Barton Fink with Chris Weitz

Blank Jack with Griffin and David

Blank 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 Blank Jack.

Look, Buck, bowering a preference, we're going to put you on a movie podcast, blank check.

I say this because they tell me you know the poetry of the street.

So that would rule out Westerns, pirate podcasts, screwball, Bible room.

Look, I'm not one of those guys who thinks poetic has got to be fruity.

We're together on that, aren't we?

I mean, I'm from New York myself.

Well, Minsk, if you want to go all the way back, which we won't, but if you don't mind, I ain't asking.

Now, these people are going to say to you, Blank check movies, it's a B podcast.

You tell them, bullshit.

We do not make B podcasts here at Blank Czech Productions.

Let's put a stop to that rumor right now.

I

you didn't hit it, which is fine because you're reading the long long chunk here.

But the way he says, I mean, I'm from New York myself.

Well, Minsk, if you want to go all the way back, which we won't, if you don't mind.

And I ain't asking.

We're like, oh, he's suddenly like, you know, he's in his own track.

And he's like, but I don't want to talk about that, even though I just brought it up.

That to me is the epitome of beautiful monologuing, right?

Where it's like, now this guy is.

in a tunnel.

Like he's no longer even thinking about the guy.

It is the thing that I feel like the Cohen brothers, it is where you feel the strongest influence, even in their dramas, of like

Preston Sturgis and like Lubitch and Wilder kind of stuff, where you're like these brief moments where a character starts to hint at a whole deeper life and within themselves.

It is a screwball comedy going on in life, basically.

Yeah, yes.

It's what I like about the city is that it makes me feel unimportant in a way that I think is valuable.

Oh, by the way, have you guys seen the clock, the Christian Barclay?

Yes, I mean not at the moment.

Not at all, 24 hours of it, but I've checked in.

Some fair weather friend of you are.

They close the museum.

Yeah.

And I've always wondered, like, how do you see the nighttime clock?

They will occasionally schedule a 24-hour session.

Fucking amazing.

Or you got to go Ben Stiller mode.

Oh, or can you get a museum?

Except it's a night at MoMA, so it's like movies come alive.

Some abstract artists like going around.

Yeah, exactly.

I got to say.

I went with my wife Mercedes there yesterday, and

it was a redemptive, it was a redeeming experience.

It was really amazing and I recommend.

I think it's going on May 21st.

It's leaving MoMA, but you're around, you get a chance.

It's leaving MoMA.

Well, I mean,

this episode's coming out in whatever, like a long time from now.

But your message is being received by the three of us.

It'll, I mean, I've gone to this iteration at MoMA, but it'll return.

Like it travels around the world, right?

Like that's sort of the thing with it.

Well, look, David, you say that, and yet the last thing we were talking about just before we started.

Regrets, I've had a few.

Is that you were offered a chance to moderate a Q ⁇ A with the Cohen brothers when they were promoting Buster Scruggs, and you were like, ugh, what a schlep.

And now here we are, and you're like, as of

this moment's still their final film together.

We keep hearing they're going to get back together, but you just.

Wait, where was the schlep to?

Unknown schlep.

Okay, well, so the schlep would have been uptown, like to the upper west side.

That's not why I turned it down, really.

It's no, it's like, well, and it would have been late at night.

No, neither of those are the reasons.

I just was like,

as I was saying to Griffin, they are.

And we're right, this isn't our first.

This is our first coins that we're recording, but we'll have probably talked about this a little bit already.

But they're notoriously the worst interviews, right?

Like so, so tough to get talking.

And the whole thing with those post-screening Q ⁇ As is you don't want to be talking because people don't want to hear from like, hi, the moderator.

They want to hear from these directors who are popping in, but like they're known for kind of just like not giving you anything.

But I was saying even beyond that, that and like mumbling, like they

it.

It feels like they play dumb.

Like it's what's going to be fascinating about this series

is that these movies are so deep and rich as text.

And yet like JJ's job seems more difficult than ever.

Even coming off of like some movies that were hard for him to research because there's not that much information out there.

I'm cracking open the Barton Fink dossier and I'm like, this thing's going to be 150 pages.

And then I read it and I'm like, oh, right.

There's just like every interview they gave is just like, I don't know.

They're not on the record.

Right.

They'll talk about it, but they're just really cagey about it.

And they kind of play dumb and go like, we just did that because we thought it was funny.

It doesn't mean anything.

It's not a metaphor.

Right.

And possibly they're hostile or possibly they just don't want to talk to you about it or whatever.

So I was just kind of like, and like I liked Buster Scruggs.

Like I liked that movie a lot.

Now I've only actually grown to like it more.

But it wasn't a thing where I was like, I fucking want to dig in on Buster Scruggs with these guys so bad.

And I just was like, what if I have like a really disappointing experience, right?

You know, like a truly like, they don't like me or I do a bad job.

And then I'm like,

you might have taken the blame for their not saying much, right?

Because exactly, people, I remember doing it.

It felt a little no-win.

Like

the win, the opportunity for a true win of like, wow, I had a really meaningful half hour with the Cohn brothers.

felt it felt like a slim ass win.

People might have blamed them splitting up on you, just being like, look, there's not a definite one-to-one, but Sims moderated Q ⁇ A and now they're apparently going separate ways.

Right.

That's the other thing.

Right.

I broke them up.

They were like, you know, we can't deal with this anymore.

Like this.

The clock, by the way, is a 24-hour movie because I feel like I just referred to it without saying what it was.

It's a 24-hour movie, which is assembled just from references to time or actual shots of clocks within world cinema.

And it is absolutely compelling.

You think you're going to sit there for like 15 minutes and you end up thinking like, I could go for 24 hours.

It's just unbelievable to think even how someone would curate and find all the footage because the way it lines up even to the minute, it's crazy.

And it's a thing too, where as you're sitting through, you'll like check and it will line up.

It's the time in which you are watching it.

Yeah, that is also the amazing thing.

And even like with modern internet databases and such,

it doesn't feel like you can just Google like movie that features 6.13 a.m.

Nope.

No.

You know, like that, that's just like manual grunt work in terms terms of like scrubbing thousands of films to probably pull up all those numbers.

Yeah.

Friend of the show, Caroline Framke, went recently.

Past and Future guests.

Yes.

And

she went in the morning.

I think they had like an early moment, like an early morning thing.

So it was like 9 a.m.

And she says like

it's all alarm clocks and shit.

Like when you're there, like it's like so much wake up.

See, that sounds triggering to me.

Right.

She's like, it's a little overwhelming, but also kind of intense.

I was so annoyed.

I wanted to go at 4.20 and it just didn't work out.

Hell yeah, brother.

But I felt like that footage would have been pretty dank.

What is this?

All the French doobie movies.

The French Chichen Jean equivalent.

Jacques and Jean.

Jacques and Jean.

Jacques Jean.

Foumet.

Folks, who are we?

Where are we?

What is this?

What are we doing?

This is Blank Check with Griffin and David.

I'm Griffin.

I'm David.

He was pratting himself for so long.

I was looking at the moment.

I was kind of like, now you were making me think I was

basketball now.

Should I...

One, one last sweep into the clock?

And like, what time should I?

I was just sort of thinking about it.

I gotta do it.

Look, this is a podcast about filmographies.

Not 24-hour movies about clocks, but perhaps someday.

Maybe that's a series.

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.

We are calling it pod country for old casts.

We sure are.

We sure are.

There was a little bit of debate right before we recorded, but we've settled on that.

And today we are talking Barton Fink, which is bizarrely their first guarantor.

Did it win the

palm tour?

I'm putting this forward as a thought because they go from this this to Joel Silver saying, I'm going to bring you into Warner Brothers and give you a big budget and major movie stars and try to get you to level up.

And to some degree, I think that was Joel Silver having the aspirations of wanting to make a higher class picture and viewing them as a vehicle to that.

I mean, they must have felt like they were living in a simulation.

Totally.

But you're like, this is a thing that.

absolutely does not happen anymore, which is like a prestige guarantor.

This movie loses money in theaters.

It does not translate to the number of Oscar nominations as like its critical reception would belie or its can reception or anything.

It does okay,

right?

But yes,

it's so undeniable.

I wouldn't say this movie did okay.

It didn't really make much money.

No, it lost money.

Right, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It didn't, it didn't have the, like, the mommy dearest effect, right?

Where it was, like, quietly they were blackballed from.

I think Raising Arizona was their first guarantor.

I think Raising Arizona was their first guarantor.

Well, Raising Arizona is not as much of a hit as you think it is.

No, No, it's not.

We'll have talked about it.

I mean, it's, but it's not.

I mean, Miller is pretty good considering, you know, its stature.

And like, I feel like Miller's Crossing is a bit of a first-blank check.

You know, like getting to do a sort of a costume.

A little bit.

I mean, look, their career is interesting because it has a lot of alternation between

missteps and hits that then get them the next one and then they have to recover and like make comebacks from like the swinging public reception to their films at the time.

Now, almost all of them have aged well, but it's going to be interesting to go back through these and see which ones were not well received at the time.

I just think, like, this film has such an insane critical reception.

Sure.

And the canned thing that is historic.

The canned thing is a big deal.

Right.

To the extent that Cann has to change its rules.

To a degree.

So that's sort of interesting.

Where it's like these guys are such

canned changed it so you can only give two awards to one movie.

This film won best picture, best director, and best actor at Cann.

And it won picture unanimously.

Yes.

And they, I mean, it sort of makes sense.

Like, they kind of were like, don't give the palm d'or and best director to the same thing.

Why not spread the wealth?

Which is become the

following year.

They apply the rule, the Barton Fink rule, basically, of one movie can only get two awards.

Right.

Got it.

Yeah.

I do.

And then they give the palm d'Or to the best intentions, one of the worst palm winners of all time.

But anyway, that's not important.

It just translates into Joel Silver swinging in and giving them the biggest budget they will have until True Grit.

Hudsucker is their biggest budget.

So it's 25 mil.

Big Lebowski costs less.

That's one where I was kind of like, because that movie's sort of

Oak Brother costs 26

with inflation.

But

it's like

they become these guys, kind of pretty much post this, but maybe even starting a little bit with Motors Crossing, where it's like they can get

a pretty good budget

for

an elaborate-ish movie, like a period film or something like that.

They work pretty responsibly because they're really, really well known for going, like working on time and under budget.

And the other thing is they get an all-star cast of people who will work for below their quote.

Like, it's just they always can get a sort of like

a cast that makes sense for foreign financing.

But I, very often, I think in their career, you have this, like, these duo relationships between movies of like, far goes the guarantor for big Lebowski, which then bounces.

So then they need to make a comeback from Lebowski, you know?

Like this constant back and forth.

It's interesting how much it like the Big Lebowski's bouncing just doesn't matter anymore, right?

It doesn't matter.

Yeah.

But it was a thing.

At the time, it was seen as like...

It was a thing.

It was seen as a musician.

We just took these guys seriously and now they're fucking off

and making like a joke movie.

Right.

They had just won their first Oscar and it was like, we've anointed you guys and then what the fuck is this?

Right.

I'm kind of interested in like what your guys' perception is of where they stand in the kind of the pantheon.

Because to me,

they're the greatest living filmmakers.

Because of their sheer range, you can argue about any number of other things.

I'm kind of inclined to agree with you.

I do not dislike one of their films.

And I don't know who else I can say that for who has made this many films or even close to this many films, certainly living today, let alone in history.

