The Big Lebowski with Seth Rogen

Black Jack with Griffin and David

Black Jack 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 Black Jack.

I'm talking about the Haas here.

Sometimes there's a man.

Well, let me take this again.

Sorry.

Oh my god.

This is important.

Enough, Griffin.

This is important.

I'm talking about the Haas here.

Sometimes there's a podcast.

Well,

it's the podcast for its time and place.

Fits right in there.

And that's the Haas in New Jersey.

And even if it's a sloppy podcast, and

Blank Check was most certainly that, quite possibly the sloppiest in New York City, which would place it high in the running for laziest worldwide, sloppiest worldwide.

But sometimes there's a podcast.

Sometimes there's a podcast.

Oh, I lost my train of thought there, but oh, hell, I done introduced it enough.

I really could not get it.

No.

Sorry.

I was trying.

I'd like you to keep trying.

For the next three hours.

I could not get there.

Was he...

Always like in Roadhouse, does he talk like that?

Like, was he always at that register basically his whole life?

Sam Elliott?

I would say this movie is the moment that the Sam Elliott thing is kind of heightened in a way that Turnell did for Christopher Walken.

Do you know what I'm saying?

I was also watching it at this time being like, I think I'm Sam Elliott's age.

Fuck, right.

He's not that old on this movie.

Okay, let's look it up.

Let's do the math.

We gotta do that.

Sam Elliott immediately.

That was the real fact.

You know what?

He's 80 years old now.

So he would have been.

Yeah, so he would have been like 44.

No, 54?

This movie's 98.

Fuck.

I'm so bad at math.

You're not in your 50s.

No, I'm 43.

You're in the clear then.

Yeah.

I think you have

54.

Okay.

You got

a decade before you.

That's closer than you'd like.

You think you'd ever do a Western?

Like a fucking

cool.

Do you know what I'm saying, though?

Like, he always talked like this.

And then I think this movie meme-ified him in a way.

That, like, SNL did with Christopher Walken, where it's like, well, also kind of Jeff Bridges did to him something to present it.

Yeah.

We're using your voice as like a comedic instrument now.

And then after that, that becomes the thing that people impersonate, and then people hire him to do that.

Yeah, I used to and I botch it.

No, but I mean, he does it.

The owner of the voice himself seems to do, yes, absolutely.

And then the thing in Star is born is Bradley Cooper saying to him, like, I stole your voice.

Yeah.

In the movie, he says it.

Right.

And I can do that better.

You can do

this point.

Hold on.

I got to watch that again.

I got a Star Isborn.

Yeah.

I love that movie.

You got to get back in the the shallows.

Oh, yeah, exactly.

Hi.

Hi.

He gets the and in this movie.

Does he?

Yes.

Okay.

It's a perfect and

Sam Elliott.

And Sam Elliott.

And Sam Elliott as the stranger.

The Stranger, which is a cool name.

Have you ever gotten an and as?

You must have, right?

Maybe.

Maybe I've gotten.

Have you ever been like angrily on the phone that feels like a studio episode being like, if I don't get the fucking and

Morris know, that's one of those things that like my agent, my agents feel very strongly about.

I'm just like, I could give a fuck.

I do not want wives.

I won't be with.

I just know when we did Ninja Turtles recently, we had to give Paul Rudd like an introduced.

Paul Rudd wanted an introducing Paul Rudd.

That was good for Mondo Gecko.

Was it introducing as Mondo Gecko?

I think it was an introducing Paul Rudd as Mondo Gecko.

What I like about the and as, and it is my favorite form of billing.

What I like about it is it's not just the honorific of the and, right?

You're the most important person who wasn't going to enter the top two or three.

But also that it's like, and we're telling you this characterism.

Yeah.

Either that it's like for the first time, Paul Redd is a saying the legendary role of Mondo Gettys,

right?

As if it's Laertes, or the movie is just saying to you, the stranger is going to matter.

You don't know the stranger yet.

He's going to matter.

Keep your eye out for the stranger.

Yeah.

And his name is The Stranger, which also just instantly makes the movie cool.

Because you're like, oh, there's a character called The Stranger?

And he's already cool.

That's cool.

He's talking.

You've already heard him.

He's been talking for minutes.

It's already been him he's he's failing to land the plane right he's doing kind of a bad job at his one job i want he's kind of doing a blank check podcast intro uh sorry you were about to you know the jason rightman used to do those live reads yes yeah i did one i got i did the one for

i did the bowski yeah and and sam elliott came and did his

place it's right it's one of those so wait who were you i was the dude you were the dude you were the dude who was walter walter was i think rain wilson interesting yeah i could see that he can do that

yeah yeah yeah but you're in an interesting place because you could i think i think as i was doing it i was like i i would have been better suited to be waltz but you're either it's one degree in either direction well as i was doing it i was like the dude is pretty angry like pretty aggressive throughout the movie like he is he's not that mellow it's part of the magic trick of this movie is that we talk a lot about the issue sometimes of making a movie where a character doesn't want to be in the movie that is frustrating for the audience where the character is like stopping the movie from happening.

Not trying to perpetuate the plot of the movie itself.

Yes.

Yes.

And is actively pushing back against it.

And this is a movie where that's the whole motor of the thing.

And it's just him being annoyed that the movie keeps showing up at his doorstep.

And yet he's towing this very specific line.

Yeah.

Of he plays his anger of just like, well, that's inconvenient.

Well, he makes one choice, which is he wants, he goes to the other Lebowski to get his rugby.

If he hadn't done that, the whole movie wouldn't have happened.

And he's incented.

So as passive as a character and as like along for the ride as he is, he does active, he starts the movie actively.

Like he could have just been like, and it's almost more in character in some ways for him to have been like, these guys pissed on my rug.

It was a misunderstanding, whatever.

Who cares?

But instead, he's like incensed about it and he wants a new rug.

Well, it's right.

It's an injustice.

It's perfect characterization

that he can get punched in the face and be like, oh, come on.

He doesn't care about that.

But the rug is like, I must do something with it.

Tied the room together.

One of the many insufferable quotes that people will never stop saying from this film.

I myself, too.

It is a weird case.

I will admit this.

I'm a big Cohen Brothers fan.

It's not a movie for you.

It's not one of my movies.

Like you haven't seen this for a few times.

Right.

And I have zero issues with it.

And I think it's like another Cohen Brothers masterpiece.

I do feel like there is 5% of the world's most annoying people getting to me about this movie.

Yeah, I don't actually hold against the film.

And I feel like on this rewatch, I did the kind of like complete brainwipe, just watch this as a film and ignore it.

But it is funny to watch it and be like, this movie has become the Wizard of Oz.

Yeah.

And that you can literally take any line or image or like character name.

And like every element of this now is well-established cultural shorthand.

What's our podcast called?

Our podcast is called Blank Check with Griffin and David.

I'm Griffin.

I'm David.

Sometimes there's a Man, and sometimes there's a Man.

It's a podcast about filmographies, directors who have massive success early on in their careers and are given a series of blank checks to make whatever crazy passion projects they want.

Sometimes those checks clear and sometimes they bounce baby.

This is a mini-series on the films of Joel and Ethan Cohen together and separately.

Today we are talking about the Big Lebowski, which I'm struggling to think if there's another example of this, which is a blank check cash-in

off at the time their biggest success sure that is seen as an absolute bounce and then retroactively has become unquestionably their biggest film yeah to the point that if you even suggest it isn't you're you're a liar you are you're just like that is that is the liar

uh it's just weird that you're like if you sit down and think about the cones for a sec you're like yeah the you know the crime movies fucking raising arizona

fargo no country you can think about that for a day and then you'd be like ah they they made the big Lebowski on top of all that.

Like, they created a whole other universe of like fans.

It is the music that everyone knows.

We have this rust.

You have the dude.

I'm looking at him right now.

We have the dude.

I'm glad you noticed because that was a new addition to the menagerie.

I recently purchased a dude.

Wait, where's the dude?

I got a little different.

Oh, there he is.

That's totally.

He's fucking...

Like a foot tall.

What the hell is that thing?

Well, you know, toys come in different scales.

You collect a bit, right?

I do have a lot of stuff.

Yes, very much so.

I was going to ask how articulatable he is which is a real toy term great and boy am i thrilled and i'll tell you what i'm most excited about points of articulation to it hopefully i am excited by the fact that for the first time this conversation is not causing david to hit his head on the table

he can't shut it down when you're asking no question

when i bring it up he goes like oh no i gotta get out of here you know my daughter took a toy from this shelf i've been mean to ask you what did she take do you know have you noticed i was wondering because you got 4 000 toys on this shelf i'm aware but i keep a rolodex and i've not been able to.

He took, I believe it is Anakin Skywalker's Force Ghost in Tiny Flow.

Great.

I thought you were going to say Force Skin.

Yeah, she took a force in.

People forget.

Canaken Skywalker is canonically uncircumcised until Attack of the Clones.

And George Lucas made a limited run.

And Cuckoo.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He was born with a watto nose because downstairs because watto's his father.

And then as part of the Jedi ritual, they what's funny, Griffin is the only other time I met you in person, I think, is you were dressed as

Watto.

He was.

There's our Watto.

We had been messaging, and then you very kindly did the George Lucas talk show, and you came backstage, and I was already in the chat.

You were already Watto.

And I went, this is a very embarrassing way to me.

I've had that.

I used to present at the, they used to do, I don't even know, do they still do the MTV movie awards and stuff like that?

Are you now the MTV movie and TV and text awards?

Movie meme awards.

Yeah, like movie and meme awards.

Most memeable meme.

And

I used to do the stupid.

Like, it's so hard to get a laugh at those things.

I would do the dumbest shit ever.

And, and I, so I remember one year, like, my bit was that, like, I was, I was all like roided out or something.

And so I was in this like insane giant muscle bodysuit.

And I remember meeting for the first time so many people.

I was a big, I met like Kendrick Lamar for the first time.

And all these people, as I'm in, is this you,

you're with

giant, stupid, buffalo body suit.

And I've tried to just ignore him.

Like, hey, big fan, so nice to meet you.

This is part of a bit.

I'm doing a bit.

I haven't done it yet.

It's coming up.

Please.

You have two MTV Movie Awards.

Did you know that?

No.

You have one for best musical sequence in This Is the End.

Yeah.

And then one for best WTF moment in Neighbors.

I don't know what that was.

I don't know.

Who was the moment?

Damn it.

I think physically one of them is in our office.

I don't know.

I don't know what happened.

You and Rose Rose won it.

Well, maybe Rose took it.

Just the moment, though.

Was it me milking her, maybe?

It might have been.

That's a moment.

That's a hashtag WTF moment.

Hashtag WTF moment.

I just love looking at the MTV because it's like the Oscars.

It's like, yeah, we've handed out these awards for a hundred years.

And the MTV is like, I don't know, every couple of years, we're like, should we do WTF moments?

And they're like, forget it, forget it.

Now they know Jesus Kiss.

Now it's back.

Yeah.

Oh, fuck.

What was I going to say?

Well, who's our guest?

Well, I got a lot of things to say here.

We've already established a lot on the table.

Our guest today is Seth Rogan.

Hey, Seth.

How's he going?

And I'm going to leave with the credits.

I was curious.

There's an account that does the cataloging of actors and how many times we've covered them on this podcast, updated week to week.

And I was curious what the Seth Rogan blank check cannon is.

I bet.

Like movies we've covered.

Tell me I listed your credits.

Okay.

My assumption of Steve Jobs and the Fableman's.

Correct.

And that's it.

Can you name the third one?

There's a Donnie, not Donnie Dark.

No.

Not yet, although I'd love to do him.

Is it an animated movie?

It is.

No.

It is.

It is.

It is.

Sometimes people pretend it isn't.

Really?

That's my hint.

And it was not covered as part of covering that director.

We weirdly did it as a one-off.

You're talking about the lion?

I'm talking about the lion.

Oh, the first one.

Right, right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The Favreau King.

Yeah.

I'm in that as well.

Yeah, I forgot.

I forgot you're in Dunny Dark.

You're just mean at a bus stop in Dunny Dark.

I'm in a few scenes.

I kill Jenna Malone.

I throw Jenna Malone.

You're the murderer.

And she gets hit by a car.

Wow.

Oh, Jesus.

But then we also,

we also, on this podcast, movies aren't, you should know it's not real.

David, you of all people.

Why did you do that?

You've done so many episodes.

How does it feel that you are the architect of Steven Spielberg's artistic career and that you fell in love with his mom?

Yeah.

Which made him make movies.

Which made him, according to that movie,

throwing him into it before that.

But it seemed like he had inclinations to make, make he was filming the train before

you're right you're right you're right but do you watch et and go like thank god thank god i did that

thank god i did that yeah if it wasn't for me yeah

making those choices yeah none of this would have happened uh yeah no it's uh it's it's weird that that happened it is

Did Spielberg say that?

Like for that role, he's like, this one's a weird one.

Well, you know what's funny is I actually feel like as we were filming, I feel like he sort of had it contextualized one way.

And then as we were filming it and like bringing it to life, he sort of started to maybe at times see how weird it was.

Like, like I think in his head, he's like, yeah, we were all on a camping trip and my mom and this guy are sort of like canoodling a little bit, which I think like in your head is one way.

And then I think like as

we were actually recreating,

there was moments where I felt.

Maybe I was protecting it, but I felt him feeling like, oh, this is maybe more fucked up.

It almost became like a shutter island.

Yeah, he was actually forcing that.

And I actually like changed the tone.

I think to his credit, he would go with it and kind of change the tone of the scene a little bit from being like, I feel like in the script, it was almost like cutesy.

And then when brought to life, it was much more tragic.

Yeah.

Why, not, you know, to be serious, why that movie rocks?

Cause it is dark, but not in like an over-the-top way.

Yeah.

It's even like the music and stuff.

Like, again, it's one of those things where, I mean, it's, it's a rare gift to have like John Williams like, score a movie, score your face.

Score your face.

And, and yeah, just to see, like, oh, like, even in my head, I was like, oh, these scenes are so much more sad now with all this stuff.

But yeah,

it's weird.

The whole thing is weird.

I sat next to John Williams at the Oscars that year.

I talked to him for like five hours straight.

Really?

It's incredibly unbelievable.

Yeah.

Completely rocked.

Yeah.

It was

cool.

One of the greatest, like, of that whole failed experience, like, that was honestly one of the coolest things was just like, because I didn't meet him throughout the whole process, really.

And then I'm like, I show up at the Oscars.

They're like, oh, here you're sitting next to John Williams.

and uh it was incredible does he get really annoyed when he loses

god damn it no i genuinely just seemed out he got

all quiet on the western front seems like he might

yeah he kept punching the scene in front of him that donnie yen was sitting in chill out man um no and it's sort of connected to this is i actually talked to him a lot about one of my other favorite sort of hapless detective films the long goodbye right which amazing score right And does one of my favorite, it does something.

It's funny because I've always loved how that movie takes the, they wrote a song, The Long Goodbye, and they use it in different genres in different times of the film.

And like when they're in Mexico, there's like a funeral procession playing like sort of like a sad Spanish version of

sort of music.

Yeah, and like when they're in the elevator, when they're at the grocery store, there's like the music version of it and all this stuff.

And I asked, I was like, How did you guys think of that?

And he was like, it was just an idea that me and Robert Altman came up with.

And he's like, what's funny is we thought everyone was going to start doing it, like, we were like, This is going to be a thing, like, this is going to like create a like musical revolution in movies where people like realize you can start to do this.

And then he's like, I thought nobody ever did it ever again.

Uh, but it's great, it's probably a pain in the ass, yeah, it's probably hard.

Yeah, I feel like I was trying to do a letterbox list once of movies where the same song is played multiple times and the context changes, which is a little different than

the song changes, yes, but both

Yeah.

Something about Mary almost does a version of that.

Yeah, with those guys in the tree, the singing guys.

They kind of do.

They're kind of different songs, but they're kind of all evolutions of Samsung.

I have not seen that movie in like 25 years.

Do you know that movie is a 10 out of 10, not that much?

I remember.

I love them.

I love them.

Yeah.

This movie is one of like...

the most like revelatory experiences I had in a movie theater in my life.

Mind blowing.

I feel like that's right before like you're in Hollywood, right?

Like that's like a night.

Like year before right yeah yeah and i we were already like i think writing super bad but i remember seeing that and being like oh my gosh this is allowed you can we can push this so much further than i thought maybe we could it's all that shot where you see his dick and balls in

like that to me is like it's like there's the like obelisk in 2001

and like you know there's like to me that is like deserves like

as far as comedy goes that is like one of the most like boundary pushing iconic shots.

And then they do it five minutes in.

They're like, yes,

the joke is so clearly and it's so smart.

And I love jokes that like play off of your expectations as an audience member, which is like, oh, the joke is that you're not going to see it.

And that they keep describing this horrific thing.

Right.

And

all these things.

Everyone's describing it.

And everyone's.

They're also describing in a way that sounds impossible where you're like, they couldn't physically.

They're just describing, oh, the Frank's above the beat.

The zippers all the way down.

And it keeps getting grosser and grosser.

And then they show it, and then somehow in that like one brief image, you see everything that everyone's doing.

It's in like Shiodo Brothers, like puppet insert shop.

But then the thing that's so revolutionary is from that moment on in the movie, you're like, they could show me.

They could do anything.

All bets are off.

Anything could be shown in any sliding scale.

It's like in a horror movie when you do something really scary up front and you're like, oh, the stakes are

more getting pills.

Yeah, you're like, anyone can die at any minute.

And in that movie, it's

funny that we're talking about that movie because that movie came out the same year as the Big Lebowski.

It came out comedy hit of 1998.

Right.

It came out probably like, well, Big Lebowski was March.

So it came out in like Mary Sterner, July.

It's July.

But it's funny how, right, at the time, everyone was like, Big Lebowski.

Everyone was like, yeah.

The next several years of comedy are people chasing Mary.

That was the kind of like, in a way that I'd say.

40-year-old Virgin was one of those.

You know, Hangover was one of those where it's just like, this is now the thing that everyone's chasing.

This movie has come out.

feels like it's like a shot from the dark, and now everyone wants to follow this trend.

I, I, that, Mary was so revelatory for me.

I went home and like young Sammy Fabelman with the train set, recreated the nuts shot experimenting with a zipper

in the mirror, zipping your nuts up.

Yeah, almost got it.

To answer your question, the big Lebowski action figure.

Oh, yeah, sure.

There you go.

Oh, Ben put it down on the desk.

So it was, this is from 2008.

It's from the 10th anniversary of the movie, which I really feel like was when the Big Lebowski

had become mainstream and Universal was like, we can put this on anything.

We can sell everything with Lebowski quotes on it.

It's meant to sort of be a riff on like a fucking kid robot Urban vinyl figure.

Yeah, it looks a little bit more

why it's limited articulation and kind of

caricatured.

It's almost more of a statue.

But, but it's, I'd argue it's in a little bit of a weird middle ground.

It is, I, it's a little too solid.

Yeah.

It doesn't have the rotom vinyl control.

It's small enough to be like an art piece, but it's not articulatable enough to be a fun toy.

It's just the arms and the head.

Yeah.

David, you're such a Philistine.

I don't know what you're talking about.

I know I don't know.

I just won a best offer for the Walter, which I think is a little better.

Okay.

Just to complete my thing.

It is good.

You have all these.

Can you describe to me what the Anakin ghost is from?

They're called Disney Dorables.

Disney Dorables.

They're like an inch tall.

They're like an inch tall.

They're like adorables, but you call them dorables because they come in a little cardboard blind box where you most have like

star wars characters up there yeah but you have three ghosts you have yoda right it was a special set it came in a test of the dead that looks like a yes right it's all the ghosts and she took him and she's like who's this and i'm like i don't fucking know

right well that's the thing it looks it's young so i said it was obi-wan because i was just kind of thrown it's not jake lloyd

it's not jake

die when he was it'd be weird if he died and they came back as a ghost as jake loyde fucking dies in the pod like some of the ghosts if that's if george lucas had gone fucking in Glorious Bastards on episode one, the movie ends with Anakin being murdered.

And you're like, what are these movies?

That would have been cool.

So she calls it Obi-Wan.

It's a prized toy for her.

It's like a big deal.

She knows who Obi-Wan is.

Well, she knows that thing's called Obi-Wan, which, of course, he's not actually called Obi-Wan, but whatever.

I'm willing to lift that slide because he is at least a force ghost.

Yeah.

And I think it's cute that she says Obi-Wan.

I just like it.

And I think if she was going to take one, that's probably the one I'm going to do.

