines

[00:00:35] Yeah, this movie's got some nice, like, scummy monologues to wrap your mouth around This movie feels like any room in any residence that Charlie Sheen has ever lived in It's got good lines! Still! Okay, alright, alright They're still there! That's my argument Had you seen this movie before?

[00:00:58] No, I'd never seen this movie before Our guest, had you seen this movie before? I have never seen this movie. I thought it was a Ron Howard movie I don't know why in my mind I always associated Used Cars as like Ron Howard's first directorial debut

[00:01:16] Well, there's Grand Theft Auto, right? Yes, because it's also a Cars movie Right, and in a certain way this feels like it could have been a Ron Howard Michael Keaton comedy Not the final product, but on paper

[00:01:31] You're like this could have been the thing that happens right after Night Shift Well by the way, this is the closest thing we have to a Back to the Future prequel I mean this is all the power players that made Back to the Future made this movie

[00:01:45] And there are zero similarities Like if you put these two movies together You'd be like alright, who are the same behind-the-scenes players You'd be like oh no one and it's everyone They have like opposite visions of America, these two movies basically I've never seen this as well

[00:02:04] But this to me, I was like, because I don't know what I was expecting something different and what it was made me so happy Because this is the kind of movie that I feel like isn't, not only isn't done anymore

[00:02:17] But very quickly after this period isn't done really at all Like I feel like Used Cars has more in common with like Smokey and the Bandit Than it does Back to the Future Like then it does, I almost feel like it's Robert Zemeckis doing something at a time

[00:02:34] When there is like blue collar scumbag anti-heroes are like the lead of movies Rousing people to help them combat usually cops or judges or whatever But this to me, that kind of shaggy bad guy is the good guy kind of thing That's like Burt Reynolds, that's Hooper

[00:03:03] That's Burt Reynolds movies of the 70s It's Burt Reynolds movies of the 70s and Bill Murray movies of the 80s Like the exact cross section between those two movie star runs I will also say this movie, there's an inherent like horniness to this movie

[00:03:17] And it's not like a sexual horniest but there is like, there's a very like I don't know adolescent young man energy Smutty, it's a weird thing, you just don't see movies like this And Smokey and the Bandit doesn't even have that

[00:03:34] And I'm gonna use that term again like horniness It's just like there's something very unique about here It's like we're gonna blow up shit, we have strippers You know it's like there's some energy

[00:03:45] Yeah it's got that kind of like early Landis thing, you know the Kentucky Fried movie right? Yeah Even like Bad News Bears has this Even like they're like just like that the guys you're following And it's like you could not have

[00:04:00] This movie doesn't work without Kurt Russell in many ways No way You know like Kurt Russell at a time in a place where he is showing you so well that he can both straddle

[00:04:12] What is capable of being like the slimy, smarmy kind of guy who is cheating people Like legitimately that opening crane down from like the lot into him dialing back the odometer Is perfect, it's like here is this guy, he's a piece of shit

[00:04:31] And then the whole movie is just him being a charming hero And that is fucking amazing Well look, no Paul, worry you say sorry No no go ahead, sorry I'm gonna do the proper intro so I'll let you see it No intros, this episode No intros!

[00:04:51] We will end intro We're gonna end intro Fine, great there we go So I'll say what I was gonna say which is just I've been digging deep into this run of the early Gale Zemeckis movies

[00:05:07] And I won't explain why because I'm not intro-ing the show or explaining our central premise But I've been watching these movies obviously and also watching all the special features And trying to find any interviews I can

[00:05:19] And there are two things that really stuck out to me while watching this movie One is Gale was saying in some interview I think it might have been on the special features for used cars That Francois Truffaut always said that a filmmaker's second movie

[00:05:33] Is always in direct opposition to their first film In one way or another whether their film was a success or a failure Once again, I'm not explaining why that's an interesting theme to this show Because that intro will come later

[00:05:47] But whether their first film is a success or a failure Their second film is in some way a direct response to that And usually trying to play the opposite of that Either now that I've done this well, I want to try to flex this other thing

[00:05:57] Or because that was a failure, I need to zoom in another direction And despite I want to hold your hand, their debut film being great did not do well And so this was very much like that was PG

[00:06:08] It was pretty soft, it was pretty gentle, it was pretty humane Let's make the most like anarchic, socially irresponsible, all-rated, gonzo comedy we can And the second thing is that in between this and Back to the Future

[00:06:22] Is Ramassing the Stone, which was the one movie that Zemeckis didn't write Because he had two flops in a row, he said I'll take a script that someone else wrote I just need a hit But Back to the Future is the third proper like Zemeckis-Gale collaboration

[00:06:35] And when they were pitching it, everyone said this isn't marketable If you're making a comedy, it has to be porkies or it has to be stripes So they had just made a movie that was like Porky and Stripes That was a flop

[00:06:51] And they were pitching Back to the Future and everyone was like If you're going to make this movie, the lead guy has to be a Bill Murray Like an anarchic fuck the powers that be guy Or the film has to be a Ryebald sex comedy or both

[00:07:03] You can't make a gentle movie about a guy trying to help his dad get a date And so this movie exists in such a weird specific pocket of Galen Zemeckis Doing this thing incredibly well that feels like it's not necessarily what they are most driven to

[00:07:19] And this is one of only two R rated movies that Zemeckis ever made The second one is Flight Well, I want to talk about comedy and Zemeckis and comedy And then go a little bit further out and talk about Spielberg and comedy

[00:07:33] Because I love Spielberg but in comedy and Spielberg I don't know what his sense of humor is right? And I feel like this movie- We were talking about this on our last episode Spielberg and comedy is very weird

[00:07:48] Exactly and I feel like in a weird way this is Spielberg's sense of humor Because he's like, I want to continue working with these guys I think this movie is like a sledgehammer comedy And what I mean by that is that odometer scene that Jason's talking about

[00:08:03] You know the music that kind of underscores it It's so big, it's so bombastic When they hit jokes here Oh it's like John Philip's Sousa marches Yes That are used throughout the movie to give you this sense of like old timey

[00:08:17] Like grand kind of like Americana kind of bullshit But then juxtaposing it with someone who is acting in direct opposition To what those kind of patriotic marches represent It's uprising music Yes Committed to a swindler and a shitbag Yeah I mean, but in a weird way

[00:08:37] You- the kind of thing that works really well And I know that we're talking about Bill Murray being like this You know, a guy who is against the system But Kirk Douglas makes a shitbag likeable I think you could always argue that Bill Murray could be

[00:08:50] Unlikeable to other people But in this movie, Kurt Russell is likeable pretty much to everybody But the guy that he's against, right? The other Fuchs brother Which by the way, why did I know I was going to love this movie?

[00:09:04] When it said in the credits, Jack Warden as the Fuchs brothers A slam dunk You can sit back You can do a roll, Jack Warden I was like, I was so excited When I saw that he was playing two rolls

[00:09:18] That was and was bummed when he died young in one of the rolls Or died early rather He is a great shithead and he's a great good old pal He's great at both He's great at both And he's like, why don't I just do both?

[00:09:34] I read that he was- He originally turned this movie down And then said only that he would only do it If he was offered, I can't remember which of the brothers And said he would only do it if he could play both

[00:09:49] Yeah, they offered him the bad guy The good brother was going to be a different actor And he said he'd only do it if he could do both Which I love Amazing Which is so good Jack Warden, you know Jack Warden is somebody who for me is

[00:10:03] You know, Jack Warden in shampoo is unbelievable Jack Warden is like And then, you know Wait Yes, like it's just one of my all-time favorite Character actors of this generation Well, I mean this movie is chock full of some of my favorite people I mean Joe Flaherty

[00:10:20] I don't see enough of Joe Flaherty Michael McKeon Oh, Michael McKeon Lenny and Squiggy Lenny and Squiggy Are both in this movie Do you think that Lenny and Squiggy create- I was trying to figure out the timeline Is this pre-Liverne and Shirley

[00:10:34] And did they cast them because of this movie or vice versa? Is it pre? No It's middle of Vern and Shirley It's middle of Vern and Shirley And the selling point was They were getting into such an urkel zone

[00:10:46] Where it was like their characters were becoming so big And they had started out as comedy partners That the pitch was Do you guys want to come? You get to work together We'll give you a lot of latitude You can make the characters as different as you want

[00:10:59] And that was the selling point for them You were not hiring you to play Lenny and Squiggy And they were great Yeah I mean, that's like the only heart- The only thing that breaks is that Carmine Regus and the big Regu didn't get in as well

[00:11:12] You'd love a little Regu on top of the puttfish Yeah, just a little bit of that spicy sauce Why did they break up? Do we know why they broke up? Or they didn't work together more? I think it was probably that problem

[00:11:23] I think it was that they were just like- The tech-assing thing Right The duo had become so iconic That to a certain degree I think they were probably worried about Like are we Cheech and Chong Are we never going to be able to do stuff

[00:11:35] That isn't reliant on this dynamic The other thing that we need to lay out right away If we're talking about career arcs Is that this is the first Kurt Russell movie That's not a Disney movie, right? I know there's the Elvis miniseries The John Carpenter

[00:11:51] Elvis miniseries comes out the year before And then use cars These two things come out within, I believe, six months of each other Maybe a little bit more This is a year before Escape from New York The following year's Escape from New York Yes I am a grown-up

[00:12:04] I can play a badass Like, you know, I'm not just like a sweetie pie But this is the beginning of him being like I can have an edge to me in a movie This is where you see him being a charming rake This is where-

[00:12:17] This is the version of Kurt Russell I believe could have been Han Solo Yes You know? Yes That makes sense to me The charming rogue The guy who's operating only for himself Until he's forced to You know, care about others Think of this run

[00:12:35] It is use cars, escape from New York The thing, silkwood, swing shift I mean, that's a pretty- It's a great run Great run And he's on his way to tango and cash Yes Right, when he hits perfection But I believe it's the Disney charm That makes him

[00:12:55] Like, that makes this kind of like This movie in somebody else's hands Is a little less likable There is something very- Like, so charming And you want to root for him And yes, he is a scumbag But I honestly don't even view it like that

[00:13:11] Because he brings a real level of an everyman to it Not like Bill Murray I think Bill Murray seems like he's working the system Or Kurt Russell seems like the system's on him And he's just trying to do good Like, he's trying to run for-

[00:13:24] I mean, the plot points in this movie are insane Well, the fact to your point exactly, Paul The fact that his drive The engine that is driving him through the movie Is that he needs to raise enough money for a bribe Yes He needs like the system

[00:13:41] It's another movie It's another great kind of movie That exists in a world in which everything is corrupt Right? It is we are post-American graffiti In terms of everybody's great Everybody's cruising the streets Everything's great It's the 50s nostalgia Which the Mech is will then firmly engage in

[00:14:01] Back to the future But instead here He is it's very present day It is very much we're fucked You know, like we're fucked It's like post-Nixon, post-Card Post-Ford, right, yes That kind of like Everything, like post-Vietnam Everything is a fucking mess

[00:14:20] And you got to scrape by as best you can Politics are bullshit Even to be a state senator You need a $50,000 buy-in to bribe some guy And that's what Kurt Russell wants in on politics And let's make it clear The reason he wants to raise that $50,000 bribe

[00:14:37] Is so that he can get into office And then accept bribes for the rest of his life He explicitly wants to be a viable politician That's what he tells everyone And like I don't think that the other dealership Is probably that much better But they're acting like

[00:14:54] Well, we got to save our used car Like they're a terrible business They rob people They sell them shitty cars The main thrust of this film is incredibly flawed Because it's driven a lot by these commercials And we'll get into like How those commercials come about

[00:15:12] They're big set pieces But like these commercials are so effective That all of a sudden people in this town are like Oh, I got to buy a car now Like buying cars are like It's not like oh there's a new thing I must get

[00:15:26] It's like people are buying cars in this town And recklessly As if they're hitting up a new frozen yogurt shop Yes, it is bizarre Like I've never seen a used car commercial And be like oh yeah I should buy a car right now They really missed an opportunity

[00:15:43] To make the pinkberry red mango Versure remake of used cars Menchies When those two went to war with each other Used Gertz I'm going to lay out a little context here Because I did a deep dive in the formation of this movie

[00:16:01] Which ties together a lot of things we're talking about In terms of what this movie gets right And how it almost could have been wrong So Zemeckis and Gale were like The two filmmakers that Spielberg really mentored And he says like the only time my career

[00:16:15] Where I really formed friendships with two directors Kept them under my wing for over a decade Was very invested in everything they did And it was from seeing their student film When he had only made Sugar Land Express Before he was Spielberg

[00:16:28] So as his career got bigger and bigger He was able to slide more and more checks their way But this movie started as a Spielberg project And you talk about Spielberg not being particularly good at comedy I think what he loved so much in Gale and Zemeckis is

[00:16:44] Him seeing this is what I would do if I had the facility for comedy In the same way that he read their script for 1941 And he went this seems fun, this sort of anarchy This scale, this level of destruction

[00:16:57] But he didn't know how to pull it off himself John Milius was their other big mentor Yes Milius, Spielberg, Gale and Zemeckis Which is crazy, a crazy crew to think about But Milius is the sort of like super libertarian Like fuck everything, movie should be socially irresponsible

[00:17:16] He I think really stirs the sort of like anti-authoritarian chaos In Gale and Zemeckis And the project started out with them all hanging out And Milius saying, you know what I've always wanted to make a movie about There is this phenomenon of used car dealerships

[00:17:34] Right outside of Las Vegas Where guys are driving to Vegas And right before they enter the town They go, I should sell my shitty car So I have more cash in hand to gamble And I'm gonna make so much money this weekend

[00:17:47] That I'll be able to come out of it driving a nicer car And at the end of the weekend they end up having to downgrade And buy a shittier car from the guy they just sold their car to What a great idea for a movie

[00:17:58] I mean a great like a centerpiece That is a crazy phenomenon And the kind of thing that only somebody like John Milius Or like in later generations somebody like David Milch Would have the kind of like base of knowledge

[00:18:15] Of like how people fuck their lives up because of gambling That's a personal experience story That's like John Milius saying So I've heard that some people sometimes John Milius is not out there like There was an article in the Atlantic about this phenomenon

[00:18:32] John Milius is like, no I live a monster's life They have eight of my cars One of the other monsters that I talked to Told me this great story And that's it That's what I love about this is Small stakes war

[00:18:50] Small stakes war that never escalates beyond what it is Like it never, like it doesn't get It never tips into absurdity It only reflects more It's all character based war Which is wonderful I would argue you could make an issue about them Interrupting a presidential broadcast nationally

[00:19:17] As maybe slightly absurd that they were Near like a breaker that said like White House communication Like they're not in DC and they're in front of like a satellite That's just a White House communications satellite They might have just gotten the local version of that broadcast

[00:19:32] No, that was the national That was the whole, wow Which was even funnier to me because it's like They are making a national commercial for a one store Used car dealership Listen, where you've got Lenny and Squiggy as your lone gunman type guys You can get anything done

[00:19:50] That's the sequel too I mean there's so many great spin-offs here But I agree with what you're saying Yes, they should have been a launching pad It really is like the easiest idea to get in front of It's just, you know, store warfare It's this one-upmanship of

[00:20:04] It's super small stakes but such good character movement And the stakes are so well defined The Gale Zemeckis thing of just like You know exactly whatever one wants What the obstruction is What the workaround is It's so fucking good So they're all talking about this

[00:20:21] Spielberg goes, that's a great idea for a movie I want to make it So Spielberg kind of calls dibs on it And at this point he's like post-jaws, right? Wow And they're like Spielberg's never going to make this fucking movie But ostensibly Milius is saying

[00:20:36] That he'll write this for Spielberg someday And the exact idea is George Hamilton They go, the premise is It's used car dealership outside of Las Vegas You can see the poster It's George Hamilton and the tagline is Would you buy a used car from this man

[00:20:51] Which talk about how well cast Kurt Russell is This movie does not work if it's George Hamilton Who seems irredeemable He's too slimy I get why they would think that When they're pitching around in the bar I totally do But could not be a, cause he also somehow

[00:21:07] Reeks of Las Vegas Too obvious You know But Kurt Russell And I could spend the next two hours alone Just talking about Kurt Russell The best You know, because he really is unique In this way that we were talking about

[00:21:22] You can root for him in a way that Even when he is doing bad To every character who is a good character In this movie You are still rooting for him Well, I mean, case in point And I don't mean to cut you off, Griffin

[00:21:38] Like the idea that I do I do mean to cut you off, Griffin When they kill Jack He's gonna railroad him out of this thing When they kill one of the Fuchs brothers I had a real hard time with that Because they bring in this demolition driver

[00:21:52] To destroy that car I don't know why that moment hit me As heavier I think it's supposed to be played for comedy But this man Kills Another man A good man A good man And it's At his brothers At his brothers behest The brother is The brother has

[00:22:11] Never shows any remorse For causing the death of his twin brother And when that happens to me There's nothing That Kurt Russell can do That is going to top that So you basically, that moment Cleans the deck It's like Kurt Russell It's killing John Wick's dog Every easy

[00:22:32] That's the magic trick Jack Warden is a cute little puppy He really, I mean that Jack Warden, nice Jack Warden Big shaggy sweater, absolutely I think there's also just There's the universal sympathy for the guy Trying to get his pills You know what I mean?