I also will say, our guest today is Chris Weitz.

Here he is.

Hello.

A renowned director and writer, producer in his own right.

Renowned?

Previously, and now once again, part of a brother team of filmmaking.

Yes, we're back together, me and my brother Paul.

But

you've been Oscar nominated.

Yes, that's true.

You've had your hits.

You've had your hits.

Take that away from me.

I've been pretty bouncy.

Actually, this is what at least is why.

You've been in a tigger mode.

Of late, I've been bouncing as much.

And actually, that's part of why the Barton Fink of it all really appealed to me because today,

first of all, I'm back.

Three years, three years away, three years poor the desert, four months, which is crazy.

Three, three.

Poor.

Are you sure about this?

Yes.

I looked it up just now.

He was last on our show

for Darkman in April 2022.

Okay.

And it's now, it's April 2025.

When we're recording this.

But it will be about three and a half years between releases.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I was heading towards what I like to call the Yoshida line, where it's like

10 episodes.

And then

I kind of

fell off the face of the earth.

And I don't think it's not you guys.

It's like,

you know, someone on the Reddit called it out and said, how has it been three years since Weitz was on the podcast last?

And I think we texted you and were like, that doesn't sound right.

Yeah.

Like once we checked it, we were like, fuck, it has been three years.

You have not been on since we recorded in Ben's living room.

That's right.

In his living room.

It was very post, just post-pandemic.

Like, I remember I took

a COVID test on the way there.

Absolutely.

Out of common courtesy back then.

But it definitely, it did not feel like that much time had elapsed.

We still talk to you fairly.

Oh, no.

Listen, I hear you guys all the time.

You've done us some mitzvahs.

You submitted a question for our live mailbag and stuff.

I think the question was, why are you guys so great?

Wow.

It was very sweet.

But here's the bigger thing.

It feels like you have been in a sort of

a real

kind of

funk.

And you have sent a lot of like Dark Knight of the Soul texts to David and I.

Not to be alarmist, but a real like, what is the point of doing this, pursuing this kind of career, this industry?

What is my life amounting to?

For David and I late at night, or like, Chris.

Is he okay?

We better get him back.

You're good, Chris.

Well, so, yeah, but this is like, I've been thinking about this episode for weeks, if not months, of like, I'm going to go there in terms of like inside baseball.

And also, I'm telling you guys to stop me when it gets like too up my own.

Never.

But in terms of like, you know, this is sort of what's happening in my career.

And these are my reflections on it, my somewhat acid reflections on working in a studio sort of world, basically.

But here's what I think is interesting, important for the listeners to know.

Maybe a little under a year ago when your last movie, Afraid, Afraid,

Afraid.

Afraid.

Okay, but it was originally called They Listen, correct?

Even before that, actually, the real name of this movie was Home, and we couldn't use it.

And then it went through a couple of things.

I never, because there have been a lot of other movies called Home.

Yeah, sure.

I think that's why.

And

then it got changed by various marketing departments and

the studio to things where I was like, fine, whatever.

You know,

well, sorry, you were saying,

I was saying that movie came out.

We'll get more into it, but you had a long, exhausting journey with that movie that you really came out the other end of it being like, what am I even doing?

Came out the other end, like,

like the rectum of the studio.

A couple of weeks after it was not really released, but escaped into theaters.

You text us and we're like, guys, I think it's time for me to come back on the podcast.

And most specifically, the insight I want to provide is I am now someone who has made a movie that doesn't exist.

And I would like to do a movie that doesn't exist that you guys are covering and talk about the like road paved with good intentions that lead to these sort of weird non-movies.

Yeah.

And then actually, and then I started to think, well, okay, what is the taxonomy of flop bomb movie that doesn't exist?

Because our

Afraid is not a bomb or whatever.

It's more.

No offense.

No, it needs a movie that doesn't need to be big enough to be a bomb.

But that's a little movie that doesn't exist.

It's not noticeable, like hence bomb.

But I feel like a movie needs to have existed for you to think that

it doesn't exist.

I I disagree with that.

Here's why I think it passes the movie that doesn't exist test.

Because if you say to someone, hey, do you remember Afraid?

The John Cho, Catherine Waterston, Chris White

directed Blumhouse AI horror film.

They'd go, like, when's that coming out?

Oh, friends of mine

would ask me.

That's the movie that doesn't exist test, which is if you describe it to someone, they'd go, I would remember if that came out.

It's a Mandela effect kind of thing.

Right.

You're describing elements that would have made some impact.

That's the movie that doesn't exist effect.

So we were like, okay, let's keep our eyes open for the next right movie that doesn't exist.

You're texting us during March Madness about who you're excited about, you know, potential ideas.

What are the movies that don't exist in those filmographies?

Then the Cohens win.

And David and I just immediately go, we got to have Chris Dubarton think.

I know it's the opposite of what he said he wanted to do, but it is kind of the movie about

how movies that don't exist come into being in a certain way.

Yeah.

I mean, it's a very, it's, it's like maybe their most astringent film, right?

There is less joy in this movie, although there is like, there's virtuosity, but I'd say like than so many other of their films.

I think this is one of the most sickly looking films I have ever seen.

It is like disgusting to look at.

And it is the first Deacons movie.

He's perhaps the greatest living cinematographer.

And this is the beginning of his like miracle run with them.

And yet the success of the lensing of of this movie is that it makes me want to vomit at all times and that look is a reflection of like the soul of the characters and the tone and the sound design right and yet getting back to our original point when you asked the cohen brothers about it they're like we've actually had like a really lucky run in hollywood right none of this is like based on our own experiences we just thought this was like a funny structure to make jokes that is the interesting thing which it wasn't based on the experiment of being ticked over by the studio because they hadn't really they hadn't become studio creatures nor did they ever really

like they're they're not really.

I mean, back to our point, they sort of have always figured out the exact right size to stay at where their movies seem like a bargain for the people writing the checks.

And they're like, if you can keep it there and you can put these 10 actors in it, then like, yeah, do whatever you want.

Yeah.

It was more fun.

I'm sorry.

It was more, not fun.

It was more making fun of the classic art versus commerce.

Yes.

You know, sort of struggle of the golden age of Hollywood.

I feel like this movie is more than anything, them reckoning with their own internal battle in their minds of who they want to be as filmmakers as their reputation is starting to get built.

The, you know, it is the writer's block movie.

Like, there's, I mean, it's about other things too, but like, no bet, no movie better

tackles the experience of not being able to write.

But a quote that blew my mind in the dossier that JJ pulled up is they were like, we have never, we have no unproduced screenplays in our drawer.

Like at this point in time, now they do, and they have over time let other people direct unproduced screenplays of theirs eventually.

But they were like, at this point in time, everything we've written has gotten made.

We have not gone through this ringism.

We have not done writing for assignment.

What a run.

Yeah, it's wild.

I feel like there was some original point I was going to make when I

said you're an esteemed filmmaker, and I'll get back to it.

Chris Weitz is an esteemed filmmaker.

He's an esteemed filmmaker.

We have to admit it.

He has worked in Hollywood for

25 years.

What are we talking about?

Longer.

Like, I guess it was Ants your first

experience.

Accredited screen shape.

But my brother and I have been working for seven years before that.

So I found out that I got my first gig on my 21st birthday.

So as long as I have been

able to drink

legally, I have been within the system.

Did you have celebratory drinks that night?

That night and every night.

Well, interestingly, what it did probably was contribute to the sense that I had early in my career that I was a golden child, right?

Like, oh, here's your birthday present.

You get to be in this industry.

Yeah.

And, you know, so I'm going to start, begin the career story.

Like, so get to work on

ants before Woody Allen is canceled.

So that was kind of a big deal.

People love that.

Look, I say it all the time.

Fantastic screenplay.

Thanks, man.

Ants is very well written.

People really really liked that.

And then, so we had the studio meeting at Universal, and there was

this movie that was eventually going to become American Pie.

We didn't have any directing experience, my brother and I, and they offered it us to direct.

And like, I didn't know anything.

I'd never been to prom.

Like, like David,

I grew up in England, right?

I went to Six Form there.

They didn't have prom.

And I was like, I don't really like teen sex comedies.

But I was like, okay, let's do this.

Let's try to make it kind of interesting.

It was like.

No response from David for any of this.

We just have to call his ass.

It's retired.

Um, astounding.

Uh, it, uh, you know, it was this kind of unlikely uh hit, uh, incredibly profitable.

And I was like,

there had not, like, there's no,

is there anything in the water when American Pie is a big hit where it's like, oh, we didn't see the teen sex comedy revival coming, you know what I mean?

There was because with Scream, it's sort of like, ah, Slasher's.

Can I throw out my

take on it?

Please, She's all that's 98.

I feel like that sort of gets credit for being like the start of the new wave of our teen movies back.

98 is also something about Mary.

Yeah.

There you go.

Right.

And then it's like the saucy comedy.

American Pie is sort of you guys synthesizing those two things together.

Yeah.

Which are kind of by mistake.

Right.

Yeah.

I mean, they had both started the year before, and you're like at the right place at the right time to have the movie that capitalizes on both things that were coming back.

Yeah, in retrospect, it was just happenstance.

But like that, you know, and it was like, okay.

And then we were offered every single teen sex comedy for like a year.

Like, I never want to do this again.

Yeah.

I was like, because this wasn't my thing, man.

You don't do the sequels.

Right.

Yeah,

I had never really seen many teen sex comedies.

Obviously, they're required like viewing if you're my age of like Porkies and whatever, blah, blah, blah.

But so then we were like, oh, we got to not do this.

We got to do something different, my brother and I.

So we did a movie with Chris Rock.

Right, Right, Down to Earth is the second one.

Down to Earth, but like beyond that, you remake Heaven Can Wait.

Remake Heaven Can Wait.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Calling it a Chris Rock movie is like

underselling.

That's like a big swing.

It was a big swing.

At the moment, you know what?

I thought I had a fantastic time working with Chris Rock and a good time working on that movie.

I was like, I don't know that that's like exactly what I was wanting to do either.

But then finally, like A Bad A Boy.

So it does make sense as a sort of like a fairly large-scale comedy.

Like it's a level up from American Pie, but it's not like you're like, hey, can I make a movie with space aliens?

Like, it's like, they're like, we can trust you to make a comedy like that.

It's a different tone.

And Chris Rock was in that state where people were like, can anyone crack how to make him a movie star?

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, I mean, and it was like, I can remember, this is like a very Barton Fink moment.

Like

our agent saying, this is a go picture, right?

Yeah.

And I'm like, I was like, I don't know.

Okay.

I like that phone question.

You also made it fast, I feel like.

We did.

We were like, and also I I was younger then, so you don't think like, oh, this is going to take up years of memory.

Is that 2000?

It's early 2000s.

It's Valentine's Day 2001.

So, you know, like 18 months later or whatever.

Right.

Then About a Boy, which is like, was like the sweet spot for me and Paul.

We go away to London and we make this movie and

nominated for an Oscar.

I was like, oh, great.

This is like, okay, this is me from

your ass, but I truly think a perfect movie.

Like a movie where everything is.

That's wonderful.

Right.

But one of my ultimate comfort movies, I said this to you, but like

day two of lockdown, I was like, what, what should I watch?

That's good.

And I like jumped to a battle boy immediately.

I was just like, this is what I need to calm me down.

That makes me very happy.

I'm glad.

Yeah.

And that was like, okay, here we go.

This is,

you know, I'm just going to keep on, you know, getting nominated for Oscars until I win one.