It's just funny that she was confronted with this wall of toys and she was like, doop.

But also, Ehrlich Sun was taking all of those.

I think we were playing with them.

Were they possibly upstairs?

What is the Total Recall thing?

That was the DVD release of Total Recall.

Oh, is that the DVD itself?

It was packaged in

Mars.

Oh, yeah, yeah, I think it was.

It was when Lionsgate was like, we're going to really fucking experiment with the form.

And I think the big thing was they paid Schwarzenegger like half a million dollars to do the commentary.

Oh, that's funny.

Is it amazing?

It's good.

I love that.

I love that movie.

Schwarzenegger's just smoking a cigar and Verhoven's making a bunch of sexist comments.

Sounds amazing to me.

But it felt like right up my alley.

Is this going to be the new thing of like big salaries for commentaries?

Right, right, right, right, right.

And then Lionsgate was like, everything's packaged weird.

Basic Instinct came with a pen that looked like the ice pick.

Really?

Yeah.

Yes.

I remember that.

This is the thing.

Speaking of collecting, I think about this a lot.

And my aspiration is to someday be someone who may be married.

I remember an interview with you years ago where you said, the rule I have with my wife is if it's a character she doesn't know, it can't be in the living room.

Yeah, there had to be like a communal, like I have an office where like I had a big collection of this stuff.

Memorabilia?

Yeah, sure.

Collectibles.

Yes.

And yeah, once we moved in together.

what could be in like communal spaces became a real topic of conversation.

Right.

Like the Hulk can be there, but but Doc Samson can't.

Yes, exactly.

But then it eventually just sort of segued into us like both sort of buying like things together, which actually became much nicer.

And we sort of started collecting like art.

We would go to like little art shows and buy things together, which because which was nice.

So like we found a way to bond over our collecting.

What a sweet story.

Yes, it's lovely.

Like the Fablemans.

Yes.

So your friend, David Crumholtz.

Yes.

Was on this podcast.

Was on this podcast.

Friend of the show.

I love a wonder on the Seven Woman.

Senator Woman.

That was amazing.

Absolutely.

One of our most normal episodes.

We are eager to have him on again.

Kremoltz keeps texting me.

I can't believe you guys haven't done Wolfgang Peterson yet.

We should do Wolfgangers.

I haven't done Wolfgang.

I gotta do Wolfgang.

Who does he?

What's his Wolfgang?

Any Wolfgang.

It started with, I missed Wolfgang, right?

You guys must have done him years ago.

That's funny.

Out of the blue, I got that text.

You must have done Wolfgang.

We haven't.

And now, every couple of months, it's angerite.

You still haven't done Wolfgang?

He can do Enemy Fine.

Ronan, Wolfgang, Peterson.

No, that's John.

I get Wolfgang peterson and john frankenheimer and

it was both the molar priest in the 90s das boot das boot is wolf that's his like uh you know what are the bigger married uh perfect storm perfect

perfect storm air force one air force one line of fire in the line of fire he actually

should we do wolf gang he does kind of rock trumholtz booked for every wolf gang one of them uh and of course he did never ending story yeah if we did him oh yeah the never ending story we could do like a 10 hour episode a never-ending episode

You know how you always complain that these episodes are too short?

Oh, yeah.

That's me.

I always complaining.

But then you message shortly after that and say, hey, Kremholtz got me into the podcast.

I've been listening.

Yes.

And then we've been messaging back and forth since then.

You did George Lucas very kindly.

We've been trying to find the right thing to do.

You did a letterbox top four on some red carpet.

Some red carpet.

And you named this.

Yeah.

Alongside Clueless, which we have just covered.

Yeah, which was a great episode as well.

Thank you.

And I'm trying to remember what your other two were.

I don't even remember.

I kind of threw them out.

I usually say the last detail because it like offsets the like lack of fanciness in my other choices.

And I often say Terminator 2, which might have been the other one.

Might have been the other one.

Last detail, Terminator 2.

That's a good four.

That's a killer four.

That's a pretty good four.

I'm really a child of the 90s.

Chase had really good.

I'm watching now.

I'm watching the entire studio cast.

Great taste.

Oh, and Catherine had really good.

Catherine Hahn also has really good.

Yeah, I watched those two.

Last detail is kind of feels like a big Cohen inspiration inspiration in a lot of well.

I mean, I think if you look at, I mean, the Last Detail and The Big Lebowski and Super Bad and Pineapple Express, also, there's a lot of similarities in those movies, and it's like not a coincidence.

Like, we were really inspired by it.

And we love the Big Lebowski.

So, did you guys see it like in theaters?

I definitely did not.

I was remembering.

So, I was, I was 12 when this came out.

How old are you?

A couple years older than that.

I was 16.

So, you must have seen it in theaters?

No, what's funny is I didn't.

Like, it looked it's because the whole marketing campaign which was written like that was

crazy right and they really leaned into like the fantasy sequences the fantasy and a lot of the marketing was about the bowling and it was like the women with the bowling things on their heads they were like is this king poster

and the poster the poster was crazy it gives nothing i actually remember going to school and some of my friends having seen it and they're like it's a stoner he's so sweet like you wear like it's a stoner detective movie.

And I was like, what?

And they were like, it's like a stoner movie.

And he's like caught in this big, funny thing.

And there's these people that are cutting toes off.

And I was like, oh, this sounds funny.

And then I remember watching it and being like, oh, this.

was like the worst marketed movie in the entire fucking world baby.

And yet, if you're like,

I just want to point out, this was the British poster, which is even worse.

Just the two with a total of the movie.

Just the toe.

Whoa, they really tried to push like a girl's toe gets together.

They don't know what to do with this.

Which, like, why would anyone?

And it was rated 18 in Britain because John Goodman bites someone's ear off.

That's crazy.

The British rating board, like, remember Mike Tyson and just in my day.

It was a sensitive time.

Biting ears was a sensitive time for earbuds.

Children are going to be biting ears on playgrounds.

At least like college play too.

Right.

That's really.

So I couldn't see it in theaters.

And so I, too, probably discovered it as Seth did, like, on video, like two or a year's, you know, a year ago.

I saw it right when it came out of video.

Right.

Okay.

I remember like, like, as by the time it was like on video it had gotten out that it was like a actually a cool movie basically i probably saw it around 2003 which i feel like that is when its cult status had been completely cemented like it became a college thing and by the time i got to college in like 2004 it was

i moved to la in 1999

and And I remember going and hanging out at that bowling alley a lot because is it still there?

No, it was knocked down but they all those like uh neon stars were like made for the movie but they left them there that's so they were

Hollywood star lanes yeah Hollywood star lanes and so and they would have like like you know like buck 99 white Russians basically and which is not a drink you should drink a lot of by any stretch of the imagination because it's mostly milk milk and vodka and so um but we would go there all the time and we would go bowling and we would drink white russians and we just like

because we love the movie.

Like, so like there was a

group of us who were fans at that time and enough people were fans at that time that there was like a little subculture of people that like would go to that bowling.

I was going to say at that moment in time, that's almost more like the Popeye Malta village of like, what are we going to tear this down?

Yeah, we got to leave.

Let's just market to the people who did like this weird movie.

Yeah.

Versus if that place had stayed open another five years.

Oh, it would have become like a

landmarks.

Yes, it would have been insane.

But it was literally knocked down by the time the movie had like a big, yeah, because it wasn't hard to get a lane there.

Like, was it like it wasn't a big lot, it's huge.

It's like 32 lanes.

I want to go to Jackie Freehorn's house, which has been in a ton of movies.

Oh, I've been there.

I was going to ask if you've been there.

Someone owned it.

Yeah, there you go.

She called

by John Lautner.

who designed all the all the homes in the studio we film in are John Lautner.

That's what I was going to say.

You live.

Exactly.

They're the same architect.

But it's one one of the most, this is one of the most famous houses in L.A.

And it's not on the beach in Malibu as they make it appear to be.

Right.

They walk from the beach to yeah,

which is pretty clever how they shoot it.

But it's actually overlooking the city.

It has an amazing view.

And is,

yes, this incredible concrete house with this very kind of famous like honeycomb concrete roof and these like built-in.

Yeah, it's got these, this roof with these little skylight, like these tiny.

It's an amazing house.

It's really, really cool.

And this guy, the guy who built it, who commissioned it from John Lautner, still lives in it.

And he's wild.

Okay.

Kooky old dude who

mostly rents out the house for like movies and photo shoots and stuff.

Like he's a big, like, I'm glad it isn't like Connor McGregor owns it now.

No, it's like, yeah, right.

The Nilk Boys.

It's, it's not.

No, it's the actual Goldstein.

The guy.

Yes, James Goldstein.

He's like a guy who goes to Laker games.

He's a rich guy.

I've filmed there.

I've done photo shoots there.

I've done, but yeah, I filmed well i filmed there like a whole couple days with uh will farrell on something once and like it was amazing like it's one of the fun parts about shooting like you get to sort of like just be in these houses all yeah so like you sort of get to like experience what it's like to really occupy time in these amazing and that house is truly amazing but it's to me most famous from this movie it's in a lot of other movies i think it's in charlie's i was gonna say in charlie's angels i think they they they live in it is tim rothball's house maybe no he lives in the chemosphere which is another john Lautner house, which is

it looks, it's like a house standing on a single.

Yeah,

which is it's Troy McClure's house in the Simpsons.

Yes, there's another movie.

Maybe it's a Palma movie.

I'm looking at Body Double.

Yes, it's Body Double.

Body Double is also shot in the Chemosphere house.

Yeah.

Correct.

Oh, my God.

All Good Houses.

All Good Houses.

So where's your studio house?

What's that one called?

That one

is on Jeremy Scott, the guy who owned

Mosquito the Fashion Line, now lives in it.

It's in the hills right about.

And Silver, the one we shot the Sarah Polly episode in is called the Silver Top House.

And the one that Katherine O'Hara lives in is another.

Yeah, is another

Lautner house.

They're all amazing houses.

And they're very cinematic.

And that's why we wanted to film in them because they...

are like in a lot of movies that we thought would be like cinematically kind of full the best thing about the video is that it looks good.

I mean, like, I mean, you're being built around

space.

Like those are amazing spaces to explore in real time.

Oh, fully.

Yeah.

And they're designed in such a way that they're meant to be walked through.

And so like, they really have this like compression and expansion and

like unconventional layouts that sort of.

are are fun to unravel and sort of as you turn a corner it reveals a whole new space and and yeah we really like piggybacked off of the design of these houses.

I will say this.

I have talked in the 10 years of doing this podcast, A Decade of Dreams, I've talked greasy about the city of Los Angeles.

You mean you should talk to LA, sure.

When I go to LA, people are like, we know you hate it here.

And I'm like, oh, God, I built that reputation for myself.

A lot of that is very defensively as a young man trying to work in the entertainment industry, being like, I want to stay in New York.

A lot of people have that.

I've seen that for years.

I've never seen that.

I've seen a lot of people.

Right.

I feel like this is dissipated now.

See you

post-pandemic, but I had like 10 years of people being like are you not serious about your career and i was just like i kind of still want to live here i need to totally live in new york and have a career yes i that was as you've proven is the employed

housed man yes he's out he's housed

but like i i love i i am housed i love the studio i think it's an incredible show it's like a beautiful panic attack when i watch it i'm like these are all the reasons i don't want to live in la the way this show feels it's this these are all my anxieties when i watched big lubowski i'm like this is everything i love about it's a real love letter to la maybe to a slightly bygone la but similarly neurotic la i actually moved into like it it could not be more yeah like the like because i i moved to la in 1999 so like i i moved into the big lubowskis truly i think about knocked up and like how you guys live in that big house with the pool that's like shitty like the birthday boys kind of right and it's like that's what i that was my old impression of las is like yeah you can kind of there's burnouts and weirdos and like it's so spread out that you can find all these pockets of yeah people like the dude who just kind of like what do they do all day i don't know the drive around like doesn't fucking do anything yeah right but it's like i'm allergic to entourage la oh yes that's a bad la studio la is the la i have the love-hate relationship with entourage that show had a bad vibe for you

it's kind of aggro i love the characters just to be clear and i endorse the characters and their choices their viewpoints it's just the cars and the buildings and their work most importantly i admire their artistic work.

Exactly.

No, but this movie, I'm like, this is all the stuff I like in L.A.

when I go visit and I hang out with my friends who are like this.

Who are unemployed?

You know, places like this.

And the nights have these vibes minus the conspiracy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, it's exactly.

Yeah.

Like going to Ralph's in the middle, like that to me was a real quintessential.

thing, which might be a visual reference to the long goodbye now that I think of it because it also starts with him at the grocery store.

But I think that that was, to me, that was like as sort of like a stoner in LA in the like being at Rouse at three in the morning in like an empty store, like

is such a familiar feeling to me.

Yeah, and so much of Long Goodbye.

Like, I would do my grocery shopping at two in the morning.

Would you pay my check?

Exactly.

I probably did.

So much of Long Goodbye has that of like this tiny figure in this big wide frame just wandering around mumbling to himself, doing banal tasks.

The movies are inextricably linked to one another.

And it's funny because, like, it is funny because I feel like Lebowski is kind of viewed as, like, I don't know if satire is the right word.

But sure.

Sort of like a, yeah, like a comedic take on these self-aware.

Yeah, a more self-aware take on these detective movies.

Character you could place into that type of movie.

Exactly.

And the long goodbye is also sort of like, yeah, like, and he's smart in that, I guess, is the only difference.

And he's like a little more capable, maybe, but like, it very much is a similar vibe where it's like it's sort of happening to him.

Yes, it's sort of happening to him.

He sort of doesn't quite get what he's sort of a step behind a little bit all the time.

He sort of has, he's not like smoking weed, I don't think, throughout the whole movie, but he seems kind of stoned and out of it throughout the movie, basically.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, Sims and I are both very big Altman people, and he was like a big turnkey.

Do you like all do you like the Long Goodbye more than the Big Lebowski?

You probably do.

I probably do.

I've seen the Big Lebowski like a hundred times.

Yeah, my whole thing with it is it's it's just sort of one of those, it's very comforting.

Beyond that, I put it on last night.

I put it on the disc.

It's so gorgeous.

It looks sucked.

It's just looking comedies, yeah.

Right.

Like true of any Cohen movie.

Obviously, their movies always look like Roger Deakins back there.

So stunning to look at for, and especially for a comedy.

It is so romantic.

We just did our Drive Away Dolls episode very out of order.

And watching these two back-to-back is kind of.

Yeah, what happened?

What they do.

Enjoy that movie a lot.

It's a huge movie.

But you miss the like lush, like, yeah.

I mean, yeah.

Do you think that's a choice?

I think so.

I think that's all time.

We'll get to it in 10 episodes.

Yeah, just to preview it.

I think it's a little bit the movie being like, don't take us seriously.

Like, we're having fun.

It's silly, but I don't know.

But that is the magic.

I mean, people always say this, right?

Of like, you can't make a comedy look too good or it stops being funny.

There's this adage that I disagree with.

I disagree with that.

Yes.

But, and I think a lot of your work has been like a rebuke to that.

But there is that sort of narrative sometimes of like, it just needs needs to be clean, bright, wide, light everything as bright as you can so you can see all of that.

Like those fucking talking hats, like cross-colours.

Something about Mary

effect, I would say, is like, and Dumb and Dumber and a lot of those movies are just like bright, bright, bright, bright, bright, bright colors, clueless.

I mean, honestly, and that movie, I'd say, actually

did it.

with like a creative intention in mind.

I agree.

Like they weren't just like bright.

Like there was, I think, a lot of reasoning behind why that was a good choice for that specific movie i agree but i think as a result oh yeah i mean i remember when we were shooting for your virgin i was just i remember at one time like coming up and giving judd like notes on how i thought we could make the frame more interesting and he looked at me like i had lost my mind like literally looked at me like i was a crazy person yeah

and he was like make the frame more interesting like he's like as long as you can see the boner

like we're good like i think

reading and widescreen engineers big enough.

Yeah, I think we're okay.

Yeah, and it's funny because when we actually made Superbat, Superbat has like a grain, well, yes, and it's and it's shot.

Greg like shot it, you know what I mean?

Like, it's not all cross coverage, like

he would do in the in the store.

There's like it was very designed.

One channel shots.

One shot will take you to this line, and then a new shot will pick it up for these lines.

And I remember there was like some very heavy conversations that were had where, where Judd was just like, why are you not just cross?

Like, you, you need to just cross cover this.

And, and Mattola was like, no, that's like not what I'm doing on this movie.

Like, I will do it for some scenes, but that's not like what I'm just going to do.

And, and blocking is the thing where you feel it the most.

Like, it's when the characters don't move.

And this movie has a lot of great blocking.

Like, the Biklubowski is like an excellently blocked film.

And the characters move in a very elegant way that serves the timing and the comedy and

the scenes in like a really dynamic way, which I think is why it's not boring, even though it's like largely people talking in different rooms and

light on action often.

So much of the self-perpetuating problem is you get into these zones where comedies have a lack of blocking because people are so worried about getting the correct amount of coverage

to edit it.

You find it in the auditing room.

The amount of movement and readjustment of positions that will cause more angles versus something like this where you just see that the Cohens and the Deacons are like, these three actors are locked in.

We can get this in a three shot in which they move six times and we only have to punch in for like two specials.

I'm going to look at our research now, but like the thing I think of most and probably what baffled people initially, right?

Like, hey, let's go see the new Fargo guys movie.

Why is it about like stone bowlers doing nothing?

Like those scenes where it's like dude, Donnie, and Walter.

And Donnie's right over the shoulder.

And Donnie's over the shoulder and he keeps turning around.

And they are all three having separate monologues, essentially, at different speeds, interrupting each other at the same time.

I don't know how you do that and have it make any sense.

It makes perfect sense to try and funny.

Watching fucking like Fred Astairs dance with a cat, right?

Yeah.

When I first moved to LA, my manager had like a library in their office of like scripts, like just hundreds of scripts.

And I...

One of the first things I did was I got the script for the Big Lebowski because I wanted to see how those scenes were like literally overlaid.

And

they were, they are written exactly as they are performed in the movie to like the half word.

Right.

So they have it.

It's not like three columns of dialogue.

It's like this tells you

exactly when the interruption comes and when it goes back to the other person.

And I remember reading it being like, oh my God, like these guys like like plotted this out into like a rhythm, a microscopic rhythm.

Right.

And, but then I was like, oh, and that's why they could shoot it in a three shot because it's they're not finding it and it felt improvisational to me and i even on freaking geeks was the only thing i was making that time but we did a lot of improv and cross coverage and stuff so that's sort of how i assumed you had to capture that sort of like naturalistic interrupty idea but then i was like oh no these guys just wrote it yeah like they actually

actually broke it down and and the actors just did it and it was that was very eye-opening for me but i think it's why yeah it's why the movie looks is allowed allowed to look good.

I mean, I feel like I will now always envision the straw man exec characters in my mind as the studio characters.

But you just imagine people looking at the like the shooting schedule for this and being like, guys, so your plan is the only way to get this sequence is for the actors to get it perfect.

Yeah, exactly.

There's no contingency here.

The only way this works.

is it's you get a take where everyone nails it.

That's not allowed.

And that's like terrifying to people.

Yeah, they don't like it.

Which which is why they're just someone who's done that they don't i can tell you they don't they don't love that

but it's the stuff that makes cohen brothers movies feel like how did this happen yeah that everything is so perfectly constructed and also feels kind of loose and miraculous you want to say something bad well i think we should get to the research

i have a little surprise oh yeah i noticed you've covered uh something on a table with a shining blanket.

Yes.

I brought the accoutrement to make a white Russian.

We should do it.

We have to.

All right.

right.

Seth did text me.

If there aren't white Russians in the studio, I'm leaving.

Yeah.

I have to.

There better fucking be white Russians.

All right.

Ben was trying to surprise.

And then I arrived at the studio as he was arriving, and I was like, Why do you have a bag of ice?

I'm just going to do a whole thing.

Some Caucasians.

I like how he calls them Caucasians.

I like that.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, then, four white Russians coming right up.

Yeah.

David, yes.

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Yeah, here's the copy for the ad.

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No, it's Joe Wright,

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I've told you that story, right?

He knows he's kind of a cool guy.

We've batted him already.

He's certainly gotten interesting.

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Bye.

I, as I told Ben, don't think I've had a white Russian since I was like 20 years old.

Yeah, I haven't had one since I was at that bowling alley.

Right.

They are so disgusting.

No offense to the drink I'm possibly about to sip, but uh, I think I remember white milk.

They taste good.

Yeah, they taste good.

It's not a good drink.