[00:22:47] You always are like, ah Jesus Just let the guy get his pills I know And I love that the bad guy The demolition derby driver or whatever He is a He You know he's a bad dude Because He walks around You know like when they have a two

[00:23:01] The guy has a tooth pick in his mouth And you know he's a badass Well he's a gear head version of that So he carries like a screw Around and dang Dangling out of his mouth is a long screw That's the sledgehammer comedy of this movie It's like

[00:23:15] You get it? You get it? Galen Zemeckis, watching all these interviews The thing they're so good at Is character, right? They always make these really compelling Really fascinating characters Who are just like a meal For an actor to dig into But also They talk about their writing process

[00:23:32] Is so pragmatic Where they go like What are the things we want to achieve At the end of this movie How do we solve that And what do you need to do to properly Set that up And in that sort of way Things like

[00:23:45] Well if you have to watch The Good Jack Warden die That sucks so much That you're gonna be on board With anything their rivals do For the rest of the movie Like they do think pragmatically And I saw Gale cite John Wick's dog In one of these interviews

[00:24:01] Where he's talking about His storytelling principles And it feels like A game recognized game thing He's just like Yeah you do that In the first act To the first movie We're with John Wick For the rest of this franchise Like that's just good Fundamental, popular storytelling Well because

[00:24:17] When you see that dog And John Wick You're like Well they can't kill this dog And that's usually How it goes in a movie Like there's certain things You know are off limits Especially because it's a gift From his now dead wife It's not just a dog

[00:24:30] It also I mean it's Within such a short amount of time That they imbue that dog With such heart And then just like Boom An Alfie Allen comes in And kills the dog So much so That when they blow up Jack Warden later in the film

[00:24:46] You don't feel that Kurt Russell Has done anything wrong No Where they literally Bury him in a shallow grave You're like Good job buddy Like great job You had to do it You had to do this Right Doing that is less disrespectful Than letting his brother

[00:25:00] Take over the dealership And that's what we should Because we haven't said What's at stake here Is that the government Is gonna reroute a highway Right through either One Right through one of the Fuchs brothers car lots So one of them is about to be Out of business

[00:25:21] And one of them is about to Have the best possible setup For selling used cars Right And the bad guy Fuchs brother Thought he'd bribed all the right people And done all the right He thought he'd played the game baby But he's wrong And now

[00:25:37] So now there's a ticking clock on Getting rid of The bad Fuchs brother So that he can buy out Or inherit rather that land And there is a contested daughter Who reenters the mix Reenters late by the way Very late Yeah This movie is long by the way

[00:25:57] This movie is two This has the John Landis comedy vibe Of it's almost a two hour film That really For the level of comedy it is This could have been a 90 minute movie But I mean I guess it's that third act too Which always kind of

[00:26:14] Not puts me to sleep But it's like the blues brothers thing It's like alright car chase, car chase Holy shit that That car chase goes on for a long time But I also feel like It's one of the better executions Of this I've ever seen

[00:26:28] Yes I loved it What should be a three act 90 minute comedy adding on An extra act that suddenly Action set pieces Yes This is where too It starts to remind me of The Berrenalds car movies You know car culture movies That are such a part of this

[00:26:45] Like this big you know They get all they've got whatever it is 200 kids to drive Jaloppes across the Down the highway and then when they turn They've got What's his name I can't remember the guy's name Who is in the lead Who realizes he's in a red car

[00:27:02] And then Oh, Derekram, yes Grimes everything to a halt Because like I can't drive a red There are so many good little Little things woven throughout here About his fear of bad luck And bad juju And like good luck charms And red cars All this stuff about cars

[00:27:22] And superstitions felt Very real again to a used car lot You know like too To guys that are like daily Having good or bad luck selling a car Well that's where I mean you guys were saying that this Does not feel like a movie

[00:27:40] Made by someone who's like Three years away from making back to the future No But on the other hand I guess five years away But on the other hand That's where for me The last act The fourth act of this movie Really starts to show

[00:27:54] Oh these guys are about to make back to the future Because the way all those things pay off All these things that for the first 90 minutes Feel like just fun bits of characterization Right, like the teacher coming back With all his students Like that's a random joke

[00:28:08] That doesn't need to come back Everything ties back in Yes Like this scrappy comedy At the last 30 minutes Becomes tight as a drum And suddenly everything is suddenly Like an activator For some aesthetic pay off And by the way I just want to shout out Alfonso Aero

[00:28:23] Who you might know is Al Guapo From Three Amigos Who plays a very large part in this movie Because he owns the 260 cars And a great little moment in the beginning That you forget about Goes away for the entire film

[00:28:36] And I was so excited to see him back again It was a great At the beginning it was odd That they did set up Oh I have 260 cars But it was a pay off I enjoyed seeing come back Both of you guys come from improv There's that philosophy

[00:28:53] Where it's like the perfect time to do a call back Is the minute after the audience has forgotten That thing you set up in the first place Oh and that's what they do this a couple of times Throughout the movie You know is they let you

[00:29:05] They don't feel like They need to hold your hand at all They let you forget That those cars exist They let you forget a number of items Even as to your point earlier How long they wait to have the daughter return You know like Not that you've forgotten

[00:29:23] But you really In another movie she would have come earlier And in the John Milius version of the movie They would have failed You know Like it's a Zemeckis You can feel Zemeckis and Spielberg In how the end of How the last act of this movie Is unabashedly

[00:29:40] Hopeful and successful Yes To the point where To the point where they are Kurt Russell And um I'm forgetting the actress's name Who plays the Fuchs' daughter Deborah Harmon Deborah Harmon are like in the back Also the plutonium newscaster And back to the future

[00:29:57] Who now says that it's Yeah stolen Um they are in the back of a pickup truck Like leading everybody Like rah rah rah It is it feels very It's ecstatic You know This we're gonna do it We're gonna save the show

[00:30:13] Um in a way that I feel like The John Milius version ends with Like a wrecking ball going through The used car dealership And them crying at the funeral of an American flag Yes I mean this They win over Grandpa Munster Like the fact that

[00:30:31] Right there's something about Like the infectiousness of this guy Representing the good And the ill of the American spirit Is the Spielberg Zemeckis connection So they're developing this vaguely Back pocket as Milius and Spielberg's project I wanna hold your hand comes out It doesn't really make an impact

[00:30:55] Spielberg's working on 1941 And Zemeckis and Gale are eager To make another movie They set up a film that's a crime thriller Which gets shut down Griffin I hate to interrupt Please Griffin I hate to interrupt Please But um I've never seen I wanna hold your hand

[00:31:12] Neither have I It rules Good movie I was just That's what I wanted to know Just cause you've now brought it up A number of times Um is it worth watching Like is there a Okay great All the music of the Beatles right Yeah Yes yes

[00:31:26] It's one of those like Super confident debuts Where you're like Oh man this guy just knew Where to put the camera From like minute one Like it is a very Involving easy to watch movie It's also A 90 minute comedy Like this is a little more Expensive

[00:31:39] That's a pretty Straight like it's a pretty straightforward It's kind of like A B side of American graffiti A little more like chipper But it's got that kind of vibe Yeah it's a more manic It's like a Looney Tunes version Of American graffiti But it's that kind of

[00:31:52] Like a bunch of young teenagers At a turning point in American culture Questioning their future And the future of their country Uh through the prism of the Beatles It rules Uh but it doesn't do well And it's like a very tender Is it just like yesterday It's exactly

[00:32:08] Like yesterday Exactly like yesterday That it's perfect Isn't it crazy that like We are still making movies In which we see the world That we live in through the lens Of the Beatles Yes Like that's how much this generation Is still like That's the boomers right there

[00:32:28] We can't get out from under that shadow They did it in the mid 70s And they're still fucking doing it Trying to convince us The Beatles are the best band of all time Right they're like I know for the last 40 or 50 years We've been making movies

[00:32:40] About the shadow of influence The Beatles have cast What if we change the game And make movies about How shitty things would be If the Beatles never existed Because we can only understand Worlds through the prism Of whether or not the Beatles Have landed Oh it's so crazy

[00:32:57] Yes I'm sorry Please continue griffin So Gale and Zemeckis Are supposed to do this movie That I think later becomes Trespass The Walter Hill film Ice Cube and Ice Tea That's great Oh wow They developed that this early Right they were supposed to Make that film

[00:33:14] And it got shut down So then they're just like Fuck we gotta direct something They go to Milius and Spielberg And they go Guys come on You're never gonna make fucking Used cars Like you guys are operating At a different level Now let us make this scrappy

[00:33:27] You know car dealership comedy And they go Yeah that's fine So they go off And they write the script They try to do the Las Vegas one It doesn't work They go let's free ourselves Of the premise We just want to make a used Car dealership movie

[00:33:38] And we want to use this opportunity To make a movie that we think Could be a hit Let's try to make something More in line with the popular Commodies of this time They write a whole other draft It doesn't work for them Scrap it They're like

[00:33:51] We gotta make something work They finally come up with The dynamic of the brothers Of the sort of political aspirations All of that sort of stuff They still want to do it With George Hamilton He passes Wow George Hamilton goes to What love at first bite

[00:34:03] Is that what he does Yes Zoro the gay blade Zoro the gay blade Yeah one of those George Hamilton passes Passes is hilarious Passes But blessing in disguise Russell has just done The Elvis miniseries Other than that He's a dude who has done Ten years of Disney comedies

[00:34:22] A solid ten years Which makes him seem like A non-obvious choice But also is the only reason This movie works As you said Like movie stars are defined By their real life experience That somehow seeps into Their performances right That's in a way The difference between

[00:34:39] A movie star and an actor Is some ineffable quality That you can't beat out of Someone that shines through And helps your movie That is they can't help But be themselves They are not transformable At the root You are always seeing them You're always seeing

[00:34:54] A Denzel Washington movie You're always seeing A Tom Cruise movie And there is something Where you don't even question It because it just You want to see them It's a sequel It's like you're seeing them Do sequels It's why sometimes When those people try and go

[00:35:06] Against that type It doesn't work Like it's why Tom Hanks Doesn't work in road to Predition Right You know But it's that weird thing of Like the ten years of Disney film school essentially That he went through Acting in that very specific vein

[00:35:22] And I found this radio interview He did promoting used cars And the radio host Won't stop bringing up The Disney movies And Kurt Russell's clearly Trying to move past them And he's being like Well it was a great experience I learned how to act And you know

[00:35:35] I was able to put food In my family's table But you know I'm not proud Of these movies And this is a new thing for me Like he was really desperate He had something to prove In the same way this character Wants to transition his life

[00:35:46] Into a higher sort of gear Of influence But also he just has that Energy that like Eddie Haskell G-Wiz I'm gonna charm the pants Off you all American charm That makes this movie work And then Carpenter Subverts it in a different way Which is like

[00:36:04] I can put Kurt Russell In these earnest like sort of Sci-Fi dystopian settings And have him play an anti-hero And it's gonna work Because he's always got That slight winking quality Like he's mocking it It's so great because here It works in the real world

[00:36:22] If you put him in the real world As a down on his luck blue Color kind of hustler It still works in big trouble In little China Even if he's surrounded by Supernatural forces You know it still works If you put him at an arctic base

[00:36:42] And there's a Cthulhu style Monster He still works because He's your buy-in He's got that characteristic That you're like I wanna be this wise He's not an expert He's never the smartest guy In the thing He's always the guy who has kind of

[00:37:03] Stumbled into and is trying to Make the best of these circumstances To that point Is there something about Kurt Russell Where, and this may be true For a lot of characters But I'm kinda seeing it with him Where he doesn't bring The problem to himself

[00:37:21] Like in this movie He's not the owner of the dealership Defending the dealership's honor Right in Escape from New York He's being brought in Kind of against as well He's never wanting to be the hero He's never really wanting to step up Whereas sometimes I feel like

[00:37:38] There are other characters Going back to the Bill Murray example Like he does stir shit up He's like I am the catalyst To a certain degree Like in Kurt Russell's always like He's not the lead guy in the thing He's not like He's always just the every man

[00:37:53] In a big situation Who then is forced to step up There's something you're right There's something about him That is put upon Yes Right and there's Like Kurt Russell excels When he as a character Has been put in circumstances That are not ideal for him

[00:38:09] That he needs to figure a way out of And even Tarantino uses this In Once Upon a Time in Hollywood By forcing Kurt Russell's character To be in between his wife And Brad Pitt You know he's still like He's still jammed He's always jammed up somehow

[00:38:27] He's never in control He's always somehow reactive He's very Here's the beauty of Kurt Russell He's incredibly active In being reactive to other characters Except when he's Captain Ron That's when you get him Full blown chaos I'm Kurt Kurt Yeah I feel like it is

[00:38:52] I mean he's a guy who always seems to Have a very canny understanding Of his movie persona And his skills in that sort of sense And what sort of stories he functions best in Because like Bill Murray is Bugs Bunny Right, Bill Murray His dynamic is

[00:39:09] I don't even want to be in this movie That's the appeal It's not only is he fucking with all the characters On screen But it feels like he's fucking with the fact That he even has to be in the film

[00:39:19] He's coming just short of staring down the lens And going, A. and I, a stinker Kurt Russell is very engaged In the stakes of whatever movie he's in But it is sort of that Han Solo thing With a little more post-modern edge Of I'm trying my hardest

[00:39:35] To be a piece of shit But somehow there's some level of decency That's coming through There's some sweet little boy Who's fighting for the right thing Underneath all of this There's a sweetness Right, and he has the Han Solo thing

[00:39:48] Of like, I am about half a step ahead of this Like, this could fall apart on me very quickly But I'm usually good at staying just Slightly ahead of whatever disaster Is about to fall on top of me But you also talk about

[00:40:02] Like the way this character is built He is a piece of shit Everything he does is objectively Kind of wrong and unlawful But as we're saying, A. He spends most of the movie trying to save a dealership That isn't even his

[00:40:17] B. to defend the honor of his friend A guy we like So you're put in a position where he is doing something Kind of selfless And the raising $50,000 is like a subplot But it does make you kind of root for the guy

[00:40:33] Because you're aligned in this sort of like Well, enemy of my enemy is my friend And I was curious though Why he wouldn't embrace the daughter And bring her into the plan earlier Yeah Why is he suspicious of her? It's a good question

[00:40:50] And you know, and I thought Oh, they're gonna pull the rug out from him Like I kept on waiting for her to say I'm actually not the daughter Like when Jack Warden, the alive Jack Warden Looks at the picture and they go Oh, that's his daughter

[00:41:02] He would say that's not his daughter He never had a daughter It was, you know, that was It's a girl who came to the dealership And then you be like Oh no, Kurt Russell's in a relationship But it was the person Like this is a bigger, you know

[00:41:13] I thought there was gonna be a bigger switch Because she's introduced as being suspicious Like she's introduced where it's like Who are you exactly? You know, like, and she's just snooping around And I thought they would play into that Yeah I thought all that as well

[00:41:28] But what I kind of like that the movie does though Is when offered the opportunity To bring her into it And thus make her a part of the Good Guy's plan Kurt Russell's character does the wrong thing And then he fucks her over

[00:41:46] And again, like, he's a piece of shit Like the movie, he actively romances her Without telling her even that her father is dead Like he won't give her like even the knowledge That her father has passed away That she just had the first conversation with

[00:42:06] In 10 years when Jack Warden The good Jack Warden Out of the office having just spoken on the phone to his daughter And the derby racer is there With the screw in his mouth Jack Warden cannot stop talking elatedly About how happy he is, it's a miracle

[00:42:27] He keeps saying it's a miracle That was my daughter My daughter wants to see me And then he dies And by the way, she wasn't a cult, right? We don't really get into that Like he does say she was a cult for 10 years

[00:42:41] And I believe that the script does not really pay off On that in her personality at all Like she doesn't seem affected She doesn't seem like she's being deprogrammed Well, she was in the nexium sex cult And so she was doing a lot of work on supporting parts

[00:42:58] On TV shows that shoot in Vancouver By the way, I thought that she was actually in that cult From that Netflix documentary where they took over there A wild, wild country Yeah, it was about the right time Yeah, I guess the only way in which it factors into

[00:43:10] Her character is that she's very quick to fall for another Sort of charismatic hoxter Oh, okay, I buy that, yeah But by the way, wouldn't that have been a great thing That she never did trust him? Like, I don't try, you know, once bitten, twice shy

[00:43:24] It's a nice thing they do though Because at this point they could redeem Kurt Russell And they don't, you know They double down on making sure you know He's only in this for himself You're right, they want you to walk out of there

[00:43:38] Being like, what was I rooting for? Like why was I so pumped up about that? Like it's a pretty acidic movie Considering how fun it is But this is another very subtle magic trick they're doing Which is you're watching it and you're going

[00:43:53] This guy is wrong, why am I rooting for him? And you're not really even factoring in the fact That it is like, it's his friend's legacy It's someone else's business, it's all these other things Like on a surface He doesn't even know He doesn't know

[00:44:09] He's doing anything good Kurt Russell doesn't even know about the highway plan It's not like everybody knows the highway plan Is looming over everybody's heads He is literally just acting only for his own self-interest At all times until the very end of the movie

[00:44:24] And even then it is only because he is Only then does he have like a crisis of conscience in a way That's the magic trick Is he thinks that he is exclusively doing the wrong thing But secretly he's doing some right stuff over the course of the movie

[00:44:39] Unknowingly, which makes him rootable I also think there was an anecdote where they said The scene where he has to sort of like Not confess to her but make the speech about Like, I really like you, right? And I think there's something here

[00:44:53] On the day they were supposed to shoot that Zemeckis and Gale like took stock of every lie This character is maintaining at this point in time All the fucked up things he's doing And how much of a huckster he is

[00:45:04] And they're like, this monologue is like four lines I don't think this is enough We would not be able to convince a girl to stay with this We have to write the scene out So they wrote a two and a half page version of it

[00:45:16] And they went, hey Kurt we know that under The scene was underwritten so we wrote A new version of it, here you go And he looked at it and he goes, guys I don't need two and a half pages I can get this done in the four lines