And then, you know, we're going to.

To you guys at that point in time, you must have been like, we've cracked it.

this is

what we want to be as filmmakers this is the tone this is the final product this is how we want to be seen and received yep yeah okay and then i read while we're shooting uh a bad boy i read uh the golden compass or in english called northern lights and i was like oh this is fantastic i love this book i love this author um i want to live in this book for for a while and so i get the gig of doing the golden compass um first writing or no it was like you were gonna direct then you it was to direct and then I dropped out because I had I really got the willies.

I was like, holy shit, this is going to be a huge movie and I'm not sure that I can handle the entire logistical load of this.

And so I don't know.

I think a lot about a thing you said to me previously, which was the best decision I ever made in my life was quitting the Golden Compass as director.

And the worst decision I ever made was deciding to go back.

Kind of.

Because,

yeah, because, look, it was a huge movie.

It was the most expensive movie that had ever been made at the time.

We had to work to get it down to $190 million budget.

So I'm going from like,

I mean,

so there was this gigantic kind of CGI element, huge production design element.

And are you basically like prepping that?

I mean, working, developing that while you're making in good company?

No, my brother was making some good company.

So

we kind of, we went our separate ways because Bad A Boy's the Last One.

Bad A Boy's the Last One.

Why did you like just kind of consciously go like, I want to do this?

I want to do this.

These are very different things.

We're going to do different things.

Yeah.

We were sort of

presented with the possibility that one of us would have to force the other not to do the thing that they want to do.

And we're like, we don't want to do that.

Now, this read Cohen's, and then we can retract your career.

Of course, no, let's go.

American Pie is directed by, it's credited as being directed by Paul White.

Yep.

You are a producer on it.

Down to Earth is credited to both of you, right?

Yes.

So did you get DJA approval as a team at that point?

Yes.

Famously, the Cohen's do not get that until I think the lady killers.

It's like somewhere in the mid-2000s, the DGA is finally like, we acknowledge that you are essentially a two-headed director.

Right.

They didn't like to grant that to anybody.

They still don't.

I think the Cohens helped break it down a little bit.

There are brothers.

It's usually sibling to you.

That's the thing.

There's the occasional, like, Jonathan Dayton, Valerie.

I was going to say, married couple is the other one.

Right.

Like, it's easier.

So Anna Boda and Ryan Fleck, they're married, right?

Weren't they a couple?

They were a couple, but they are now both married to other people.

They haven't been together romantically in over a decade.

But they are obviously, there's the

American Splendor team, Pulcini and Bergman.

But this is right.

I think part of it is

if you are bonded by blood or by law, it is easier to make your case to the DGA because they're like, well, you have a bond that is established in another realm.

Yeah.

Well, it helps by using it.

You literally need to make your case.

You go into a conference room and there is a council of elders elders sitting there, and you have to explain to them why you should be a team, and they ask you questions, trying to poke a hole in your argument.

And I remember one of them.

Why do they like, in a way, you're splitting money?

I've thought about this a lot.

Okay, it's because eventually it's because of the auteur theory.

It is because of the DGA's sort of position, which I appreciate, of course, because it's my union, of like, you know, this is a very special role, and the film is made by the director.

You cannot split it up into various various parts so that you don't have some producer.

Everyone will be trying to get a director credit.

Sure.

But it's quasi-religious because it leads you into situations where things obviously don't really make sense.

Yes.

So my brother and I can't be a director team again officially.

We cannot.

We cannot

divorce.

They said when I remember, and I had forgotten

Jedi Council.

You were sending this to us right before we started recording.

I was like, pin this, save this, because

your show has just come out on Apple Plus at the time this episode's come out, Murderbot, which is the first thing you guys have fully worked on together since

About a Boy.

Exactly.

Although you've produced things together and helped each other, this is like

you couldn't get fucking credited for directing episodes together.

No, because apparently, 20 years ago, when we got the

license to...

About a boy also directed by the pair of you.

That's right.

Yeah.

They said,

would you ever split up again if

you found things that you were interested in doing separately?

And we said, of course not.

Because I don't know, the time didn't make sense, but they've held us to that.

Wow.

And we have, yeah,

we have been cast out of the garden as a

team.

What a lot of teams do if they can't get

the guild recognition is what the Cohens did for years, which is like, how do we divide and conquer?

And it's like, we co-wrote the screenplay.

One of us is credited as producer.

One of us is credited as director.

We edit under a pseudonym.

Right.

Yes.

And like try to create a sort of like weird, how do we even out the positions and the power.

A conceptual like intermeshing so that everyone really understands what's happening.

Right.

But then it's always the thing of just like, well, they obviously just do the whole thing together, right?

They're called the Cohen brothers.

Everyone refers to them that way.

They don't talk about like Joel Cohen.

And even

so it took.

15 plus years, almost 20 years, for the DGA to finally go like, okay.

Because does Joel get a solo director nom for Fargo?

Yes, absolutely.

Right, which is so weird to consider.

I don't know, totally.

And then obviously, like, if

you imagine if he won Ethan's.

Correct.

And non-best picture.

No, Fargo is not.

Because Fargo is the only time this comes up because the next time they get a best pick nom is for No Country for Old Men.

But yes, like nominated best picture, Ethan Cohen.

Nominated best director, Joel Cohen.

Like, that's, you know, that's.

That's the No Country year.

They are united by it.

They share three Oscar wins together.

Correct.

The movie wins picture director screenplay and both of them have credits in both positions but that's right once again as you said a thing that had only finally gotten it had just happened i think it's one movie before that they'd finally gotten the

so that's interesting um but now if you do work together again you're saying you will have to do a sort of like technical director

and by the way i think i hope i don't get in trouble for saying this but i think dga doesn't say that like there oh there are certain things on the set that only a director can do i'm like god maybe there are shit maybe i'm in trouble um but like they don't really care if a producer talks to an actor or if they act like a director per se.

Well, there's also the other thing of like, there are things that a director can't do.

This, well, this is

the myth is that they can't talk to

extras.

And I'm not sure that that is actually true.

Because

first ADs almost always end up directing background actors.

Yes.

And I had always assumed that was because of some weird guild guideline.

This may be true.

In Canada, that is not the case.

Maybe it is in America.

And I think that there was something where if the director talks to an extra, they become, first of all, they get bumped up instantly and they're like, oh, you can't talk to them because

sure, sure.

Right.

The second the director is shaping their performance

versus like the first AD talking to a crowd.

Yes.

Yes.

And the moment that an extra says a word that can actually be distinguished, also, which, you know,

the game is always that extras are occasionally trying to say things or to elicit a line.

Yes.

So that, because then I think you get into sort of sag stuff.

Right.

Then you can, right, you become eligible.

Right.

So ADs are always saying, like, you know, you can sort of say the kind of thing that a crowd says, like,

you know, right.

They can't say words.

They're going to be like distinct enough to make out.

Yeah.

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 ads based on this podcast, the big thing they want is personal host endorsement.

Right.

They love it to 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.

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.

Reimagining, whatever.

A reboot of The Toxic.

Avenger.

Now, David and I have not got to see it yet, but they sent you a screener link.

Yeah, I'm going to see it.

We're

excited to see it.

But Ben, you texted us last night this rules 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 trembled is toxie's son his stepson his stepson okay uh wade goose yes great name give us the takes we haven't heard them yet okay you got

dinkledge is fantastic yeah he's talking plays it with so much heart.

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.

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.

Truma.

Yes, yes, that's right.

The original film.

Yep.

I grew up watching toxic 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 jokes.

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 Cineverse 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.

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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

who are also mercenaries

and drive a van

with a skeleton giving two fingies up on the grill.

And that's all I'll say.

Okay.

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Okay, wait, so golden compass.

Golden compass.

Okay.

People just want to hear about the Cone Brothers, and I'm sorry, but I'm just going to go there.

So, okay.

I now have a theory that there was an original sin on the Golden Compass, which is that I knew that the stuff about the Catholic Church was going to be too toxic for

New Line to want to deal with.

Sure.

And they told me that, and I was like, it's going to be fine, no problem.

And then I sort of sneakily infused my cut and my film with all these things.

And then in post-production, everything went totally wrong where they freaked out about this whole thing, wanted to change the ending, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

I was eventually kicked out of the editing room.

And I would like to say, like, it's the typical thing of being hard done by a studio, but I should have known better.

And when I think about my latest movie, too, I think there's an original sin there as well.

But by the way, I want to say before I complain about studios,

I love Blumhouse and I love all the people there.

They're fantastic.

They're great.

So none of the things I say actually apply to these guys.

They're the producers on this.

But

the people who screwed you on Golden Compass no longer exist.

I mean, I'm sure the people exist, but New Line, the entity that you dealt with then, ceased to exist.

I basically brought down a studio.

It's partly your fault.

it's that movie's fault but also like the the trailer for that movie i remember so distinctly is the ring from the lord of the rings yeah rotating in slow motion and then turning into a golden compass that was that was like an early promoting thing and you know but i let wait wait wait wait oh sorry that was my fault really my fault it was my fault i was i was i was kind of at the time like things were really stressful with the studio and i was like fuck it i know what they want in 2001 you guys cinema opened the door.

Yeah.

And you see a ring.

Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah.

I mean, to Middle Earth.

I mean, it's a little, I'm just going to say, it's a little on the nose.

It's a little,

it is totally truckling.

And I think it was at a moment where I was like back on my heels.

They were there like kind of.

How do I win back favor?

Yeah.

Right.

Making them feel I'm a team player.

Yeah.

But then that also, of course, like fucks you and putting even more pressure on the movie where now like you're saying the quiet part out loud.

Yeah.

That was always the design of this movie is the Lord of the Rings trilogy has ended.

Yeah.

We don't have the rights to the Hobbit.

How do we find our next Lord of the Rings?

And now you're like telling them to market the movie be like, we promise you this is the new Lord of the Rings.

But the pressure was always going to be there because I spent so much money.

You didn't create that narrative, but now you're underlining it and delivering it to the public.

No, this is this is like,

so a big movie like that where everyone is freaking out constantly, messes with your, your head.

And so you end up like kind of going going slightly punch drunk and doing crazy things.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, I get it.

I'm also like,

I mean, to your point of the original sin thing, right?

Like you're in this sort of catch-22 where it's like, okay, they go, we'll give you a green light, but.

Yeah.

And the condition they throw out to you is like anathema to successfully adapting this thing.

Yeah.

So you're like, what's your choice here?

You either do what they want and then you're making what fundamentally is a broken version of the movie in your eyes.

And that's correct, it would be broken.

Well, or you try to smuggle it in and get it past them, but of course, they then have the right to go, you tricked us, and be angry about it.

Yeah,

they fucked up.

Look, I mean, the whole thing with the northern, with the northern lights, the book, um, is that it's

it's plainly in the text and it's less in the first book, right?

Like, the church stuff is way less in the first book.

You have to sow the seeds.

By the third book, they are truly, literally, spoiler alerts for his dark material, killing god yeah like they kill him it's hard to soft battle that one right but so by that point i think the whole trilogy had come out you know the books had all been so it's like we know where that alethiometer is pointing the whole pressure is you need to be able to make the sequels to this we want this to complete the book series so you're gonna have to get there yeah here's a question for you

so

Getting to the moment of About a Boy, where it's like, this is it.

This is the movie that represents what I'd like to be as a director, how I'd like to be seen in the industry.

That's my question.

Like, you had not made a film like Golden Compass.