So, like, there's no

cue in your stomach.

Well, being 20 and like, because when you're 20, you're just drinking to get drunk.

So you're having like four or five of whatever is you're drinking.

And then a white Russian is a disgusting thing that you're estimating.

Yeah, such a bad thing to ingest.

Like, right, because it's doing other things to your body at the same time that are not cooperating with the drunkenness.

I was at a bar with a girl in college.

Tumble brat.

Yeah.

And she told me, like, oh, they do good white Russians here.

And then the bartender asked what I wanted.

I said, like, a white Russian.

And he was like,

get a real drink.

Wow.

And I never, ever ordered a white Russian again after that.

Not that I would really want one.

They're gross.

They are kind of gross.

So, okay.

All right.

I don't want to, as Ben does.

Watch Prince.

You know what he's doing.

He's making four white Russians.

I watch him carry them in the movie, and every time my brain immediately goes to like, God, that glass is so dirty.

Yes.

It just looks gross as a drink.

Why do you think he drinks white Russians?

Do you think the Raccoons are just like, that's funny?

Like, that's a funny drink.

Well, there is

a dude.

There is a dude and we're talking about that.

There's kind of two guys.

I've read.

One of them is the main guy.

And you probably met that guy.

I have met that guy.

And does he drink white Russians?

Like, did they steal it from him?

The assumption is yes.

So our friend Connor Attler, friend of the podcast, uh made a great point uh talking to him the other day that it's so funny that fargo is like the pinnacle of their career up until this point right the anointment moment they win the oscar it's their biggest crossover hit and it's one of the great best movies it's it's the best

nothing wrong with it we love fargo i do want to point out

and jj put this in the research and it is crucial to note Big Levowski is a script they'd had for a long time and had been trying to make throughout the early 90s.

It was their pineapple experience.

So let's only get this made once we have it.

Once we have a hit, yeah.

And according to JJ, it might have come first, but Goodman, uh, before Fargo, but Goodman was making Roseanne.

Jeff Bridges was making White Squall.

Never forget that fucking, he got like 10 buckets of rain dumped on him every movie that like created QAnon.

Yes, because the storm is coming, yes.

Where we go, one, one goes all the quotes

have become QAnon models.

That is maybe the weirdest part about QAnon.

Everything else is not a problem.

I don't say that

Of all the stuff I've heard.

The only thing that makes the least sense is that.

It's like how Proud Boys is all spun out of a song deleted from Disney's Aladdin.

Yes.

Really?

You got proud of your boy.

Yep.

There's a song in Disney's Aladdin where Aladdin's mom sings that she's proud of him.

They decided to cut it because it's boring.

Right.

And then they grabbed it and said, like, Disney cut this because they don't want women saying that men are good.

Oh, well, that's 30 years ago.

They do.

We need to be proud boys.

We need to create the Aladdin's mom that never existed to make us feel proud.

Doesn't that make them a lot dorkier?

I mean,

not that they needed help.

So the Cohens, it's a personal movie in a way in that, yes, it's based on dudes they know.

Can I just finish this thought?

The comic part, it's

tied to what you just said.

That he was like, I think part of the legitimacy bestowed upon Fargo as these guys have stopped fucking around and made a real movie was the false selling of Fargo as a true story.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's so true.

Which lent some weight and all the weird Coenisms of it.

People were like, wow, but they didn't make it up.

I guess the story is just really quirky.

And that Lebowski people are like, what the fuck is this?

This is bullshit.

This came from nothing.

And you're like, the movie

is based on two real people.

So the circumstances aren't real, but the characters are very much riffing on real people.

So there's this guy, Peter X-Line, Pete X-Line, who is like one inspiration who had been like, worked for Michael Douglas and then was a professor at USC.

There's this guy, Lou Abernathy, but who's sort of like a Walter type, but John Millius is obviously a big inspiration for Walter.

He's an ethnicist.

Yes.

Right.

And then this guy, Jeff Dowd.

Yes.

That's the guy you're talking about, who is sort of like, he calls himself the Pope Adope.

And like, he was a member of the Seattle Seven, which like the dude says he was.

And was he an entertainment lawyer?

Yeah.

He's just like a, and I just.

He's a producer, actor.

He produced Fern Gully, among other things.

There you go.

And like when you look at him, because he's still around.

He looks like the dude.

And he kind of feels like the real kramer from seinfeld right how that guy was kind of like i'm gonna cash in on being kramer yes like he's still just kind of being the dude and you've met this guy i have met him yes and he was annoying

cool

so peter x-line the thing with him is They were at his house one time.

He's some fucking USC professor guy.

And he had a really shitty rug in his shitty house that he would not stop saying really tied the room together.

That's really funny.

So they never forgot that.

X-Line, when they ask him about it, talks about this fake Persian rug where, I mean, he admits like that it was a conversation piece in his shitty house.

And he, X-Line once told them a story about his Mazda getting stolen.

And then when he found it in an impound lot, it had like a 14-year-old's homework in it.

Oh, that's really funny.

So they never forgot that either.

Like they have a lot of like little weird

anecdotes from these crusty Hollywood.

It feels like it feels like 20 years of incubation of like a notebook notebook of things that got stuck in their craw of like that's funny and how could we unify all of this yeah and I remember me and Evan hearing that and that actually being very inspirational when we started writing Pineapple Express literally like I remember us thinking like oh you can sort of accumulate a bunch of ideas and create a narrative that allows you to bring them to life.

You don't have to like start with the story.

You can start with a bunch of little things and then create a story that sort of architecturally supports these ideas.

And like, can you build a character strong enough that can hold all of these separate things that becomes greater than the sum of its parts?

Yeah.

X-Line also was a Vietnam vet who could not stop talking about Vietnam, like, would bring it up all the time.

And so they did have that in their heads.

I think this movie is very wisely set during the Gulf War.

Right.

It's 92, 20.

91 or 92, because it's like, we won the Gulf War so fast.

One.

You know, what we like ripped through Iraq so fast.

Yeah.

And when David said one, he gave two thumbs up just for this.

And I do think it's quietly making Walter matter that like America just crushed some fucking war.

Yeah.

And he's still this like piece of shit Vietnam bet that, you know, nobody likes thinking about that.

Right.

Obviously, John Millius, who I feel like just sort of the agro energy, right?

The kind of like.

The way he looks, the way you hear about John Millius is just being like eternally ready for war in a weird way.

But he would, he described himself as the Zen fascist.

Yes.

Right.

That it was this glass that you get there.

I got an Indiana Jones.

Beautiful.

Okay.

And the Great Circle.

It's the Xbox game.

This was a promo item for their IHOP menu.

I know I paid a lot of pan coins to buy that.

Yeah.

Your original.

Okay, let me take my lactate before this fucking cocktail.

That's vodka and milk.

Oh, that's a very nostalgic to me.

Yeah.

It brings me back to 1999 to the bowling alley.

It's quite good.

Yeah, it's not bad.

You know what?

Yeah, I actually like it.

So they, and like Milius is kind of, he's a fake vet.

He didn't serve in the military.

Like, he, but they, he had all his paraphernalia.

So like, he's the other thing with Milius.

They met him when they're making Barton think, I think.

Yeah.

Spielberg had great Milius stories.

Because he was.

And he was, he was like, that guy's amazing.

Because he was kind of the old

guy.

Yeah.

He was like, and he had had success sort of before.

When they're all coming up, exactly.

He's the badass of all the movie brats, which is, to your point, like, this guy wasn't actually a Vietnam vet, right?

And it wasn't that this guy wasn't extreme, but it's like George Lucas, Steven Spielberg,

Brian DePalma are all like, this guy's unreal,

you know,

which is like it fits into the same character where you're like, he's not actually, Walter isn't actually powerful within his world.

No, but around these sort of like meek dudes, he's very

selecting.

Like, why is he hanging out with Donnie just so he can tell Donnie to shut the fuck up?

Exactly why.

Right, exactly.

Now, Jeff Dowd, the guy you have met who is in the Seattle 70s night, he claims he does not drink white Russian.

Okay.

He says, hey, man, sometimes it's Harvey Wallbanger.

Sometimes it's Tequila Sunrises.

It's always a silly, stupid drink.

That does sound like it's true.

And like

old timey named drinks.

Yeah.

Ethan Cohen's take is basically like, the dude is kind of personally more like Jeff Dowd, but like, you know, with these mixed in other anecdotes, but the physicality is kind of that guy.

And like, that's maybe the most.

But then also you hear that like Bridges contributed a lot of the clothes.

And like.

And he's like from, he's like a California guy.

Yeah.

Like it feels like he's tapping something in himself that he maybe hadn't quite tapped yet.

Yeah.

It's it's just like how Drew Grit turned him into like an old cowboy.

It turned him into that guy.

Yeah.

Every movie he makes up to True Grit.

He's like,

you know, and like for a while after Big Lebowski, he was the dude.

Yes, he was the dude.

And then with the toes.

I think if you see him on the street and you recognize, and if you either say to him, Hey, man, I love the Big Lebowski, or Hey, man, I love True Great, you'll get a different Jeff Reevers, depending on which one you say.

If you say, I love both, he'll give you a really funny.

Have you ever met him?

I haven't interviewed him.

Maybe one or two times.

And yeah, and I ran up to him and I went the Lebowski route and I got a very dudish response.

And it was, it was amazing.

It was lovely.

It does feel like the dude has either become the closest thing to his like default persona in life if as an actor right because even like the year after this is the contender where he's back in like the most handsome man in hot i remember

stained for a while he was

stained he went stained

clean the stain

no tide pen could fight this stain it is so funny that iron man had to run through him before he deals with dano star Yeah, like a space alien.

You take a bridge the first dude

and then a space god.

I'm going to build a slightly bigger suit than you.

I like negotiating.

Obviously,

they started writing this script.

James M.

Kane is their blood simple.

Like, you know, Miller's Crossing is Dashel Hammond.

This is Raymond Chandler, right?

Like, they, they're like, well, it is dressing for this plot.

Have you guys re-watched the Big Sleep recently?

Not in the last 10 years.

Like, I've seen it several times.

I never know what's going on at at the end, which I know is part of the point.

It is sexy and quite horrible.

Yeah, I watched it for actually, I think, the first time, like a few years ago.

And I was

some parts of it I really liked, but I was mostly like, what the fuck is going on?

I love Humphrey Bogart.

I think Humphrey Bogart is just like maybe the coolest.

He's the coolest guy ever.

He's the coolest guy ever and like is unbelievably watchable.

He's so cool in the big sleeve.

Yes.

He's playing a guy who fucks.

Yes, he's so cool in that movie.

Like in Casablanca, which these are all movies I love.

In Casablanca, he's like, I don't fuck anymore.

I just have this bar and I'm sad.

In Maltese Falcon, which is my favorite of his movies, he's like, I need to figure out what's going on with all you assholes.

But in Big Sleep, he fucks.

He wants, you know, he's just being a cool motherfucker.

He's just kind of cool.

But it is similar where he seems kind of confused as to what's happening throughout a lot of the movie.

Right.

The spectrum of those movies, which are all kind of about perfect style, these impossibly cool leading men and these undecipherable plots.

Right.

And then Long Goodbye does the modernist version of that, which is, this is who this guy thinks he is in his mind.

We're placing him in a modern context.

The world at large is not in sync with him.

The kind of like stylish voiceover narration is now just being like mumbled just kind of cheering and just feeding cats, right?

And then Big Lebowski adds the additional distance of what if this guy doesn't even know he's in that type of story, and the narrator is someone else who he barely meets at a bar who can't even finish his thoughts.

Can't even like quite remember, doesn't quite understand what's happening.

I mean, re-watching it, it's funny that it's like some things like that where you're like, oh, this is so much weirder than I remember it being.

Like the Sam Elliott narration is much stranger than I remember it.

It's strange because they call him the stranger.

It's strange because he's doing a bad job.

Yeah.

Like as a narrator.

And they kind of paint him as like this all-knowing guy, but he doesn't know anything.

He gets lost in his training.

He's going to land the planet.

He interrupts the movie to be like, do you have to curse so much?

And Jeffrey's just like, what?

And he's like, don't worry about it.

Like, it's very funny, but it is, it's weird.

We talk about this kind of like, my favorite kind of Cohen dialogue is this like big chunky monologue that is like a freeway that takes off ramps and merges back into the freeway where characters like answer the questions they pose themselves.

And that's usually done in such a rat-a-tat, fast-talking way.

And you got Sam Elliott who's going to slow that down to a molasses crawl, but then you're also going to have him not figure out how to get back on the highway.

You're like starting with a broken version of a Cohen monologue.

Yeah.

And it's like like starts with like narration that doesn't work yeah so but nobody in this movie makes sense so like you've got the dude who moves through every plot line uh sort of competent but like also not paying attention and then will be like saying things he heard in the last like episode yeah he repeats a lot of things right he repeats things that don't really you know and then you have walter who literally makes the wrong decision every single time and like works himself into a frenzy.

And then the final wrong decision, I feel like, is pulling the Big Labowski out of the wheelchair.

I mean, like, the funeral is like a coda, but that's sweet.

But, like, him being like, this guy walks.

And at this point, you're like, I swear to God, he's not going to, like, he's not going to do something about it.

You know, he's going to.

It's one of the greatest scenes in any movie.

It's just fun.

Like, this is a classic Cohen story in that they like wrote 40 pages and they were like, that's interesting.

And they got stuck and they put it away.

And then they put it back

to explain the narration.

They say he's like an audience substitute.

And and like Chandler stories always have a narrator.

So we kind of wanted like a, but like they can't really explain that.

It's not a decision to be like, you couldn't have Lebowski narrate this movie because that gives him too much of a connection to the story.

He has to be pushing against it.

And the big driving force for Lebowski, as you said, like him wanting the rug back is the active choice he makes that keeps the whole movie going.

Right.

But that choice is driven by this guy wants to do nothing.

The only active thing he does is to try to reset back to the status quo of where he is at the beginning, which is I'm unemployed.

I like everything in my apartment and I have my roof.

I have a you know, I got my roach clip.

I got the white Russians.

But the thing that does stress me out is if he just got the 20 grand initially from the job he fails to do, the, you know, it feels like the dude could live on 20 grand for like forever, five to 10 years.

Like, he doesn't seem to pay rent anyway.

He barely yet.

He like abhors that level of ambition.

I know.

His pride in being unemployed.

Yeah.

Anyway, yeah.

I mean, they said it in like the more marginal L.A., Venice Beach, the Valley Pasadena or whatever.

You know, like, that's what they were interested in.

And then Pete, one of the inspirations, is a big softball guy, but they were like.

Bowling is like, makes more sense.

It's aesthetically more pleasant.

It's very male, which we think is like, we want these guys to just be sitting around.

It's also weirdly rhythmic in a way that feels very Cohen'sy of just like the kind of repetition of the role and the sounds and the wood.

And yeah.

Now, the craziest thing, obviously, is their first choice was Mel Gibson for the dude.

Whoa.

Which is so wild.

That was wild.

Do you know which role Mel Gibson would have played?

He would have killed Walter.

No one could be better than Goodman, but he would have done a great Walter.

Yeah, he actually would have.

He's maybe too scary.

Like, well, there's like an impotence to Walter a little bit, but he doesn't need to be not actually.

Yeah.

If he had played Walter at the time, people would have said, where did this come from?

This is an amazing transformation.

And now we would have said he gave us all the clues.

Exactly.

It's all there.

We'd be like, oh.

And no Gibson has himself.

He has Walter.

Gibson reads the script.

He's like, this is kind of funny.

There's no way I would have.

I'm not going to do this.

Like, this is like ransom era Gibson or whatever.

Jeff Bridges.

famously is kind of like, especially back then, like a waffler.

Like he would like flirt with projects and not decide what to do.

He was like kind of tough to nail down.

He was like, should I play like a pothead?

He had like teenage daughters and worried he'd set a bad example.

I mean, this feels very old-fashioned.

He's still in like near-peak handsomeness era, too.

He's kind of like a B-list movie star, like a really sturdy, studio-leading man with a lot of Oscar nominations under his belt.

But it felt like he was at a comfortable level of like,

you handle mid-budget.

What were the other big Jeff Bridges movies around this?

It's like, you know, Fearless, which is a great movie, is

93.

Peter Weir movie, Peter Weir movie.

Strawberries.

Yes.

Blown Away is 94 with Tommy Lee Jones.

There's two movies called Blown Away, and I always watch.

One is that one.

I can't remember.

It's one with Corey Hayman and Corey Feldman in me.

That sounds right.

Let me look this up.

Yep.

Yep.

Yep.

I like that Tommy Lee Jones.

And they're both from around the same time.

Tommy Lee Jones does the worst.

Is he supposed to be the Irish accent maybe in the history of

yes?

It's Corey Haim and Nicole Edgerton.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But right, the one you're talking about, right, is Corey Feldman, of course.

course.

That thing, like Blown Away Patriot games with Devil's Zone, like when like IRA guys were like a holly.

Oh, cool.

Yeah.

That was a good target.

That was a good, easy villain for him.

Bridges was kind of like, you know, $40 million movie.

That has to give you the red light.

I'm going to give you the rest around.

Harrison Ford turns it down.

Get Jeff Bridges.

Yeah.

But it's like, obviously, he did the Fisher King in the early 90s.

That's a great movie.

He's closest to this.

He did the Vanishing remake,

which is like okay.

He did Fearless, Blown Away.

He played Wild Bill Hickock in a Miami pick that was a Walter Hill.

Walter Hill, yeah, yeah.

But wasn't a hit.

Yeah.

White Squall, which he's like good in, but it's again, it's him just like yelling.

And it's good for the culture.

Good for the culture.

And then Mirror Has Two Faces, which we covered on this show.

Barbara Streisand, your former co-star.

Former co-star.

Fucking movie.

With Kiltron.

That movie is Kiltreis.

Have you seen The Mirror Has Two Faces?

Like,

it's really weird.

Really?

Yeah, it's about her.

She changes her face.

Yes.

Yeah.

I listened to her whole all 50 hours of why I'm going to see recently.

It is more similar to Big Lebowski than you would imagine, and that it just sort of has these

weird.

The last thing he'd done before the Big Lebowski.

Wow.

And then right after he does Arlington Road, which feels, again, more like another blue.

I like that movie.

The movie's fun.

Yeah, that's fun.

But that's, he's like the king of kind of like adult counter-programming mid-budget studio fare.

Being a very beloved, respected actor.

Anyway, his daughters are like, what do you get?

Do whatever movie you want.

And he says he was sort of like, I guess I am kind of like the dude.

I do sit around all day smoking weed.

Although he says he doesn't, he did not smoke weed while making the Big Lamas.

He's a professional.

Right.

And he said that, like, the script is written exactly, like, the dialogue is written.

Like, he said that once in a while, I would put in an extra man and it would fuck up the line.

Like, you could tell, like, nope, they already, they already balanced every line out.

Yeah, when I did the table read, I, it is weird because, like, you are, you know, you kind of just do it.

And like, and it is one of those things where like, it's like, just by reading it, I'd be like, it's happening.

Like, like, if you just say every word, it sounds exactly like the dude.

It was really remarkable in a lot of ways.

Like, well, you are, you are so good as an actor, a writer, and an improviser.

And I feel like you have a skill at being able to take material and put it in your own voice in a way that isn't fighting against the movie.

But then also, like, the movies we've covered that you have been in, those are things where it's like, you got to play this part.

You got to fit into this.

This isn't you making it.

Not autorification.

But like Steve Jobs is something where it's like, you have that monologue, which I love so much that is like seven unbroken minutes where I'm sure you cannot move like a letter.

No, what's weird about Aaron Sorkin, though, actually, is he was.

If I would go to him, which I did a few times and was like, this is a little weird coming out of my mouth.

He'd be like, I'll rewrite it.

He's a Hollywood guy.

I was completely, if anything, he would, I, he would give it back.

I'd be like, I think, like, you changed too much in this.

Like, I literally thought like these few words could be adjusted.

And he'd be like, no, I realize it.

Like, he, I was actually, all I had heard was how rigid he was.

Tony Kushner, I would say, was more someone who has put like an insane amount of thought into every word choice in a way that I had never even considered as a writer.

Like, what sound, literally, like what the consonants, what sounds they make when, and, you know, that, well, when you say you, it has a certain power, but when you say you, you guys, it means something totally different.

And when you say I, like, and it was stuff like that, where I was just like, oh my God, like this is a level of like, like

overthinking, perhaps that, that I don't engage in.

But then what was funny.

is Steven didn't care.

And so he would just be like, ah, see what?