[00:45:27] And they went, really? And he delivered the four lines that you see in the movie And they went, fuck it Kurt Russell's right He as a movie star has the power to take those four lines And imbue them with enough earnestness Activate his fucking computer war tennis shoes

[00:45:43] Disney charm Super dad Even though you shouldn't root for this guy He gives that speech and he's like, gee Where is I? I really like you And you go like, fuck yeah I know she should stay with him I guess It's true Yeah

[00:45:56] It really is like you don't lose She came in at a weird point in time Where her presence messed up the plan And I believe that on a different situation In a different day they would have connected The same way

[00:46:13] He just couldn't let her in to this secret plan So I believe that that's also a part of it too I mean not to keep on defending this character Which I really do like But I do believe that you believe That there is a connection between them

[00:46:26] Like even when he comes after the bolt After the bowling alley Like there's something there in that scene with them Like oh I like them together There's something genuine between the two of them Even if he can't crystallize it Yes

[00:46:39] Even if he can't until the end of the movie Realize that he needs to Perhaps put himself aside It's only in that moment where he's actively Giving the bribe over To a person who handcuffs himself To the doctor's bag full of money

[00:46:58] With a chain that is 7 feet long I was like what is this about? Why put a safe in your refrigerator But yet not cover up the safe Like if you were to open the fridge You would see there was a safe there

[00:47:12] It wasn't like oh you move a carton of milk And the carton of milk is actually a safe It's just a safe in the fridge But that moment for me I also went Oh this is one of 20 hiding spots he has Right Well by the way this movie

[00:47:26] For all we're talking about how it's good And twisty and turny I mean there are some real leaps of logic We talked about breaking into a national White House transmission I do want to even just mention The core of the film Or the third actor

[00:47:40] Are you talking about burying an Edzel? Or are you talking about the mile of cars? Is that peed? Well I'm even talking about something even different Which is like the lawsuit About how they've edited Her TV commercial Like that seems the most To be the most provable thing

[00:48:00] To be like oh no here is a script And someone definitely manipulated it She doesn't even seem to have any defense You're telling me Lenny and Squiggy Can't figure this out? Yeah Lenny and Squiggy were able to break into A national broadcast

[00:48:13] They can't figure out that the things Been messed with Like that to me was such a logic Jump and the fact that she has no Defense for it Like she's like Like just a shrug it off Like it would have been better

[00:48:26] If they went over there and convinced her Like hey let me give you a tip on how to Shoot your first commercial Say this and she didn't know And they trapped her into a lie Instead they go in this confoluted route Doing something she didn't say

[00:48:37] Where there is a script You actually show the script in the movie Like there is proof, there's evidence They could have just gone across the street And said hey honey I'm teasing the character's voice Not my own way of talking about it Wow Hey honey

[00:48:50] You know let me help you do this And they could have tricked her Like it would have even been more effective In a weird way In both this scene that you're talking about Paul when the bad jack warden alters Her commercial and in the previous stuff

[00:49:07] I wrote down a note because I was like In this movie there's so much A-V Explanation because this kind of stuff Like moving words around Or breaking in using satellite feeds And all this stuff was so brand new It's like James Bond shit

[00:49:25] They really had to walk people through But then in the Lenny and Squiggy version of it There are jokes the best being When they explain that Squiggy Has put a pacemaker into Lenny Like they're biohacking In like whatever year this movie was made I was like

[00:49:46] Does he need a pacemaker? If so he should go and get a real one done Like what is going on? And he brags about the pacemaker by hitting it And there's such a good performance moment From McKean where he winces Oh yeah I love that The best

[00:50:01] There's just a lot of Again in a movie that is pretty straightforwardly Just a war between used car lots There's a bizarre amount of it hinges on A-V Components Well that's the Zemeckis thing Like that weird tech of These guys are kind of gear heads

[00:50:22] That's true I guess The next movies they're going to make Are the Back to the Future Is the Roofing Rod and Rabbit Yeah Well I guess it is this idea too It's this very contemporary moment That it's depicting But it is cutting He's going to insist on saying

[00:50:39] But yet there is cutting edge technology Out there that we have access to Let me just give you a glimpse Let me show you It's almost like let me show you Jack Warden Generation, the greatest generation Let me show you Old Man What we can do now

[00:50:56] And he's like what? You can do this? It really is like It's an explainer for old people It is funny as you said That they just cut into the middle Of one of those courthouse scenes And Grandpa Munster says like And because there's no evidence

[00:51:12] Of tampering of the video footage They just don't show you the part Where somehow that is completely disproven Even though it should be very provable Eugene, sorry, Joe Flaherty Basically goes I have expert testimony To say he hasn't been tampered with Right, that's what it is

[00:51:30] We're just believing the prosecutor And I, Grandpa Al Lewis Love Grandpa Al Incredible And the fact that he's the hanging judge All over his judges table Are like little effigies of like Hanging, I don't know like That to me Little models of the electric chair Little functioning models

[00:51:52] Little working models of a hangman's platform So that when he's talking He can activate it and the little man Drops and hangs It's so good When I was a kid That's what I thought a judge was That it was mostly just like

[00:52:06] You banging things to make things happen That was the role of a judge And the fact that the hanging judge Is assigned Well, I mean there's so many things Assigned to this like Weird wording of a local commercial It's so, there's so many things It's so sitcom-y though

[00:52:24] Like you know, and like casting Joe Flaherty And Al Lewis and Lenny and Squiggy Like he's trying to like You know, invest that all into this movie Yeah, this is a heightened universe Which is great because you've got I think if you're Zemeckis

[00:52:40] You know on the other side of it You've got Jack Warden You've got some, you've got people Who are gonna ground it to enough Of a degree that it's not gonna float Away into the sky Everybody, because everybody Make no mistake, everybody

[00:52:56] Is a capital C character in this movie Everybody even like And I forget the actor's name The guy who won't drive the red car Yes He's like a DiPalma regular His name is Garrett Graham And he's great and he is, you know You know Kurt Russell's

[00:53:15] He's the other salesman at the used car lot And he's kind of Kurt Russell's partner in crime The set piece where They bet against different teams For a game Oh my God And he tries to get bad luck Inside of a bar He's for like two minutes

[00:53:38] For solid two minutes He runs around a bar Knocking over salt shakers Opening umbrellas How are there that many umbrellas in this place? That is one of the most original And hilarious set pieces I've ever seen In the sense that You've seen so many of these things

[00:54:00] You know in different variations I've never seen trying to get bad luck And again they are so smart This just sets us up for why he won't drive that car At the end Like how extreme his reaction is in the bar And it's extreme and it is funny

[00:54:19] You know it is not raining out And there must be 15 umbrellas Closed umbrellas inside that bar And the restraint that they took to break glass I mean a break a mirror Because we all know that's a big one And you know he found many a thing

[00:54:35] Before breaking a mirror That's the artistry of Zemeckis and Gale in this period Is like they are able to look you in the eyes And convince you that the check-offs gun in the wall Is just decoration They're like I know you know how movies work

[00:54:50] I swear to God this is just a funny joke It's not a plot set up I don't know Jason and Paul if you had this thing But like as people who write comedy When I recognized oh fuck This scene is now going to be him trying to create

[00:55:05] As much bad luck as possible I got vaguely angry at how good a set up that is Like when you just see like You so rarely see a set piece in a comedy Where you go wow that's actually an original idea I haven't seen before

[00:55:20] It's not a take on a classic I also had the thought I was like oh I can't believe I've never seen this This movie is 40 years old And you're like fuck this is the only time anyone's done this I love comedy as magic

[00:55:36] In the sense of there's a Chappelle special I don't remember what it was And he basically says at the top Like I'm going to make this thing funny Like you don't think I can make this thing funny Or here's the punchline He goes away for 15 minutes

[00:55:52] And then he gets back to it and he hits it And you're like oh like it just Like I love like saying like here it is I'm showing it to you and then it kind of sneaks around And this movie does a lot of that

[00:56:04] It really like plants those seeds really nicely And it's so fulfilling when it pays off There's something wonderful about discovery You know true discovery Like unexpected that's what makes things funny When you really are surprised by Whatever something along with the characters

[00:56:23] And that is for all intents and purposes What is I think exciting about performing And what I think is also fun about watching improv Because improv is all discovery Not just for the audience But the performers as well Everybody in the equation is seeing this

[00:56:43] For the first time be done And that discovery is exciting when it works And in this scene I was like This is such a great game You know such a good game to play They are against each other They've bet against each other

[00:57:00] And this man is going to try and engender As much bad luck as he can In order to win his bet on this game And it also is a great friendship moment A great character moment Which is kind of like that's the other thing

[00:57:13] It works so nicely because you buy this bond Between these two guys And you also get why he then is sitting on the side Of the road later and is like I can't do it man, I can't It's a red car man, it's a red car

[00:57:26] I was like fuck yes I love this That scene accomplishes like five things at the same time One of them is you think that's the check-offs Gun going off of the superstition That's the ultimate heighten That it's not going to pay off with the red car later

[00:57:41] Two is it actually sells the bond Between these characters right It's a great device for device's sake But also talking about how like Gail and Zemeckis Do these sorts of payoffs without holding your hand Ironically for guys who had just made a movie

[00:57:53] Called I Want to Hold Your Hand It's that thing, that storytelling principle And I think especially with comedy That's so satisfying where You don't spell it out for the audience You give them one-on-one and allow them to Make two together

[00:58:08] You sort of have them betting on the game He's bombing, Russell's depressed Garrett Graham comes in he's like this is amazing I'm so glad, I bet you should have bet on this I did, I bet on the other team The syncing realization Him saying

[00:58:23] How much did you bet? Everything The only way you can win Is if I lose He says that You know this guy's internal mantra Which is Every superstition matters right And then he knocks over the salt He doesn't say anything He slowly prepares to knock over the salt

[00:58:43] As like the throw The other guy gives him the salt Which is even better Such a great small slight move It's also again, not to interrupt you Griffin But definitely to interrupt you It's also wonderful in a way To illustrate Kurt Russell's character

[00:59:03] And it's not even brought up between them Kurt Russell has They've talked earlier about the bet The friend has made Kurt Russell has knowingly Bet against his friend By the way, another bet That he made based on superstitions Like again it's beautifully crafted Exactly, he instead

[00:59:23] Yes, he takes the opposite bet He's such a contrarian He's actively working Against one of his best friends In search of his own selfish success Which is great And like Jim the mechanic He starts over the salt He knocks it over Slowly unscrews the top

[00:59:44] Knocks it over right at the moment Like the play gets fumbled And then he just sort of has that wide-eyed look And you realize like They have set up an entire mousetrap board In front of my eyes I didn't even realize it

[00:59:58] And now they can just go off Now he can do fucking anything Jim the mechanic by the way Frank McCray He is actively Rising to the challenge of I don't care how big any of you guys are going I will be bigger I'm going to be the largest

[01:00:16] Performance in this movie By Hoke or by Crook The gay anecdote is that because he Didn't come from traditional acting Back then I've been acting for a while But had different schools of thought When they started filming Would say every one of his lines As slowly as possible

[01:00:34] Like what are you doing? And he was like If you say your lines slowly Then you end up with more screen time In the movie Kid I've been making pictures for 60 years If you say your lines that slowly They're going to cut around you

[01:00:50] You got to say it quick And that way they have to use everything you say So then Jack Warden put the fear of God in him And his game became Every line as quickly as possible And the actors and the actresses used to motivate Their actors to say

[01:01:06] Try to even out speed him Let's be at this tone At the whole time The whole energy of the movie Was sort of reverse engineered from that That's amazing Unbelievable And he's great I loved when they charge him With being a car salesman Not just the mechanic

[01:01:28] And he's trying to get that guy in the car Everybody gets moments to be great In this movie Everybody gets to have their character developed Like two more steps Than movies now do Like now an ensemble Movie Doesn't give you Those character beats for

[01:01:48] The kind of fourth and fifth bananas They don't give you Information They don't give you enough to really root for them The way that movies here In this era did They really leaned into Getting you to care about These other characters Because of the

[01:02:08] Little beats here and there That scene where Garrett plays the Dead dog prank On the guy in the station wagon It's amazing And the fact that We see everybody at home Watching those commercials And those are the same people who show up to the car lot

[01:02:28] The next day To buy those cars You see that guy in his family And then you see them by the station wagon I think that there's something to be said for Simplicity In comedy and big movies Because this movie is

[01:02:44] Complicated in some of the decisions that are going on But at the end of the day It's just really an us versus them It's just like how do we shut down that other dealership Things get in the way of it And it's just like

[01:02:56] You have to have a lot of scenes Of these characters just kind of hanging out It's the ensemble nature of it I think Ghostbusters number one kind of exists in that same world Where it's like yes they're getting Ghost but at the same time

[01:03:08] You're just existing in these guys Owning a business and the ups and downs of that And I don't know You get to like every one of those characters Because there's no other real world outside of it It really is In that station

[01:03:22] You also get to know a little bit more About Annie Potts You also get to know a little You get to know more of their Other life Issues and stories The supporting cast In a way that now You just don't Supporting players are often times there as

[01:03:42] Pieces of the mechanism To trigger This movie Where we talked about how this movie is a little longer Than perhaps it Would normally be And it's longer because of these moments Because of these shaggy or beats Where you're like now people would be like

[01:04:00] We don't need to know that much about The other Salesman actually Because he's not that important at the end He can just come in and save the day Let's take out his whole thing with the dog But you guys know this just as well as anybody

[01:04:14] So often the supporting roles In these types of films are just like A slot for us to cast a ringer Or someone who's on the verge of a breakout Let them show up to set and just Riff and score some big laughs

[01:04:26] In that scene. Just like fill it up with Whatever funny you can while delivering Whatever the exposition is that needs to get Across in this scene. And what Zemeckis and Gail are so good at doing Is Disguising plot as character Or humor. Making things just feel

[01:04:42] Like this is just charming, this is fun Behavioral stuff, this is just a joke But actually they're setting a piece In the back of your brain that they can Use later. Ghostbusters I love, but Ghostbusters is like Half a very behavioral comedy With all this great character building

[01:04:58] And then the plot of the ghost shit And it's kind of an amazing Miraculous accident that It ends up feeling cohesive Whereas this it's all unified That's why Ghostbusters 2 is so flawed Is because they focus on the ghost ship But they don't focus on the characters

[01:05:14] And I'm going to ask a question That maybe it will be taken the wrong way I don't mean to slam this person Or are you about to slam Griffin? Oh no I was going to say is Deborah Harmon Deborah Harmon who plays Barbara Fuchs

[01:05:28] Is she not a good actress I liked her but she never really works Again after this movie And it feels to me Like I mean maybe this is the thing Of the 80s where you get one shot As like a female lead and then you just

[01:05:42] She's gone but she really is gone Like she's in bachelor party She just does like sitcom stuff I was surprised at that She's fine Like she's perfectly appealing There's nothing about her in this movie Where you're like unlike some of the people

[01:05:58] We've been talking about where you're like I got to know so much more about this person Like give me some big scene Versus like Eric Graham or whoever If I have a criticism of The movie which I do Is this which I wrote down on my notes

[01:06:14] Is they do her a tremendous Disservice By not writing that role At all Like that role is so passive She comes in without any engine We don't know She's just coming to just see her dad That's it and that's all we know She's been gone for 10 years

[01:06:36] The guys don't know her By the time she gets there her father is dead They don't feel any allegiance to her And so she basically And she shows up so late in the film Without a want Without any sort of discernible drive She's an obstacle That's her problem

[01:06:54] There's a problem where They've underwritten her so much That she only exists To kind of Further the plot that they've already said In motion And just kind of play a part Relatively in being used Let me recast it and say Julie Hagartie Coming out of

[01:07:16] Coming out of a cult A little bit more Like injured or wounded Because she can kind of play that But then I feel like, that's what you kind of need You needed someone to play Something of the character

[01:07:30] And I think you could have hit all the other things But I think that she is not comedy forward Right where everybody else is coming She's having fun. Yeah. I think she's a good actress, but perhaps for this role to work you needed to bring

[01:07:42] someone in who was a comedian to find some comedy in a role that does not have much of that. Shelly Long. Right, then she'd have a bit. I mean her only bit is essentially Kurt Russell being like, uh-oh, how do I not tell her her dad is dead?

[01:07:55] She doesn't get to do her own thing versus basically everyone else in this movie at least gets a moment, like a side plot or something like that. It's tough to drop somebody in the middle of the movie who is unaware of the plot of the movie.

[01:08:11] She, you know, and she purposefully so. Purposefully so. And they're not going to show her. Yes, purposefully like she cannot know what we've been doing for the last hour, you know? And that's a tough thing to play.

[01:08:24] I felt bad for that actress because I feel like she's in a thankless position. But she can and not blaming it fully on her, but to lean into the cult of it all.

[01:08:33] And if you go again, my mind I'm thinking cult, there's not a lot of consumerism in a cult, right? So then to come into this world that's fueled by consumerism, it could be a really funny juxtaposition like she's the naive person coming into this.

[01:08:49] Can I say something when I missed some line where they said she was coming out of a cult? That was when Jack Wharton said it. He goes, my daughter just called me after 10 years. She's been, I didn't know where she was. She was in a cult, right?

[01:09:01] Such a quick throw away. Yeah. I mean, I just heard it because I thought he was a liar. I missed that. Yeah. OK. It's not led with it, but I think it gives you the explanation of why he hasn't

[01:09:13] seen her in 10 years and makes him also a good dad, right? Because he's excited to see her. But she's been away not because of him because she was on her own. Yeah. And he's willingly accepting her back. It's 1980.

[01:09:26] There's a lot of people who like had become flour children, right? Right. Like, just like gone out and lived in a commune or whatever. Like, for sure. It all lines up and he's just like, I don't get it all. I get his head so like, you know, like.