To some degree, is Newline, like, oh, we want that Chris White's feeling.

Is there like an X factor you can bring to this, much like Jackson not seeming like the obvious choice to do Lord of the Rings at that time?

Like, is there a sensitivity?

Is there emotionality?

Yeah.

Was there a thing they were quantifying or that you were trying to weaponize as like, here's my feelings?

Chris White's touch.

I think I had a Barton Finky feel, there was a Barton Barton Fink feeling at the time.

Definitely.

Like you, there, you definitely have Pixie Dust, right?

Like

you'd made it about a boy, right?

Made about a boy.

And also like, oh, you made this like small movie, or he and his brother made the small movie that made like 10 times as much as its budget.

Like,

let's do it.

I feel like you also told me, I think it was maybe when you very briefly appeared on one of the interminable George Lucas pandemic live streams, and Connor and I only wanted to ask you questions about the Clumps.

I have never been on the on the George Lucas.

You have it was really brief.

It was like early lockdown and we were raising money for charity

and watching all the Star Wars movies and we had you zoom in during Rogue One and then I think like five minutes into you being on

something happened with one of your kids.

Not too dramatic, but you were like, I'm so sorry I have to go.

And Connor for years was like, did I piss him off?

Not at all.

Because we had you zoom in while we're watching Rogue One.

And then we were like, the funny bit is let's only ask him questions about Nutty Professor 2 the Clumps.

Which you are credited as right or wrong with various other people.

There was a great moment at a Q ⁇ A because you go on these Q ⁇ As when you get nominated for the Oscar.

And

people ask you questions and they list your credits.

And it's like, you know, also nominated as blah, blah, blah, blah, Chris Weitz,

this and that, and Nutty Professor 2 the Clumps.

And I was like, oh, God.

Connor and I were very united on this bit.

And then you were like,

gentlemen, I'm so sorry, but I do have to go right now.

Hunter was like, He's irate.

And I was like, I really don't think that's Chris's vibe.

You don't, but you said to us, right?

It seems like it'd be hard to really press you off.

How did you end up being accredited writer on the clumps?

And you said something to the effect of at that point in time, my brother and I had a reputation for like we could take comedies and put a little more genuine feeling in them without being saccharin.

That was the whites' feeling was a core of a sweetness and an emotion that feels earned.

In theory,

that is what I still can do.

I still have a heart.

It's in there somewhere, folks.

If you pay enough, you get it.

Okay, exactly.

So there's an original sin on my last movie, Affiraid,

which is like, this movie

was a paranoid thriller like the Parallax View.

And the studio, which shall remain nameless,

wanted it to be a horror movie so much that a number of decisions that make it sort of jumpier and a little more like more horror.

The film, which I've seen, has anyone else seen A for Raid?

No.

Ricketts.

Griffey?

I admittedly have not, out of respect to the fact that I know

the final film that was released was not reflected in the film.

I went very ambivalent as to

whether I want people to see it or not.

They would need a long kind of pamphlet from me about what I'm saying.

I have been curious to watch it, but I haven't seen it for that exact reason.

I thought you had relayed that ambivalence to it.

I watched it knowing that you had had a bit of a tough time making it, but not really knowing any detail at all.

And right as it started, I was like, oh, well, I can see what Chris is, I can see Chris here right away in the family and in how the movie is kicking off and stuff.

But then, yes, it does have that sort of the first purge movie, not the movie The First Purge, but the...

the purge, the first of the purge movies, where they're like, let's do our concept as a home invasion movie because that's cheap.

And that's like a way to sort of suggest something bigger, but still have like the sort of reliable horror of a home invasion movie.

We can, we can cut this out if I'm saying anything that I shouldn't say.

No, let's go.

I remember getting lunch with you.

I was visiting LA, and it was maybe only a month or two after you had wrapped the movie.

And Megan had just come out, Mithrigan.

Mithregan, of course.

And they had announced that your movie was being pushed back a year.

Yeah.

And I was like, what's going on with this?

How do you feel about this?

And it was just sort of like, I'm told it's a good thing.

They want more time.

They might want to try some things.

But there was already this sense of like, is Mithrigan being a hit creating some expectation of what this movie needs to be or not be in relation to that?

Yeah.

And I also remember you just talking about how pleasant a time you had in the initial production of the film.

Yep.

And being like, I have been so burned out on the industry and frustrated and heartbroken by these different things.

The idea of finding like a very personal story, me telling an emotional movie about the way I feel about my family and keeping children safe, you know, in a world that's a little bit terrifying.

And I can disguise it in just enough horror movie trappings to get it through in a low-budget way, unencumbered.

And then like a year and a half later, everything had gone upside down.

Right.

Yeah.

But you were sort of like, I think I cracked the code if it's this small and I have two marketable elements and it's this and that.

The stakes are low enough that maybe they let me make my thing my way and get it out.

See, I thought I was clever.

I thought I was smarter than

the system.

But it is a playback that has been working.

Yeah.

That has been like the most consistent way to get kind of emotionally psychologically

getting movies out there.

I think

it really helps if

you love the kind of product that they want in the end, as opposed to thinking, I'm going to sort of sugar this pill.

And like, so the movie started when like I was talking to my friend Hani Abu Asad, wonderful filmmaker, and he was like, I was like, I don't know what to do next.

And he was like, well, what's on your mind like right now, as I've talked to you right now?

And I was like, Well, I guess you know my kids are like spending time on the screen and a kind of like a worry because you can, you can sort of try to take care of them as much as you like.

But like, our home is like, it's next door to the internet, which is a really, really bad neighborhood, no matter what.

There's no way to protect people.

And that's what the whole movie about is like, you cannot protect your children from the world.

And then, you know, it becomes like a movie about a killer AI.

And by the way, the year in which it was delayed,

was

a year for AI to develop to such a shocking extent that anything timely that it had to say about AI was like already like, yeah, we know.

But like, you're not getting hired to develop a Walter Berry AI thriller.

You're looking in the mirror.

You're talking to your friend.

You're saying.

I'm going to take this computer down.

Right.

Walter Beery.

Like it was.

Walter Berry's a real guy, Ben.

Like, Walter Berry was like a classic Burley 30s star, B-picture kind of star.

Probably exactly what you're talking about.

I mean, one of the names like Wally Wallace Berry.

Yes.

I'm sorry, Wallace Berry.

Wallyberry.

I just, it might sound like an unimportant distinction.

Oh, wow.

Look at that guy.

But the difference between you

getting hired to make an AI thriller and then going, what's the personal story I can smuggle inside of this versus going, what am I feeling right now?

And what is the way I can dramatize that into an idea that is sellable?

Yeah.

That's a big difference.

As it goes through the like the process of,

you know,

of the way that studios put out movies, it just gets twisted along the way.

And this is like no shit, but like, you know, you go to like marketing screenings, and one of the first questions they will ask of an audience is: was there anything that you found confusing?

Yeah.

Right.

And of course, that is priming the pump because the moment, like, an audience actually has a right to be confused and to not feel as though everything is resolved and explained.

But like inherent to the system when this much money is spent is like a sort of derationating of the original intent.

I have gone to

like friends and family screenings, the roughest cuts, right?

Of folks just being like, I just, before we have to go to like blind test screening, sure, I want some studio notes, I want like 15 people who also work in the industry or friends of mine or whatever, cold audiences, but a warm audience, you know, at the same time.

And the lights will come up.

And I've seen people make this mistake several times where they go like,

so what do you guys think?

Anything like jump out to you immediately that you bumped on or that you had questions about?

And people are sort of like, no, basically, you know, this or that.

Or they might call out one thing of like, I missed that line or whatever it is.

The second a leading question is thrown out, the filmmaker expresses their anxiety about something they weren't sure would work.

Go, hey.

Was anyone confused by this thing?

Then suddenly every single person in the room goes, Now that you mention, I do actually think.

And then starts offering their notes on what it should be instead.

Yep.

Yep.

You're totally straight to that.

You can't ask people that.

No.

So Barton Fink, then, his,

I think,

it's

a Cohen Brothers movie.

It looks at the studio, right?

In a negative fashion, but also Barton Fink.

It is.

very scathing about Barton Fink himself.

It is his conceit.

Absolutely.

His blasphemous conceit.

It's like this guy is a fool and he's like arrogant.

He's unpleasant.

So this is my favorite Cone Brothers film.

I think kind of without a doubt.

I know this for many.

Sure.

I love

a lot of the great Cone Brothers movies like Fargo and Siri Man and like, you know, Raising Arizona and whatever.

Oh, no country.

You know, all the, whatever.

And you could kind of talk me into a lot of Cone Brothers movie and ranking movies is a little silly anyway.

But this movie profoundly affected me when I saw it when I was like 19, I want to say, like I was in college, and I was sort of, I think, like, well, I've loved the Cone Brothers since I discovered them as a teenager, but like now it's time for me to watch every Cone Brothers movie I've never seen.

Yeah.

And I've only probably seen this movie like four or five times because it's not Barton Fink is not a movie you're just all the time like,

you know,

Barton Fink's on cable, right?

You know, it's like the Simpsons

gift.

Barton Fink.

We have to, of course, acknowledge that moment in The Simpsons, which is amazing.

That entire run of like the stealth runner of Simpsons jokes that are the kids getting excited in the wrong direction for 90s art house movies.

Always funny.

The Naked Lunch.

I can think of two problems I have with that title.

Very funny.

I'm familiar with the works of Pablo Naruda.

It's a slightly different version of the trick.

But anyway.

I watched this movie a couple of days ago to prepare for this podcast and I was like, I don't think I've seen Barton Think in years.

I put it on and I was like, I could close my eyes right now and I'd be fine.

Like, I know this movie so well.

It is so impressed on me.

It is one of the most influential movies for me in terms of just like mood and tone and the way its story works.

I don't know how to describe this.

It's also an incredible film analysis movie.

Like it is a movie that is basically,

it isn't consciously designed to be studied, but it's like a fucking playground.

If you're someone who has a mind where you want to fucking break apart movies and try to figure out how to read them, you know, and like even I, this was my second time watching it.

I watched it last night.

I saw probably around the same age as you, David.

Sure, sure, sure.

There was,

I guess, 2008, 2009, MoMA

did a comprehensive Cohen retrospective of all the movies.

They made up until that point.

And Barton Fink and Hudsucker were maybe my only two blind spots at that point.

They were playing on the same day.

I saw Hudsucker in the morning.

Where?

I got lunch at MoMA.

Both of them.

And then I saw Barton Fink.

Hudsucker is my favorite Cohen Brothers movie.

That has to do so much with just my taste and my sensibilities.

I do not think it is one of their five best films.

It is a movie I've watched endlessly and it means so much to me.

And I was just like, holy shit, that's Hudsucker?

That's the one that people don't like.

Obviously, I know, and we'll talk about how dearly you love Hudsucker, which I also dearly love.

But Hudsucker has your manic

thing.

Have you seen Hudsucker?

Yes.

It's got Griffin energy up the wazoo.

Definitely.

The Haunted Hotel or the Trapped in a Hotel thing is my favorite thing in the world.

We're going to talk about this at length.

And of course, there are other versions of that.

Yes.

What are other versions of that?

Shining, of course.

Shining.

Yeah, it's a great example, of course.

Yes, duh.

Jesus, David, what a genius I am.

What's my thoughts?

I thought you were just giving me an easy one.

Finish your thought.