Like, like, like, he almost had, man, the funniest part of that whole movie to me, and this is like the perfect example of that conflict in a lot of ways is like, there's this line.

There's a line in the script where Paul Dano, we're arguing, and then Michelle comes out and starts dancing in front of the fire and we kind of start watching her.

And in the script, as that's happening, Paul like quotes like a famous like James Joyce poem or something like that.

And, and.

And I would, Stephen doesn't rehearse ever.

Like, so if you want to rehearse, it's incumbent on you to find time to do it.

Basically, but basically, he's shooting the first block.

He doesn't want to rehearse.

He's like, I don't want to rehearse.

And he's like, very, and he's like, I honestly don't want to talk about the acting.

Like, he's like,

I don't want to talk about it.

He's like, do it.

And, and,

and, and I'll tell you if I want something different, basically.

And so me and Paul would get together at my house sometimes to rehearse some of like the more dialogue-y scenes.

So when we showed up on set, we weren't like when you got to be dropping like science and math.

Exactly.

Especially it's all these words.

I literally don't know what they mean.

And we kept rehearsing it.

He kept being like, this one James Joyce line, like I'm, I, it might not be that, but let's pretend.

It's like, he's just like, this is the line that like, I'm really

like, I'm kind of finding it hard to say, but then I kind of keep rediscovering like what it might be about.

And I've been talking to Tony Kushner about it a lot.

And there's been an interesting back and forth about this line.

And he's like, but to me, like.

this line is so important and sort of like summarizes the whole thing in a lot of ways that like i want to just make sure that i do it right and that we're shooting the seed and we're blocking it And Stephen's like, so we're on you guys.

And then you say this, Seth.

And then at that moment, Michelle comes out and I'm going to pan with her.

And she goes over there and starts dancing.

And I'm filming her dancing.

And Paul's like, well, if you pan away from me when she crosses, like you're that, I say my line after that.

So the shot won't get my line.

And Stephen's like, oh, forget the line.

Yeah.

And I just

literally, it's like Paul looks at me and is like, what?

Like, forget the line.

And you can see,

and

you know, but to Stephen's credit, he's also like,

it's like, I'll shoot it.

Like, don't worry.

You don't like that.

It doesn't matter.

Like, if I'm, if I'm directing this properly, I'm in charge.

It doesn't make a difference also.

Like, he's like, trust me, the shots will tell the story properly.

It's a thing, especially when we re-watch, like, I don't, I can't think of an example of this in Lebowski, but especially when we re-watch like some of the most totemic, quotable, repeated movies of all time, where you watch sequences and you're like, they actually aren't covered in the way you remember in your mind's eye, where you don't see that actor's face during the famous line.

Oh, for sure.

So there are examples where it's like an off-camera, over-the-shoulder.

And all logic would be like, well, that's the big line.

You need to get it in a close-up with them selling it.

Oh, I'm always saying that.

I mean, it's like some of the biggest laughs in our movies are like off-camera lines.

Like, literally, like, you don't care at all as long as you hear it.

David.

Okay, okay.

I'll be very quiet.

Oh, I'm used to it.

Producer Ben is sleeping.

Oh,

Hazzy, Hazzy boy is

getting some

with multiple dashes.

What's he sleeping on?

He's sleeping on one of the new beds we got from Wayfair for the studio for our podcast naps.

But this is a big opportunity for us.

We get to do the first ad read for Wayfair on this podcast.

No, no, Griffin, you're clearly not listening to past recordings.

Ben did a Wayfair ad for us recently.

You listen to past recordings?

Yeah, sometimes.

That's psycho behavior.

It is.

Look.

He did that when we were sleeping?

Look, apparently we need to talk about how when you hear the word game day,

you might not think Wayfair, but you should.

Because Wayfair is the best kept secret for incredible and affordable game day finds.

Makes perfect sense to me.

Absolutely.

And just try to, David, just if you could please maintain that slightly quiet, we don't have to go full whisper.

I just want to remind you that Haas is sleeping.

I mostly just think of Wayfair as a website where you can get basically anything.

Yeah, of course.

But Wayfair is also the ideal place to get game day essentials, bigger selection, created collections, options for every budget/slash price point.

You want to make like a sort of man cake style?

Okay, fine.

Okay.

All right.

sorry you know wayfair uh stuff gets delivered really fast hassle free the delivery is free they if you for game day specifically griffin you can think about things like recliners and tv stands sure or outdoor stuff like coolers and grills and patio heaters like that's you know that's all the winter months david you have like basically a football team worth of family at home you got a whole team to cheer up this is true you need cribs your place must be lousy with cribs.

I do have fainting beds.

I have cribs.

Sconces?

Chaise lounges?

I'm low on sconces.

Maybe it's time to pick up a few.

That's the kind of thing that would make your home team cheer.

Look, I'm just going to say that Wayfair is your trusted destination for all things game day, from coolers and grills to recliners and slow cookers.

Shop, save, and score

today at Wayfair.com.

That's W-A-Y-F-A-I-R.com.

Wayfair, Everystyle, Style, Every Home.

David, there's only one shame to this ad read.

Don't wake Aussie.

There's only one shame to this ad read.

That I didn't find out about this in time before I already purchased coolers, grills, folding chairs, patio heaters, recliners, barware, slow cookers, sports-themed decor, merch for my favorite teams, and more.

If only I'm

Cleveland Browns, of course.

Fonte Mack, no matter what.

Okay, that's the end of the ad raid.

David, what?

This episode of Blank Check with Griffin David podcast about philanthropies is brought to you by Booking.com.

Booking.y.

I mean, that's what I was about to say.

Booking.

Yeah.

From vacation rentals to hotels across the U.S., Booking.com.

Booking dot yeah.

Has the ideal stay for anyone, even those who might seem impossible to please.

God, I'm trying to think of anyone in my life, perhaps even in this room.

Ben, who's like, what's an example of someone I know who maybe has a very particular set of demands?

Bringing me in and there's only one other person in the room.

There's one other person in the room right now.

This is so rude.

I sleep easy.

I'm definitely not someone who insists on 800 thread count sheets.

No.

That's an example of a fussy person.

But people have different demands.

And you know what?

If you're traveling, that's your time to start making demands.

Maybe you've got

a partner who's sleep light, rise early, or maybe, you know, like you just want someone who wants a pool or wants a view or I don't know.

Any kind of demand.

I'm traveling and I need a room with some good soundproofing because I'm going to be doing some remote pod record.

Sure.

Maybe you're in Europe and you want to make sure.

That's very demanding to be in Europe.

You got air conditioning.

Well, I think of one person in particular, although it's really both of you.

Yes.

You got to have air conditioning.

I need air conditioning if I'm in the North Pole.

Look, if I can find my perfect stay on Booking.com, anyone can.

Booking.com is definitely the easiest way to find exactly what you're looking for.

Like for me, a non-negotiable is I need a gorgeous bathroom for selfies.

You do.

You love selfies.

As long as I got a good bathroom here for selfies, I'm happy with everything else.

Look, they're again, they're specifying like, oh, maybe you want a sauna or a hot top.

And I'm like, sounds good to me.

Yeah, please.

Can I check that?

You want one of those in the recording, Stupid?

That'd be great.

You want to start, you want to be.

I'll be in the sauna when we record.

I was going to say, you want to be the Dalton Trumbull, a podcast.

You want to be Splish Flash.

You look good if I had a sauna and a cold plunge.

And while recording, I'm on mic, but you just were going back.

I'm like, ha!

Like, as I move to the bathroom.

These are the kinds of demands that booking.com booking.

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booking.com booking dot yeah booking.com book today on the site or in the at booking.com booking.y

piglabowski uh just to wrap up the the research walter written for john goodman really no choice other than john goodman for the cohens goodman says it's the best movie he ever made best thing he ever did he is unbelievable in this unreal did he get like like he should have won an oscar

should have there's no awards for this movie no one crazy because their previous movie had won a lot of oscars like you're totally right it's really weird and again i think it speaks like what i was saying before we started rolling is like i feel like there has been this like

Like people did not like this movie when it came out.

And my memory is it got bad reviews.

And I was actually shocked when I went on Rotten Tomatoes and had 80% or something like that.

I was like, that is not what this movie is.

You can't trust Rotten Tomatoes for an old movie.

Can we sidebar here for a second?

Please.

The Cinematrix.

I don't know if you play the Voltron screen.

Oh, I do Cinematrix.

Our friend Joe Reed, who runs that.

Shout out to Joe Reed.

We gripe every time there's a Rotten Tomatoes score as a prompt in that.

Yeah.

Because Rotten Tomatoes is a living text.

Yes.

Beyond it being a bad metric.

It's a living text where you're like, well, I can start my website tomorrow called like GrifflikesMovies.org and be like Big Lebowski 100%.

And then that will up its tomato score versus what I want is how is it received at the time?

Well, I also think a lot of like, I, I mean, I could be, I'm, I'm, you're right.

I'm almost sure like the Hollywood Reporter like re-publishes new reviews.

So they're not on the wrong side of history.

Like no one liked 2001 when it came out.

And now it has like 100%.

Like they, whatever publications gave it bad reviews.

And what's funny is I feel like I said this once on Twitter or something.

And like, I got like attacked, like savage.

On Twitter?

By exactly.

But by movie critics.

Really?

That doesn't happen.

No, they don't do that.

And I was like, they do.

That happens.

Like the general.

I'm looking at this general thing over there.

Like people didn't like that movie when it came out.

And now you go on Ron Domeo's and that's 100% or something.

But what it's a real disservice, I think, to people who are interested in movies because you are not getting.

the actual context of how these movies were received when they came out.

And if you gave the general a bad review 100 years ago, you should shut the fuck up and deal with it and eat it.

And congratulations.

Exactly.

And if you've made it to that age, you should take the ding and accept that you that you were on the wrong side of the general just as you were on the wrong side of 2001 and the big lubowski just how the character in the general was on the wrong side of the war he was he was and you should acknowledge you should acknowledge when you look at metacritic which does a pretty good job trying to find like the um the actual of the time reviews like and he's also better at not being a consensus but being a sense of how positive the reviews were rather than what percentage and it has a 71 on metacritic and even that i imagine is a little inflated by later stuff.

But you see, like, Ken Turan and the LA Times being like, film feels like totally thrown together haphazard.

Yeah.

And like, I get it.

It's crazy.

It's crazy.

I can sort of understand people, critics sitting down in 1998 for this like Fargo follow-up and being like, I don't fucking get it.

It's like so composed and it's so

deliberate.

Weren't they just spoiled at the time?

Like that there were just too many good-looking movies.

I don't know.

I honestly think maybe like you see like the Associated Press were like let down, strange for the sake of being strange, like just like has nothing to say, bad inside shit.

Like it was like epic bacon movie.

And then like, it's all just rando shit.

I also, a thing I saw a lot of critics at the time repeat is it basically doesn't have a story.

Just saying like this movie is just this meandering series of like bullshit with no story.

And you're like, if anything, the slam should be the opposite.

Yeah, there's too much.

Well, there's a lot of plot.

It is an unconventional script.

Like, it has, like,

it, but I think almost that's what's oddly magical about it is it sort of foregoes a lot of traditional things, but remains incredibly entertaining and watchable, I think, in like a moment-to-moment basis.

And even though you don't quite get what the fuck is happening, you really want to know what happens next.

Like, and I, because it's so funny and like the characters are so interesting, but it is.

I get why it would be challenging to people at the time because it sort of is from people who you like are used to kind of getting their work, I think.

And then it's also at a time when comedy is like so big,

you know, and not

very like conversational.

Like, I think that's actually.

I remember when we were making 40 old Virgin, we were writing Super Bad, like, we were so inspired by this movie, me and Evan, because we were like, oh, they actually like swear as much as we do when we talk.

And at the time, that was like crazy.

That was like,

you couldn't do it in a movie.

Like, the, like, always.

If you did it, was the Scorsese movie where the point is, these are the worst people on that planet.

But even something about Mary, they'll show you like a fucking, like, gaping asshole.

You know, fucking.

Fucking that movie.

Yeah, but like, they aren't casually profane.

They're kind of very innocent.

And, and that was always a thing that I like really was kind of a fan of.

It's something that my work would later reflect.

I'd say in many ways.

But, but that was to me like, I think that's why it's aged well, is it's sort of more reflective of comedies that came out

10 years later.

It's probably the seeping of them.

I mean, it is literally like you guys taking stuff from it and then literally taking stuff from you guys.

The movies you made.

Yeah.

And us making movies in 2006 and seven and eight and

us talking about this movie a lot, honestly.

But you like, you think about there were always, there would be those stupid repeated stats of like the Guinness Book of World Records for most fucks in a movie.

Yeah.

And there were always like four movies that people would repeat.

And it was like Casino Goodfellas.

Nil by Mouth held the record for a while.

Nil by mouth, they only say the word fuck.

Right.

That's the thing.

It's like, right.

The only word spoken is fuck.

It was movies where Jerry

was about like murders, criminals, or movies.

Movies where that's like the stylistic choice, right?

And Jerry does have the most Jerrys, right?

I think so.

Only second to Tom and Jerry.

Well, because that has a lot of Tom.

That more Tom

splitting the the vote.

But then you, I know you guys talk a lot about like Kevin Smith influencing you in that way.

And that's a movie where people talk the way the people talk.

His first time.

I love the way he talks.

Like, certainly the way he talks.

It is.

And then, right, like you guys kind of like put that on a mainstream scale where there is this shift post.

Like, I think so much about that summer where knocked up.

and super bad come out within eight weeks of each other.

And it feels like the entire culture shifts of just like, all of this is now just understandable by everybody.

Yeah, it was, uh, but I think like in well, even when we were making 40-year-old virgin, I was like, they should be swearing casually all the time.

And that was like my

biggest creative contribution to the movie is I was like, we should be smoking weed casually and swearing all the time.

And, and it's two things that are very much from the bigger mouse.

You right?

Yeah, because like 40-year-old virgin, that's that's sort of Steve's movie.

Like,

he bursts to dude, right?

And, and he, and I was brought brought on as

kind of character he'd done at second city exactly and i was brought on as like a co-producer to help write the script and and to rewrite it as as we were doing it and that was always my thing is i was like this is going to be an r-rated movie we should fucking go for it like we should we should have them

I remember, and Corell was very uncomfortable with it.

Right.

And he had the prompts of that prior generation.

Yeah.

He didn't want to swear.

I remember I had to write a whole script that was like, there was no swearing it.

Like I had to like redo every scene.

And I was always coming up with clean versions.

That's where that Kelly Clarkson joke came from because I literally was tasked with like, what are not profane things that he could say?

Right.

Like as he's getting waxed.

And I even remember like, there's the scene where me and Rudd are playing video games and we're saying, you know, I know you're gay.

And we're smoking weed like from a pipe in that scene.

And even that was like, are you sure?

They were like, this is crazy.

Like, it was still in going electric.

Yeah,

there was, they were never, there was never people smoking weed if the joke wasn't that they were smoking weed that's it was it was always if they were smoking weed it was the joke and and if they but i was like people just sit around and smoke weed also it's not it's not always the joke and i remember when we did it in the theater people like burst into applause just like because at the sight of two guys smoking weed and playing video games and like swearing and at the time that was like somehow revolutionary the thing about that movie and i do remember i mean like the first time i saw it in a theater and all that, is you're also watching all those characters kind of realize they all like hanging out.

Like, like at the start of the movie, they just like work at the TV store and they hate it.

And like, you're watching them.

They all want to hang out and talk about their dicks.

You say 40-year-old virgins.

I mean, the first image that pops into my head is him sitting uncomfortably at the poker table.

It becomes the boob conversation.

But that's Bagga Sam.

That's like the movie that the whole, that's like the idea of the whole movie is based on.

But also, that is the motor that you just described: this guy doesn't like all this cursing happening around.

It sort of worked for the

all the friends.

You guys all react with, like, can we get you laid?

Instead of being like, Oh, I don't want to deal with you, yeah, no, why the movie's fun, like sweet, yeah, exactly.

It's fun to hit each other with uh the fluorescent light bulbs, yeah.

That was something that me and myself, that was Adam McKay's.

I remember we did a tailor read in Adam McKay.

That was whose strong weight pitch was whose idea was breaking light bulbs, uh, David Caruso and Jade.

That was me, for sure.

That is, that was eight days.

That's that's the best line 100%.

Okay.

And Corell being like, I know.

Oh, yes, of course.

There's another thing.

We mentioned that a lot on the podcast.

I often cite it as my single favorite line of dialogue, the funniest line of dialogue in any movie.

And I need to know if this came from you and Evan or from Hayter in Superbad, when you're driving McLovin around and you're doing Star Wars impressions, and then Hayter turns back and he goes, you know, Yoda from Attack of the Clones?

Yeah,

that was Bill Hayter.

Okay.

that was the funniest joke that was so stupid that was really making ourselves laugh yoda from attack

yoda from attack of the clones that was so stupid me and bill loved with christman's boss um who was a child at the time right and i remember new childhood back i remember we were talking about the movie short circuit like we were we'd film all these scenes where he's in the back of the car and me and bill would just talk and we were talking about short circuit we were talking about oh yeah it's like we're just kind of reminiscing it's like right it's like the robot he gets struck by lightning that's what brings him to life.

And Chris is like, what do you guys talk about?

And we're like, this movie, Short Circuit.

And he's like, oh, what is that?

And he never heard of it.

And Bill goes, it's a documentary about

a robot that comes to life.

And Chris's like, got hit by lightning.

And I feel like this was like maybe a little before everyone just was Googling everything all the time.

And for like several weeks, we convinced Christmas boss that short circuit was a documentary about a robot, which made the Fisher Stevens playing an Indian guy even more confusing.

But

this was real?

You're like, that's the real guy, huh?

But I feel like to your point, right?

Like, you guys had this sort of like devotion to this idea of why are comedies not reflecting a certain like social reality, right?

And that

in sort of studio logic, these things need to be justified as that is the entire point of the movie.

If you were making a stoner movie, it is cheech and chong.

Every scene is driven by these guys' overwhelming desires to be like, they're like hungry weed in a van made of weed.

Wait, that's that's they look at an object, they turn it into a bomb.

Yes, yes.

Right.

And it's like, if weed exists in a movie, it is either that or there is a set-piece scene in which a character is.

One scene where someone smokes weed and has the crazy.

And then they like fuck a bucket or whatever.

Exactly.

Right.

And those are like the only.

It's half-baked.

Yeah.

It's like, it's like all about right.

Similarly, if a character's cursing a lot, it's like this character is a bad person.

Yeah, they're like a mafia guy or something.

It's one scene of John Polito.

I went to college in 2004, and I do think part of the thing with this movie is like there weren't a lot of good stoner movies.

No, there were almost none.

Like there were Cheech and Chung or whatever.

That felt very old-fashioned.

Which I actually think it's one of the reasons it struck such a big cultural board.

I really think that the culture was swerving that way.

Yeah.

And when we made Pineapple Express, we could just see that there was like so few good things that even like had the care and attention put into them as like any normal thing put that for people who smoke weed or even like mentioning people who smoke weed in a respect like like giving them the respect of actually like crafting something that is like worthy of watching and this movie i think was probably like cathartic to a lot of people in a lot of ways because you're like oh like the cohen brothers like some of the best

filmmakers i mean

and i will stop talking your dick after this but just like with super dad super bad like i'm watching that i was uh when did that come out 06 07.

it came out so i was the summer between my high school graduation and going to college which i was just like that was like watching the movie in 10 dx yeah it was the most visceral

five times.

I was right out of college.

I just graduated, but still, right, I felt like that was a movie where it's like, they want to fuck, but they're pretty scared of it.

Oh, yeah.

And like there weren't like sex comedies were instead about like guys who are like, you know, 28 years old playing 17 year olds being like, I can't wait to get laid.

And Superman is them being like.

I'm interested, but I wouldn't know what to do.

And I'm scared.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

I don't think I'd ever seen that in a movie like that way.

No, like Michael Sarah in bed with Martha McGuyser.

I was like, this is like the eyeball being cut in Sean De Lou.

You're finally tapping into the most like primal terror in my being.

Yeah, it's like the girl's hornier than you.

And what do you do with that?

What am I supposed to do with you?

What do you do with that?

Yeah, it was, and that's, it's very reflective of our real life experience.

But like, on ramp back, I mean, all of this is

like totally inspired by the sound.

I know, yeah.

Very directly inspired.

I always think about you and Evan talking about it.

And then the three, I'd say Evan and Michael and McLean is inspired by Walt and the dude and Don.

That energy.

Like Jonas very much.

That like palpable sort of aggressive, argumentative dynamic to us was something.