[01:09:36] There's like legitimately 12 documentaries right now we can all watch about about like actual cults that existed during the 70s. Right. You know, did you know about the Wisconsin three? Like it's always some new like from the spot in America.

[01:09:51] From the evil ones to the benign ones like or to the what's the family, the one that the fan, the right they had the health food restaurant in LA. There's them, there's yeah, yeah, Bogwantri Rajneesh, there's everybody had a cult.

[01:10:05] But it speaks to how passive this character is that a like even that setup is just to make Jack Warden look better for not having spoken to his daughter in a decade. And it's never played comedically as any sort of characterization.

[01:10:17] She just exists to help every male character be set up in whatever they need to accomplish within the movie. Let me ask the experts then. Is this something that you see in all Zemeckis films? Are the female characters more underwritten?

[01:10:29] Because I mean, I'm thinking about I want to hold your hand. No, because that's three female leads. That's sort of intriguing about it. And Kathleen Turner is amazing, right? But then back to the future, like there's you know, I think Lorraine's a great character. OK, great.

[01:10:46] No, I don't think that's certainly a case. I think Jenny and Forrest Gump isn't an underwritten character, Polar Express. The train, the train is a woman. She's crawling with ladies. Tom Hanks plays three women in Polar Express. Like Jenny is like a problematic character,

[01:11:04] but she's certainly not underwritten. I think this is a weird example, but it ties into what you are asking Paul of like, if she was a good actress, why didn't she have a better career? Putting aside just general sexism in the industry, a thing that's come up,

[01:11:17] I feel like any time we get into 80s comedies on this show is like 80s comedies were the absolute worst era for for actresses. Because I think you look at like early comedies, you look at screwball comedies, you have these women like Rosalind Russell and Catherine Hepburn,

[01:11:34] Barbara Stanwyck, who are like tough broads who hold their own. Right. And then even to the 60s and 70s, you have like Goldie Hawn and Barbara Streisand and all these people. And then the 80s, they really just start to become like one note love interests or like obstructions.

[01:11:51] And you have so many actresses where you're like, oh, it's weird that Beverly Hills Cop is still one of the highest grossing movies of all time. And I have no idea who the female lead of that movie is. Absolutely.

[01:12:02] And if it wasn't for the post career of Gina Davis, she disappears after Fletch because in Fletch, she's not doing anything. Like she's not even the female lead. She's in the office. Yeah. Right. You're forgetting to interview her. Oh my God. That's the actual. Yes. That's the point.

[01:12:18] You're in your mind relating it. Right. Yeah. And I was going to cite her as another example of like, who's the love interest in Fletch? We don't know. Sigourney Weaver and Ghostbusters is the one major example. And I think it's only because she was already a movie star.

[01:12:33] Like if she was batting above her weight class, so they had to give her more to do. But for the most part in this era, thankless, you know, these are male ensemble movies. All of those John Landis, Harold Ramis, all of those movies are male ensembles

[01:12:52] who are not really interested in women other than conquerable sexual conquests or, right, like you said, Griffin impediments to getting further to where they need to go. And so as a result, unless it is a romantic movie like Kathleen Turner in Romance in the Stone,

[01:13:14] which I think is an incredible performance. I want to say, pointedly a two-hander based on their push. Exactly. But there are fewer of those that you can. Then there are the kind of big, you know, big revenge of the nerds, porkeys,

[01:13:29] the big sex comedies of that era, the big, you know, it's interestingly at the same time, a period in which women are also suddenly eroticized as villains in erotic thrillers. Yes. You know, like it's the same time when things like that. Yes. Speaking of Kathleen Turner.

[01:13:50] Exactly. When women are also starting to like kill people and are like dangerous. The 80s are also like the same era when the guy is like, well, whoever this guy is, he must be, he must have a real kill.

[01:14:02] And then later they have to be like, wait, it's a woman? What? But that's also it's the 80s moralism where it's swinging to like all men are pigs. They can't trust him. But also like, you know, cheating on your wife or whatever,

[01:14:14] like that'll bring doom and death upon your family. Like where we're swinging away from the more like swinging 70s back to like more like, no, you don't you don't want to mess around with Glenn Close. Like she's going to see it's going to be bad news.

[01:14:27] But what is 80s conservatism? It's 80s conservatism. There's a way of or a thought process in the 80s with women in these comedy films. Like we don't want to get them in the muck with these men. Yeah. You respect them so much

[01:14:41] that we're out. We're not going to make them funny. We're we're going to make them a moral high ground. Right. Yeah. And there's that sneaking suspicion that that her character kind of exists because it's like, well, for Kurt Russell to be cool,

[01:14:53] he should be like getting late in the movie. Right? Like I did wonder about that kind of halfway through where I'm like, is she just there because he needs a love interest because like that's part of the five tool belt, you know,

[01:15:04] of like a male lead and then 80s movie. He needs her for the end. And because she provides redemption. Because without her, he doesn't care about the dealership ultimately like he's just trying to get to the 50,000. So even if she was not there,

[01:15:22] would he have gotten the 50,000 and then the dealership would have collapsed? Like, like, is that what the plan was? Yeah. Right. The only reason and he still wants to save the dealership is because he cares for her. And the last line is nice

[01:15:34] because the last line of the movie is finally her getting into the mess. Right? The last line of the movie is her now realizing there's value to being a huckster, but it's the last fucking line like we never get to see her play.

[01:15:49] And when she's on the stand, the bit is that she cannot even defend herself like she's nonverbal and Kurt Russell has to feed her lines. But it but when we meet her the first time we meet her, she's giving him a hard time about the yellow taxicabs

[01:16:03] that are repainted and she knows so she also shows us I am a part of this game. I grew up in this game, right? But then she doesn't have any of that. It should be fun that she gets it that background.

[01:16:16] But then they sort of like defang her. And I do wonder if it's going back to the 80s sort of like you know, pure it in sort of sensibility where it's like the 70s, a lid comes off where now like you can get really outrageous behavior in comedies.

[01:16:33] Suddenly you're allowed to put things on screen and behavior on screen and language on screen that was never permittable before. But then that cuts the other way to this sort of like Madonna, the horror complex where it's like, well, if we want the love

[01:16:48] interest to be compelling to the audience, she can't get too sullied by the boys misbehavior because she has to be a good version. The most perfect iteration of this is Sally Field being cast in Exactly. in the band. Let the flying on. Yeah, the smoky.

[01:17:05] Like, Gidget, you know, be be in the car with fucking burp. That's like the ultimate bad boy. And she's the old. In the law. Yes. You know, and that's what's like, and that's such a she that's what again, as we kind of get back to what we're talking

[01:17:23] about before, she brings what as a movie star, she brings so much of her past to that counterculture movie, a car, a movie about or cannonball run or any of these. Yeah, right. Yeah. About like this kind of like counterculture thing that's

[01:17:38] like the police are bullshit, fuck this, blah, blah, blah. And she's in there in the passenger seat, like along for the ride. You know, totally. And like you look at once again, like Sigourney Weaver and Ghostbusters as an exception in most comedies of this era.

[01:17:52] If a female comedy star gets some heat, it's not because she played the love interest. It's because she usually played like the Jeanine role or Gina Davis and Fletch, where it's like you get a couple of scenes. You don't have to be the love interest.

[01:18:05] You could just have personality. You can have a little energy because Gina Davis and Fletch is not funny. But she I mean, and it's weird because I only can think of her now as Gina Davis.

[01:18:15] But like when you see that movie, I think she's just Gina Davis Olympic. Yes. Yeah. But I will say like the the breaking of that rule going back to Julie Julie Haggerty or probably the bigger one is Shelley Long,

[01:18:29] who comes out of TV and is like she is funny. And she's got her own sense of like what makes her funny. And Terry Gar, I think, is very good as well around this time. Absolutely.

[01:18:41] But it's a it's a much shorter list that you have to kind of wrap your head around than it is for the men of that area where you could probably lift lift off like, you know, and even Shelley Long,

[01:18:52] she's coming out of Cheers where she's like, this is what I am. Everyone knows me. I'm like, I'm a comedy package ready to go and they're still like, we don't really have a lot for you.

[01:19:01] You know, it was still tough for Hollywood to find stuff for her to do. She had a very defined person. You want to play a mom? You know, yeah. Yeah. She had like five years before she became a mom.

[01:19:10] Yeah. No one's talking about like, oh, my gosh, Mia Sarah and Ferris Bueller's Day off. I mean, she really hit some hormones. You know who pops in that movie is Jennifer Gray. Yes. Because she gets to be the little shithead. Yeah. She's so good at that.

[01:19:23] And then she goes on to have like a real like bunch of goes on a run there. You know, it was better in this time period not to be the love interest. Absolutely. Because that person you that that character is usually

[01:19:39] the equivalent of a manic pixie dream girl for that era. That person is usually put on a pedestal and is thought of as unimpeachably just like beautiful or something. Yes. Something that is untouchable, which is why now I'm going to bring it full on back to Kurt Russell.

[01:19:55] Overboard is such an interesting dynamic because you've got him and you've got Goldie Hawn, Goldie Hawn starting as one type of a person and then turns into a different type of a of a of a person from

[01:20:09] like it's almost like she's splitting the difference between the two archetypes and he is along for the ride. And you you that movie only makes sense because you're like, I think Kurt Russell is ultimately a good guy, not a piece of shit. Although it's a problematic idea.

[01:20:27] Oh, deeply, deeply problematic. You believe that there's something salvageable in Kurt Russell, even if the character isn't showing it to you and also just in the sense that like it's based around this guy trying to make this career move,

[01:20:41] even if it's for the wrong reasons, that he wants to be a corrupt politician, that he thinks he has a future, that there are places he can go past this dealership and Kurt Russell is just filled with potential

[01:20:53] in a way that if it was George Hamilton, you'd be like, this guy is going to be stuck at a car dealership until he looks like Jack Warden. Right. You know, there's no way out for him. Absolutely. There doesn't, you know, like there's something hopeful about Kurt Russell.

[01:21:06] There is a future there. But if it was somebody who was closer to Jack Warden's age, you'd just be like, oh, it's a movie about like two old guys going to war with each other who cares. Yeah. You know.

[01:21:15] But there's something about Kurt Russell's down on his luck, but still has hope. Even if it's just like selfish, narcissistic kind of hope in himself, in his future as a corrupt politician, that's still driving force enough.

[01:21:31] You know, in a way that you just don't, you know, I guess we were we're drowning in TV anti-heroes, but you don't see the same kind of storylines in movies as much anymore, where we're really tracking someone's bad behavior throughout and still rooting for them.

[01:21:48] And I feel like Gail and Zemeckis were such mechanics of this stuff. I mean, I'll get into it when we do it back to the future episode. But like I've just been reading and watching all these fucking interviews with him with them, where they explain all these decisions

[01:22:05] that you've never even thought about before that are such tiny micro things that sort of disobey any conventional line of thinking in a pure algorithmic like save the cat kind of way. But are things that just subtly shift your allegiances or your investment

[01:22:23] in certain characters to keep you on board? They just make every calculation correct by and large. They let the characters choices guide the audience's response rather than manipulating the audience with moments. They let the characters themselves be manipulated, thus conveying that to the audience rather than now.

[01:22:48] Save the Cat is a good example of what we do now, which is it's it's external things rather than internal movement. And that is very different. You know, like they the idea that, you know, we've retconned one of our greatest rogues Han Solo into like

[01:23:08] he was always the best guy. He was always rooting for the underdog. He was always a good dude, you know, like is is shameful. Well, I mean, by the way, if that was to be the first of a trilogy,

[01:23:19] it's the worst place to start because you are you you are solving that character's core problem in a prequel in the first movie. You'd have to do so much twisting to kind of. Yeah, it's it's such a mess.

[01:23:36] It's like that's where you can turn him into a new hope on Solo. Yeah, after Solo, a Star Wars story, you would have to like really destroy the guy. Right. Not only do they do they sort of solve this problem,

[01:23:50] but they also kind of make it clear that his central problem was actually kind of a smokescreen to begin with. Yeah, there was a thing I found on like all these different interviews where Gale keeps on saying like we had a really, really specific

[01:24:07] philosophy when it came to comedy, when Bob and I were writing these movies, which was we don't really have many jokes. And our comedies are based on the idea that every character takes what they're doing incredibly seriously and the stakes are really high.

[01:24:23] And we believe if the circumstances are funny and the actors are keen enough comedically that their commitment and seriousness to the ridiculous of that world will be funny. And you do think about like how well that works for all of their films. It does.

[01:24:38] And that confidence of just like we have very few set up punch lines. It's really just asking people to buy in and even something like the bad luck sequence is like we're hoping that we've earned

[01:24:51] 90 minutes of investment at this point that will pay out like a slot machine. That's funny, though, to think because this movie got crushed by airplane at the box office, like which is the opposite? Well, airplane is jokes. Yeah, it's just jokes.

[01:25:04] No characters have any internal logic to them, nor do they need to. Like it'll just we're just going to pummel you with jokes and you're going to enjoy it. And of course it was a sensation. It comes out the week before this movie.

[01:25:16] I mean, not to get ourselves, but they originally were supposed to make this film at Universal. Then Universal passes. They pitch it to Frank Price at Columbia and he's like I worked at a used car dealership when I was young.

[01:25:30] I get this. I am so behind this movie. So like Sony was like really are at Columbia at the time was like really gung-ho about it. They do the test screening. It's the highest testing movie Columbia ever.

[01:25:42] It was supposed to come out in August and they were like, fuck this, we're holding a hot hand. This comes out in 10 days. So they essentially pulled up the release. Well, not really having the theaters in place right in airplanes path,

[01:25:57] like literally like they just pulled it up so that it was just and they also advertise it horribly, like have you seen the posters? They suck. Yes, they advertise it horribly. They didn't have the advertising plan in place. They advertise it on the car chase at the end.

[01:26:13] I've seen posters where it's like, yeah, it's like almost like it's a mad, mad, mad world kind of like the biggest car chase ever on screen. Yeah. It's like and so much. They don't have any where. Yeah. The teasers all lemon. The lemon thing. Yeah.

[01:26:28] But they pulled it up like six weeks. They couldn't get the best theaters they wanted. So they were like, well, just release it everywhere that can play it now. And then we'll get the better theaters in six weeks. But by six weeks, it was out.

[01:26:41] The marketing was bad and also not in place yet. And it was just like it disappeared. Like airplane was the sensation. It was like a landmark comedy. Wow. That is amazing. And it's just like that's the problem.

[01:26:54] It's like once airplane is out, it's like, uh oh, like the whole whole world of comedy movies just got re reorganized and we're not in the. You know, like now we're not cool. Like if this had come out whatever five months earlier, maybe I was just going

[01:27:09] to say timing is so important in these in these moments. Yeah. And they joke on the commentary. Like it probably should have been a Bill Murray movie. It would have been a hit if it was a Bill Murray movie.

[01:27:20] And in that sense, yes, it probably would have been a hit when it came out. If it was a Bill Murray movie, but also for all the reasons we've underlined, it wouldn't be as good. It wouldn't hold up as well today. Yeah, it wouldn't.

[01:27:32] And also that's very early for Bill Murray. He's done meatballs by that point, basically. Like Caddyshack is about to come out, I guess around there, right? Like, you know, that's that's like early Murray. Bill Murray would have been. I mean, it would have been good.

[01:27:44] It would just have been a Bill Murray movie. I think it would just be like and that's its own. We would remember it in the pantheon of Bill good Bill Murray movies, but it would not be an ensemble movie the way this is.

[01:27:57] It would have just all hung on Bill Murray. He would have talked over all the supporting characters, not a bad way, but it would have been I mean, I'm a big on the biggest Bill Murray fan, but it would have just been like you would have.

[01:28:07] I feel like Bill Murray again, he's the the planner. And I think Kurt Russell is reacting to the plans around him. You need that earnest investment, you know, that Kurt Russell provides. Well, it's Bill Murray is not good at playing someone who is

[01:28:23] invested, yes, invested and also losing the thread, barely keeping it together. Bill Murray's guys, Bill Murray's guys are always like, don't worry, I got this. He's a little bit of a conflict. It doesn't even care. He's above the conflict. He's above the thing dies. Who cares?

[01:28:40] I'm all right. Right. If everyone's like, well, how are we going to do that? How are we going to save the planet? And he's just like, yeah, whatever. Yeah, Kurt Russell, you need Kurt Russell here to be like, fuck, I need this.

[01:28:50] Oddly, if he was to seduce her, it would have been sleazier. Absolutely. Much. Definitely. Yes. He's a sleazy persona for sure. Right. That's part of the sort of edgy appeal. You believe like in Groundhog Day or like in so many other things,

[01:29:08] you believe Bill Murray's, you know, root to be he's only out for himself. You know, he is without generosity in that way. You know, and that's the lesson. Scrooge. That's the lesson Bill Murray seems to always need to learn is to care about other people.

[01:29:25] But we don't know that he actually ever really learns it here in this movie. That's the lesson that Kurt Russell needs to learn. And you get it immediately like he's on track to figuring this out. Absolutely. Yeah. And in the same way that it all boils down to

[01:29:40] Russell being able to pull off the like two and a half line version of that love confession in a way that Bill Murray couldn't with two and a half pages. I also think that was another deterrent against this movie being a hit was just

[01:29:54] like if you don't have a concise marketing campaign, if you're rushing it into theaters very suddenly, if people look at a poster that's like it's a used car dealership movie with a lemon on the poster starring the Disney guy, like what the fuck is this?