No, just that I was not disappointed by Barton Fink, but I was writing at such a high by how much I loved Hudsucker and how much it surprised me that in my mind, Hudsucker, the Hudsucker for the first time experience always eclipses Barton Fink.

Sure.

Yeah, you, you, by putting them up the same day.

I've seen Hudsucker upwards of 10 times since then, but I got to see both movies for the first time on a big screen.

with a proper crowd on a beautiful print, had not watched Barton Fink again until last night.

And yet I had the exact same experience as you where I'm like, yeah, I basically remember every single element of this.

It's pretty spare.

I mean,

right?

It's not.

It's very primal in its own weird eggheady way.

Well, yeah.

I was thinking about David Lynch a lot when watching this.

And I feel like it's a little bit in conversation with some of the aesthetic.

Like there's a shot which feels David Lynch.

Like when just going down the drain,

right?

And there's the hairdo.

There's Barton Fink's hairdo, which feels eraser head adjacent for sure.

And just that sort of feeling of like everything is just a little wrong.

This is so immaculately made.

It is so tightly controlled.

You get the clear sense from the first frame to the last.

There's not a single decision in this movie that isn't intentional.

And yet, some of it feels deeply inscrutable.

And all of it conjures some feeling within you.

Not that Barton Fink feeling, but this sort of like, what's wrong?

What is this movie doing and why?

Yeah, I think that may be what won it, the Palm Door, right?

Because I remember when they won, it was kind of like, American boys bring home gold.

I kind of had that feeling, right?

Sure, yeah.

Weirdly,

the third film in a three-year streak of American Palm Door winners, which was like an unusual swing.

Sex Lies is the year before.

And then Wild at Heart.

Wild at.

Oh, no, it's sorry.

It's Wild at Heart and then.

Then Sex Lies.

Then this.

this.

Okay.

Okay.

And it is, of course, an incredibly exciting time for

American independent cinema and, you know, whatever.

By the second half of the 90s, the joke that Billy Crystal keeps making is that the studios can't get a movie nominated for Best Picture anymore.

You know, like this is the start of the wave that by the end of the 90s is just like...

The American independent cinema is exciting, is thrilling.

There's something happening here and audiences are engaged, and then that dream sort of starts to die.

Yeah.

But

haunted hotels, Griff.

I mean, what else?

I mean, I'm very dorky of me, but the 1408.

Well, of course, 1408.

Do not go in there.

Yeah.

I think it's I told you not to go in there.

Me and my brother.

I told you.

Me and my brother would always fixate on that moment in the trailer where Samuel L.

Jackson shows up while some shit is happening.

I told you not to go.

It's also like, look, it's not like they're ruining anything by putting that in the trailer, but you're like, I don't need to see this scene.

I can guess that Sam Jack's going to come back at the end and say, I told you so.

Wait, which I see.

1408 is a mid-sized horror movie from the late 2000s

directed by, I want to say, Michael Hofstrom.

Yes.

That is based on, you know, something Stephen King coughed onto a wall once or whatever.

But it is kind of like

the pulpier, trashier midpoint between the shining and Barton Fink in a certain way.

For sure.

It checks into a lot of people.

I think it's a how to write a book.

No, it's a guy.

No, it's a guy who's like, I'm checking into a famously haunted hotel room because I'm tough and scary and I know that's all nonsense.

And then the room is like, I'm going to take on the really,

I love the Next Generation episode of The Royale for anyone out there listening from season two, which is about a,

like they arrive on a weird planet that is just a hotel that they cannot leave, which is very like a Barton Fing stuff.

I honestly may have been directly inspired by Barton Finn because it's just like a couple of years later.

You're forgetting four really big ones.

And is it a space hotel or is it just a hotel that seems like an old-fashioned episode to find out?

Okay,

it looks like an American hotel from the 30s, but there's all true.

Yes, forgetting, of course, the Hotel Transylvania.

But everyone's in a Hotel Transylvanian.

I'm just having a 30-summer vacation.

Yeah, but it is fundamentally a haunted hotel.

You cannot deny that.

I'm not saying the movie is supposed to.

It is a haunted hotel.

Is it a hotel haunted?

Yeah, by humans, by Johnny.

That's true.

What about hostel?

Or is that just a hotel?

I mean, hostel's sort of there, but I mean, hostel, it's obviously quite naked.

What's going on there, right?

Yeah.

Like, people don't really get to the hostel and are like, this place seems like really comforting and inviting.

There's almost like a richer history of like comedies kind of ripping on the

trope, you know, the like Abbott and Costello.

Right.

Right.

I guess those are more like you have to spend a night in a spooky castle kind of shit.

That gets more into shining haunted hill.

I love that too.

Right.

I basically always pro this.

Yeah.

What is the difference between a haunted house and a haunted hotel?

Great question.

In terms of a taxonomy, it's scary.

Because it's the liminal space thing, which has become this internet sort of world, right?

Where people are obsessed with what they call liminal spaces, these kind of like bland, anonymous sort of environments, like long corridors, samey kind of, right?

Do you know what I'm talking about, Ben?

Very big Reddit.

I think something about the promise of the hospitality, you know, being like, you are here and you are being taken care of, and yet something feels wrong, versus like, I've just walked into a castle with a candelabra, maybe I shouldn't be here.

Right.

You know, there's some morning signs here, whereas like a hotel, it's like the idea of like, I'm on a floor with 50 identical rooms and it's one of 15 floors.

Right.

Your head starts to spin a little bit.

Another great example recently, The Eternal Daughter, the Join a Hog movie, one of my favorite movies of that year, which is also like she and her mom are at a hotel that no one else is seemingly there, but everyone's kind of behaving like it's normal and it gets weirder and ghostier.

Very good movie if you've never seen it.

It's not, I mean, it's not quite the same and it's only an aspect of the movie, but Neon Demon has a lot of like, what the fuck's going on in this motel?

Weird motel shit.

There's the tiger or something, right?

Kiana, yeah.

And there's a Kiana.

But yes, I always find this very affecting.

But this is the best version.

I agree.

I mean, the Shining is its own thing.

Barton Fink could have stayed at a different hotel.

The studio wanted to put him up in a nicer place.

So that was interesting because I remember thinking he's getting

$2,000 a week, King's Ransom.

Right.

But he wants to be with the people.

He's in his hotel earl all this time.

And it speaks to the movie having this sort of like, it'll load to this fucking guy.

Well, he thinks this makes him a greater artist.

I think it's starting with the hair, like you mentioned, where it's like he has that hair.

Yes, it's to code him as Jewish, which he is, like in this way that, you know, like the Cohens like to, you know, explore that kind of like, what is it to be like kind of loudly Jewish in these kinds of worlds or societies, but also like he thinks he can get away with looking like this because he's different and he's artistic.

Right.

He's not the only Jewish character in the movie, and there are other people who are maybe trying to assimilate more, but it does feel like, to your point, he's like accentuating the Jewishness almost as an act of provocation.

Right.

Right?

Like, this guy is taking a stance on the music.

Everything about him makes you uncomfortable.

He's provocative in this sort of like, I'm not like you.

I'm not superficial.

And I'm not an intellectual.

And I'm not a Hollywood type person.

Right.

He has this attitude.

He is an intellectual.

To every single person he's talking to.

Yes.

A quiet, I'm not like you.

And it doesn't matter if the person is higher or lower status.

Except for Mahoney.

Like, that's the one guy that he briefly does seem to be quite entranced by.

Although,

yeah, we'll get to that.

You're right.

He wants Mahoney to say, you are the same as I am.

Exactly.

Right.

I mean, or at least, like, I too know your work and I, you know, whatever, like, admire you.

There's actually, like,

oh, I just said it.

There's the use of the word actually is really interesting in this movie because there's

when John Goodman, when Charlie asks him what he does, he says, I'm a writer, actually.

Yeah.

Right.

And I'm like, the actually is doing a lot of work because it's like, just say you're a fucking writer.

But instead, he's like, well, you're probably going to be amazed by this, but I'm a writer.

There's a little bit of like, isn't this charming?

Yeah.

David, we both would give Goodman Best Supporting Actor this year, right?

Good question.

Let me take a look.

I do think it's one of the most incredible performances, but I'm always forgetting, you know, what could its competition be?

So 1991.

I looked at the field and I certainly would give him the win over the five nominees.

Yeah.

My five nominees, if you want them.

Do you want them

for 1991 for Best Supporting Act?

Are you interested in this at all?

I would love this.

Please, David, please.

John Koodman, my winner for Barton Fink.

Keanu Reeves for, speaking of, Neon Demon, Keanu Reeves for my own private Idaho, performance outdoor.

Barbara Patrick for Terminator 2.

I was wagging my finger.

Larry Fishburne for Boys in the Hood and Samuel Jackson for Jungle Fever.

Those are my five nominees.

Great five.

They're five nominees.

1991 is an incredible year for cinema because this film came out and the Silence of the Lambs came out.

And these are two totemic movies for me.

There's a lot of other great movies movies I love.

Where they'll get nominations in other categories, but you look at the things that didn't make the best picture cut and it's kind of bananas.

Like you have Singleton nominated for director, but not picture.

You have this nominated for supporting actor.

Two craft awards.

Kind of insane it didn't even get a screenplay nom.

Inside baseball.

I was at a discussion.

Yeah, I think this movie was too niche, like for whatever, the Oscars.

I mean, I can look at the.

nominees.

This argues in favor of there being upwards of 10 best picture nominations.

It would have made the 10.

I was at a discussion in the director's branch of the Academy in our sort of conference room in which

I might slot Barton Fink over Grand Canyon or Bugsy.

Yeah.

I'll chose it.

I mean, no offense to those nominees.

A huge offense to those men.

You're right, I think.

Oh, you were in a discussion.

We were discussing whether to expand the

director's nomination thing

for Oscar?

For DGA.

Yes.

Oh, for DGA.

Wait, for the DJA or for the director count of the colours?

For the director count or the Oscars?

I'm probably going to get kicked out of the academy now.

And Steven Spielberg says, no, I don't think so.

I don't even think there should be

more than five.

Pick nominees.

Pick nominees.

But that battle has been lost.

And I said, as someone who has not won best picture, I'm in favor of there being as many as possible, which obviously shows a lot of balls on my part.

Like, I should be so.

Was Spielberg amused by your little bum mo?

He's a no,

I wasn't joking.

I mean, I was trying to dress it up.

Was he amused by your he didn't seem overly amused, but he didn't seem to like want to sanction me either.

He was very nice.

I mean, I was also at the time it was framed as like the Oscars need to do this because they seem out of touch and things have trended too indie and they're ignoring blockbusters and maybe the 10 will make things a little more open.

There's the other thing, which is just like, it's good for the fucking industry in a time where it's harder and harder to get serious movies made to let 10 movies brag about being best picture nominees.

think the 10 thing has been an unambiguous success.

I agree.

And I think the minute they moved it to, you know, it's between five and 10 was less good.

Putting it back at 10 has been better.

There's rarely a true kind of like, oh, how the fuck did that get a nomination?

You know, like even the stuff I don't really like or whatever, I'm sort of like, yeah, I can see, you know, where this thing's support came from and all that.

I think expanding director to 10 would kind of ruin that.

I do.

Well, but there's a problem in amongst the.

And then, of course, everyone's going to start expanding everything to 10.

You know what I mean?

That could happen.

But in my branch, the problem was for the directors,

well,

are there movies without directors?

Like, are you saying that there's going to be somebody who's...

But that's always

the case.

That's

a good question.