And even though, like, shut the fuck up, Folk.

Literally.

I mean, literally.

Yes.

No, I was going to say, I've heard you guys talk about so much.

how like making movies are it's so difficult and so many things can go wrong and it can be so embarrassing and demoralizing that it's kind of like it's not worth doing unless you have an idea that you're willing to die to make.

Yeah.

And that you talk about when you were like StarTerrite Super Bad in the years of you trying to get it made when you didn't have like the clout in Hollywood.

You were like, we would die to get this film made.

And no one else gets it because it's like a fucking high school sex comedy, but it means this much to us that there's something we have to say.

And the dismissal of Big Lebowski at the time is so weird with this attitude of like, are they fucking pranking us?

Where you watch this and you do feel like this is a movie they were willing to die yeah and they're like we'll we'll use all the cachet from winning best picture and put it into this like stoner job

weird level of urgency and thought to it of like we we have always wanted to make this and this is the only moment where we can yeah where we have the cachet to do it yeah the movie costs 15 million dollars and bridges apparently when he got like the whatever low ball offer that like they sent him was like you guys just want an oscar you can't pay me more money and they were like we want the budget low so they won't fuck with us.

It's another thing I think about a lot.

You guys have talked about the post-green hornet thing of like, you guys learned the lesson from this movie got too big.

Too many people had to weigh in on every decision.

And I cite it all the time in this podcast that you guys will pitch films as like, what is the budget number where if it's below this, you don't give us notes?

Literally.

Yep.

That's basically it.

Where it's such a bargain that.

If we can get these actors,

you'll always leave us.

And to us now, it's the number where it's like, what is it?

What's the number where there'll always be a bigger problem they have to deal with?

Right.

Like,

as long as there's a more expensive movie going off the rails, they will, they'll just never get to us.

They don't have the infrastructure.

They have too many other holes to just like see

at this point.

Yeah.

Exactly.

But they've been so smart about it where it's just like their two biggest movies are Hudsucker and True Grit.

Hudsucker is their biggest flop.

True Grit was their biggest success.

But both of those still were like $50 million.

Not out of control.

They've just always kept it at a level where like it allows them the hits and misses to all even out.

It's so smart.

Yeah.

And they clearly shoot in an efficient way.

They clearly plan everything.

I mean, I remember even,

yeah, I remember when this, I remember watching this, and it was so funny because it was like right when we were making all of our movies.

And I remember watching like all the behind the scenes features for it and see how they like storyboarded every single shot of the movie.

And I'd like never seen, I'd made four movies and never seen one storyboard in my entire life.

And was like, oh, wow, that's like a really different way of making things.

But you see, a lot of it is so you can be efficient.

And so you can shoot the stuff that has like scope in a very quick and cheap way.

Right.

Yeah.

So what do you want to say about the big Lebowski?

I think we pretty much said it all.

Thank you all for

it.

Starts, as we said, with

paying for the milk.

Well, we're pushing the stranger with LA.

Right, literal tumbleweed.

Some sort of CGI-looking tumbleweed, maybe

each.

This is an early CGI movie.

Like them doing the dream sequences and stuff.

The dream sequence weirdly works so well as a time capsule of

screensaver.

Yes, it feels

aesthetics.

You know what else is good about it?

Jeff Bridges is so locked in and in.

He's so funny.

He's having so much fun.

He's incredible in this.

Yes.

It is.

Oh, yeah.

I think Jeff Bridges gives a good performance in the Big Labaus.

No, he's incredible.

And what is striking about watching it now is actually how clearly he speaks.

Right.

Because I think the drop rate of this thing has gotten so accelerated

in what we talk about, the fucking like Billy Goat Graf shooting on a tin can.

Yeah, no, he's very, and his voice is sort of high is what's interesting.

He's kind of whiny.

Yeah, it's sort of like, oh, what do you, it's like a high exasperation, which is.

Has such a good take on how to play this guy that is not the obvious way of doing it, which is this guy wants to believe he's not affected by anything and yet he's very easily annoyed.

He's very worked up about everything that happens.

Right, because the inciting incident is, of course, Jacob from Lost and another guy stealing his rug.

That guy's always Jacob from Lost.

Well, they piss on the rug first.

They piss on it and then they take it.

Yeah, actually, it's a good point.

Why do they piss on it before they steal it?

That's bad.

They steal it later.

That's right.

They piss on it and they beat it.

No, they just pissed on it and they think he gets rid of it.

Yes.

Which they don't show.

Yes.

You're right.

And they

put his head in the tail.

They put his head in the top.

And they really leave him in there for a while.

I feel like that's the first time I call call and even still that's sort of like a shrug and it's not until they get on the rug that he's like come on guys

details and it's like uh it's something it's like i remember when we were blocking uh like the fight scene in pineapple express like showing the the the fight choreographer like and it always left such an impression on me when the guy's like rushing into the bathroom and his bowling ball hits the door frame and it like shatters it like breaks off a chunk of the door frame it's just so awkward and weird yes and again like sets a tone for like a world where just just like nothing's going right, kind of in a weird way.

I remember being like, They clearly did that on purpose, yes, but it's such a cool little detail that sort of shows like the sloppiness of all the pineapple fight is so good in that same way where you're like, This is given the amount of space and time as if it is like a jet lee set piece, yeah, and yet it is all just people who don't know how to fight in a shitty apartment causing collateral damage.

The whole joke was like

how hard it actually would be to knock someone unconscious, right?

And so the fight, the fight would just have to keep going.

By the way, that's like what the Cohen said was their main impetus for Blood Simple, is that like movies make it seem like it's really easy to kill someone.

Yeah, it's probably hard.

Yeah, it probably takes hours.

And people are just close to death for so long.

So his rug is destroyed.

He goes to his bowling out.

They clearly are looking for another guy.

They're looking for the big Labaus.

The big Labaus game.

After like an amazingly cinematic opening sequence, which I think is also like what's so interesting.

At the bowling out.

At the bowling out, yeah, with such a good tone to that, it's so like indulgent in a weird way, and but like shamelessly cinematic at the same time, I think.

I love the tum-tum shot, yes, the guy, that's so the guy who does the little like shimmy, yeah.

But there, it's also like why this movie is centered in the world of bowling, right?

It's like which is also why, like, to call this movie like thrown like haphazard is so crazy, like

so clearly composed.

I agree with you, like they talk about it like right, like just some like indie comedy that was like, you have to build special sets that like capture, like, that allow the camera to like pass through like the bowling ball.

Shiny and like beacons, wide lens shots.

But this idea of like the, the like

Busby Berkeley musical sequences with bowling alley dances.

This idea of like the middle-aged working man's like weekend sport.

Bowling's so fucking funny.

Right.

I love bowling.

I really love bowling.

I did it a ton as a kid because like it was a great thing to do when when you couldn't go to a bar yet.

Right.

I loved going to the arcade and bowling alleys.

Oh, yeah.

Right.

You still do.

Yeah.

I went recently.

The gutter in Williamsburg.

I go there all the time.

It's like so shitty.

Like half the time the pin thing doesn't even work and you have to be like, hey, and they're like, oh, sorry.

And like.

Everyone is unathletic.

Everyone looks like a complete dork, like especially in like the bowling world.

Anyone who takes bowling seriously, bowling leagues.

Like they're all weird.

People kind of love them.

Culture is permanently stuck in the 1960s.

You're like, this is a late 90s movie where all of the vibes of bowling like the aesthetic is like bowling carry shows are like 1960s style shirts literally am i wrong has anyone updated it since even the chef and you're so like just caught in that bowl culture is all stuck in like 1968 well no now there's like pins is that what it's called there's sort of like hip bowling influencer bowling it's like the top golf of bowling kind of like okay like i don't know about this they have them around la there's looking at it i was the i am c yep i like there's like

there's like cool singles bowling, but that's different than like people who make their life be built on.

I don't want that.

Like, I want to go to a shitty bowling alley with hangars and neon and

$2 beer.

Drink shitty beer.

Exactly.

Just sit because like so much of bowling is sitting.

A lot of it you're mostly not doing anything.

Right.

Yeah.

And then when you do your turn, you're like, how, right?

How much do I like sort of shimmy?

It's probably like

40 seconds of stuff for every eight minutes of not stuff.

Yeah.

So, right.

So, and also the part of it is that, like, when the most exciting thing happens, there's a good chance that no one's no one's paying attention except you.

Yeah.

That there's like two thrilling seconds.

You see what I did?

I'm eating mozzarella sticks.

And you get to celebrate, which is a really fun part of bowling as you come back to your stage.

There's like a walk.

There's like an organic sort of walk.

You're in the end zone, Dance.

Yeah.

So they go see the big Lebowski.

Now, I love that it's David Huddleston, who's just like a character actor guy that's in a, they wanted like Robert Duvall, who like read the script and was like, what the fuck is this?

Like, they went to all these big shots for that.

That's really funny.

Probably stabilize it because the whole point is that this guy isn't really important.

Like they asked like Anthony Hopkins.

They wanted Jack Nicholson, Gene Hackman.

Like, oh, that makes sense.

But like, I feel like it's perfect that he's this kind of, you can immediately understand that he's a loser.

Yeah.

Brian, I feel like I've seen a movie so much that, of course, I know he's kind of full of shit.

But I feel like you know that right away.

He doesn't have a robot.

He's not a really

strong

or imposing.

But he's like one of the guys in the boardroom and Hudsucker.

You're like, even in a movie that is heightened, this guy is

an affect of a wealthy, powerful person.

Well, also, you meet Brandt first, who's like a fucking blowhard.

He's so funny.

He might truly be the single greatest split three card in the history of cinema.

There is one card that is Philip Seymour Hoffman, Flea Leon Russum.

Great Leon Russum will play the sheriff at the end, who is my beloved pull-the-cork man in true gray.

I love that guy.

But I'm just like,

the fact that the bench is so deep and this era of American cinema, where it felt like there is a clearly identified consensus pool.

of the 25 greatest character actors alive.

And in the second half of the 90s and the early 2000s, the five best directors are all pulling from it.

Yeah, all the time.

And you're like, the amount of overlap between like this and Boogie Nights.

Yeah.

You know, like there's

this pool of just like, hey, you know what?

Any movie that has some combination of

you're cooking with gas if you get six of these people, even if they're only going to pop up for 20 lines.

Like they auditioned a murderer's row for that role.

Paul Giamatti.

I remember remember Paul Rudd auditioned.

He told me he auditioned for Brandt and he performed for me what he did.

And it was like the weirdest thing in the entire world.

Did you see him perform it after having watched Phil Franz?

Yeah, like you're like, it was making Ford Virgin.

I was talking about how much I like that movie.

He's like, I auditioned for Brandt, and it was humiliating.

And I made the weirdest choice in the entire world.

What did he do?

He did, he was like, he did this like weird, like, hello.

Like, and he, like, I just remember he had this like weird cartoon cartoon butler.

Like a, he had like a cartoon butler, like that guy from the cartoons who was like, yes.

Yes.

It is the magic of Holtz Lamar Hoffman.

And our friend James Drabaniak has talked about this, but that he auditioned for an off-Broadway play in the 90s and was just like, got the audition, was like, this is my role.

This is a James Drabaniak role.

Post-Henry Fool.

Who else is going to get this part?

And he doesn't get it.

And he's furious.

And he goes to see it opening night.

And he comes out.

And immediately from the first second on stage, he's just like, this is the only guy who could have played it.

He is making a choice I never would have considered.

And it feels so bizarre and out of left field.

And yet it is in retrospect the only right choice.

And like he's taking big swings with this part.

It's not like he's not doing weird shit.

Oh, he's doing such weird.

The weirdest part is when he repeats the line.

Yes.

And I could never

do that.

I genuinely don't know if it was supposed to be in the the script or if he just

so weird and seamless.

It's robotic.

Yes.

Because he doesn't even reset to the beginning of the line where it could be an edit point.

He goes back four words.

It's so where you're like, it wouldn't even help to have this.

There was a movie I was going to be in and then I didn't do it.

And then he did it.

And I remember, and I've talked to the director.

No, it was that.

It was called The Boat That Rocked.

Yeah,

the Richard Curtis.

Yeah.

And he wanted me to do it, and I couldn't do it.

And then he got Philip Superhoffman.

And then I saw him after that.

And I was like, you really lucked out.

And he's like, honestly, I did.

He's like, I feel no remorse to tell you guys he did a much better job than he would have done.

He's a much better actor than you are.

The movie turned out much better as a result of him having done that role.

It's right.

I do just kind of think he's the best to ever do it.

I think he's like the best screen actor of all time.

And I think the argument for that is every single performance.

Oh, yeah, well, he wanted me to be in the movie he directed.

The Jack Disposer.

And I met with him and he wanted me to be the star of it, which was to play the part he ended up playing.

Yeah.

And it was one of the most flattering moments of my life.

Because it's like, yeah, I can see how.

But I remember saying in the meeting to him, like, A, I don't, I would be honestly too scared to act for you every day.

Right.

And B, like, you should do it.

You are a better actor than I am.

Do you know you have access to you?

Are you aware that you're not?

Is no one giving you your shoes?

You should know you?

Have you been told you're technically unavailable for this?

Because I don't think you are.

You should do this.

You're the best actor.

There's no better actor.

And then he did it

and was good.

I was like, you know, you're right.

I have a better actor than you.

Great advice.

I love how all your stories end up with someone being like, by the way, I fucking crushed it.

You were right.

Another thing in blank check lore I need to invoke.

Oh, what's that?

You auditioning auditioning for James L.

Brooks for How Do You Know?

Mm-hmm.

Was that for the Rudd Roll?

Yes.

Yes.

I auditioned for the Rudd Roll.

Wait, what is the I don't know what this is?

Well, it's a crazy story.

I'm not going to tell the story, but it's the greatest audition response I've ever heard.

It's pretty funny.

Where I've known Jim, Jim, as they call him, James L.

Brooks.

I've known him for a while.

And it's like one of the great gifts of my life that I know James L.

Brooks.

Like, it's incredible.

I wrote a Simpsons episode once, and he, you know, he was very helpful, and he was amazing.

And he's come to our table reads.

And he's just, Judd got his start on the critic, which was a James L.

Brooks show.

So he was sort of like in our orbit always.

And so

he called me when Superbad came out.

He's like a huge fan.

Like, so, so he's making how do you know?

And he, he calls me an audition.

And his audition process is like crazy, you know.

And I go in and Reese Witherspoon is like there, like, because she's already cast in the movie.

And for the audition, we're like in his office, which is at Sony, I think, at the time.

And, and he basically shoots the scene.

And it's like a five-hour audition.

We're like, we do a master, calls me out of the room and gives me direction.

We do another take.

Are you just in an office?

We're just in his office.

Okay.

Sitting on a couch.

We do another take, calls me outside, gives me more direction.

He starts giving Reese direction.

I'm like, she's casting out a movie.

Like, what are you doing?

And I'm like, he needs like full simulation of what he's doing.

He does a full simulation.

And so we spend, I'm not joking, five hours shooting this scene.

And then I don't hear anything.

Weeks, a couple of weeks go by.

And I'm like, maybe I'm going to do this movie.

People ask me what I'm going to do.

I'm like, oh, maybe

you got this part in the Jim Brooks movie, which is exciting.

Then I remember, I remember it so, I remember like where I was, I was like walking across the stony lot where he also was.

It's where our offices were.

And I got a phone call and they were like, Jim Brooks calling for you.

And I was like, oh, cool.

And then.

Like a minute, a second goes by, and like the first words out of his mouth are, he goes, not even close, pal.

not even close pal it's like the greatest lines ever oh my god i was like and i had that i was like what what are you talking about i was like it's been two weeks

it took you two weeks to get to not even close

parents has a good writer that's the right line that's the best line someone could say in a james o'clock movie so funny he's not even close pal laugh so hard did he then couch it at all then go like but i love that He was fun.

He was like, Honestly, watching it, I realized you're just too young.

Like, he was like, That he's like, and that's what I've been wrestling with for the last few weeks.

Is he's like, I liked what you did, but I keep just thinking maybe you're too young.

And he casts Paul Rhode, who is, you know,

10 years older than I, or something like that.

But it's like, Seth, I have Jim Brooks for you online, too.

Not even close, not even close pal.

Literally, that was how it sounded.

I have Jim Brooks for you.

Cool, not even close.

Pal.

I like it.

It was

legitimately hilarious.

Ben.

What's up, Griff?

This is an ad break.

Yeah.

And I'm just, this isn't a humble brag.

It's just a fact of the matter.

Despite you being on mic, oftentimes when sponsors buy ad space on this podcast, the big thing they want is personal host endorsement.

Right.

They love that they get a little bonus ben on the ad read, but technically that's not what they're looking for.

But something very different is happening right now.

That is true.

We had a sponsor come in and say, we are looking for the coveted Ben Hosley endorsement.

What?

This is laser targeted.

The product.

We have copy that asks, is the product a porch movie?

It certainly is.

And what is today's episode sponsored by?

The Toxic Avenger.

The new Toxic Avenger movie is coming to theaters August 29th.

Macon Blair's remake of

reimagining, whatever.

Reboot of the Toxic Avenger.

Now, David and I have not not gotten to see it yet but they sent you a screener link yeah i'm gonna see it we're

excited to see it but ben you texted us last night this fucking rules it fucks it honks yeah it's so great let me read you the cast list here in in billing order as they asked which i really appreciate peter dinkledge jacob tremblay trembled boy taylor page with elijah wood okay and kevin bacon tremblay is toxy's son his stepson his stepson okay uh wade goose yes great name give us the takes.

We haven't heard of them yet.

Okay.

You got fucking Dinkledge is fantastic.

He's talking.

He plays it with so much heart.

Yeah.

It's such a lovely performance.

Bacon is in the pocket too, man.

He's the bad guy.

He's the bad guy.

There's a lot of him shirtless.

Okay.

Looking like

David sizzling.

Yep.

And then Elijah Wood plays like a dang-ass freak.

He certainly does.

He's having a lot of fun.

Tell us some things you liked about the movie.

Okay, well, I'm a Jersey guy.

I just got to say the original movie was shot in the town where i went to high school

yes yes that's right the original film yep i grew up watching toxy and trauma movies on porches yes with my sleazy and sticky friends it informed so much of my sensibility your friends like junkyard dog and headbanger yeah exactly making toxic crusader drills and so when i heard that they were doing this new installment i was really emotionally invested

It was in limbo for a while before our friends at Centiverse rescued it and are now releasing it uncut.

But I feel like there have been years of you being very excited at the prospect, but also a little weary.

They're playing with fire here.

Yeah, it's just, it's something that means a lot to me.

And they knocked it out of the fucking park.

Okay.

It somehow really captured.

that sensibility, that sense of humor, even just that like lo-fi, scrappy kind of nature that's inherent in all of the trauma movies and the original Toxie movies.

And they have like updated in this way that it was just, I was so pleased with it.

It's gooey sufficiently gooey.

Tons of blood, tons of goo,

great action.

It's really fucking funny.

It just, it hits all of the sensibilities that you would want in an updated version.

Cineverse last year released Terrifier 3 unrated.

Yeah.

Big risk for them there.

I feel like it's a very, very...

intense movie.

And one of the huge hits.

More interesting, yeah, theatrical box office phenomenons the last five years.

Want to make that happen again here?

Tickets are on sale right now.

Advanced sales really matter for movies like this.

So if y'all were planning on seeing Toxic Avenger, go ahead and buy those tickets.

Please go to toxicaver.com slash blank check to get your tickets.

Blank check, one word.

In theaters, August 29th.

Yup.

And Ben, it just says here in the copy, wants to call out that Elijah Wood plays a weird little guy who says, Summon the nuts.

Can you tell us anything about that moment without spoiling it?

Summon the nuts is in reference to a

psychotic new metal band.

Hell yeah.

Who are also mercenaries.

Cool.

And drive a van

with a skeleton giving two fingies up on the grill.

And that's all I'll say.

Okay.

And they are the most dang-ass freaks of dang-ass freaks.

I'm excited to see it.

And your endorsement, I think, carries more weight than anyone else's in the world on this list.

Seriously, get your tickets now.

Go to toxicadvengure.com/slash blank check.

Do it.

Do it.

Wait, how did we get to that?

It doesn't matter.

We're talking about Brand.

The only thing I want to call his laugh is when she says, I'll give you a blowjob for 100%.

The buddies are truly amazing.

I wish I could laugh like that.

Like, I could do that that kind of like, I want to kill myself laugh on command.

That's one of those lines I'm always, I think there's almost like a Tourette syndrome that kicks in.