[01:30:10] Pitch makes no sense to audiences if you haven't really worked to communicate it to them. Oh, absolutely. And I think that's, you know, that's a failing. That's I mean, I'm and I'm sure that's why this movie is not

[01:30:23] thought of as like one of these because this should this movie should be in that kind of clutch of classic late 70s, 80s comedies, you know? Without a doubt, this movie is like this thing. And I'm amazed it took me so long to see this.

[01:30:42] Well, no, yeah, I mean, it's interesting that it also hasn't like rebounded. Like people have found it because yeah, it does feel like a movie that like this, right? Oh, how? Why aren't we? Why hasn't this been unearthed? There's enough great stuff in here.

[01:30:55] Russell's in it. Yeah. Yeah. It's odd that it still stays under the surface with the cast, with the premise it captures an era of filmmakers. Yes, I didn't even ask you guys, but I'm assuming yeah, you both like Zemeckis. Like I assume that's a guy. Yeah, medium.

[01:31:13] See, I'm a medium on Zemeckis, you know? So for me, like this, I'm like, like why does like why we reclaim certain what I would say we've reclaimed like sorcerer. We've reclaimed. We're saying, you know what? Everybody was wrong. Friedkin made a masterpiece.

[01:31:32] We're deciding now, you know, that that was an amazing movie. We don't do that comedically, really. We don't we don't go back and elevate used cars now and say, wait a minute. This isn't actually this is an incredible movie.

[01:31:48] We might we still will do it now with Heaven's Gate. Heaven's Gate is actually not about you know what? Heaven's Gate is actually a pretty amazing movie. Well, let's reevaluate. Let's recontextualize all of these kind of 70s auteur their kind of their lost movies.

[01:32:04] And let's find ways to make them to elevate them. We don't do that. I also feel like comedy for the most part is of its time and people don't look backwards. Yes, there are classic comedies, but I imagine that for most people

[01:32:20] it's like who's going back and watching Police Academy. Those were like the biggest movies of all time. I also feel the same way about Beverly Hills Cop, which I like Beverly Hills Cop is one of my favorite films. I just watched Beverly Hills Cop to two nights ago.

[01:32:32] I mean, I love these movies. It's a good movie. It's a good movie. It's a Tony Scott movie. It's amazing. It's a great action movie. It's also a pretty good comedy, but the Tony Scott part of it is like an OK comedy part of it.

[01:32:44] Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. It's a it's a good sequel in the sense that if they didn't have the first one, the second one wouldn't be as good because I think they knew what they could steal from the first one to make the action of the second one better.

[01:32:56] Right. Like they kind of yeah. It was a weird alchemy in that that I think makes it work and makes it flashy. But but we don't go back for the most part. Like yes, there are the beloved movies.

[01:33:06] And I think we talk a lot about people are realizing that pop star is really good or McGroober was really good. Just movies that the Lonely Island. Yeah. But right. Those are those are the ones right where it's like they have the long shelf life on right.

[01:33:20] We're just right. Any shampoo promoting lonely. But I think yeah, that's a big difference. I think when we go back, it's in a very short period of time. Like I can think of some other comedies that weren't hits when they came out

[01:33:30] that became Holt hits, but it happened within the very compressed Samberg-esque timeline of like Big Lebowski got rehabilitated fast. A Christmas story got rehabilitated fast. It's only like it's it underperforms when it comes out in theaters. It goes to TV and within three years. Everyocracy. That's one right.

[01:33:50] Idiocracy like there's a few where it's like, hey, you know what? This turn was ahead of its time. But Idiocracy didn't have a chance to succeed at all. Idiocracy came out one theater or two theaters. So it's like, oh, we are discovering this thing that didn't even really

[01:34:04] puncture the surface. And I feel like yeah, I mean, it's it's an interesting debate because comedies are I think that younger people don't care about comedy history. I think where you can be like, oh, I love a certain director.

[01:34:16] And I think comedy directors often are slighted in the grand scheme of things. 100 percent. I also think that comedies are a lot more of their time than genre movies or dramas because genre and drama transcends time, really.

[01:34:33] And comedy usually reflects the taste, the comedic taste of that era. You know, so to put on, you know, in the midst of like the naturalistic Judd Apatow kind of comedy scene we've been in for the last whatever, 15 or so years, naturalistic performances, real life circumstances.

[01:34:53] To say to someone who's come up in this time here, watch Liar Liar or watch here, watch Ace Ventura Pet Detective. This is what was a normal comedy. A person would be like, what the fuck are you talking about?

[01:35:07] Yeah, comedy is so reactionary, both in terms of what it's saying in dialogue with the culture at the time, but also what it's saying in dialogue with the comedies that have come in right before it. And like the Apatow movement is 100 percent a retort to this has become

[01:35:24] twenty million dollar star above the title, super high concept premise. Jim Carrey can't lie. Magical realism, like like all the movies have some sort of weird magical element or some crazy. Let me tell you, let me tell you right now, just out of curiosity,

[01:35:43] I typed into Google best comedies of 2019, right? This is comedies of 2019 according to Google. So there may be a little bit of a person. Yeah. Yeah. Spider-Man far from home. Well, you're not far off.

[01:35:56] So the number one is Longshot, which I am in, but I also think is a great again movie that came out. That's a comedy comedy, but didn't get its due kind of found its way in its BOD release has gotten a sort of reassessment

[01:36:12] within eight months of its release. If it happens, it happens quickly. And and it's and that was also because they decided to release it the week after Endgame opened, which was a problem. Then the second comedy, The Hustle, the remake of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.

[01:36:27] With love in the way. Right. So that's all right. So that's I mean, it's definitely a comedy, but that was shelved for a long time that they tried to hide behind Avengers Endgame. And it then made seventy five million. Then fighting with my family, that wrestling movie.

[01:36:43] That's, you know, that's a sports movie. Exactly. I like that movie, but barely a comedy. Yeah. And then it goes to Book Smart, which Book Smart, you know, great, you know, indie movie, great, great. But an indie always be my maybe Netflix movie. Right. Yeah.

[01:36:59] The Beach Bum, the Matthew McConaughey. Carmie Curry, Carmie Curry movie. And they go once upon a time in Hollywood. Right. Now we're stretching. And then we're going Pokemon Detective Pikachu. Like so like, I mean, there were laughs. Laughs. Of course. But you're absolutely right.

[01:37:19] There are there are no come out. I mean, this speaks to a much larger conversation that we could all have that I would be that I would love to have is the state of just as somebody who writes and acts and works in this business, the state

[01:37:34] of feature film comedies is in is in disarray. I utilize this at least once every five episodes. Griffin is on that horse. This is we're we're in an era where people because I mean, listen,

[01:37:50] this is for me and I've been in movies that suffer from this and I've, you know, whatever. Comedies have now decided we don't care about visual storytelling at all. And so people don't feel like they need to go to the movies to see something that is visually unspectacular

[01:38:07] because they can wait and watch the jokes at home. Not realizing what's fun is to laugh along with an audience. By the way, this is only going to get worse because of the like Palm Springs, which I think is a really fun, great movie. I really enjoyed it.

[01:38:19] But now it's like, oh, great. It's almost reinforcing it where a tenant is pushing off and off and off. You know, and it was in a weird time. But like Palm Springs throw right onto Hulu. You know, you're right. You're right.

[01:38:32] I saw Palm Springs's Sundance with an audience who didn't know what they were in for and it was like a wonderful crowd experience. I would have loved that crowd to feel them all cluing in, yes. Which is why it then sold for like 14 million dollars or whatever.

[01:38:45] Like, yeah, it's a it's a record breaking Sundance sale because of how well it played with audiences. I thought this could cross over. Yes. Well, here's what I'll say. And this is my only and I am on I am on team comedy.

[01:38:58] I agree with what everybody here is saying. The one positive about going direct to VOD is the lack of bigger advertising. So I was able to go into Palm Springs going like, I don't know anything about this movie and the same thing for the Be My Maybe.

[01:39:16] Like, I don't know anything about it. I'm just going to based on the stars. I will hit play because I have nothing invested in it. And it made both of those films to me that much sweeter

[01:39:26] because I was like, oh, I didn't see the 10 jokes in the trailer. I didn't get over that. Now, I'm not saying that they should make them, but there was something really enjoyable from a comedic perspective. I was like, oh, I was totally surprised.

[01:39:37] But what we don't have any more are those centerpiece, those movies. Like the last kind of comedy that everybody like so it used to be that every like I always gauge it by like my I'm a comedian.

[01:39:51] So everybody I know is dialed into comedy, you know, big and small. And rare and broad or whatever. But when I talk to like my cousins, you know, like when I'm like, what's the last big comedy you saw a lot of times?

[01:40:05] My cousins will be like, I don't know, Bridesmaids. That feels like the last one that really sort of like tied the culture. And that's kind of it. Bridesmaids and then maybe dot, dot, dot game night. Maybe one.

[01:40:17] Another one where it did it did pretty well and has grown only in the 18 months. Yeah, guys, unfortunately, I have to jump right now. I'm sorry to end this conversation in this moment where I'm so passionate about things, but continue and I apologize.

[01:40:34] Do you have any final words? Yeah, final thoughts. Let's sign off. Let's go back and try to unearth these comedies because I think there's something to be found. Like when we talked about the set piece that we all of us have never seen before,

[01:40:47] there is worth there to applaud these performers that we've forgotten about that we can even as people who make things reuse, like let's get some of these people back in the mix because they are legitimately funny and they should be held up.

[01:41:02] I want to go back and watch other movies now because they were too old for me when they came out. Like just to kind of get back in there. I think I don't revisit comedies at all.

[01:41:12] I revisit the ones that I love, but not the ones that I've never seen. So that's my that's it. All right. Thank you. Bye guys. Paul Shear. And that was Paul Shear. We now give him his intro. OK, OK. So now we can really get this podcast started.

[01:41:25] I feel like I mean and I understand why this is the case, but I've talked about it with David a lot when when this pandemic hit right? This thing that was unprecedented, that has rattled the film industry to its core

[01:41:41] and it will take years to figure out what the actual long term effect of this is. But certainly it seems to be changing behaviors already in terms of how people think about movies and movie going. As an experience and I think is only like putting steroids into trends

[01:41:56] that were already going in a certain direction, which is what types. Negative negative as far as I'm concerned. And I feel like theatrical movie going has been trending closer and closer to something like live sporting events where the things that people think are

[01:42:10] worth going to see in a theater are its opening weekend. I need to be part of the conversation. There are things that could be ruined for me and it's spectacle. I don't want to be spoiled on social media and it's got to be something that is

[01:42:25] that has components that are going to look better on a big screen than they do on my sixty five inch television. Everybody, that's the thing is everybody has an enormous television now. So you know, a movie like, you know,

[01:42:41] I'm trying to think of a comedy that's come out, a movie that's a good comedy. People are like, I don't need to see that on a giant screen. It's going to look just as good on my sixty five inch television. Even something like game.

[01:42:52] You can imagine people did that sort of like math and that's a movie that's actually very visual. It's a comedy that's actually cinematic, but it feels like it took a while for people to get that one of the only comedies in the last five years

[01:43:06] to break a hundred million dollars. But but domestically it was under and also it like opened OK. But then it was a rare comedy to start doing better and holding in future weeks because it felt like there was an actual word of mouth there,

[01:43:20] which so rarely happens and is how comedies really catch on. Not because all the best gags have been in the trailer, but because people start telling each other. And what happens is comedy also is this weird world in which,

[01:43:34] you know, in which we all live and work and all that. But comedy is this weird thing that when you get good enough at it, you decide now I'm going to go do that other thing.

[01:43:47] You know, so so so like it's like some of our best comedy director, some of the people, some of the best comedy visual directors or let's say I'm just going to say I'm going to take one and say Todd Phillips.

[01:43:58] Todd Phillips is an incredibly good director of comedy. You know, I think old school is amazing. I think hangover is like he's an incredible comedy director. He he imbues very simple like what we're talking about. Very simple game based comedy stories with stakes,

[01:44:16] with scope, with scale, everything and does so with incredible visual storytelling. He now does not make comedies. Right. He's he's fully out. Yeah. And he's he's embraced serious movies as him like leveling up in some kind of a way that.

[01:44:35] And that's the thing that's like at a certain point you get good enough that you're like, well, now I want to be in I've gotten good enough at this. Now that I'm the king of comedy, I want to go do this other thing

[01:44:44] because because that's the that's the real club I'm trying to get into, which makes me so confused. There is nothing weirder than Todd Phillips's career because like you said, he's a huge comedy director. He makes so much money doing it. He's basically atop of the game.

[01:44:59] He's like, I'm done with this. I'm going to go do a like gritty, scorsese reboot of and he wins like the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. Like it's not just that the movie did well. Like, you know, like he won over a billion dollars.

[01:45:14] It's insane. It's insane. It's crazy. Also, I mean, the director of Dumb and Dumber, making his like weird, you know, driving Miss Daisy, which also played like gangbusters overseas. And to that guy, you're like, comedy's been trending downwards. My last couple of movies weren't hits.

[01:45:32] I make this sort of saccharine dramedy and I win best picture. Can you imagine winning best picture just years after you did the three stages? It's insane. You're like, this is why here's another example of this. We don't think of Robert Zemeckis as a comedy director,

[01:45:51] but let's go through his career. I want to hold your hand. Use cars, romancing the stone back to the future. Who framed Roger Rabbit back to the future to back to the future? Three death becomes her all comedies.

[01:46:04] There are other genres sprinkled in there, but all of those movies are comedies first and foremost. And then he makes Forrest Gump. It's his biggest hit. He wins the Oscars and he never looks back. That's the problem. Forrest Gump was him leveling up.

[01:46:17] Yes, or what? You know, that's how it's perceived. Yeah, that's the thing that happens so often is there's a tip where once they get it's and I hate to say it, but I think it's like

[01:46:29] and maybe I'm wrong, but it is it is the false idolatry of the Oscar or in your case, Griffin, this Saturday. The desire, this something about even Jim Carrey was on Howard Stern recently and they started talking about how he's never won an Oscar.

[01:46:48] How he's never and he even still with everything Jim Carrey has done with like what an icon he is. You can still feel the hunger and the hurt he has. It's so on the surface to have not been given that Oscar.

[01:47:04] You know, which is such an incredible who cares? You know what's also wild is I recently watched the trip to Greece. The fourth, the trip. Amazing. Great. Amazing. One of the best franchises ever. Not talked about. Hands down, Cougan and Bryden

[01:47:21] are one of the best comedy duos of the last 25 years. They are. But also I love how that movie feels different, like how they find weird new angles on the exact same format. Are you guys aware that those are shot as British TV series?

[01:47:36] And of course, Jason, how would I know that? I've grown up in the United States. I only watch American television with David. You know, listen, David as a lifelong New Yorker. How would you? Geez, how would you know how it works? I'm on British on the side.

[01:47:52] I want to explain British television and how it works to you guys as 100 percent Americans who my understanding is have never even been abroad. I assume that you're the one who has the greatest understanding on this subject of any of us.

[01:48:06] Sure. I mean, as the child of Greek immigrants, I am closest to an international consumer of European content. David, I believe you to be a lifelong Upper East Side boy. Upper West Side, but Upper West Boys in the house. Anyway, trip to Greece. Sorry, Griffin, I interrupted you.

[01:48:29] I went to London. A thing that I assume no one else on this podcast is done. You took you took a trip, one might say. I took a trip, but I think it was when we were doing tick press

[01:48:40] and on like British Netflix, they had the seasons of the trip TV show, which is how it was released over there. And I just like stayed up all night binging all of those seasons, because I was like,

[01:48:53] when I fly back to America, I'm stuck with 90 minute versions of these. It's so when I discovered that for the first one somebody told me and I flipped out in it's so much like they're five hour story. That's crazy. Oh, it's more riffing.

[01:49:10] It's it's the trip is something I've been chasing for years that again, it gets back to what I like about used cars. It's what I like about Lebowski. I like it's what I like about Lodge 49. I like a shaggy kind of rambling hangout movie that has emotion,

[01:49:31] though, like that's what sort of magical about the all the things you're talking about is like the trip. You're like, oh, this is just, you know, initially maybe you're like, it's just them doing bits. It's funny. But like what, you know, what's hanging this together?

[01:49:43] And like those move those shows, movies, they're so sad and they're so heartfelt and they're kind of like, you know, they're kind of genuinely mean to each other and genuinely loving and like I feel like Greece is all about dying, like the latest one.

[01:49:57] Like it's all about sort of confronting your mortality. But also those are the most joke dense comedies. Like, you know, if you look at things in the last 10 years, you're like what comedies actually just have really good joke hit ratios.

[01:50:09] And I'm like those four movies, what we do in the shadows and pretty much the Samberg movies you named, right? Like those are the only ones that are operating that level. Apatow has gone more and more towards sort of tragic comedy. He's trying to do James L. Brooks.

[01:50:23] He's given up on he's given up on comedy and he's trying to do James L. Brooks movies. And that's that's it. That's the that's now his template. Aside from the the fact that the trip movies are sort of despite not even being intended as films,

[01:50:38] what we wish we were seeing in American studio comedies. There's also the fact that in terms of the character arcs in those movies, I don't remember if it happens between two and three or between one and two.

[01:50:51] But like Cougan's soft spot is you never made it as an American movie star, right? With these guys poking fun at their own identities. That's where Brighton pokes him is you tried to cross the pond. You never fully translated as an A-list American comedy star.

[01:51:06] And then his defense at some point starts to become but look at the awards I've won. The character gets his sense of confidence from. He is filomena and he gets the serious nom for Laurel and Hardy. Right. It's exactly what you're talking about.

[01:51:22] In Greece, he's talking about his. I got a serious after in a dramatic film. Yes. And the slight where and Bryden soft spot is he's a TV. You're a light entertainer. He's a TV actor still doing a man trapped in a box.