Because if you have best picture nominees without a directing nominee, if you have 10 and 10, it's still not going to line up most of the time.

Like, you're going to have the weird like.

Well, that would be

especially hard for me.

The true fix that is so clear, and I'm weirded out that the Oscars have never done it, is that a director should get a nomination for best picture no matter what.

They should be listed.

They should be included 100% agrees.

Yeah.

Like, it's so obvious.

And it's like, I don't know why the producers insist on, like, I mean, I don't know what that discussion has ever been, but like, take it up with selling black and bloom.

Like, nominate the producers too, but tack on the director.

That's what they do for documentaries.

That's what they do for, you know, like the other feature categories.

So

that's my take.

The thing about, okay, the Academy and the problem with the problem with independent films, you know, kind of dominating a nomination and the Academy thinking, like, oh, we're not going to be relevant if like the number one box office film isn't nominated, blah, blah, blah.

Okay, we are in a country in which there is no public funding for film.

The big thing is, right?

And so this is the big thing which Barton Fink has to deal with as well.

Yeah.

And that's why it's different in France, where the government will consider film an actual art form that deserves support.

Most other countries.

And here it is.

So here we are in this kind of capitalist setup.

And

I actually kind of realized I sort of can't direct studio films anymore because it is impossible to skin the cat so that, uh, I mean, this is unashamedly, it is making movies for money, right?

I get it, but, um, but then there's

the art sort of is inherently crowded out, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's tough.

It's, I mean, uh,

I saw Seth Rogen was on Stern.

talking about the studio, a show that I am unsurprisingly loving that feels like it was made for me.

And when people had described it to me like a year ago when it was being made, I was like, holy shit, I can't believe they're giving him the money to make that.

That sounds like so scathing.

I will find this cathartic to watch, assuming it was going to be as acidic as like the player, which is clearly a big influence on that show down to it, like sharing a character name.

Right.

And my surprise in watching the show is that it's like trying to hold the things that are great and the things that are terrible about the industry simultaneously and very close together.

It's quite a loving show.

Yes.

Like,

and it does more, I would say, nibble at the hand that feeds that, like, out than outright chomp.

Like, it's about, it's sort of about how people in that industry want to make good movies.

Well, he's the romantic character is kind of a Barton Fink figure who's like, I've done it.

I beat the system.

I've somehow become a very young studio head.

And what I'm going to do is somehow sneak important movies back in.

And this guy thinks he can be Robert Evans.

Bit of a buffer.

Original sin.

Right.

And like it represents his quest as good.

Like this is coming from the right place.

And yet you just watch this guy fuck it up and you're like, dude, this is never going to work.

And he was giving this interview on Stern and he said like the thing that's great about the industry is there will be

one movie that changes everything forever in many ways.

You basically get like one of these movies a year at least where you go, like, Barbie changed everything forever.

Right.

Or at least for a long time.

That's now what people are chasing.

Change upon change.

What was it this year?

What would you say?

Was it Anora?

I mean,

you mean last year?

I mean, last year.

I mean, here's the thing.

You could like a month ago, I would have said, like, Minecraft is the movie that's like changed everything.

And now Sinners has already replaced it.

And by the time this episode comes out, but you're like, Sinners is a movie that is going to change the way people have discussions in the fucking boardroom.

Sinners is the one changing things and not a Minecraft.

You don't know.

The point is these things can happen.

Multiple things can happen.

And he's the thing he said that I thought was really profound is that like, it's great timing for David as I'm getting to the big.

Just leave the door open.

It takes this insane kind of hubris to think like, I can do it.

I can beat the system.

I can sneak the thing through and make it work and be lauded as a genius and change things culturally for the better.

Yeah.

And that's so insane and hubristic to think.

And yet people do it.

They do it all the time.

And if you're not chasing that kind of glory of like kind of slipping one past people

and somehow like changing the landscape for the better, then why even bother trying?

I think there are some filmmakers who have the wind at their back, who are stubborn enough,

who are talented enough to like, you know, actually sort of do that.

In any given period, I think there are like five filmmakers who can work within the studio system and,

you know,

they are going to be able to have a really good shot at getting what they want done.

Yes.

You know, Scorsese, I like still.

Yeah.

Christopher Nolan, you know, there's a few.

But people, people lose it all the time.

People win it back.

People have it for a moment.

I mean, it's like, it's the whole fucking framing of this show.

Yeah.

That like, it's not always

a lifetime status.

And also, sometimes the movies that change everything aren't good.

You know, they're not net positive, but they do break a certain line of thinking in the way that like Barbie, you're like, Barbie is a triumph and it has felt like the last two years you're watching with every deadline announcement, all of the executives take all of the wrong lessons from it.

People are trying to get that.

Right.

Barbie feeling.

And Barton Fink is right.

This guy who like does not want to work in the movies is almost disgusted when it's proposed to him.

They have to sort of like launder the pitch in this sort of credibility of like, you know, this is like what all the other serious novelists and playwrights do.

There's nothing like loathsome about this.

And he's justifying it as like, this will help me build the theater of the people.

And it's that contempt with which he comes to the thing, combined with his arrogance of, I'm such a good writer, I should be able to crack this and do it better than the swill that they're settling for.

Right.

And of course, it's 1941.

Movies are not exactly new, but it is

a younger industry.

But the industry has like a nascent art form.

The industry is settled into a cinema as art.

Yes.

Obviously, it's not like nobody talked about cinema as art before the 60s or whatever, but I do think it's the 60s is when people or the late 50s start to form proper

sort of theories and academic sort of notions of what film is.

Film analysis as we know it today.

So, yeah, the 40s, it was still kind of like, yeah, well, this is, you know,

this ain't the theater.

This is swill for, you know, the working man.

Right, the possibilities.

It's the studio system.

So

you're signing up to a system in which you're going to to be assigned pictures.

Yes, that's on contract for one studio and you do what they want.

I mean, it's interesting because Barton...

So his agent says, you know, this is going to be great and everything.

But Barton Fink is kind of, he doesn't really appear with seemingly any kind of energy to want to do this.

He's just kind of spaced out throughout a lot of the

entire movie.

It doesn't seem appealing to him, and he doesn't even seem excited by the idea of what he could leverage the success into.

Really?

He is in a fugue for pretty much most of the movie.

Like like a weird kind of dreamy the movie exists in a dreamy state the latter half of this movie you know could be called essentially a dream like it's not like this is a movie where someone wakes up being like wow that was crazy yeah but um and uh you're he always feels like like he's passive in a scene yes you know like even though he's the center of the scene yeah which is like so not sid field uh

three-act structure kind of thing this is such a watchable movie for a movie where not much happens and

like, you know, it's much of its

plot is inexplicable or like much of what's going on is sort of inexplicable.

It's like not, that's what the Cohens are so good at.

Like it's kind of a perfect screenplay, even though you would never, you'd be bananas to teach this screenplay as an example of anything to, you know, structure your movie as.

Like it's so watchable and like every scene is kind of, you're kind of like leaning forward, like, what's this now?

I went to McNally Jackson the other day and I saw that they had one copy of this, which is Ethan and Joel Cohen collected screenplays one.

So it's Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller's Crossing, Barton Fink.

It does not seem like they maybe ever published volume two or on, that this is just the same one.

I mean, at least a compilation they would do like separately.

Peeve, I hate when I love that Faber and Favor publishes these things, but I hate that they're not in the format of a screenplay.

That is to say,

it's not a page per minute, which is like the general guide to when you're going to be reformat it.

Yeah.

Yes.

I'd be really interested in what

the descriptions are in Barton Fink.

That's And I had heard this from people.

And I guess I've read excerpts when people post like a page or two of some of their scripts.

But I saw this and I was like, I want to have this so I can fucking leave through this, especially with these first four movies.

They are so sparse.

They really are just like the absolute least amount of information that needs to be conveyed to the reader.

Interesting.

So like, because I was thinking,

the reason it's watchable to me, even when like it's kind of a punishing film in the way that this film, I think, kind of of is.

A little bit.

You never know when some funny shit is going to happen.

So you're sort of always on your toes.

Or some scary shit.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And, and, or there's going to be a great sight gag.

Um, you know, and I think that they're really uh clever, you know, in that way.

Like they, they will resort to comedy in order to like sort of keep the artistic kind of arc of things going.

Yes.

Um,

Barton Fing, I'm opening the dossier because, you know,

we should look at it.

Um, famous story of its genesis that like a lot of con because because the cone brothers so disgust but also just because they do they do set their legend quite firmly i feel like with little anecdotes because they don't get a lot of

cohen masterpieces come while making other plans right they're trying to uh script uh miller's crossing which is their third film the film they move for this and they get a bit of an impasse because that's like a complex film about rival gangster, you know, mobs, and there's a lot of...

The biggest movie they had made until that point.

Right.

And I think they find it a little boring.

They say they were not blocked exactly, but the rhythm was sort of fucked up and they weren't having fun.

That's a movie.

So they have to be more concerned with mechanics, where even if you're not like stuck in writer's block,

doing math.

And I think these guys talk so much about that.

When they have an idea for a movie, they talk back and forth about it and work it out in their heads.

And then once they start writing, they write pretty quickly.

And I assume it must have been really frustrating for them for the first time to be like stopping at that point.

That doesn't make sense because he knows that guy.

So you have to go to the index cards.

So they get out of their problems with that story by thinking about another one.

They take a vacation, and the vacation is Barton Fink has two primary points of origin.

One, they wanted to work with John Tuturo, who is in Miller's Crossing.

Yes.

But obviously, they haven't made that yet.

But he's a guy in there.

They know him.

He's obviously someone up and coming.

He's worked with Spike Lee and stuff.

But they also love this idea of the hotel.

Before Hollywood, they have the hotel.

Like, it was

a neglected hotel.

Blood Simple, right?

They said they saw

the first hotel they'd ever seen in Austin.

And they were kind of like, it's like hell, motel, hell.

Right.

What if you could never leave?

Right.

They also had worked with John Goodman on Raising Arizona.

More like John Greatman.

It's very, very true.

More like John the Bestman.

And come on.

That was we have made a really 10 comedy points.

Wait, I'm going to take it away.

And they certainly write this role for him as well.

The most fashioning thing.

I mean, it speaks to the other day, we were singing the praises of John Goodman.

Things have gone well in blank check scheduling in 2025, and that we have a lot of Goodman to discuss.

True.

That we had

our live show, and now we have a lot of Goodman in the Cohen series.

And you were talking about how he is an actual undersung genius

in his execution of characters.

Oh, God.

I think I feel like I talked about this on the podcast before, but like that moment in the Flintstones trailer where his foot is

doing his torn is oh sure it's so upsetting yeah yeah sorry I just had to talk about that for a second he's a genius always

yeah I'm trying to think of a Goodman's we've discussed before obviously we've done Arizona at this point flight

princess and the frog sure uh-huh sure I mean we must acknowledge speed racer speed racer he is pops racer and he's wonderful in that

is that it

possibly we're about to double that if that's the we're gonna obviously do a bunch more but is there because he's been in

so many movies?

There's something else I'm forgetting.

Does there?

Have to?

Feels like it.

Not sure that there is.

No, no.

At this point, they have worked with him, and he has now been on Roseanne, right?

And he is starting to be accepted as one of America's most lovable people.

Right.

And they like John Goodman.

They like that, but then they like.

his more menacing side.

What I love is that they were like, oh, you know, it'd be fun is to weaponize that and use how much the public is just naturally endeared to John Goodman and pull the rug out from under them.