Like when you realize you can quote the Big Lebowski, if you're a fan, you have to.

Like when someone, and I'm not proud of it, but it is something I find myself doing.

And whenever someone says that someone's a nihilist, I say, oh, that must be exhausting.

And people look at me like, I make no fucking sense.

Right anyway, Shaber.

You're trying to speak the language.

Yeah, that's right.

It's like what like Monty Python and the Holy Grail was.

Like this limited canon of movies where you're like, it truly has 1,000 lines that you can repurpose into any conversation.

The only thing I want to call out is in the meticulous sort of table mood setting of the bowling, you do get the introduction of the Jesus, who is given the pomp and circumstances, if he is the Darth Vader of the movie.

I mean, again, right, the fact that this movie is like, let's pause for a minute and do

six minutes in.

Right.

And do right, a whole Eagles, like underscore, you know, like, do the whole thing for the Jesus.

My favorite shot in the whole movie is the shot of Jon Toturo having to knock on the door of the guy to explain he's a pedophile.

And, like, it is truly

beautiful visual storytelling.

Like, in Superbad, we directly reference it when there's a scene where McLovin's like explaining how he saw a girl in a thong in the hallway.

Oh, yes.

And, like, like, that is

a direct rip-off of that moment.

And the cutaway to something you could already imagine you're imagining very mundane, basically, and benign kind of.

That's already being very specifically explained in the first place.

It's so funny.

And him just being a little dressed down.

Yeah, that he looks different.

You see, like in the bowling alley, he's a different guy, kind of.

Like, he's sort of like a cool cock of the walk in the bowling alley, but in real life, he's a pedophile.

He is

an eight-year-old dude.

Eight-year-olds, dude.

But right, like that it's like all these men who are losers.

God bless them.

Like,

right.

This is where they're happy but also and like this is where they themselves it's a movie of self-styled like mythology right yeah everyone is like here's who i am you know my thing here's my reputation they are people they are like sketch comedy characters in a real world smoky's a pacifist right

emotional problems and their look and they're just like how dare you don't know my game right what my thing is and then like donnie is this kind of blessed he's like the fucking pinball wizard from uh you know tommy or whatever where you're just just like, he's arguing

normal strikes.

Right.

But also it's like

you feels like you couldn't have a conversation with him like about anything.

There's the reason he does not exist.

Yes.

Sure.

Really?

Because no other character in the movie addresses him.

We have this porch replica in our office, right?

There's a replica of Ben's childhood porch that he used to watch movies on.

Oh, yeah.

Did an art show earlier this year.

We built it as part of the installation.

Very cool that you know what porch movies are.

I know what some porch movies are.

And then had it moved here to the office.

The guys who came and installed it in the office, I came in when they were finishing up and they went, Hey, what do you think about that theory that in Big Lebowski, Donnie isn't real?

And I was like, What do you mean?

And they were like, You know, you could go down this rabbit hole.

There's this whole theory because only the dude and Walter ever reply to him, that no one else ever acknowledges him.

That'd be a weird shit

in which he exists, right?

And he dies.

This funeral director gives them someone's ashes, unless that guy's in a.

It's why it doesn't make it's not a good theory.

But I said to them, like, oh, interesting.

Yeah, we'll talk about that, I guess, when we do our Big Lebowski episode.

And they went, oh, you're doing a Big Lebowski episode?

And I went, why did you bring this up to me?

And they were like, I don't know.

We heard you liked a movie.

We heard you guys were in a movie.

It also speaks to the proliferation of this film.

Yeah.

Right.

That like two carpenters were just like, hey, you're a movie guy.

Can I talk about Big Lebowski with you?

That's the number one movie I want to talk about.

Yeah, sure.

Well, because it is this movie that has kind of an art movie.

Yeah, it a mystical sense to it that you are like, What is it about?

Like, I feel like if you

watch it a hundred times, it is like the weirdest cross-section between like an art film and like an incredibly mainstream, like, comedy, silly comedy.

Yeah, because, like, if I describe the plot of the Big Lebowski or attempt to, it's like

the rug gets stolen.

He bugs the Big Lebowski about it.

And then, because that connection is made, the Big Lebowski tries to use him to recover

the rug because they thought he was the Big Lebowski.

He realizes he can use this idiot to embezzle money to himself.

The Big Lebowski race is stealing a million dollars from his own share fund.

Yeah, from his own.

And he's going to use

his daughter keeps track of the money, so he had to concoct a plot in order to account for a million dollars that he's trying to do.

His young wife has gone missing on vacation, but her nihilist friends have seized it as an opportunity to pretend that they're holding him ransomware.

launder his own money exactly yes yes to give it back to himself away from the fun that his the movie stepdaughter

the movie

it is biological yeah

but the the dude is progressing through things one step at a time so he's always like concerned about whatever like we lost the bag we need the briefcase but obviously at no point does money change hands at no point is there money for him to have it's a briefcase full of right fumbles at no point is tarot read in trouble nope the only person who loses a toe toe is a nihilist and she doesn't care about anything she sacrifices it she sacrificed it uh but she's mad about it the great angel pissed off about it

yes uh an iconic no dialogue or she says pancakes or something

pancakes and walter says i thought you guys were nihilists one of my favorite

uh one of my favorite things is of course that john polito is watching all of this happen in another movie, essentially.

Pretty good movie over here.

And he seems to be from like the 50s.

One of the best gags of the Big Lebowski Lebowski is the picture of the farm where he's like, we think it'll make our homestick and it looks like some fucking dustball picture.

Industrial, yeah.

But also his pinto, it's like the spectrum of like.

Right.

He's driven from another dustboard.

Dog artist who everyone at the center of a story like this wants to think they are, right?

Polito is who they actually are.

Yeah.

And Lebowski is the guy who doesn't even want to be in it.

Polito is so funny.

He's so fucking funny.

And God.

The way his like whole like stance he's in when he thinks he maybe has to fight the dude really made me.

I mean, one of the funniest things about Polito in this movie, right, is also him just being like, Are you a genius?

The dude, and the dude's kind of like, Yeah, maybe.

In the Miller's Crossing episode, I was talking about how he they didn't want to audition him for Miller's Crossing, right?

They knew him as a pretty boy actor.

Well, I was going to say, also, like, I've met John Pulito.

God bless us.

God bless us.

People are more different from how they are now.

Oh, really?

Was very even-keeled.

No, he was like extremely flamboyant.

He was flamboyant.

He was married.

But like an incredibly

flamboyant game.

It's like

old-fashioned

and not like a tough Italian.

He was like John Waters.

Yeah, like he was like Harvey Feyerstein.

Like literally.

In such a lovely, disarming way.

I think he auditioned for something we were doing.

And like, I just remember him like sort of like perching himself literally, like on the edge of the thing, being like, what's the direct?

Like, like, it was, it was adore.

He was adorable.

Like, there's no better word for it.

He was absolutely adorable.

And I had only known him from these movies.

He makes me love him more.

Right.

You expect this guy to walk and be like, hey, what are you doing?

What are you doing?

And he was like, hello.

Yeah.

What's your correction about John Burst?

No, it's like that he had been a pretty boy actor and they didn't want to audition him.

They wanted him to audition for the Dane because when they had last seen him, he was very skinny and had a lot of hair.

And many people on the Reddit got upset.

Because he never had hair.

He never had hair.

No.

He was skinnier and a little like more.

There is pretty boy Polito you can find in earlier crime movies.

There's there's a tupe he wears in like two or three, but it's even a receding tupe in his early 20s.

But then he just, yeah, it's like one day he suddenly had this look and he was the perfect guy to play these characters that were so different than who he was.

My big take on sort of the dude and Walter, right?

Who are like, because like you watch the movie enough, you kind of start to be like, why are they friends?

But then you watch it more and you're like, they have to be friends.

Like they're essential to each other's like continued happiness, right?

Like, it's a yin-yang thing, they can't exist without each other.

Walter hates, like,

like, what's happened to him, right?

He hates that the country isn't whatever he wants it to be, right?

Like, well, Walter, it's just like grievances everywhere.

He basically lost his mind in service of a war that didn't.

He

became Jewish, he stayed Jewish, right?

He stayed Jewish.

If you will, it it is no dream, according to Theodore Herzl.

Um, and he has the QAnon energy of like, how are you guys not angry about this?

Like, everyone should be screaming at all.

Also, the energy of like, he hears one thing and he's like, it must be true.

You know, like, where it's like, she connected herself is something the dude just idly thinks.

I can make the connections.

The dude, like we all say, is actually kind of like, does get kind of grouchy and does get, but he does have this vibe of like, he stopped caring about changing the world 20 years ago.

Like, he was once, you know, a radical.

He's a true sex.

He's given up, it seems.

And now he's like, can I just fucking chill out?

But he is neurotic about his principle of trying to do as little as possible.

I know so many people like that, especially when I was younger, who were so aggro about how they had to chill out all the time.

Yeah.

Where you're like, can you relax?

And I'm like, I need to chill out.

You're messing with that.

Like, they would just always seem to be searching for some like sublime chill zone that they could not reach.

Which takes so much effort, right?

It's part of his branding of the thing.

It's like, why does he drink white Russians?

It's because he needs to have a thing.

Yes, he has a thing.

He needs everyone to call him the dude, except the way he dresses, what he drinks, how much he doesn't want to deal with this bullshit.

It's like this very purposeful.

Like, I knew a guy in high school who was bathrobe man,

and it had that energy of he just wants to show up and be like, oh, this?

I didn't even think about it.

Yeah.

And you're like, there are so many people.

You put a lot into this.

And I'm sure it was, by the way, directly influenced by it must have been.

Yeah.

But he was just the guy who showed up to the parties with the bathrobe.

And yet every night, he would be making out with someone incredibly hot.

Yeah.

And I'd just be like,

this fucking bathrobe man do it?

And he just sold the narrative of what he represented strong enough in a way that when you're 15, people buy.

And the, like, the dude exists in a universe where people can see through it enough because he's at an age where it's no longer cute.

So I can't do the go-through the plot scene by scene because we'd lose our minds.

But like the threads are like Julianne Moore.

as this kind of performance art, but also visual art, kind of

a Fraser Crane mid-Atlantic accent.

DGS, what were you going to say?

No, I was going to say, like, for whatever reason, one of the most like

one of the lies that always stuck in my head and was always so funny to me.

And again, it's something I think as we were writing was very inspirational.

Is when David Thulis is there.

I like that.

That's who I was going to bring up.

He just keeps laughing.

And it's a line that has its own dedicated shot

as well, which is just when he's standing next to David Thulis, who's in the chair, and he goes, Who the fuck is this guy?

No

It's the only, there's, it's the only shot.

There's one shot for that line.

It never goes back to that shot.

It's just a weird wide shot where you see the dude like head to toe standing.

It's almost a meta joke of him saying, like, do I need to learn another character this late in the scene?

Let me now tell you the thing I was going to say, which is they wrote that whole scene without that character.

And they were like, this is kind of a lot of exposition.

It's boring.

What if a funny guy was sitting in the chair too?

And what if that like had a weird british you know incredible actor like the michael

coming off of fucking mike lee's naked isn't it can you sit in the chair and be you know giggles like the whole weirdo the entire did you see seth did you see the reveal and this goes to ben as well David Thuleis is an Avatar 3.

He is.

Yeah.

He is a character that James Cameron has promised has a small part in three, but it's the long play and he's really going to pay off in four and five.

Great.

Sold.

And they posted a photo of David Thuelis Navi, and I just sent it back to Sims, propped close up on the lips.

And I went, they got the thulis mouth right.

They got it.

Jim Jerry.

He has those thu-less.

Spam around in a gyroscope.

$200 million.

Weta didn't sleep for months, but they cracked the thule.

They got his weird first lips cut.

Maude, apart from like knowing her dad is full of shit, knowing her like stepmother is full of shit, like she also wants to get Jif, the big, the dude's sperm.

She wants a child, but she wants a child that she has no relationship to the body father of.

Right.

To put it in the...

So is it just that like Jeff Bridges walks into rooms and people are like, you are Jeff Bridges?

It is.

This is the thing.

I like

that.

She acknowledges that even though Jeff Bridges in 1998 is clearly putting work into trying to look worse.

Trying to.

He still is Jeff Bridges.

He still looks great.

He's got the greatest eyes in the world.

His hair is great.

Yeah.

Fucking cool looking.

Yeah.

Just looks cool.

Right.

And she's just like, why not?

This guy will never show up.

And that's what I'm looking for.

Right.

It's like he's the perfect mix of like good looking, tall, but also right would never bother me.

And then like, what are the other threads?

It's like, you know, Ben Gazara for one scene is the great Jackie Treehorn.

He doodles himself with a giant cock.

The funniest, I mean, maybe the funniest line to me after re-watching the movie is when they go to

the guy's house.

They find the paper in the car and they go to the kids' house and the father's in like the iron lung iron lung who's who is not even the creator but he wrote a lot of

people that deserves a branded right right and he goes does he write still and the lady goes no he has health problems

the cohen moment of walking into the house seeing the iron lung before you can even make out there's a person in it his little head immediately going that's him that's him

and branded is like a real fucking gun smoke also right it's like a shitty gun smoke, exactly.

That ran for like, you know, that was like more racist.

It was called Brandon because it was about like fighting the Native Americans.

Oh, my God.

I think it was pretty racist.

Yeah.

And do they use the branded theme song later?

Yes, I think so, right?

It's the first time I noticed it was this time.

Does he write still?

I mean, imagine, again, you're a critic at the time.

You're, again, you're here, like you saw Fargo, right?

And like, cause that scene is like an hour 45 into a two-hour movie.

Do you see what happens when you fuck a stranger?

They have never made a very long film.

Also, this movie is kind of their longest or under 210.

Yes.

Almost all their films are under an hour, 45 minutes.

Like there's only a couple that are even longer.

And like, I can imagine being baffled by like, wait, why do I need to watch this now?

Like, you know, Walter going insane.

Where is this going?

And it doesn't go anywhere.

And you're like, the answer is the kid stole the car that sucked, that got back to him.

Right.

And the briefcase is missing, which never had money in it anyway.

Right.

So it doesn't matter.

Well, I think that's the answer.

Where it it goes is you kind of can see that

there was nothing in the car, nothing about it.

The droid car.

The kid doesn't answer.

And maybe if he had,

if he had kept money, he would have been more protective and defensive, even if he was not speaking.

Like, that's the thing about the Big Lebaski.

Like, the scene where the dude explains it to the two cops is so funny.

So funny.

Right.

They're like, good luck with that buddy.

We'll.

Right.

But

that wraps up the case of that.

Well, just say that we're like, we'll have to, we'll have to take shifts on this.

Yeah, no, he's like, you guys got any leads?

Leads.

Leads.

They got us working in shifts.

Yeah.

But, and like, all those scenes are just like ultimately, you're like, when you pull the movie apart, like, yeah, this is all meaningless.

Well, it's also funny.

Yeah, like, it's in service of nothing.

It's them colliding their own plot with reality from time to time.

Like, it's them acknowledging that

it's completely unimportant, like, that it's all so trivial.

And that, like, the cops don't care no one cares it's not important the ultimate joke is not so denialists are the only people at the end of the movie who are like where's our money they care they care deeply

we have body sacrifice where the fuck is our money in a way i think it is the most pointed thing in this movie because of course

storm air of course we haven't mentioned oh he's amazing right after yeah and the doctor from funny people

Yeah, the big tall guy.

Yes.

He was great.

Yes.

That's a real like

treat every time I go back and watch this film again, post funny people.

Yeah.

In funnier

vogue.

We literally like cast that man so we could make fun of him.

Which is like the run of the game.

It feels like a diehard guy.

It feels like a cheat in movies where you like you do a thing and then make fun of the monopoly.

It's Dan Hartman's joke about...

Right.

Is it Ace Ventura 2?

It's Ace Ventura when Nature Calls.

Where the guy, he's like the monopoly guy.

He does.

Yeah.

He actually does.

You actually did not pass him.

You cast him.

You passed him.

Dan Hartman's bit.

That's the joke.

You don't get to make me think that your character is clever for making a joke about a guy you cast as funny.

You cast to look like that guy.

That's what we're saying.

That's how you think it's funny.

But then I love that in Funny People, he gets the joke back.

Yes, he got it.

Yes, of course.

To speak to the stoner thing that we were saying before with the nihilists and the avant-garde artists.

I love how in this movie, it's like not making the joke about how they're weirdos.

No.

I like that they just kind of exist.

Yeah.

I really, I think as a kid, I really appreciated that as I was like getting interested in being like a

weirdo.

This movie is quote unquote a weirdo or on like the fringe of society.

No one is nor except for the occasional cops who were.

The sheriff of Malibu.

Yes.

Once I was arrested by the sheriff of Malibu in Malibu.

The real one?

For smoking weed.

And the whole time, it was funny.

We were like smoking weed on the beach in Malibu.

What year was this?

2000.

So weed was still pretty illegal in LA.

And we were smoking weed on the beach, and we kept joking that, like, we were big Lebowski fans.

We're like, oh, the sheriff of Malibu's going to get us.

Look at where the sheriff of Malibu.

And then, like, literally, like, next thing, there's flashlights pointing at us.

And they're like, free, sheriff of Malibu, don't move.

We're like, oh, no, they actually caught us.

Stay out of my beach community.

Stay out of my beach.

And that then with the, I really hate the fucking Eagles right after that.

It's such a great, like, like, in another movie, this is like a really low point for him.

And like, that's the dude's actual lowest point.

He has to listen to the Eagles after getting a cup.

Another thing we stole

for Pineapple Express was, and like, I think I remember showing our stunt person, was when he gets the mug thrown at his head.

And there's, there's a scene where, I don't know how they did that.

There's a, it's just a rubber mug with a sound.

I guess.

Like, because like there's a scene where I get

someone throws an ashtray at my head.

Yeah, that's right.

And it's like, I remember we showed them that.

We were like, we want it to look exactly like this.

Like, we want it to look and feel.

And just like how when I watched that, I was like, oh, like, like right that's what we want is for that exact thing to happen the thing that for me makes that moment land so hard and I don't understand how he does this on a performance level it's like Bridges is reacting on a two-second delay

right

it doesn't feel like mistiming it feels like this guy is so stoned that it takes a little bit longer for his body to communicate with itself.

You know who lives in Malibu?

Iron Man.

And Jeff Bridges didn't like him either.

No, he didn't like him either.

He's got a long storied history.

You know who else lives in Malibu?

B-Rad.

B-Rad from Malibu's Most Wanted, a fellow you once accused Ben of liking.

One of the rudest things you've ever said to me.

When Ben has like five drinks in, he'll be like, Do you remember that fucking time seems assumed I liked Malibu's Most Wanted?

Once I was at a, I used to do these like writers' roundtables where you'd punch up a movie and I was punching up.

He was from Big Mama's House 2.

Sure.

And

job done.

Exactly.

And

we were in like a production office.

So there's all these posters on the walls.

And I was with my friend Jenny Connor,

who's a writer.

And she

to the table was like, you know, it's always a red flag when you come into a fucking production office.

And the poster for Malibu's Monquet is on the wall.

And then put that one up.

And the director of Big Bama's House 2 went, I directed that movie.

And was he like, and it rocked?

He was, yes, he was very insulted.

Hell yeah.

That is really funny.

I just think it is one of the funniest franchises because the setup of the first big mama is.

He's got to dress like this woman.

This woman woman, right?

Dia Long needs to be monitored.

So you have to dress up as her mama, right?

And go undercover as her great aunt or whatever it's supposed to be, right?

And then two and three, two is once again.

It's about jewel thieves or something, right?

Yes, you need to go undercover at like a women's college to bust a jewel thief thief.

Run, maybe you should whip out that old mama cop.

You got that mama suit.

We invested $500,000 in that mama suit.

He's now married to Niolong.

He's adopted her son, right?

And it's like, and I'm going to just go out and pretend to still be your mama.

Big Mama Three is, yeah, hey, Nia Long, son, it's time you take up the family business, pretending to be mama.

Not just dressing up as an old lady, but like specifically mama.

Mama is important to American crime.

Taking down down these rings.

Mama works, mama works,

mama plays, mama's effective.

Um, I want to say, to Ben's point,

especially at this point in time,

the Cohen brothers get hit a lot with this idea, this criticism, especially from their skeptics, of like, are they just fucking nihilists?

Right.

They put a bunch of dumb characters on a board, they make

a crime movie in which nothing matters and people die, and everything was kind of pointless, and they're mocking everyone.

And the nihilists in this movie are the only characters characters who are like doing something.

Yeah.