[01:51:39] But Brighton, Brighton really is that's that's a thing in Britain. That Britain, I feel like values much more right? The light entertainer like you say, right? Like, you know, the guy who can like do 10 minutes on a talk show, host an award show, do a serious sitcom,

[01:51:53] do like a wacky sketch show, like can do it all basically. Do a little bit of everything. And but Cougan wants to be a superstar, an American. He wants to be a movie star the way that American movie stars are. Cougan wants Cougan's drive is to be

[01:52:11] is to be and it's in Tristram Shandy as well. Like it's in there. It's baked into that as well. It is Cougan getting his shot. And it's it's so like he not only wants to be an American movie star. That's funny, though. Yes.

[01:52:24] He knows it's funny that he wants to be an American movie star, which is what he's leaning into it. He's leaning into why the movies are good and that the guys own everything that they're insecure about. But not only does he want to be an American movie star

[01:52:37] as as a comedian, he wants to do that so that he can also then do the Jim Carrey move of translating to drama. And so he's had to become very defensive of the fact we're like, well, the American career didn't work, but then I went back to England

[01:52:50] and I sort of got the dramatic respectability, which is his whole defense. And Brighton is so comfortable in the fact that he's a light entertainer and Cougan has so much more success and is so much more insecure about it.

[01:53:03] It speaks to this whole dynamic you're talking about of like how comedians perceive what they do and what the ultimate aspirations are. That's why they're so brilliant together. It's almost as if to say the thing that I have pursued,

[01:53:17] the thing that I have wanted and pursued the most is only in service of some other thing I'm not allowed. I'm not being allowed to do. It's almost as if comedy is a tool or will grant you an invitation to the cool kid table.

[01:53:35] You know, it's almost like at the high school mentality of like, hey, I bet if I'm funny enough, the cool kids will invite me to sit at their table or will invite me to hang out with them. Not realizing like they're boring.

[01:53:45] I don't want to hang out at that table. It's a huge bummer. Yeah, that table sucks. Why can't being a comedian be enough? But then we will, I'm certain we could sit here and just like lean in on Sandler and be like, oh, here we go.

[01:54:02] Here's another Sandler grownups movie. Here's another this. And then we reward him for uncut gems. We reward him for his more serious turns when he turns it on and is like, hey, wait a minute. I can do a PTA movie. I can do uncut gems.

[01:54:20] I can do I have this gear. But then when he continues to churn out happy Madison movies, we are all kind of rolling our eyes and being like, is this still what we're doing? Some of them are good. Like I can't defend all of that. Sure.

[01:54:33] There was some interview he did during the uncut gems tour where it was like a longer form podcast interview. And someone asked him, like, look, every time you do one of these movies, you get really great reviews.

[01:54:45] You've proven you can do this, even if all your dramatic turns haven't like worked financially, you always get good notices. Why are you still doing these Netflix comedies? And Sandler, whose persona is so like, yeah, yeah, Lazy Fair.

[01:54:58] I'm a chill. Yeah, buddy, whatever, actually got kind of defensive. And he was like, because I love comedy. Like, why are you asking me this? Comedy is my first love. It's why I got into this. Why would I stop doing it? I like doing the dramatic stuff.

[01:55:14] It's satisfying. Yes, it is nice to finally get some good reviews, but I don't view that as a way out. And you're like, we wish our comedy stars had a little bit more of that attitude where instead. Agreed. I think not to make the second half

[01:55:26] this shearless half of the episode. And I'm saying half because this episode is going to be 17 hours long about psychoanalysis. I do think there's something tied to the fact that so many comedians, their development of their comedic personality is rooted in some sort of insecurity. Right?

[01:55:44] Yes. Basically what it seems to me is especially those guys that generation before the Jim Carrey, the Mike Myers, the big solo, it's me. The I am the movie. You're the franchise. Ferrell is the closest you have to that now, right? Like, I think Ferrell works.

[01:56:03] Here's the difference, though. And I'm going to say this, Kerry, Mike Myers, these are guys who are solo lone wolf performers, right? Yeah. Ferrell likes bouncing off someone. You're right. Ferrell always has an ensemble. Yeah. He always has an ensemble because he knows

[01:56:19] I work better when other people are also being funny. I don't need to just be Ron Burgundy. Britt Tamblin might as well be just as much a hilarious character and whatever. Whoever else. I can't remember the character names of everybody else. Paul Rudd can have his game.

[01:56:36] Everybody gets to have a game. But in a Jim Carrey movie, he has the game. Nobody else has a game. You know, and those guys seem to always be trying to prove something to someone else, not come and will Ferrell operates from a.

[01:56:50] And I'm saying this because I've been in Will Ferrell movie. Like, I know him. He is coming from a place of joy in that. This I don't know. This cracks me up. But mixed results. Sandler's the same fucking thing.

[01:57:02] Sandler's all about like fill the cast with other funny people, let other funny people score. I want the movie to be a hangout. You can strike him for that being sort of lazy and him getting caught up in his same stuff over and over again.

[01:57:13] But those movies do feel like he's doing them because he finds them fun. Yes. And I think that translates into viewers. Like his movies on Netflix have been massively successful because for for for nothing else than people want to hang out with him, hanging out with his friends.

[01:57:31] OK, so now I'm going to tie together a bunch of threads we've been throwing out. So one I feel like third beat. Third beat connections. You have a lot of comedy being rooted in security

[01:57:41] in terms of what drives people to pursue this as a career in the first place, right, which means that for a certain type of people who isn't keeping their love of comedy and the craft of it at the forefront of their mind and are viewing rather comedy

[01:57:54] as some sort of solve to the emptiness in their lives. If I can say this, perhaps you get to the top of the mountain, whether as a director or as a star, you're making twenty million dollars a movie. You're the guy above the title.

[01:58:05] Your films are all hits and you still feel empty inside. You know, I guess this isn't it. I need to go serious. Maybe the awards filled the gap. You start chasing that thing or agree. You do sort of a Mike Myers thing where you're like,

[01:58:18] I don't know, I guess I just kind of disappear. I'll show up when I feel like it, right? Myers is like, you know what? I'm out of ideas. See you later. Right. I guess I just will I'll check back in.

[01:58:28] Yeah, I think Mike Myers was basically like, oh, the thing I do people don't want anymore. Right. And I'm not going to just be the cat in the hat instead. And I can't evolve. I can't evolve otherwise. Like I can't because here's the thing.

[01:58:43] Mike Myers could have just become a working act. Absolutely. You know, it could have been a plug and play comedy star. He, you know, like he's good in Studio Fifty Four. He could have been a good actor, you know, like he didn't.

[01:58:54] But he was so used to being these. It was all about the externals of his characters, the broadness of love guru or these kind of larger these cartoon characters, whether it was literal cartoon character, you know, with prosthetics and stuff, or whether it was Austin Powers cartoon,

[01:59:16] big bright color kind of cartoon characters. But the world just was like, we don't want that anymore. And he was like, I don't know how to be. I think he was like, I don't know how to be funny without that.

[01:59:24] And you got to give him credit for that level of self-awareness, you know? In the same way that Sandler and Farrell have the self-awareness of like understanding where their bread is buttered, what they do. They'll still try other things. They'll be in other people's movies.

[01:59:37] They'll try dramatic roles. The idea that Will Farrell was like, you know, it'd be funny if we made like a Spanish language telling a vella that I was the star of. And people are like, great, go do it. Like that tickles me.

[01:59:48] I like that, you know, I love. I mean, I love Farrell. But like with Myers, we do have that sort of sickness. And we had it with Farrell. I feel like when he was at his Anchor Manny height, where like when he takes the Stranger Than Fiction role,

[02:00:01] where like the press and I feel like even moviegoers are like, oh, like is this it? Is this the serious turn? Like, you know, it has become so much a part of the arc. And like anytime Mike Myers pops up in something like Inglourious Bastards,

[02:00:14] I feel like there is that kind of thing of like, oh, I want to see Mike Myers be serious. Like, and then he, you know, that he just doesn't want to do that. Like that's not his thing. It's such a funny trajectory that I feel like

[02:00:25] both Tom Hanks and Robin Williams kind of pioneered, you know, the flip from TV popular TV comedian to Oscar winning dramatic actor became a path pretty close to each other. Those two did that thing that a lot of comedians were like that. I'll do that. That's the template.

[02:00:50] And it's the same template for both. It's like sitcom to mad cat movies, to sincere comedies, like still a comedy, but more of like a sweet comedy to taking the dramatic roles. Like they both went on the same path or like the comedic role

[02:01:08] like Patch Adams is a comedic role in a serious movie. Right. You know, you know, and there's like serious stuff in big, you know, that's like versus like Bachelor Party or Splash or whatever. Big has like emotional stakes that are that help Hanks get to the next level.

[02:01:33] Big is his Good Morning Vietnam where it's like, oh, you have a movie perfectly set up to allow him to be funny while the outside trappings of it are vaguely serious. Yes. While Mercedes rule can give you like real grounding element of my son has disappeared. Yes.

[02:01:51] But but I think it's also telling that like Hanks, you know, it's it's Philadelphia and then it's Forest Gump that are the pivot points where it's like, well, now he's America's dad and his comedies that he makes that are successful after that point are like romantic comedies.

[02:02:09] Right. The rare examples where it's like he's playing a human guy. The guy isn't goofy. It's more based on charm or whatever. Hanks has this insane box office run that pretty much is like knee capped by the back to back flops of the terminal

[02:02:25] and the lady killers, which are his two attempts at like, I'm going to do a big goofy character again. And he's he's funny in the terminal. He's like genuinely. I don't like that much. Raiden. Lady killers. He's funny too. Like he's good when he goes for it.

[02:02:40] Like and I appreciate that he did. But people don't want it. People don't want it anymore. People don't want it because also by the time lady killers comes around, nobody remembers Buzzing Bunnies. Right. Nobody remembers him as a TV star. Yeah. Yeah. You know, yeah.

[02:02:58] It's that's not part of people's memory of who he is. You know, I think I think the modern version of it has become the Chris Pratt, which is like you want to go. Let's get you in a franchise. Yeah, let's get you buffed up.

[02:03:12] And I've heard stories from like friends who worked on shoots with people who are like UCB people where suddenly on this shoot, they have like an entire team around them that's going like stand up straight or don't do this.

[02:03:28] Can we get a shot of him with his shirt off? Because they're viewing still their comedy work as a soft audition for can we make this guy more of a conventional leading man? Yes. Oh, yeah. Well, that's the thing is like any indie

[02:03:42] movie can now take Jake Johnson and take him from safety not guaranteed and put him into Jurassic Park. You know, because of Trevor. Right. And if you get to play the tech guy in Jurassic Park and prove that you can fit into this genre,

[02:03:59] then it's pretty much in your hands to go, do I want to cash in the trips and try to be the Chris Pratt next? Exactly. And and that tip, you know, but what we're talking about now again is that tip is only available

[02:04:14] into these certain franchises because there are no more used cars. There are no more on TV. Maybe. Yes, it's on TV. Right. But the reality is like everything now is an audition for a Marvel movie. Yeah. Some Disney subsidiary, a Star Wars, Lucasfilm, Star Wars movie,

[02:04:39] a Marvel movie or I guess now Jurassic or something, one of these giant temples and this is coming from someone who's in John Wick 3. So take it with a grain of salt. But this is what I was going to say, like I look at you

[02:04:51] and I feel like you are one of the handful of people of sort of like your generation, your comedy class, you and Paul both fit into this thing where it's like you guys have done other stuff, but you really have had like great comedy careers.

[02:05:06] But the comedy career now is kind of just like you just do everything. Yes, you know, because if you want to go from being like the guy who scores in supporting roles or on TV shows or whatever to being a leading man,

[02:05:18] you almost have to sell out your comedy bonafides or evolve it into something else. If you want to be doing pure comedy work, it's more like a potpourri of a lot of different stuff

[02:05:29] because I yeah, I talk about this with my buddy all the time where you're just like, it's very weird that we live in a timeline where we haven't gotten like three Nick Kroll character comedies. Oh, yeah. Well, I used to think that I kept being like

[02:05:45] when they made the Sandler deal at Netflix, I was like, why aren't they making tiny versions of that with all of us? With right. Why is and why isn't Hulu or, you know, right? The competitors, why are they paying him an enormous amount of money?

[02:05:58] Why don't they do the same for our crew of people? And just give us a smaller amount of money. Name your name and say this is a public forum. Yeah, give it, you know, like we'll give you, you know,

[02:06:12] ten million dollars to give us three movies over the next three years. And people talk about this thing where it's like comedies used to be. They were so low budget. Funny was what sold if people said, man, this movie actually made me laugh.

[02:06:25] That would get people in the theaters because there was a little more breathing room for something to become a word of mouth hit. And also like home video is big, cable sales were big. I think the actual residuals on those things for everyone involved

[02:06:40] were richer than when they end up on streaming platforms. And so those movies, those budgets got bigger. You know, so you're making then suddenly in the 90s and early 2000s, you're making 60 to 80 million dollar comedies, which then becomes a problem of if this guy costs 20 million dollars

[02:06:58] and his movies cost this much and the expectation is that they're going to gross this much. Why would we give Jim Carrey a script that's really good? If a script's really funny on paper, in theory, we could cast unknowns and sell it based on humor.

[02:07:13] What we're going to give Jim Carrey is a premise that sounds funny, but the script isn't great. And the hope is that Jim Carrey and, you know, a steady hand behind the camera will make it funny, which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't.

[02:07:27] But these guys stop getting the best material and agree. The best comedies used to come out of this guy's been on two seasons of SNL or on this sitcom or scored at the best friend roles in these other movies. Let's put him in a five million dollar comedy.

[02:07:40] What's there to lose? The thing is those what doesn't happen anymore is exactly what you just described. And what is in fact had to take place is those people that even that are within the comedy machine, let's say you just brought up SNL.

[02:07:57] If that's the case, Kyle Mooney, who I think is a genius, has to go sideways and make Briggs be there. Right. Like he has to go and make it on his own basically. Right? Right. Like maybe you basically have to make a Sundance movie,

[02:08:09] even though you are already in the established community. Yes, you have to make a Sundance movie or the equivalent thereof. There isn't. There aren't studio movies that are for people that are there for up and cut. There isn't a building block of feeder system.

[02:08:23] It is really just it's, you know, Chris Pratt only happens because James Gunn is like, I want Chris Pratt. Right. You know, Helms Gallifianakis and Brad Cooper, Bradley Cooper, yeah, that's Phillips being like I'm putting my life on the line. Right. Yeah.

[02:08:39] Todd Phillips was like, I will forgo my director's fee because I want to cast these guys because the studio was like we want Jack Black. I care about Jack Black and the two other. Tom's hate Joe, I think we're the three. Something like that. Yeah. It was not.

[02:08:53] Yeah. Phillips was like, I'll give you back my ten million dollars director's fee if you let me cast these guys and made movie stars out of all of them. You know. And comedy tends to function best with that kind of hungriness and that kind of risk.

[02:09:08] I have two thoughts on the stuff you're talking about. One, the other thing that has kind of changed in a weird way as well is that there used to also be the avenue of like, we're going to construct a network sitcom around you.

[02:09:20] Kind of like what, you know, Sam Burke did with Brooklyn Nine-Nine. But that's weirdly rarer now. Like that was such a thing when I was a kid of like, you like this comedian? You liked him on SNL or some other thing? Here we go.

[02:09:31] It's the X show. That's it. It's going to run for 100 episodes plus. He's going to make a fortune like, you know, and for some reason, just because network TV is becoming so diffuse, that's kind of going away too.

[02:09:43] The other thing is, what do you guys think the biggest comedy franchise right now is? Because I have an answer and it's weird in movies, comedy franchise. In movies, did you say best or biggest? Biggest, not best. No offense to it. Oh, yeah. Hotel Transylvania. That's a close.

[02:10:06] Oh, funny. Yeah. I love it. Animated. Nope. What is it? Action. You know, action comedy, obviously. That's what every big franchise is now. It's not a marvel. It's got to be something that the rock is in. It's got to be a rock. Yes. That's right. Oh, Jumanji.

[02:10:24] It's Jumanji. Yeah. I'm thinking of like, you've got the big franchise, right? You got your Marvel, your Star Wars, your Jurassic Park. Sure. And then it's like Sony is like, yeah, we have Jumanji. That's the world we live in now where Jumanji is a tentpole franchise.

[02:10:38] Well, that's the thing is like, as also a writer, you know, I will have scripts in development. And at certain points, they will reach a point where we start looking at casting. Yeah. And the casting lists for actors, the top 10 people are not comedians. Yes.

[02:11:00] They are not comedians. This is another thing I talk about. Yes. These are they're not and I've had conversations. I've had conversations with with studio executives. I had a movie that I wrote and they were like, we will give you a green light

[02:11:14] to make this movie today in this room. If you will agree to cast one of these three women in the lead role. And they named three pop stars, not actors. Yeah. They named three pop stars, all of whom what they then told me were

[02:11:33] they the three of them were the three pop stars who had the largest social media following and probably shunny and relatable. On Twitter, which is why they think they'd be good in the comedy. And that was their whole thing.

[02:11:43] Their whole thing was literally if you can get Katy Perry to star in this movie, we'll give you the money. And I was like, nothing gives me like Katy Perry, but nothing makes me believe she can carry this movie. What are we talking about?

[02:11:58] Right now, if you're bringing her in, there's a whole apparatus that comes with her that kind of just takes over the movie. Yeah. And I'm just trying to make a funny movie here. So it's like a we're in such a weird time because of the Jumanji's,

[02:12:12] because of all these things. You know, the top grossing comedy stars are people like you know, the Rock or Zac Efron or Ryan Reynolds or people who are not necessary. And I think all of these people are funny. Let me be very clear.