And they said the second they started filming, they were like, this guy is so

proficient and nuanced and thorough in his work that he's finding ways to color in the menace even in the earliest scenes.

That we thought of this as a very like one-to-one.

It starts out sweet and adorable.

And then it's a surprise this guy turns out evil.

But instead, he's playing this weird balance of like unease and pity and arrogance and scariness and like pathetic.

It's, it's, and, and Taturo in the same way was like,

guys, I like the way you wrote this character.

I understand you've made him sort of an annoying pill.

Will you trust me to try to put a little more humanity into him?

I would like to try to put a little more realistic feeling into this guy so he's not just kind of a setup.

for a punchline.

Yes.

Right.

And he says that they gave him a degree of ownership of letting him deepen it, not by like changing the text, but changing the characterization a little bit.

Yeah.

Wrote the script in three weeks, as they say.

They tend to work quickly.

So the film was the film was ready.

The script was ready.

And so then when they go back to Miller's Crossing and then make Miller's Crossing, when it's like, okay, what do you want to do next?

They were like, here's Barton Fink.

It's ready.

It's done.

We want to do it.

Same financiers and everything.

They decide to set it in Hollywood's Golden Age.

But obviously, as you pointed out, they are not basing this on their own experiences, which had largely been pleasant.

Like their movies are produced by Circle Films, this indie company, you know, their first few movies.

So like,

which is basically they would be like, hey, here's this weird script.

And Circle Films would be like, great, we can give you this budget.

And they would be like, great, well, we'll use that to make the movie.

Thank you.

And their trajectory up until this point was just boop.

It just was straight up.

Like these guys are with each film proving that they're the real deal.

I think you're kind of right that my framing was a little glib and that it really is Miller's Crossing and Barton Fink coming out within a year of each other that is like a combined guarantor.

After I think people thinking that Raising Arizona was a little silly and being like, okay, so these guys are really good stylists, but do they have anything to say?

Is this all like genre riff lark stuff?

And then Miller's crossing and Shartan were seen as like, oh, these guys have thoughts.

But also, yeah, well, and since when did that mean that you get to make a big movie?

That's recently.

That's crazy.

Like, that's the thing that doesn't happen anymore.

Is like two movies that are so good that even though they weren't hits, the industry is like, fuck, I guess we got to see what these guys did with a bigger budget.

So,

Right.

The 1941 setting is most important to them.

They want it to be right as the war is about to begin.

So then that informs the Hollywood thing, if that makes sense.

They wanted this kind of the verge of madness and this idea of during that time when like suddenly the country empties out of normal people, like in terms of like sort of fit, you know, like 30, 20, 30, 70 men.

Like now it's like the country has a strange emptiness to it.

Classically, Classically, as the Cohens always say, like, ah, we didn't do any research or anything like that.

They always say stuff like that.

And like when they're adapting a book, they're like, yeah, we read the book.

And you're just sort of like, I just don't know whether or not I should take them seriously.

You know what's the other part of it too that JJ dug up is that they were like, no, we didn't really do any research for it.

We had over the previous 10 years read these 20 books.

Yes, that's the thing.

I guess they have books in their bloodstream already.

There's a book called City of Nets, which is about German expatriates in LA in the 40s.

They have the book called Faulkner in Hollywood that's about William Faulkner's experience working as a screenwriter.

Where he never drank to excess.

I feel like they are just constantly digesting things and retaining it.

I mean, it feels like anytime they develop a new project, they're like, oh, yeah, we have this filed away in our brain, all this accidental research we were doing.

And then, yes, there's this very superficial sort of resemblance to Clifford O'Detz, who is one of the great playwrights of the sort of red 30s, you know, like, you know, this great left-wing playwright who then goes to Hollywood and is not like Barton Fink in that he has success and also drinks himself like crazy.

But the character's look is modeled on George S.

Kaufman from the Marx Brothers movies and stuff because who look like that.

Right.

And people had like,

oh, they're taking Odette's and exaggerating it.

And they're like, no, we're just like doing Kaufman directly.

Right.

And they, you know, they're like, Barton's a shit, but we do love our characters, which I think is just generally always true of the Cohens.

Like, they love their characters even when their characters are unspeakable.

And it's a thing that I think now, like,

going back to your earlier point, I think they've basically been accepted as undeniable now.

It is funny to read the criticism of the first 15 years of their work, where so many critics were kind of folding their arms and being like, not so fast.

This sort of like, we shouldn't be so quick to like anoint a potential false god and treating these guys as serious filmmakers.

And there were a couple different like strikes that would be thrown against them.

And one of them was they're so condescending.

You see this repeated.

They just have such contempt for all their characters.

Their movies are just mocking all these people all the time.

Isn't this exhausting?

They can seem glib and condescending, but I actually, I do think they love their characters.

I think they take great pleasure in them, right?

Yes, I think that's always been a misread on their work.

It's the same thing with Michael Lee.

It's the same thing.

People really struggle with people who write and create direct quite unsympathetic characters, but they're often sort of misreading it for they're making fun or they're you know whatever cassie they also love making movies about idiots but i think their magic is that they they um dramatize idiots with compassion absolutely while also understanding what's fun about having a stupid character driving your story now blood simple is jj's pointing this out and he's right like blood simple is a neo-noir film very obvious raising arizona is a cartoon comedy film like right it's a little uh like more outside of genre like in terms of like, you're like, wow, I haven't seen something like this in a while, but it's a cartoon movie.

Right.

Chuck Jones' chase picture, basically.

Miller's Crossing is a gangster movie.

Like, you know, like, like with all the sort of fucking trappings and fittings and all that.

Barton Fink, I do not know how to describe this movie to anybody.

Like, it's not really a horror movie, but it's got sort of a horror stuff to it.

It's not really a comedy.

It's like a very black, sort of strange comedy.

They always said their single biggest inspiration was the like Polanski, one person going crazy.

Obviously, Obviously, like cul-de-sac and repulsion, like that makes sense.

Beyond the sort of haunted hotel thing you were talking about, there are a few things I am more just kind of innately in the bag for than a person in some sort of weird state of isolation slowly losing their minds.

And then another movie.

It is a thing I relate to way too hard, and it just almost always works for me as a setup for a film.

And then so people raise their hands and are like, the movie reminds me of Kafka, right?

Very, very obviously.

And they're like, huh.

I mean, I guess we read Kafka in college, but like, weren't thinking about him.

It doesn't just feel like they're sponges and they retain everything that, like, they have a fucking library in their brains.

I also love that they, whenever they talk about books they've read, it sounds like they're reading in tandem.

They always talk about, like, you know, we were just reading no country, and then at some point, went, like, maybe this would make a good movie.

And I'm like, so how's this breaking down?

Are the two of you

in a bed?

Holding hands.

Right.

Are you holding it?

They're two cards.

Do you have parallel books?

Are you like Burton Ernst?

They get their own books.

Brothers get their own copies.

Obviously, John Mahoney is cast because he looks so much like William Faulkner.

It's crazy.

They don't have to do much to make him look like Faulkner.

Faulkner was someone who occasionally enjoyed a drink.

I cannot deny this.

He had more success.

Not this level.

He was not self.

Probably not.

But they're just adjusting the dials, obviously, right?

Mahoney was one of the great secret Brits.

Unbelievable in this way.

No one knows he's fucking British because you screamed the accent out of him.

Yes, right.

He's kind of fake British, right?

Because he was British, but then he came to America as a like 18-year-old because his mother, I think, was a war bride.

And right.

And that was enough to kind of like, yeah, to move him.

And of course, we've lost him, but he would always say, like,

I trained it on my system.

And yet, when I hear myself perform, I still feel like I hear the inflections and it drives me crazy.

Michael Lerner, to me, obviously looks like Louis B.

Mayer,

but it's kind of based on, I feel like, a lot of Jack Horner, like a lot of those and had already played both Jack Warner and Louis B.

Mayer on other projects.

He played Jack Horner and Harry Cohn, two different studio guys in TV movies.

I mean, he's a mashup.

He is, but I mean, Michael Lerner is just out.

He's outrageously good in this movie.

He gets its only Oscar nomination, which is only acting nomination, which is kind of crazy.

Not that he's bad, but it's just crazy that that was the one.

He was a little.

Also, if you look at the precursors that year, it felt a little out of left hand.

He gets Lafka only.

Like that was the one, like the Los Angeles critics gave him best supporting actor, and that was.

The The spread is really weird because like Goodman gets supporting Globe nomination.

It gets no other nominations from the Globes.

Right.

I think it does get a Writers Guild nomination.

I can look.

This is interesting that, you know, that the Oscar, because

I was talking earlier about Mommy Dearest, right?

And how that movie, which savaged, you know, Hollywood legend and Hollywood in general, turned its back on Faye Dunaway.

You know, right, right.

It was very active and then had to be reclaimed decades later.

But in this case, this is

no offense.

Bad.

It's not a good movie, right?

It's very watchable and insane, but it's not like you're like, ah, a gem.

You're like, wow, I can't believe it.

No, it's amazing.

You're right.

Not only did people hate it, but they were sort of like, Faye Dunaway, how dare you attack your own?

You are toxic, right?

But with Barton Fink, you know, the guy who plays the monster, maybe because he's a fun character as well, or maybe it's like saying, well, we better own this.

I'm trying to think of what the Oscar voter is thinking in that point.

They're not saying, like, you son of a bitch, how could you despoil the military?

That is funny that, right, that they're like, yeah, yeah, great job playing an evil studio exam.

But

he is also just a guy,

learner, where they're probably also just kind of like, you know what, you're never bad.

And like every scene you're in in that movie is funny.

And his final scene is hysterical where he's in the

fake military outfit.

Sure.

But in terms of like Goodman being a rising star and like America's favorite and whatever, it seems like an obvious Oscar play.

And yet I think it speaks to people not totally.

I think that's a good question.

Let me say this.

It speaks to maybe the most successful people in Hollywood, i.e., the people who are members of the Academy, especially at this point in time where it's a more selective group, being less receptive to this movie.

You know, he made one other movie that year in 1991.

Goodman?

Yeah.

Do you know what it was?

King Ralph.

King Ralph.

Hell yeah.

So was King Ralph his Norvin?

We were thinking of giving you an Oscar non, but that King Ralph movie.

No, I don't.

I think they

maybe it split the vote, you know?

That's why it didn't.

I think this movie, even if they didn't find it offensive, probably made successful Hollywood people a little uncomfortable.

Yeah, I would say, I think Goodman didn't get a nomination because he's creepy and scared.

And I think Michael Lerner is like not reductive, but there's also just an aspect of like, it's a skill piece performance.

He's got three monologues where he talks non-stop for eight minutes.

I mean, it's you watch a worthy, like undeniably, what this guy just did is like complicated and difficult to achieve on a technical level.

And the Cohens are so deliberate in their coverage that you're watching him do it with minimal cuts.

Yeah.

I think it was just kind of like, well, yeah, obviously, look at that guy.

He's acting.

Film cost $10 million to make.

It was shot for 45 days.

And they filmed it at a hotel, Dennis Gastner, you know,

the great Dennis Gastner.

Have you worked with Dennis Gastner?

I've worked with Dennis Gastner on

the Golden Compass.

He was nominated for the Oscar for that

year.

He's an A-tier

production designer.

This guy, art direction, and costume, right?

Yes.

He's a member of my camp at Burning Man.

I have to say.

Shout out to Sasha and Galactica.