Right.

Who like they're the only ones who care?

Right.

Are trying so hard to sell the idea that they don't care and have other people repeat the idea that they don't care.

And that's their defining characteristic.

And yet they're willing to like fucking lose toes to make money.

They just want money is what's right.

Which I think like.

Do you think they want to make another record?

Like, is that what they want to do?

Right.

But in the name of what you're like what we were saying of like, this is a movie it feels like the Cohen brothers were willing to die to make.

It's a movie about like no we like all these people we find these characters interesting these movies are not condescending we are not nihilists nihilists are kind of like broken yeah right if you actually don't care about anything what are you covering for no one just naturally doesn't care about anything and that this movie is a bunch of people who have their own things they want to do and they're all just fighting each other for how to get to it yeah but all of them are just like i want to be seen as this philanthropist i want to be a performance artist i want to be the ultimate chiller You know, I want people to view me as an American hero.

You know, Jesus wants to be the greatest bowler rather than the greatest pederist.

Sure.

Like, everyone has this.

I get that.

I mean, it's so sweet.

It's so sweet at the end that Walter starts talking about Vietnam.

Like, obviously, it's sad that he can't let it go.

And it's weird.

It messes up Donnie's sad little funeral.

And the dude justifiably gets mad at him.

But you do feel for Walter that he's like, I don't understand why bad things have happened to us.

It's the great Vietnam thing.

Right.

It's like young men were told they had to do this thing that then like the world said like this was bullshit and it never should have happened.

And you're like, so what were my scars for?

And then like the movie ends with the stranger like, you know, being like, hey, how are you doing?

You know, and the dude's like, the dude abides and I'm chilling out.

And you do feel like comfort in that.

And the stranger being like, it's nice, right?

I guess it's good, the dude abides.

I guess it's good.

It's comforting knowing this dad's just out here.

And then like, you know, another little bowski's on the way so it's sad donnie had to die but like you know life keeps moving on and like i feel like it's donny dies a lot

of the it's meaningless it didn't it it had nothing to do with the plot mechanism well maybe he got a little worked up i think he was shot no i know yeah no i know right people think he was shot i'm saying in the movie they're shot

well he also missed for the first time and then he's sort of with his hair like right he's he knows he's off he knows there's something going on something's going on jammy's so good in this oh he incredible.

Like, just the joke of them being like, Bo semi, sorry.

I always

send me.

Like, of them being like, you won't have any dialogue in this movie, basically.

And him being like, yeah, that's fine.

I'll still create like a character.

You'll talk a lot, but you'll never be heard.

Right.

Like the opposite of getting yelled at all the time.

So good.

And it's kind of like invisible, like yeoman's work because you're like, the point is to do the thing that feels like it doesn't matter.

It's also amazing in comparison to what he just had done in Fargo, where like he doesn't shut shut the fuck up.

He's like a dominates the rat, tat, tat, tat, tat energy that, like, yeah, dominates the entire movie.

Reservoir Dogs was a few years before that.

Like,

he's sort of known for being this, like.

Smarter than everyone, kind of more clever than everyone.

He's kind of playing the Walter, the guy who is getting so worked up.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Angry, aggressive in a comedic way.

But then, yeah, in this, that he's just sort of like the dopey guy who's a step behind all the time.

It's so good.

Have you ever worked with Goodman?

I was trying to do do this calculation in my head.

I don't think I've ever met John Goodman.

He feels kind of hard to pin down in a way.

Yeah, like Bride got him.

He's had him for years.

Bride got his ass.

He's doing great work with him.

Yeah.

But no, he to me was like...

Honestly, like when I started acting, he's one of those people I looked at as like, oh, like he's like

evidence I could perhaps be a professional actor.

No, in this rewatch, it's why I wanted to ask you this.

I was like, is he quietly a humongous

on you as an actor?

Absolutely.

And like really was

channeled.

And it's funny because for years I wanted to be Jonah in Superbad or the Seth role in Superbad.

And my take on it was very much derivative of Walter, like Teen Walter.

What the fuck?

Just screaming at people.

What are you talking about?

Just kind of.

always so angry that like no one's quite on my rhythm or or or uh like following what i want wish everyone was following and and jonah found honestly was probably like a much more endearing way of doing it than what I imagine I would have done.

But it was very inspired by John Goodman.

And I loved him.

And like Roseanne, I was a huge fan of and thought he was so funny.

And, you know, King Ralph, I was a big fan of.

We just did a big King Ralph live show in tribute of Ben's respect for the king.

I like that movie.

Yeah.

It's a funny movie.

It's a funny movie.

The whole royal family dies in the opening.

Nothing funnier than that.

The funniest, the most

bit.

Yep.

It's a pretty good bit.

David, in your,

I i don't know if you know about david's brackets your brackets or his spreadsheets i'm sorry okay but that david has spreadsheets for every years of the movies uh he has seen and what he would nominate in every character category at the oscars amazing you gave goodman two best supporting actor wins right it's this and martin fink correct i think those are just martin fink uh martin fink's not a movie i particularly respond to interesting yeah that's because you've seen it a long time that's because you you've bent hollywood to your your exactly I honestly think it's other, I don't, I honestly think I just don't fucking get it.

Like,

I don't think I get it.

I love Martin Fink, but I do have him, yes, as my best supporting actor of 1998.

That is absolutely the case.

He's incredible in both of them.

They both feel like they should be like, if not career cappers, because obviously he had so much more work to do, but like, congratulations.

We acknowledge you.

Yes.

And it's just crazy that we're like 30 years later and he still remains like one of the most grossly unnominated, not just for Oscars, but you're like, he won one Emmy for fucking Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

That's the only time they ever lifted John Connor everyone for Roseanne.

He's so good on this.

He's why Roseanne is the best.

I mean, we love Roseanne.

We love like.

That's why the Connor still rips.

Yeah.

It's like, he's so amazing on that show.

But you watch this and you're just like, this is an astonishing performance that

I was about to say no one else on the planet could do, but Mel Gibson could do it in a way that Mel Gibson could have done it pretty well.

changed laws early

the fucking look on his face after he rolls out of the car and the Uzi goes off and it's just like him kind of deadpan looking off in the distance it's so funny he is so good every time he has to admit he's wrong but won't do it but kind of will just sort of like go quiet kind of doesn't care yet whatever dude

yeah it's like he instantly diminishes his own failures immediately like right away he's able to write off his own shortcomings but the idea whatever when he does his big outfit change into the sort of like covert military fatigues right he's been doing his sort of like flack jacket like full milliest thing yeah and now it's like we're on a secret mission i need to be stealth and then going to the sort of businessman mode it's

and this is what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass is like one of the all-time great comedic scenes in a movie agree right and also one of the great weird tv censorship edits of all time what did they say the cable version of this movie and that line gets repeated so much

is this is what happens when when you find a stranger in the Alps, which is weird as a one-off statement, but when he has to say it 10 times, it's insane.

It starts feeling hallucinatory.

It's funny because, right, this, I guess, is a cable classic, but I think of it as also.

This is what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps.

That's pretty good.

Punches a kid.

That's good.

Like, like, it's a DVD classic to me, like an early DVD, right?

Heck, this was a movie everybody had.

It's part of the proliferation of what you're saying of, like, there wasn't a big canon of stoner movies this movie is like cresting at a point where it's like dvds are cheap available every college student has a player because they either have a video game system or a computer or a tv or whatever it is and this movie's on comedy central all the time it's on basic cable and there's like theaters that are doing like Lebowski night and shit

like right away

serving white russians showing up in robes and shit like that was that was happening a lot yeah my other favorite tv edit line is of course scarface where where in the original, the first interrogation, they go, how do you get that scar big guy?

And the line in the movie is eating pussy.

And the line in the cable edit is eating pineapple.

And I like it because there is an internal logic to it.

Sure, there's like, yeah, you could scar it.

You just shoved your face in a way.

If you didn't eat it right before we played the box office game, no sense to spend a lot of time on those.

Yeah, so Kelly Clarkson, you said was basically designed to be a little bit more difficult.

That was in the movie, though.

We used to, but I remember we used to, we would steal one from, I remember Melon Farmer was from, I think, Die Hard, maybe.

Like, I grew up watching John McClain sing yippeek Melon Farmer.

Yes.

And that's in Pineapple Express.

So in Pineapple and Motherfucker.

But

I actually think we put it in the actual movie.

Like, I think Danny just says Melon Farmer, like the actual movie itself.

But yeah, we would try to get really creative.

I will say, like, right, because like.

Four-year-old Virgin knocked up.

These are movies where I was like, I can't believe it.

The freaks and geeks guys are making movies.

This is crazy.

Pineapple Express was like, did this escape from a lab?

Like, that was a little bit more like, I can't believe this is allowed.

It felt the exact same way.

It's like a summer movie.

We're like a button, like machine gun

show.

I watched Freaks and Geeks like on broadcast on NBC when it aired, which took so much effort to track down where it was.

It changed nights like three times.

And even the summer burn off of the last couple episodes.

Yeah, they would be off for three weeks and then came back.

And I was like, yeah, catching like episodes I'd missed on Fox Kids, going to the fucking Paley Center, then the Museum and Television and radio to be like i think i haven't seen four that's so crazy you know kim kelly never air

never aired then i get that yearbook dvd my like freshman year of high school we all got and so finally i have control i can re-watch it when i want also in high school

with the commentaries and the context and all that that also in high school i get so into david gordon green in those first three oh yeah

and when in like 2008 it's like there is an action comedy directed by david gordon green what the fuck are you talking about like i had the same reaction david where i was like this is actually just impossible it was weird it was very weird yeah but honestly we wanted them to be artful movies and part of us were like the obvious version of pineapple express he's just like a dumb stoner get the director comedy of malibu's most horrible yeah exactly literally and we were like we were big george washington fans and we loved all the real girls and we were like oh what if we got sort of like a fancy indie guy to make this all the real girls again that's what i mean where it's just like who allowed this right like yeah all the real girls

The answer is Amy Pascal.

God bless her.

And what's funny, to her credit, she let us make the movie.

She let us hire whoever the fuck we wanted.

They never came to set.

They never said anything.

We were at the first test screening for the movie and like it played and tested very well.

And there was like a moment early on where it's just like annihilating.

And Amy is sitting beside me and she turns to me and she goes, now I get this movie.

And I was like, now you never got that?

We spent 25 million dollars on this we're at the test screening and like to her credit she just trusted us and she was like i i assume i'll get it eventually and and she did we talk about her a lot on this podcast

because i think especially

covering the 2000s and the 2010s of studio filmmaking and when sort of blank check movies were able to come out of these careers you're just like she was the one studio head where you can look at her and you're like she took chances on people she like developed movie stars uh-huh she identified people in places that people wouldn't have assumed yeah you could take this person there yes and would just be like i want to make things that are artful and commercial at the same time yeah and actually it's like exactly the opposite of how movies are made now basically which is yeah she would believe in an idea

or a person and and allow them to go make a movie without every element being a sure thing basically if if we own spider-man that gives us the latitude to be able to incubate some side projects and to make like a 20 million dollar movie and we're also making men in black 2 this year so right right so it'll be fine yeah exactly it'll ultimately be men and black 2 i mean no problems with that great movie all chinions you kidding me

old timer i did another at comic-con i did another like 10 drinks in can i tell you the pitch that sims and i had for men in black yeah sure this is like a formative moment in sims and i's friendship because we were at a bar we broke the story men in black 2 was playing on a par it was it was was years before we had the podcast.

And we were like, is there any version of this that works?

And was there?

We came up with one we thought was pretty good.

The whole problem with Men in Black 2 is the undoing Tommy Lee Jones' triumph at the end of Men in Black 2.

It's hard.

It just kind of fucks up the movie to begin with.

You want him to have his happy ending.

So our answer was the movie is that he's basically Siobhan Fallon Hogan.

Jay is missing his partner.

He gets told that an alien crashed.

It's the same thing.

He needs alienation.

He needs Tommy Lee Jones.

He's the witness.

And the witness is the neuralized Tommy Lee Jones.

Oh, that's

a good thing.

And it's like, I don't believe in aliens.

That's a great idea.

That would have been good.

And they get to team up, and he's like, I'm here with my best friend again who doesn't remember me, but I don't want to neuralize him because I'm enjoying the time we're spending together.

And it's like midnight run.

It's them in three days trying to solve the case.

And the one guy's a skeptic.

I guess, I mean, like, the problem with Men and Black 2 is instead it's just like, go in this room, be okay, you're Tommy Lee.

You're back.

You're back.

But also, it's important that it's that the movie starts and they show up and he's like, my wife left me.

I'm working at the post office.

Jesus, why don't we, you know, we fought for this.

Yeah, anyway, Men in Black One, great movie.

Um, should we do final thoughts?

Yes, anything else we want to say about Bigglebasket before we play the box office game?

I want to shout out Dom

Arrera.

Dom Arrera.

Oh, he's really funny as just a little tiny cameo.

He plays

the limo driver.

The limo driver.

Oh, the limo driver.

That's right.

The landlord is also great.

He was in some other movie.

The landlord's name is Jack Keller, and he's in a ton of stuff, but he's so fucking funny he's in um he's one of the guys in the austin power spy who shagged me run of dick jokes yes he's the the guy i can't remember which one but he's in the i probably have and to do that little joke is also like so reminiscent of like being

like in los angeles friends with like people like you gotta go to this weird show

but you know what's a great character detail that the landlord that they go that he goes and that he's eager to go that that like that's a great bridges choice yeah that he doesn't play it as like, oh, yeah, I'll go to that.

He's like, yeah, man, absolutely.

Yeah.

And then they go.

And they're not making.

And like, it clearly sucks, but there's not, they're not making fun of him.

They're just happy.

They're totally happy to support him.

You learn so much about the dude from the fact that he is the one guy who wants to go see his landlord's creative side process.

Yeah, yeah.

He's so eager to.

He's also like appropriately horny, if that makes sense.

Like he responds to all of the horniness coming at him with the right amount of horniness.

Yes.

He's not overly horny or underlying.

But also kind of like overwhelmed like he's just kind of like it all but he still wants to fog yeah yeah um it might be tara reed's best performance she is great in it yes she beat out heather graham for the role uh which makes sense i guess uh heather graham just been boogie nice uh the obviously the gag of the chair falling down like him building the thing to block the the door from being open and then the wrong way

is just i know it's simple but i think about it all the time funny joke same with treehorn drawing like the dick picture of the treehorn dick thing is one of the weirdest jokes it's such a good encapsulation of the movie of like ah a clue a clue oh no it's just nothing

nothing nothing matters but also like i will say my mother always had a notepad near the phone growing up yeah near the landlord my mom did too and i would look at it afterwards and like 5% of the time it was something that someone said.

Doodling.

Most of the time it was doodles.

And you're like, this guy would just doodle himself with a boner.

That's what he would doodle.

It doesn't mean anything.

Oh, God.

And it's like the one time the dude does something smart.

Right.

He like notices

that he doesn't realize he's being drunk.

He could have

goes to get like Hitchcock vision for five seconds where, like, he's putting the pieces together.

Like, look again.

I also just love that, like, all the windup on Jesus is just to do the payoff at the end of him being angry that they still showed up at the bowling alley on the night they said they couldn't bowl.

Yeah, exactly.

You just expect that for some reason this guy is going to factor into the plot in a major way at the end and he could not be

seen the like Jesus spin-off.

I've scared somebody.

Literally, no one has ever literally no one.

Josh Toturo didn't see it yet.

The weirdest thing is that it's directed with his eyes closed.

It's so crazy.

Like, Pete Davidson and John Hammer in it.

Like, really?

It's got like 10 big people.

Because, like, Toturo's friends with people.

And it's like, yeah, making a movie.

I hate to say, if they asked me to be in it, I probably would have said, yeah, he should have freaking done it.

The weirdest thing.

The thing is that it's like, it's a side quote to Lebowski where he basically went, because I think the story is that he used to do this character.

He would do like character monologues as a version of this character.

He was in a play and like sort of had done something like this.

And he was like, that's what I'll do.

And they were inspired by that.

And then they sort of like write it in.

And then he was like, sort of, since I kind of made the character, is it cool if I do something?

Well, I think the Cohens are also like the dude showing up to his landlords.

They're like, yeah, man.

What are we doing?

That's their attitude.

The Fargo show and everything.

They're just like, you do what you want to do.

It's fine.

Right.

We're not afraid that our movie will be like corrupted by this.

But for years, it would like he'd mention in interviews and people would be like, oh, there's going to be a Lebowski sequel.

John Toturo is going to write and direct a Lebowski sequel, assuming it's a more straightforward thing.

And then it's like, no, he wants to remake a 70s French Girard Depardieux sex comedy.

Oh, is that what it is?

It is.

It's this movie going place.

This is about a competition to see who can get laid more.

Yeah.

That he doesn't.

But it's about eight-year-olds.

That's the other thing.

The movie, I think, makes him.

Like, he's a pedophile.

He ignores that part, which then you're like, then what is the guy?

Yeah,

I know one thing about him.

Right.

Two.

He likes bowling.

He's a pedophile.

He likes bowling and children.

Yeah.

Eight-year-olds, dude.

Eight-year-olds, dude.

This film came out March 6th, 1998.

Last thing.

Got to shout out the Dylan song.

Yeah, the band.

Oh, good.

To bear an earlier point of like, right, songs getting repeated or repurposed, this is a weird case of a movie that uses all songs that are not obscure and yet feels like it claims ownership of them.

For sure.

Right?

Like it has that kind of condition, my condition was in.

Yeah, the man in me, for sure.

But it like does the risky business, like old-time rock and roll thing eat times where you're like, well, that's now the song from the Big Lebowski, a song that had a recognition.

The weird

mariachi version of Hotel California.

Yeah.

Does it really like it is like a 90s Scorsesian or Tarantinoian,

maybe they're the same thing type thing where it is like shamelessly aggrandizing of a character using needle drop and shots and slow motion.

And I love it.

And it's something we do.

Again, it's like we do that like when Danny McBride shows up and this is the end.

Like I literally remember showing RGP the sequence from the mix of house game.

It's like this.

It's like a musical interlude to introduce a new guy.

And we are like shameless about it.

But it's perfect.

It's like you copy what works.

Like steal from the past.

All right.

March 6th, Griffin, Griffin, 1998.

I don't know if that was the right, I don't know if there was a right time to release this movie.

It doesn't really feel right, but

spring break.

Yeah.

But this is right.

This movie needed to exist in order for people to understand how it could exist.

Yeah.

It had to be the first.

Yeah.

He's taking a hit no matter what.

Right.

It opens to like $5 million, number six at the box office.

It's released by Grammercy Pictures.

And

like, you know, makes, what does it make?

$18 million.

I think it's a big flop, and yet no one kind of made sure

because they always kept their budget small.

And also, probably sold like 4 billion DVDs.

Oh, now it's like, now I am sure it is one of the 10 most profitable movies in the universal life.

At this moment in time, like any movie made like $30 to $40 million on DVD sales.

Basically, like, it was like guaranteed.

If it's a movie you've heard of, it made 30 million.

And this one possibly made like 300.

Yeah.

What's number one of the box office, Griffin?

It's been number one for three months.

Fuck.

It's Titanic.

Titanic.

It won't be knocked off for another month.

Three months.

Isn't that crazy?

Fucking.

It's just like, yeah, forget it.

Lost in Space.

Let's go see Titanic.

April, end of April.

Lost in Space is the movie that knocks it off.

Oof.

I saw the blank rooms.

That's not a good one to see on the moon.

That's a real weather.

You're going to turn into a spider monster.

It was a lot scarier than we thought it would be.

Exactly.

It's like dark and

we're like, this is a mistake.

Man in the Iron Mask and Spice World come out in January and February, and those were the two that people thought could dethrone Titanic.

They're gone.

At this point, it's like Titanic.

I saw all these movies in the future.

You got four new releases in this top 10.

Bigelabowski is the lowest of them.

So number two at the box office is a sequel to a huge action movie underseason

territory.

Great movie, but no, it is U.S.

Marshals, which is a bad movie.

Yeah, yeah.

With Robert Downey Jr.

With Robert Downey Jr.

Can we do the fugitive without Harrison Ford, just have Tommy Lee Jones chase a new guy?

Wesley.

Rose Snipes.

Right.

With Robert Downey Jr.

Robert Downey Jr.

is the bad guy or

he's like the third banana at Marmee.

He's like the assistant.

He's like Tommy Lee Jones is like new.

He's the new Jolie pants.

That's Robert Downey Jr.'s like, I don't, I was not conscious while he's like, this was like a heroin fever dream.