[02:12:28] I think all of these people are funny. I've been in movies with some of these people. I think they are funny, but they are not comedians. Comedy movies have become the Arnold Schwarzenegger thing where it's

[02:12:37] like the only comedies that can get financed now are it has to be the brand, the franchise. It has to be at a certain size. It also has to the spectacle and the selling point is here's this guy doing comedy.

[02:12:48] But to a degree now where you're like there's no novelty in the same way that Arnold eventually did five comedies, he's just sort of become a guy with a parallel comedy career. And I think I would argue there is one pure theatrical comedy movie star

[02:13:03] left and it's Kevin Hart and we'll see if it lasts. But he's the last guy who does like comedy movies that get released theatrically and do well. And also half of his movies are now him with the rock.

[02:13:16] His last big hit movie, he did the upside, which is him trying to tiptoe into that prestige territory. I will say this, though, in his defense, they shot that movie five years. They did shoot that a zillion years ago. I mean, that's not a recent attempt.

[02:13:30] That movie, they shot that movie so long ago. Do you know what his next movie is? It's also sort of a tragic comedy about him raising children as a single father. It's a it's a white movie and no disrespect. I hope it's good.

[02:13:44] I'll take I tend to like Kevin Hart movies. I'm a big fan of ride along, I will say it. I'm not just saying this because you're on here. But I mean, don't worry about it already tiptoeing into that territory. He's got a big action franchise.

[02:13:56] He's got his fucking lifeboat with the rock and he's starting to do his drama to that point. I when I wrote my iteration of that movie, it was not for Kevin. It was supposed to be Andy Sandberg and Ice Cube. And really, and it went into turnaround.

[02:14:14] That movie died and came back to life multiple times. Wasn't it the rock and Ryan Reynolds at some point? Oh, no, you might be thinking of central intelligence. Maybe. But when it came alive again, it universal bought it out of turnaround

[02:14:31] and made it a Kevin Hart movie, right? Which was awesome. And that I did not re that was not my right. You know, that was Manfredi and Hay wrote the version for Kevin Hart. But that really was capitalizing on the momentum of both Ice Cube

[02:14:48] coming out of 21 Jump Street and Kevin Hart on the rise being like, let's put these guys together. Let's lean into this two-hander that we don't have much of anymore. And it worked. It was great. It's about fatherhood, the movie that Kevin Hart is currently making.

[02:15:03] The weirdest thing about it. Paul Shearer's back. We're still doing. Wow. I'm posting more. What happened? We have death of theatrical comedies. Well, good for fatherhoods. I have a couple of thoughts on it. What this is huge.

[02:15:18] One thing I just want to say about it is it's a Kevin Hart movie. It was written for Channing Tatum, who's another one of those guys like we're talking about like the Rockstar comedian. Who counts as a who's on the top 10 list of can can open a comedy?

[02:15:31] A question mark, except he has kind of vanished. Like there's the weird thing with Channing Tatum where he kind of is just it seems like he's sort of soft retired or he's taken a break. I don't know what. Yeah, yeah, where it's like what happened to Channing?

[02:15:45] Like where'd he go? But he was also in that zone. Anyway, hi Paul. Hi, I'm back. I'm excited to talk about coming to you. Wrapping up. That's fine. I just wanted to jump on. Four hours left. Just getting cooking. Jesus. No, I think it's interesting.

[02:15:59] We've gotten very fired. Can I tell you my theory that gets me angry? Then this is I'll bring it to the group because I talk. I yell this all the time, which is I'm really upset because what happened and I'm not talking about the outliers.

[02:16:13] But what happened to comedies is this thing where we've adapted this weird thing that happened in independent movies, which are these dramedies. And what is becoming the norm is it's not funny and it's not dramatic, but it's a dramedy.

[02:16:28] And then we're fucking sucked in this thing of like a really mediocre movie. Give me a really funny movie or give me or give me a good drama. But I feel like we're in this weird zone where it's like, I guess that was funny.

[02:16:39] What I just watched, I don't know. Yeah, I think the problem that to answer that, Paul, I think the problem. The reason that is true is because we're not casting comedians as the stars of those movies. So those movies have to percentage wise, lean more towards their strength,

[02:16:58] which is as actors rather than lean towards jokes, which is not their strength. Here's another crazy level. So when you're talking about Kyle Mooney being in the position that used to launch movie careers, right? You've done a couple seasons of SNL. You're starting to pop.

[02:17:13] A studio goes, you got a script or we have a script that could fit you. Here's two million dollars. Make the movie if it doesn't hit no skin off her backs. Right. Instead of Madison. Right. They're now launching these sort of indie films.

[02:17:25] The the pathway to them having a movie career is to play at festivals, which brings me bear is the best example of this. But I think the worst examples of this that I'm not even going to name are I need to make an indie type comedy.

[02:17:39] Yes, either has to be level of quirky, flex that. Meta or or drama. That's what I'm saying about that. Comedy. It's like I got to show all sides when the truth is what I want to see you

[02:17:51] do is be funny and know it was an indie comedy meatballs. That was right. Fucking Ivan Reitman going, Bill Murray's funny. We should make a movie where Bill Murray can be funny for 82 minutes. And it was independent. Give me a movie where Bill Murray yells at kids.

[02:18:05] Done. Can somebody write that? Boom, we got it. No one's making those vehicles on a studio level, but the people also aren't making them on an indie level. And indie films are now rising to the size of what used to be the lower level

[02:18:17] studio comedies and the indie movies, the indie movies that are interested in being funny, are more interested in being heartfelt or giving you an arc. Being funny isn't enough. I also just maybe throw one thing into the mix

[02:18:33] that the stars of these movies and I'm not thinking of anyone in particular also aren't satisfied with doing two or three movies where they're just funny. It's like, no, no, I need to show you the range where we used to have like

[02:18:47] Robin Williams just become a giant comedy star and then take a drama swing. Bill Murray. It's a little bit. Right. So it's OK. Sorry. All right. So that yeah, I feel like there is an energy of that. Yes. Absolutely.

[02:18:58] No, there is. We talked about that idea that like comedians believe that at a certain point once you get successful in a fit comedy, it for some reason is something you desire to leave behind now. And become a dramatic actor.

[02:19:12] Like it's like if I get good enough at this, the other that I can sit at the cool kids table and do drama. But I'm even I'm even saying that where that used to be a step, step, step. Now this is like, let's start with that step.

[02:19:24] Let me show you a comedy movie that has a really solid dramatic core. I'm going to show you in movie one, I got the goods to go off and be in a sorkin, you know, mini series. Absolutely. A sorkin joint.

[02:19:39] Like here's a career I think about all the time. Bill Hader, right? Griffin Newman. Well, I think about that all the time in the wrong way. I'm just like, why can't I make this work? What's the angle here?

[02:19:50] But Bill Hader is a guy who in any other era had made every single correct move to be an A-list comedy leading man. And I think it was very much a choice on his part.

[02:20:02] Barry is for my money one of the best TV shows of any stripe in the last 10 years. It's so good. But is also telling in terms of how much the industry changed, that Hader was like just amazing utility player on SNL. Right? Just serves everything.

[02:20:17] Small roles in comedies, working up to bigger roles in comedies, being key supporting, eventually being second lead in bombshell, not bombshell train wreck. And I wish he was the second lead in bombshell. I wish he played Roger Ray.

[02:20:29] A lot of makeup in that movie, a lot of makeup. He did the first makeup test for for making kills. For making kill. Oh, wow. Sure. They thought he was a little too subtle. It was an interesting curveball. Right. Yeah.

[02:20:40] But then he gets to the point where in any other time period it would have been like, Hader, what's your movie? Who do you want to write it with? Who do you want to hire as a director? Who are your buddies in the cast? What's your ideal vehicle?

[02:20:52] And for years I remember hearing like he's working on a script with Apatow. He's working on a couple of scripts. He sold pitches for what his vehicle would be. And instead it's like, here's the master of none path. When you get the moment to be the guy,

[02:21:05] you want to make the sort of personal thing that is the juxtaposition of tones and shows that range and grows you to that point where you bypass that just being the star of the pure comedy thing. Once again, Barry is the absolute best example of that.

[02:21:20] I do not criticize him at all for doing that. But I also think now that's the paradigm that people follow. And sometimes you get what sucks, which is the shittier version of that, where you're like, just be funny.

[02:21:32] Yeah, I think that what this is kind of illustrative of is the fact that and I don't know about, you know, we can only conjecture about what haters head spaces at that point. But at this point in time, if I'm creating,

[02:21:48] if I'm wanting to create for myself, TV is the safest place for me because I have more control. That's where you get the control. Yes. And you don't need to worry about an opening weekend. Yeah. Yeah.

[02:21:59] That's where me as the writer, performer, I can exert more control over this than if I say to Sony or Paramount or whoever, I'm going to go into your big movie and seed control to whoever this director is.

[02:22:14] Even if Donald Glover is another person who could have done that, you know, it could become a movie star. I will tell you this. I was in the office of a place. I won't name names because I I'm sure they would be fine with me saying it,

[02:22:28] but I won't name names. I was in the office of the was it Dunder, Mifflin and the CDC. Yeah. You were in the office of Dunder. And I was there on the day that the studio delivered the poster mock ups for the film, a comedy film.

[02:22:45] And they were terrible. One of them was used. They were awful. They didn't convey comedy whatsoever. And they were so bummed, you know, as an office because they couldn't really fight back on that because on that it's the level of trust us. Trust us. That's our job.

[02:23:09] And you work so hard. And then the simplest thing, the one image that represents your film, you have zero control over. Same with trailers. That the marketing for your movie is in the hands of not you, you know,

[02:23:26] like somebody else gets to cut your movie up and say, this movie is this. Yeah. Give away the biggest jokes and the reveals. Like I didn't see a trailer for Palm Springs. I'm so glad I didn't. Yes.

[02:23:38] Because there could be a way back in the day that you could have cut that trailer in a really cool way that wouldn't have revealed anything. He's a little bit. Just a little bit. Trust us was the tagline on the poster for used cars.

[02:23:51] So I want people to know we're still on subject. I want to say something about used cars. We should wrap up, but like I'm seeing we have two hours. A movie that I rewatched recently that kind of has a used cars vibe.

[02:24:06] It's a little maybe slightly less Mads cap, which is a movie I liked when I saw it, but when I on rewatch, I was like, oh, this is a very smart movie is Logan Lucky speaking of Channing Tatum. Oh, yeah.

[02:24:17] Which is a movie when I saw it, I was like, that was great. I had a great time. I didn't think about it much, you know, and obviously it wasn't a big hit. I also rewatched it recently.

[02:24:26] It was something I jumped to in quarantine is like, I think this movie would make me feel good. And it's kind of used cars is more acidic because used cars is really like it has the stuff like Jimmy Carter's getting interrupted in the

[02:24:39] middle of a sincere speech where they really are like, fuck you guy. Like, you know, America is a shithole. Whereas Logan Lucky is kind of like the whole trick of that movie is that the whole time Channing Tatum is smart and he's smart because

[02:24:51] he knows how the system fucks people like him and he knows how to work around that. And like the first time I saw the movie, like everyone he involves in his scheme are the same types of people who like, you know, the system

[02:25:03] fucks. Can I bring up another movie that used cars reminded me of to get back to use cars? Good guys, the Russell Crow. Nice guys. Nice guys. Yes, nice guys. Which also is the same element of I mean,

[02:25:19] I think oftentimes these kind of scumbaggy guys are often caught up in like more of a thriller heisty kind of a thing. Well, Shane Black, this is like that's a Shane Black special. You know, like Kiss Kiss Bang Bang might as well be the same thing.

[02:25:33] Like Downey Jr. and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is legitimately a bad guy. You know, like he stumbles into the events of the movie trying to run away from the events of his life that have been that are bad.

[02:25:47] You know, so that is such a Shane Black like trope that is part that is from this era that is from his, you know, that's from the action comedies that he does in the late 80s, early 90s.

[02:26:00] Like it's he is like he's a through line up until now. I'm underrated. Oh, great movie. Best Marvel movie. Best Marvel movie. Predators may be not as successful, but a lot went wrong there. Can I draw my very quick Predators anecdote? Yes, please.

[02:26:18] I was out at dinner with somebody and they ran into a guy walked by and they went, oh my God, how are you doing? Nice to see you. Da, da, da, da. And they went, this is my friend. He's an editor. It was you know what it was?

[02:26:29] He had edited, I think the pilot of the tick, but didn't do the series. Got it. And I was like, oh, why didn't you do the series? I was with the the tick cast and and he was like, I got pulled into editing Shane Black's The Predator.

[02:26:45] And that was two years of my life where the studio green lit a movie going, yeah, we get it. We want to Shane Black movie. He delivered a Shane Black movie. And I had to spend 18 months making it less of a Shane Black movie.

[02:26:58] Oh, I would love to see Shane Black's cut. Yeah. There's like a full cut that I think whether or not it's perfect is a Shane Black movie. And that's and that's interesting to me. I mean, I remember reading some synopsis like based on scripts

[02:27:11] from more reputable sources and it sounded at least it's not a Predator movie was a Shane Black movie about Predator, which I look, I'm down to that kind of idea. It's like James Cameron and Aliens. It's like you could take a director and redo something.

[02:27:26] Totally. Oh, I love, you know, I just watched Aliens. I guess I'm watching everything from that era during quarantine. My quarantine media diet is wild. I want to just offer a movie up to the group here as a rewatch in this used

[02:27:43] Cars vein because I was thinking about it the other day and I loved it as a kid. And that movie has tones of kiss, kiss, bang, bang. It's called The Hard Way. I was just going to say, I bet it's The Hard Way. Holy shit, that's so weird.

[02:27:57] Wow, I try. I'm that. Go ahead. No, I haven't watched it in a long time. Michael J. Fox is an actor who wants to like learn how to be a cop and he is paired with why I'm ever getting his name. James Woods.

[02:28:10] I looked into the rights for this movie to remake it a couple of years ago. Can I just say very quickly? I was playing the mental exercise of if I became a comedy star and I was in

[02:28:20] a position to be able to make my own vehicles, what premise would suit me well? And I independently came up with the premise of The Hard Way and then found out that it existed because I was like, that's such a good comedy. It's funny.

[02:28:31] I miss soft actor has to actually learn. Right. The premise of The Hard Way is James Woods is a homicide detective in Detroit. Fame Twitter community and James Woods. No, it's New York because the final scene is in New York. The final scene takes place on that giant

[02:28:48] billboard above Times Square like the smoking. You're right. You're right. Sorry. Yes. And so and he gets assigned like this. They're like, there's some actors going to play a cop in a movie. So he's going to be in your car with you.

[02:29:00] And that's the day that like all of the crime lords decide to go to war with James Woods and Michael J. Fox, who's just an actor is along for the ride. It's right along. It's right along the movie. Of course, I forgot about that.

[02:29:16] I want to watch it now. Let's all watch it and get together and talk for four hours about it. Please, please. Here's what I'm going to say. The hard way. The reason I was looking into remaking the hard way is because the hard way is to

[02:29:27] me, the perfect version of movies that should be remade because it's flawed. It's not a great when you rewatch it, you're going to be like, oh, this isn't great, but the bones of it are it could I can the things that are wrong are very easily fixable.

[02:29:46] So it's a rewatch that is like so tempting because it's not. You don't watch it like, fuck, this is a this is a jet. Make and it kind of is the broken remake. Logans run remake the broken scripts that like, you know, or the movies that can

[02:30:01] be done better, like a good premise that is executed. Don't remake a class ever. Right. The closest I have ever come to selling something is I almost almost talked some junior executives at Universal off of a general meeting into letting me

[02:30:18] try to develop a last starfighter remake like years ago. And it was a thing where, A, they were like, we'll quietly let you do this without any money to see if it turns out good enough that we could pitch it up the ranks.

[02:30:30] But also the rights on that thing are fucked. But that's one of those things where you're just like that premise is perfect. It's even more relevant today. You could apply like any new comedy star, build it around their personality, totally transform it, but do it with better effects.

[02:30:46] Like that's the kind of thing you want to fucking remake is the thing that didn't totally hit the first. No, or something that has no. It's IP without an emotional connection. You say the thing I've heard of last starfighter. I don't remember it.

[02:31:01] So I have no connection to wait, you're not going to have the guy who takes out his eyeballs and washes them with the chip. You know, no one cares. And that's what you kind of have to walk this line of familiarity,

[02:31:10] but not devotion to or connection to it. It's weird. It's a weird there's a subtle line there. I also wanted to say one other thing about as we're talking about actors and stuff. I had this realization the other day, whether or not it's a good and maybe

[02:31:25] I change it in a couple of days, but I was like, I almost just want to strive to be like Eugene Levy. I'm like, here's a guy co-wrote some of the greatest, you know, big comedies, improvised comedies, just subtly just working away, did sketch shows,

[02:31:38] now created, you know, Schitt's Creek, like just continually getting to do his thing for a long, a long time. You guys are doing. I'm not blowing smoke up your ass, but we're talking about these sort of

[02:31:50] comedy careers that don't exist anymore and the types of comedies that don't exist anymore. And it's like you guys represent the modern paradigm, which is you do a little bit of everything. Like both of you guys have great careers.

[02:32:02] You're like beloved and you're in a lot of popular great projects. But there's no longer the like, you become the guy, here's the brand, here's the thing and you're just doing pure comedy. It's I'll do guest spots on this. I'll do an arc on this.

[02:32:15] I'm a regular on this. I do this movie. I rewrite this script. I sell my own projects. I do sketches for nothing. I want to be like very clear, not for nothing. A huge component of yes, exactly what you're describing. Griffin is true.