Yeah.

Still maybe one of the amazing.

You still kind of crush every line your throat.

Because that's the whole thing where I like Allie McBeal was like one of the first times I was exposed to him.

And I was like, this guy's a genius.

And he's like, no memory of ever making a show.

Do not know I did that.

I thought I was in Bulgaria.

Number three, the box office, great movie.

Comedy hit.

Okay.

Big star kind of sinking in his run.

Yeah, for sure.

I've been out for a month.

Early 98, so it's a February 98 release.

Sure.

Yep.

It's made $47, $57 million.

It's going to make $80.

It's going to end up at 80.

Yeah, February.

And it's like the start.

It's not the start of this guy's career.

He's been around.

It's a Sinan Sandler movie.

It's like Big Daddy or something.

It's not Big Daddy.

It's Wedding Singer.

It is kind of that.

That is the level.

Because Wedding Singer is kind of like Sandler.

Like, it's like, yeah, not just dumb.

Yeah, it's like good.

I mean, I love Happy Gilmore and Billy Madison eroded.

It was like, oh, Wedding Singer.

It's kind of

something with some drama.

I think it's probably his best-reviewed movie.

Yes, it was.

It was kind of the crossover because it was like, oh, he can be a viable romantic lead.

He's playing a little bit more.

It's like the first one they like sort of take seriously a little bit.

And then he would come up.

Yes.

It's a good movie.

But it's really simple.

Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore were received similarly.

Then this was sort of like, the guy's got emotion.

And then six months later,

Big Daddy's Boy comes out.

It goes Waterboy in October 98.

And then Big Daddy's the fall.

He was fucking crushing.

He was on fire.

He was on fire.

Yeah.

He was on fire.

He still is.

He is more on fire than ever before.

He might be winning an alley.

I was out with Aziz and we were having dinner.

We were like, we were talking about Adam Sandler.

And we just like,

our waitress was like, you know, like a 25-year-old woman.

And we were like, who's your favorite comedian?

Adam Sandler.

Right away.

We go to like the coach.

Who's your favorite comedian?

Adam Sandler.

Like, and it's almost, it's not, it's almost like they don't know there's another one.

And like, like, me and Aziz are like, like,

you're getting asked this question by two famous comedians and you don't even think of naming them.

Like out of politeness, you don't even, they didn't even consider it.

They're just like, oh, Adam Sandler.

Fuck you guys.

Not even close.

Do you know what the other part of it too is?

Like, he's the kind of guy where like, who's your favorite comedian?

Eddie Murphy.

and you're like yeah murphy's like an actor who does comedy movies now he's not like generating comedy in the same way sailor does comedy again he's still so funny

special is so good he's so funny he's done three specials in the last 10 years yeah and they're so funny they're amazing sandler's the man yeah he's the best number four uh yeah number four also new hard-boiled neo-nor thriller with gigantic movie stars that is now remembered for only one thing it's not eight millimeter It's remembered for one thing.

Is a thing meme-fied in it?

It's a thing his character knocked up would know.

It's okay, so it's got a nude scene.

Yes.

Yes.

Okay, two giant stars, early 98.

Three giant stars.

Is it Twilight?

Yes.

Three Academy Awards.

Reese Witherspoon gets naked in it.

Paul Newman, Gene Hackman, Susan Sarandon.

No,

directed by Robert Bennett.

Right, the guy who made Kramer vs.

Betsy,

yeah.

That's all I'm doing.

And David is correct.

The only reason I know that movie exists

is because in 2003, I googled Reese Witherspoon nude, and there was only one result.

I mean, it's also got like Stockard Channing and like John Spencer like that.

He has a cryber stack pass.

Yeah, I don't know this movie.

I don't know what it's about.

It's like a what's it called?

Twilight.

Yeah, that's the other thing.

It's now un-Googled.

Yes, you can.

It's impossible to find.

I know nothing about it other than the fact that I've seen one scene from it 200 times.

200,000 times.

I know that scene very well.

It's funny because like Gene Hackman was a guy they wanted for the Big Lebowski and he was like, I'm kind of not making movies right now.

And it's literally opening against a hackman.

Twilight was a bigger hit.

Well, by about $500,000.

They're all making about $500.

What does Twilight end up at?

Twilight, which is not a movie anymore members,

ends up at, come on, the numbers, 15 mil.

Okay, so Lebowski.

Lebowski kicked it out.

Number four at the box office, another kind of forgotten movie is like an erotic thriller about like, I mean, I've seen it.

I saw it like on VHS's 11 years ago.

You know, Lady Mary.

There's like a mean mom.

Lady Mary's a guy and the mom is bad.

The mother-in-law?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Mother-in-law.

It's an erotic thriller with an evil mother-in-law.

Either evil mom and the female leads are like an established Oscar winning actress and like an up-and-coming, about-to-win an Oscar winning actress.

90.

I don't know if you'll know this movie.

So it's like three big stars.

It's the new husband.

Two big stars.

No, the husband is a guy who never.

The husband's like a Billy Campbell or something.

I mean, I feel bad saying that, but yeah.

Is it Billy Campbell?

No.

No, no.

Here's how I wish to see it was Billy Campbell.

Here's how I know when it's a Billy Campbell movie, David goes, the star of this, you're never going to guess it.

And I go, it's a Billy Campbell movie.

The third lead in this, it's someone you're never going to guess.

That was the rocket.

It's a Billy Campbell.

Okay.

Okay.

So the actress is, she's going to win an Oscar.

She's an Oscar for a movie this year.

It's not Gwyneth.

It is Gwyneth Paltrow.

It's a Gwyneth mean mother-in-law, erotic thriller?

People just don't remember this.

I don't know this.

Is it a perfect murder?

It's called

Douglas.

And that's like a dialem from Murdoch.

Yeah.

What is this one?

The movie's called Hush.

Oh, yeah, I've heard of that.

There's another

also another movie called Hush, I think.

Which is a good movie.

That's called Flanagan, right?

Yeah, which confuses American fucks up the SEO.

Jessica Lang is the mean mom.

Yeah,

and no memory.

God bless this man, Jonathan Schake, the guy from that video dude.

Jonathan Schkeek.

Skeek.

Schkeek.

I think it's Turner House Grech.

I don't know.

Jonathan Schrech.

Excuse me.

That's when Hollywood finally was like, junk this guy.

Say his fucking name.

Like, the guy had a totally good career.

I don't mean to shit.

He was married to Christina Applegate.

Nice work if you can get it.

She was almost Christina Schech.

You thought about it.

I thought about it too.

Christina's cake.

Right, yeah, hyphenate, maybe.

Applegate cake.

Number six is Big Lebowski.

Number seven is Goodwill Hunting, which is also hanging out.

What's it up to it this way?

103.

Wow.

And it gets to 130?

I don't know.

See, that's a good thing.

Fucking crazy.

Yes.

It's fucking March.

Yeah.

It got to 140.

That would never happen in 100 million.

And like came out in September.

No, I mean, what would have happened by now in like this year is Goodwill Hunting would have been like released for free to your phone without you even asking.

Exactly.

Forget VOD.

They would have just been like, oh my God, just put it on TikTok.

The modern version.

180 videos.

The modern version of this is Goodwill Hunting comes out in four theaters in September.

Yeah.

Right.

And by March, at the time of the Academy Awards, there was already three spin-off streaming seats.

Yeah, exactly.

And the show has been directly loaded onto your brain since the day after it came out.

Wow.

Number eight along the same lines is James L.

Brooks is As Good As It Gets.

A very good movie, in my opinion.

Best picture that he had.

He was nominated.

It lost to Titanic.

Oh, but did he wear Jack Hunt?

He went Jaquan and Helen Hunt.

And Helen Hill White.

Yeah.

Do you think that movie is as good as it gets?

I do.

You think it's actually as good as movies?

Great Times Noodle Salad.

Okay.

Number nine is Dark City.

Very underrated movie.

That's a huge bomb, but a good movie.

Is that Alexander

Alex Proyes?

Alex Proyes.

The pro guy.

Yes.

I like that movie.

That movie rules.

That was sort of like a pre-matrix matrix.

Yeah.

They reuse a lot of the sets, I think.

A lot of the rooftops because they also shot in Australia.

Oh, that's funny.

I think the opening, like Trinity Chase in the 10.

Oh, he's a Dark City shot.

It's mostly Dark City set.

That's amazing.

Really good recent 4K release.

Yeah, I like that movie.

And then number 10.

Yeah.

Hotty.

Jennifer Connolly?

Yeah.

Seen him on the stage.

He's a hottie.

Number 10 is at The Borrower speaking to John Goodman.

Oh.

Kids movie.

Kids movie.

Yeah.

But that must be a couple weeks in.

Or did this bomb really fucking hot?

And number 11, we got to shout it out, Crippendorf's Tribe.

Anytime I ever see Crippendorf's Tribe,

Walt Disney released that, man.

That's the.

Richard Dreyfus, the inventing a tribe.

Pretends he

finds his tribe.

I did this trilogy.

Disney was like, yes.

Mr.

Holland's Opus, Krippendorf's Tribe.

Different trilogy.

Really?

That's not the same trilogy.

I had a head cold at some point last fall, and I was like, what's I need like some syllabus?

Jungle to jungle.

Jungle Jungle.

Crippendorf's Tribe.

It's three Disney live-action family comedies that reappropriate Sibel and Jungle.

Yeah, Jungle Jungle, and the Air Up There.

Well, you know what?

That's a good one.

That would have been a good one.

Should have been faking it circumcised in the movie.

It was Man of the House.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Which is the Jonathan Taylor

Kevin Chase movie that is all about their like scouts.

Yes.

But gets deep into the lore of what they're.

It's the duology is really strong.

And then the house, I'm kind of.

I get it.

I think Air Up There is a solid one, though.

I think it's a good movie.

It's pretty good.

I don't think it was.

That movie is just kind of dramatic.

Like, the thing about Air Up There is funny.

It's a tone that doesn't exist anymore, is what's funny.

Is that a Shelton?

No, or an Underwood?

Is it an Underwood?

It might be an Underwood.

It might be an Underwood.

It's not.

No, directed by Paul Michael Glazer of Starsky and Hutch.

And the Running Man.

Yeah.

There's these toned movies that just don't exist anymore where you're like, they're not really funny.

They're not really dramatic.

They're sort of like somewhere in the middle.

They cost like $20 million.

And in 1998, they make $200 million.

Also, just like walking through the video store as a child and seeing that box and being like, here's all I need to know.

Kevin Bacon, not a comedy star, starring in something that's seemingly a comedy where he's up against a really tall African man and a basketball.

I saw that shit in theaters.

I think I know what this is.

He got circumcised in it.

That's the only thing I remember.

I saw it a double feature with Airborne.

Airborne.

Airborne.

The rollerblading movie.

Well, you guys don't know Airborne?

That Airborne Screams fucking balcony movie or that fucking

porch film.

Do you know Airborne Ben?

Yeah, here it is.

Yeah.

This is kind of in like the three ninjas at inline screen.

Oh, yeah.

Jack Black.

I wouldn't quite put it in three ninjas.

Three ninjas I put in its own genre that I also love and it's far master pieces.

I'd say it's like kids beating up adults.

Yes, you're right.

That is part of like Homo, like the kids horror of the 90 red.

Yeah, now is your time.

Get one over on it.

It's on the good adults genre.

Right.

Kids setting traps for adults.

Yeah.

I'd say that is that genre.

Directed by Rob Bowman, who does X-Fight.

X-Files Fight the Future.

Jack Black's in it.

Seth Green's in it.

Edie McClurg.

Yeah.

And the star of it, I don't think ever went on to do anything, Shane McDermott, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Seth Green is second-build.

Wow, yeah, you don't want Wikipedia to not even have a link to your name, but that is.

Yeah, I think I think I saw the air up there in Airborne, or no, maybe I'm thinking of Cool Runnings, which is another sort of

questionable

more respectful than the T I listed.

This is this is a classic the thing you love, Sims.

Uh, Airborne has three taglines.

Okay,

I love it when a poster can't decide what to tell you about a movie.

The poster is young guy and girl canoodling, right?

And then above them are three inline skaters

shredding air, right?

In front of like a blue, like white cloud background.

Wow, the tagline just so fun.

Mitchell became the most popular guy on earth, dot, dot, dot, once he took to the sky.

And once in sky are in a different font and a different color.

Then second tagline.

That's not what happens in the movie.

I'm sure not.

He's not the most popular guy on earth.

At any point.

The second tagline is like rainbowing.

And it says man wasn't meant to fly kids were but it's like an old i like that one that one's pretty noodling head and then the third tagline is the classic the tagline leads into the title right ooh heroes aren't made they're airborne they're dot dot dot dot genius that's good that's actually really good

heroes aren't made they're airborne as well

god taglines are fun you don't come up with the taglines right like they tell you heroes no we we we you've done that for pineapple put this in your pipe and spoke

that as a magic we came that up with that as a tagline And it's funny, for Superbad.

Superbad had no tagline.

Exactly.

They kept pitching us bad taglines.

And it was one of those things where we just rat out the clock on it.

And we're like, if we just don't approve any of these, maybe there won't be anything.

Noctuck was like the whole thing of like your face.

What if this guy got?

What if this guy got your bad?

That was the tagline for Nock Dad.

That made sense.

I got that.

Yeah.

A 40-year-old Virgin was

there's always

better late than never.

Which is also pretty good.

Yeah.

Because like if the studio, which we should plug the studio now and everything else.

I'm sure our listeners, I I think, would not be able to lock in with would mean nothing to us.

The Ron Howard episode, it's tangential, but I do think like it must be so awkward when you have to sit down and they're like, okay, so he's

what we have.

That's exactly how that goes.

Posters and taglines.

And if you hate it, you have to be like, ah, shit.

Yeah, yeah.

I've been there.

You pray there's something you like so you could at least sort of be positive.

We all like that one.

Right.

But no, I've come out of a lot of those meetings where, yeah, they're like, it's very bad.

And it's very...

You have to start from square one.

Yeah, and you're like, you have to start over, and this is not good, yeah.

Right.

That happens a lot.

Um, so yeah, the studio, uh, the studio, and it's returning, right?

We're gonna

be currently writing the second season.

Okay, yeah, yeah, right, platonic

is season two, and sausage party.

You have two and sausage parties

returning, one's on Amazon, Saucer's Party is on Amazon's Amazon Prime, Amazon Prime, Amazon Premier.

Amazon Premier.

Amazon Prime.

And the Platonic Season 2 is on Apple TV Plus.

When do they debut or do you?

I'm not, I don't.

what is the, I think Saucer Barry debuts this week, maybe the 12th, I think.

And I think maybe Platonic aired a couple of days ago, August 6th, I think.

Yeah, it just came back.

Right.

Absolutely.

Yes.

By the time this is out, maybe they'll both.

No, but this is out in a couple of weeks.

It's all

available.

Yep.

It's on the soup.

Yeah.

I don't know.

Yeah.

Anything else?

Like, what's the Seth Rogan movie we should plug that nobody has seen enough?

The Guild Trip.

I push the Guilt Trip this Waltz so much.

Do you think this Waltz is really good?

That's a good movie.

Sarah Paulie is a good person.

Very few people have seen that movie.

Almost nobody.

I've seen that movie writer.

I love that movie.

But Guilt Trip, like as a Griffin, I will say, he's not fucking you up.

He loves that movie.

I haven't watched it since it came out.

I think it's really good.

It might be.

Maybe.

You've told that story about reading the script and it made you cry and being like, I guess I got to do this.

Yes.

And then I, and then making the film, there it was a little more conflicted.

I think it's so good and it got to me emotionally.

Yeah, well, it is.

I mean, Dan Fogelman wrote it, who is like an objectively talented writer.

And I think there was a few, there's a few plot twists and turns in the movie that I would also say are like objectively effective.

He's good at those.

Yes.

He is good at them.

But I think the movie itself, I think, maybe was not ultimately as good as it could have been, in my opinion.

It may be funny.

But it was really fun for me.

But like, I got to sit in a car with Barbara Streisman all day.

She's so good in it.

She's amazing.

But she never fucking does movies anymore.

She doesn't do movies anymore.

And I got to just be like, what was JFK like?

Tell me stories about that.

You ever meet Elvis?

Tell me what he was like.

Like, it was, it was great.

And I would just do that all fucking day.

Like,

it was wonderful.

Yeah.

Man, I just saw that.

There's this interview with Mariah Carey where they're like, you're going to go to space like Katy Perry.

And she's like, you went to space?

Yeah, I saw that.

And they're like, yes, you went to space.

You're going to do this.

She's like, I've done it now.

That's how I imagine Streisand is.

She's like, yeah, that was cool.

I don't know.

I've done it.

I've done a lot of stuff.

She's done a good

plug guilt trip and take this waltz.

Yeah.

And everything.

I had Teenage Meet Ninja Turtles recently.

We covered that on Patreon.

I love that movie.

Good movie.

Ben kind of swears by the church of Bebop and Rockstay.

I don't know if you know this, but David has young twins, and I have taken to code naming them Bebop

and Rock Study.

And I gave them Bebop and Rockstay toys for their birthday.

Oh, nice.

We're also working on a sequel to that.

Very excited.

It's coming along very well, I think.

And Kellen, he participated in.

Kellen Jett and Woodrow White, who were

two of the big designers on the movie.

They did an amazing job.

Yeah,

they participated in our art show.

Oh, that's cool.

Yeah, they did a painting of Ben as the bunny kid from Gummo

that I got for Ben's birthday.

Kellen did that.

It was very nice.

That's a fun movie.

Do kids know gummo?

They need to know gummo.

I'm trying to do that as much as I can.

Can we rescind all your plugs for your own project?

Just to vote.

Just to watch out, I'm more than happy to.

Under the age of 25, the plug is watch gummo.

It's like, I mean, it's funny because it just speaks.

It was a wild time in movies.

Yeah.

Like, and

there wasn't so many movies that these things went under your radar.

Like, if you were if you were clued into movies, I remember at this time feeling like no movie came out I was unaware of.

I could like, like, I never was

in the video store

and saw a movie I'd never heard of.

And like, Big Lebowski wasn't an A24 movie, it was a failed attempt to make a mainstream castle for company.

All of these streamers who, you know, employ Seth sometimes say we love them, but you know, they like actively keep those movies from you because they're like, nah, come on, you want one of these 40 movies, right?

Like, you know, you want to get electric.

Yeah.

Well, yeah.

Yeah.

All right.

Come on.

Let's be thank you for being here.

My pleasure.

This was great.

Seth, and thank you so much for doing this podcast.

That's very silly of you.

I was very happy to do this.

Okay.

Ben, thank you for the white Russians.

They be hitting.

Yeah, that did hit.

They're perfect.

They were wonderful.

They were well-made, to be clear.

It's a good 1 p.m.

White Russians.

It's perfect.

I'm going to go back to my family.

Yeah, exactly.

Thank you all for listening.

Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe.

Tune in next week for brother.

Yeah, right.

That's their follow-up.

Yeah.

It is a rubber gap for them.

No, two years.

It's not bad.

Felt a great movie.

Yeah.

Our friend Emily St.

James returned to the show.

Yep.

And as always, Seth, not to put you on the spot, but with this moment, this opportunity, is there anything you want to say?

Perhaps any apologies you want to make to young Sammy Fableman?

Sorry, what?

Sorry for what I did to your family.

You bought him a nice camera.

I apologize.

i should never have done that

blank check with griffin and david is hosted by griffin newman and david sims our executive producer is me ben hostley our creative producer is marie bardy salinas and our associate producer is aj mckeon This show is mixed and edited by A.J.

McKeon and Alan Smithy.

Research by J.J.

Birch.

Our theme song is by Lane Montgomery in the Great American Novel.

With additional music by Alex Mitchell.

Artwork by Joe Bowen, Ollie Moss, and Pat Reynolds.

Our production assistant is Minnick.

Special thanks to David Cho, Jordan Fish, and Nate Patterson for their production help.

Head over to blankcheckpod.com for links to all of the real nerdy shit.

Join our Patreon, BlankCheck Special Features, for exclusive franchise commentaries and bonus episodes.

Follow us on social at BlankCheckPod.

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This podcast is created and produced by Blank Check Productions.

I'm a way out west.

Nope.

Nope.

Nope.

Way out, way out west.

Let's see.

Just won't take another look at you.

I gotta jacks and main my way into this.

I like your style.

I like your style, dude.

But then I feel like, what am I getting?

I'm getting into something else here.

Like your style, dude.

And I'm now re-strategizing based on how short an amount of time I think I can sustain this voice.

Okay.