[02:32:28] Like the comedy career currently is you do myriad things, including what we're doing right now. You cannot underestimate how big a driving engine podcasting has been building an audience. Yeah. For the rise of comedians, you know, like you see somebody, you know,

[02:32:49] you see people come up through UCB, you see people come up through whatever. But like the like like the people that come up through UCB that then like Lauren Lapkis being in the wrong. Missy. I was going to bring up is almost the one.

[02:33:02] It's so much about should happen. Yes. Is so much about comedy. Bang bang. Absolutely. You know, comedy bang bang is the is the SNL for her is the is the thing that takes her from a UCB kind of she's doing her own character stuff.

[02:33:18] She has the Netflix thing, but like, but like comedy bang bang, I think introduces her to an enormous amount of people that ultimately garners the attention of the happy Madison people who are like, how about her?

[02:33:30] She did the movie where she just gets to go full lap, guess right where she gets to be the full on character and spade is get her in the room with maybe just a little bit underneath her.

[02:33:42] Like and then she can score and just kill it like and crush it. Like, you know, to me, the one career of them always kind of amazed that and I believe it will continue to go.

[02:33:50] But Nicole Byer, I think is like this full package of just why isn't she a movie star? Yeah, why isn't she the best? Put her in my movie and she'll never be on this podcast because there aren't comedy movies.

[02:34:01] Yeah, that's the only reason the only reason a lot of these people are not comedy movie stars is because there are not comedy movies. And when there are comedians aren't in them, bring everything full circle, you're like what needs to happen is as you said,

[02:34:16] Jason Netflix having the courage to be like, let's have a 20 million dollar slate of like four to five comedy movies made at that cumulative budget where it's like, what's the Nicole Byer vehicle? What's the this? What's the that in the way that like the wrong

[02:34:33] Missy is the first time it feels like they're using one of their pre-established Netflix comedy stars to launch someone else's leading star career. They need to start doing more of that, like proper two handers. Well, Tim Robinson too, it's like he did his show.

[02:34:48] They gave him his characters and he got a show. It's like I'm all for that. But I love what Jason like I've been I've been saying, where is the Blum House of comedy forever? Make this one million dollar movies go and then one can hit one

[02:35:02] and 24 should do it. Netflix should do it. All these places should do it. It makes it should not be the rarity. It should be like it's like it's the same thing I feel like this should every shop, every streaming service, every studio should have

[02:35:18] a low budget comedy division that is just making deals with people like us. I mean, listen, here we are panning ourselves on the back, but no, but it's to be making forwarding. It should be the Blum House thing is a collective where your

[02:35:31] ownership you get ownership of you get this whole thing. But you'd have to do it for like two years to really see the affect because all you need is one movie to make one hundred and twenty million. And the other 10 movies that you made for one million,

[02:35:43] you've just ate up all the cost paid for. And by the way, they might be great. They may actually be really great movies. But if you have one that just hits, that's all you need one a year to do minimal hit guys. Let's let's start a cult.

[02:35:57] That's what I'm doing. Let's start a cult. Let's start a cult and let's get Jack Warden's daughter on board. But I do I do think to like bring everything in together, all these threads, right? It is that fact. You keep saying that.

[02:36:08] No, but watch this, watch this. OK. Wow. Third beats of the second herald is the fact. Connections, baby. Committees do come out of movements, right? Whenever there's a big shift in comedy, you're like there's the spider web connecting all of these people.

[02:36:23] They came out of the same theater, the same group. And these people are connected there. They appear in each other's movies, right? And then there's now been a generation that never translated to film in the sort of meaningful way.

[02:36:34] It's been in this sort of like side pocket way. It's been spread out because comedy films as a genre started to go down as they became too inflated, as the expectations became too high, as they went sideways and as the vision went to like overseas

[02:36:47] billion dollar grosses, which comedies are very, very hard press to achieve. But but there is this thing where comedies are also about careers that are about low stakes, big picture in the way that Zemeckis and Gale could make several flops in a row that people knew were good.

[02:37:03] They were like these guys are going to make a hit. We have to just keep on betting on them. Kurt Russell isn't a movie star yet for adults, but he's going to translate like all these things that then pay off

[02:37:15] with something like Back to the Future, where you have two sitcom stars who haven't starred in movies directed by a guy who's mostly made comedy flops and everything's perfect and it fucking explodes like a supernova. And you need to have that sort of big picture, low stakes,

[02:37:32] long game kind of view of trust the process. That's what you need to do. This is my hope. I want to just outline a vision here. It's scary right now that is everything has been like upended by the coronavirus that every studio immediately went without any second

[02:37:48] thought we can just put the comedies on VOD, right? Like 10 polls they're still considering. Mid-level kids films went to VOD and comedies, they were like get rid of all of them immediately. Dump it. Dump it.

[02:38:00] We don't need to think about this, which yes, comedies play well at home, but also a good comedy plays so much better in theaters. And I think people forget how thrilling an experience it is. There's a whole generation of people who haven't been raised.

[02:38:12] But my spy, it was a flawed film that was that they were trying to sneak out so they used the coronavirus as a cover and a lot of can get. A lot of them have been like that, but then there's something like

[02:38:24] Palm Springs where you're another comedy starring in on comedian, you know, and or like his second or third, Stuber before exactly, you know, again. And Camille, obviously a comedy star, but Bautista not, you know, Camille had to go the indie routes.

[02:38:42] And even then he's paired up with an action star who they're spending more energy trying to make a comedy star than actual comedians. And now Camille is in a Marvel movie. Exactly. To the conversation we to the conversation

[02:38:54] we were having one more step together, Stuber is kind of like the hard way. Absolutely. So it's to have everything fold in on itself. This is sort of my hope. Studios seem to be like. Fuck it. It's only three. We're fixing it.

[02:39:10] This is the last episode because we're fixing it today. We're fixing the whole system. We fixed comedy. It's three hundred million dollar billion dollar movies that have to be seen in theaters because people want the exuberation of seeing Cap catch Thor's hammer opening weekend before it's spoiled.

[02:39:28] And that's all that matters. But what people don't realize is a hot comedy playing with a good crowd is as exhilarating, a communal experience as Cap catching Thor's hammer. It's the same kind of juice that now people keep on meming. Remember how exciting this was?

[02:39:42] Here's my camera rip of people cheering in the theater at end game. What I wonder is as studios start to go more and more, if a movie isn't a four quadrant slam dunk, it will just punt it on to VOD.

[02:39:55] These theater chains are going to have less and less things to play because there are only so many tent polls you can make a year. They need they need other movies. It's why they need a 24 and STX and all that much like what happened in like the 70s.

[02:40:07] And even before that, it's like you have your prestige movies, your serious movies. We have a lot of little scrappy companies that are filling in those genre niches. I was going to say it's all the things that right now it's genre. It's horror movies.

[02:40:21] Those are the things that people go to the theater for. They don't go to they go to what's interesting about where we though the time we live in is people still will go to the movies to be scared together, but they will not go to laugh together.

[02:40:34] And that is weird. But if a movie has that heat around it where people are saying you won't believe how funny this is, that's my question like what will it work again? Is it even possible to get people back?

[02:40:45] But I wonder if a place like a 24 could sense the opening in the industry as like suddenly there are fewer films to play on screens because the studios aren't putting everything onto theaters or the theatrical window is collapsing to go like make low risk

[02:41:03] comedies, follow a Blumhouse model. Theaters need things to fill screens, make things that are just low risk and hope that if one of them hits, as we said, it more than makes good for the entire budget of the slate of movies you made.

[02:41:19] And you are building, hopefully theoretically, that next generation of people that are going to become the movie stars of because that's the other thing. I mean, I'm not going to start this conversation now because I suspect it would lead to another hour of chat.

[02:41:36] But we don't have movie stars anymore. It's something that doesn't exist as a reality. Anybody who's still a movie star is over 50. There is no there is nobody who's 30 something and is a movie star in order for Ryan Reynolds to become a movie star.

[02:41:52] He had to put a mask over his face. You have to play a character bigger than yourself and no and no slight against Ryan Reynolds. But Ryan Reynolds is also in many respects, I would think if you asked many people, a comedy star.

[02:42:04] He is in an action movie, but he is the face of comedy. Like that he is our biggest comedy star. And I think you could make that argument very strongly. And I feel like and Chris Pratt has been the other person

[02:42:20] who has been able to fill a void, has a Kurt Russell thing, tying it back to the podcast. Absolutely. And and and been able to run. Kurt Russell played his dad in Guardians 2. And I think forever, though, they were trying to find

[02:42:33] that Chris Pratt and they did it with, you know, the Star of Tron, the remake of Tron, all these like faceless white guys that were not bad actors, but they didn't have that charisma, that extra little bit of energy. What's gone now.

[02:42:46] And now this gets into another thing is what's gone now. I just watched The Old Guard, which I enjoyed. We love we just did an episode based on the Greg Rucka comic, which I really loved. But here's my criticism of both The Old Guard

[02:43:03] and another Netflix action movie, which I enjoyed but not enough, which was Triple Frontier. Extraction I enjoyed for Extraction I enjoyed as just a straight up pulpy, you know, action. Action like a shitty Stallone movie. Yeah, it's like Warriors or it's just getting across town.

[02:43:23] I mean, that's the answer. Sure. Yeah. Which another good movie that falls into that category is 21 Bridges with Chadwick Roseman, which I also enjoyed. But The Old Guard and Triple Frontier are ensemble movies where every single person is brooding. Yeah, like the ensemble doesn't have a joker.

[02:43:43] It doesn't have a wise ass. The ensemble doesn't have a comedian. The ensemble doesn't have a weirdo. The ensemble doesn't have any variety. Everybody speaks with the same triple frontier is like every guy is handsomer than the next. Even like the weirdo guys are still

[02:44:02] hunky, like good looking, brooding guys. You can't we can't have movies in which everybody's Charlie Hunnam. Charlie Hunnam's not even Charlie Hunnam. You know what I mean? Like we got a like there is no differentiation amongst everybody has the same voice. Everybody has the same cadence.

[02:44:22] It's very bizarre. This is why I'm really looking forward to this movie Tomorrow War, which is the Chris Pratt film. He had a comedian on set. I won't name names. A comedian on set to do punch up while they were shooting, which and she's a great writer.

[02:44:39] But also there are people in here that are. Sam Richardson, Mike Mitchell, Mike Mitchell, Marylin Rice Cub. You know, it's it's interesting director of Lego Batman movie. Like it feels like that's a movie that's trying to be

[02:44:53] a big tentpole like action sci-fi movie that is also really funny, where funny people are getting to score. So I mean and that's what you hope. But that's what you hope that ensembles can have that. Sorry, Paul, go ahead. When you get somebody like Chris Pratt,

[02:45:07] who I believe is a funny person who also is looking for that in that film. And I look at Triple Frontier, which I didn't even realize came out. I remember when they were shooting that now I look at it.

[02:45:17] I'm like, oh, yeah, well, I don't think any of these people fancy themselves, a comedy person. I think the only person you know, it's like, I guess, Anna DeArmas thinks that Ben Affleck is hilarious. But besides that, like based on their paparazzi photos.

[02:45:29] But besides that, I mean, to me, it's like it's not. It doesn't have to be a it's not a comedy by any means, but an ensemble to me should have some people that I have that can sell jokes.

[02:45:41] That's what's great about the that's what's great about the original. Yes, that's what's great about. That's what's great about all of that's what's great about. That's what's great about die hard. That's what's great about these Verhoeven movies. But die hard is Bruce.

[02:45:55] I mean, at the center, I guess what I'm saying is that the centerpiece, it's somebody who like, I think that Schwarzenegger thinks of himself as being funny. I think that he makes a lot of jokes. And you know, I think is open to that.

[02:46:07] I think there's another generation where ensembles like, no, we're all the badasses. We're all the tough guys. And I think Shane's Black movie, Shane Black's predator tried to deal with Keegan-Michael Key and the cat. Like there are these elements, but you have to have

[02:46:21] somebody who gives a shit about that, like just not looking cool. You have to be like, oh, yeah, we should have a light moment here. And I think that Stallone and Schwarzenegger for as much shit

[02:46:29] as they're given all of their movies for the most part have comedic relief in them. Yes. Yeah. Oh, and all the great, like I think the great directors of this era, you know, recognize that levity is required. You know, I think Paul Verhoeven, I think James Cameron.

[02:46:49] Scorsese is a great example. Scorsese movies are funny. Sure. Like like Bill, Bill Paxton in Aliens is funny. It's a it's a big enormous performance. Juck's opposed against, you know, Ripley, that is not a funny character at all. Deadly serious.

[02:47:07] By the way, I really want a James Cameron and comedy discussion as well because I think he is what he thinks is funny is funny to me as well. So. Oh, absolutely. He's officially reached the threshold of biting his nails and rubbing his temples.

[02:47:22] I think this is also now going to be our longest episode ever. This is our longest episode. We've also my headphones are reaching. They're about to die, which I know that's when I know things have gotten things have gone close to the three hour mark, which is great.

[02:47:35] I love it to be clear. I mean, this is essentially two episodes in one. We gave people a two for us. Right. We were fully done with you said that we had another half. And I was like, oh, that's a funny joke, Griff.

[02:47:47] And yeah, that's pretty much what I was watching it. I was on my conference call watching it go on. I was so excited to jump back in. I couldn't wait. I was so upset to get off. I'm pushing my call. Kev, I'm pushing it. Pushing it.

[02:48:01] I was like, I got to get on it now and got on it. And then you guys are still here. Usually when we have, you know, people who have busy lives on our podcast, we're like, well, let's try and get them out.

[02:48:10] You know, let's not try and take up too much of their time. There we go. This is all I have to do today. And nothing I want to do more than talk to the smart, funny people about smart, funny stuff.

[02:48:23] Well, I think you and I are in similar boats as a single man who leave alone and are paranoid about this virus and never leave losing my right now away from my home at a rented house in a safe area

[02:48:37] and my children are down by the pool and I am in here railing against the system. You're in here and you're like, OK, but guys, James Cameron, let's let's get into his comedy. So you're just like to come up names.

[02:48:49] Well, guys, let's I think we've started a lot of larger discussions that will need to be continued at some large or point in time and we need to figure out. Yeah, you're going to have to come back.

[02:49:00] And I'm sorry to tell you you're going to have to come back. Yeah, happily, happily. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, guys, do you have anything you want to plug talking about how great comedy is right now? I'll plug something really quickly.

[02:49:14] Last week, Rob Hubel and I hosted a show on Tiltify and YouTube where we were raising some money for Color of Change. You can actually still donate to this thing. We're up to almost $9000 right now. Jason's on it.

[02:49:27] June, Diane Rayfield from How Does This Get Made Is On It? Nick Kroll, Carl Tartt, Tom Lennon and I feel like I'm blanking on somebody else. They're all on it. It's super fun and you could check it out.

[02:49:41] You can go to my YouTube page and you'll have the Tiltify link right there. But I think that's a fun thing to check out. You know, we talked about small indie comedy kind of stuff earlier.

[02:49:53] I made a movie a couple of years ago called The Long Dum Road Yeah. That's now out on Netflix, written and directed by Hannah Fidel, who's fantastic, who's made great movies in the past called A Teacher. A teacher and so yeah, great filmmaker,

[02:50:09] co-written with Carson Mell, who's a Silicon Valley writer, who's an incredible writer. And so that's on Netflix and also I mean the I'm one of the voices in the new J.G. Quintel animated show on HBO Max called Close Enough.

[02:50:24] That's really fun, family absurd from the guys that did regular show, but a very adult cartoon. Oh, and by the way, I'll also plug that. How Does This Get Made Season 2 is starting August 20th and that will be. Wait, how did this get made season two? Unspooled season.

[02:50:42] Oh, did I say how does this get made? Yes, Unspooled season 2 very excited. How did this get made? A second season would be there it is. It's going to say the longest first season of all time. Paul Shear is trying to make trying to make

[02:50:55] how did this get made into school? I knew it. Planting a bit and I thought too much of the bit and then I said how did this get made? Wow. Yeah, unspooled season 2. I was like and that shows me because in my mind,

[02:51:07] I was like, have we been doing season? That's hilarious. Sorry for a minute. First season was a decade long. Yeah, the first season was season two is going to be two decades. Wow. It's just like British series, though. So David, you wouldn't understand this.

[02:51:22] We're only doing two seasons and then David has fully surrendered. He's given up. His headphones have died. One of them is dead. This one's hanging on. Is it? No, no. Those earphones often die on me during podcast records. Yeah, OK. Yeah, right. Yeah, wrap it up guys. Sorry.

[02:51:40] Thank you guys so much for being here and check out all those things. Thank you genuinely. It was it was wonderful to have you guys and we'll email you guys soon to figure out another episode. Perfect. Because now we need to start solving other genres in Hollywood.

[02:51:53] We fixed comedy. Let's let's save the adult drama next. I love that. Happily. That's the other thing I've been watching a lot of. Thank you all for listening and please remember to rate, review, subscribe. Thanks to Andrew for co-producing this show.

[02:52:10] Laymon covering for a theme song, Joe Bonaparte rounds for artwork. Go to blankies dot red dot com for some real nerdy shit. Tune in next week for Romancing the Stone. General Mancestone. One of my favorites and as always. This is a podcast called Blank Check. It's about filmographies.

[02:52:32] Directors have a massive success early on in their careers and they're giving a series of blank checks to make whatever crazy passion products they want. Sometimes those checks clear and sometimes they bounce baby. This is a mini series on the films of Roberts and Mech.

[02:52:42] It's called Podcast Away and our guest today are Jason Manzookis and Paul Scheer.