Is he really?

He is.

I invited him to join my camp at Burning Man.

Go on.

Sorry.

Sorry.

Oh, no, please.

Shout out.

And his camp is all like peeling wallpaper.

A little bit.

Mosquitoes.

So they're right.

They find this weird art deco place that's falling apart.

They use a lot of green and yellow, as we sort of mentioned in the color of the movie to suggest putrefection, you know, like just kind of like everything is

very fleshy.

Not to be hyperbolic, but it is just one of the most viscerally rendered and realized locations in the history of movies.

It is incredible.

Obviously, Barry Sonnenfeld has heard the snap-snap of the Adams family.

His fingers are running very quickly along the floor, attached to nothing but the rest of a hand.

So they lose their iconic director of photography and they turn to roger deacons who obviously then works for them for you know 30 years basically yeah who i don't think at that point was much of a major name had done sit and nancy was the biggest crossover right i mean another not so secret brit um and

yeah i mean like his biggest credit before then is right either sit and nancy or if you want like a bigger budget thing like air america but like not right that was kind of his only studio right like uh and uh they liked uh his work on a movie called stormy monday obviously they'd they'd also seen Sid and Nancy.

Stormy Monday.

Yes, I actually saw that movie in the theaters.

Do you remember how it looked?

It looked fantastic.

Actually, I love that

Roger Deacon shot Air America.

Because in every great cinematographer's resume, there are movies where you're like, what?

Right.

You know, it's like, what's the vanilla ice movie that was shot by

Yanushkaminsky or something like that?

Yeah, cool as ice.

Yeah.

Well, it's also just, because basically from Barton Fink on, there is no movie you would be surprised to hear was shot by Roger Deakins, right?

Like Air America is maybe the last time where you're like, huh.

Yeah, right.

No, I'm with you on that.

Every movie on from that point, he is a star, like

an ethereal voice in the film.

Yeah, I'm a, you know what?

He shot The Siege.

That's surprising for me to learn.

Ed Zwick's The Siege.

He did a lot of Ed's Wick movies, though.

He did Courage Under Fire.

Yeah, I don't know, man.

Mostly

becomes like, yeah, he shoots, you know, the kind of movies you think he'd shoot.

Yeah.

The shot of the drains stuck in the Mendisverse.

He gets out of there.

The only shot he had trouble with was the plughole shot that you recognized.

Yes,

which Joel and Ethan say he made fun of them for, and then every time still makes fun to this day, exactly.

They're like, okay, so here's something we want to do with this weird shot.

He's like, as long as you're not making me track down a plughole for three decades, it better not be a plughole shot.

Like, that's still

like the boys were a little on the nail there going down the drain.

It's early in their career.

You still want to try stuff.

It's just like the grossest version of that joke.

David, what?

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So let's talk about the plot of Barton Fink.

It's 1941.

We begin with Barton having great success on the Broadway state or off whatever.

Like it's Broadway.

Standing at the wings, making a picture for

a play for the people.

He just looks so fucking weasel.

He's so self-satisfied.

He's like, right.

The expression on his face, which he maintains for the entire movie, is the most unflattering, kind of gormless.

You know, this pathetic, like, focus, this pathetic concentration.

There are few guys who would have that, like, sort of, you know, whatever risk.

Like, you know, like John Chatura is so happy to play that.

Like, Miller's Crossing is like that.

Quiz Show is like that.

Where in Quiz Show, most actors would be like, I want to make him a little more like sort of straightforwardly likable.

Chatura is like, no, no, no, I can do this.

Like, I could be the most annoying guy in the world.

This show is a movie where the premise is a real true life story that a network

fucking annoying.

This guy's so annoying.

We have to figure out a way to get him off this fucking show.

The entire scandal is a byproduct of like, people hate watching this guy on TV.

So funny.

He's so, so good in this movie.

He's so good at, yeah, this kind of like gormless shit.

But you're just right.

It's amazing how much he conveys wordlessly in these these first couple of shots of just like this guy's sort of like self-obsession with his own work, his sort of like absolute on-edge.

None of this actually makes him happy, even when it's going well.

That's right.

He doesn't do the thing where you see him subtly mouthing the lines, right?

Which you almost have a screen memory of this thing.

He does too at the start of the yeah, he's doing it very fast.

When he goes fresh fish, like that's yes, right.

But he's doing it in a way where it feels like he's on edge, worried they're about to fuck it up.

Right.

You know, like I've seen directors do it where it's really charming because it feels like they're living in

a movie.

Right.

It's so deeply in them.

They're not even aware they're doing that.

And he's doing this like in this very clenched way.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so pretty, pretty much right away, we're at Capital Pictures, right?

Like it's like.

He does the play and then he's meeting with Michael Lerner and Michael and there's the great Michael Lerner.

He's been winded and dined by these like rich patrons of the arts who he's immediately like, you don't get it.

I'm like trying to do a service for the people, the people's theater.

It's a movement.

Like this guy just can't even accept a fucking compliment.

He's a prick.

Yeah, he gets talked into it.

Yeah, he gets talked into this

contract by his agent.

I presume it's his agent.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Obviously, it's so much more money,

I guess, was what lured everyone.

West, right?

It's like, you're not going to actually make any money writing plays on Broadway, even if they're sort of well-received.

No, and it was like for the first time, right?

The Hollywood machine has been built up properly.

The sound picture is an established thing.

People want language in their movies, right?

The transition actually of this era of like, if you're a successful, if you're a respected novelist or playwright, that's nice and all.

But what you really do is you leverage that to go out to Hollywood to make some money to keep doing your own shit.

Exactly.

You have the money to keep doing your own shit.

Right.

The actual dissolve is,

or fade, or

you know, is to the beach, the rock, the waves up against the rock, and then to the hotel.

This recurring motif of the beach

of like, what does it mean?

You guys can, you know, throw your theories in.

Dude, that's

another very lynching.

That's a lynchy thing about this, maybe, to me.

Escape from purgatory.

Yes, go ahead.

Maybe it's the other way around because it does seem like that's a very lynchy shot, right?

Yes,

and like it feels like it's sorry to interrupt David, but it's like it's in conversation with Lynch in some way.

Who is first to certain kind of textures and feels?

Because the hotel is very, very Lynch-in, I think.

The good.

Yes.

I mean, anything with Chet, a tiny role for Steve Bascemi, where he's the bellhopper.

I love that there is a wall of keys behind him.

It's like fucking 10 stories high with so many keys in it where you're like, are there other?

You never see anyone else there except for Goodman.

Right, correct.

And that's my favorite thing about any haunted hotel.

Like the implications, like, yeah, there's other people here.

You just don't see them.

But there's shoes outside

yes yeah so it's showing that there are people but you never see them correct which is a really smart choice on their part which is like a really clean visual language to let you know these other rooms are occupied oh by the way if you're seeing the voices you're seeing the shoes you're not ever seeing anyone else's face two thousand dollars in 1941 is the equivalent of forty one thousand five hundred and ten dollars so that's per week yeah that's per week so he's he's getting paid shit tons can we unpack this for a second that is bananas yeah because and it's like but what's the implication that he'll be doing this for a month, for a year?

I want to unpack this because I feel like this goes into a point you started to set up a little while ago, right?

The uniqueness of America not having any investment in funding its own arts, right?

Like an investment in cultural enrichment.

I was talking to a friend of the podcast, Sam Clements.

who works for the picture house chain in the UK.

And we were talking about the difference in financing and funding and films and how things feel weird in the UK.

And the things like the film lottery have started getting gutted and it's harder to get the things made.

And I was like, I think when I talked to my friends working in the American film industry, we're so envious of there being any program like that.

And he was like, isn't the Sundance Lab kind of like that?

And I'm like, the Sundance Lab is that having to be created.

Right.

It's like a prize you win.

Right.

As like being created by not a government, but a successful artist being like, this kind of thing should exist, leveraging his entire creative

charities filling the gap.

And then, even then, I was like, here's what it is: it's like

you

submit, you get accepted, you get this beautiful sort of like sojourn, staying with other artists, working with them, having actors at your disposal to workshop the scenes, getting all these mentors.

And then you do a presentation.

And at the end of it, they're like, well, we hope that one of the people who saw this presentation wants to give you money to make this movie.

They do not help you make the film.

And then the hope is if if you find money for it, you maybe stand a better chance of getting into the Sundance Festival, which would maybe then lead to distribution.

But all of it is still like, you're having to piece it together so thoroughly, right?

And in this country, we just decided that we don't give a shit about this.

But the way the movie industry used to be run, the studio system, which was dissolved for a number of reasons, and it was seen as a bit of a victory that now the power has gone back to the artists.

They control their own careers.

I think long term, I've been thinking about this a lot.

I think was maybe a fatal mistake that has fucked the industry forever in terms of eradicating the middle-class artist.

Yeah.

Well, wait a second.

I don't know how I feel about any of that, but okay.

All right.

I mean, the studio system was largely eradicated because the biggest stars didn't like the lack of freedom.

And the biggest directors, the biggest writers, the people who had some level of clout.

didn't have

much autourism or anything right that's the point the studio directed all art they were and they controlled the theaters, they did not feel like they had agency, and theater didn't have agency, they literally didn't, correct, correct, correct,

not a feeling thing, no, correct?

They were bound to do what the studio told them to do, correct, but there was a model that sort of made sense.

Let me unpack this.

We're moving on,

we're not moving on.

This is a Barton Fink episode.

There was steady employment, but I don't think Barton Fink was talking about how this

system was good.

No, let me unpack this.

You have to let me finish my point.

You can't cut me off and then say you're wrong.

Okay, finish your point.

Finish your point.

There was this holistic system of like, we own the real estate.

We own the machinery.

We own the equipment, right?

It's called a monopoly, but yes, go on.

Yes.

You went to eat with all the other writers and directors and actors in the mess hall, that kind of thing.

But it was also like they're sort of controlled costs because we own

the means of production, right?

We own you.

We control you.

You're under our salary, right?

I mean, this is a little bit what Hail Caesar's about.

It's a lot what Hail Caesar's about.

There's certainly much to discuss about this in Hail Caesar, which is more about the machinery of the studios.

And if you're a star or a writer or director who's like proving yourself and you're like, why am I still like subject to the whims of these people owning me?

You start to want to destroy this system.

What ended up happening long term is.

Basically, everything collapsed.

And now it's like Warner Brothers loans out their soundstages to other production companies, which like becomes both a form of money laundering and a way of intensifying costs across everything.

Same to their post-production facilities, all these things.

But also, no one in this industry has any fucking job security anymore, right?

That's true.

There used to be this interest on the studios in exchange for them owning you, which was basically they'd go to someone like a Barton Fink and say, we're going to pay you $2,000.

$2,000 a week.

And we have a reason to keep throwing work at you because we're paying for you.

Preston Surgis was the highest salaried individual in America when he was at his height.

He did have a certain degree of control because once you were compelling as a figure in and of itself,

he's one of the only ones who

have the earliest writer directors.

And obviously most of these guys did not even get written, like credit.

Right.

Yeah.

Like their names are not on the movie.

There'd be fucking drama school showcases and a guy would get up and do a model.

The whole point of Mink, the great film Mink, is Mankowitz being like, I think I actually want credit on this movie.

I think it's good.

Yeah.

And Wells being like, that's not how this fucking works ever.

I am, you know, and like, and Mank's like, I want it.

Sorry.

Like, please, for the first time ever, I'll actually make that fight.

You'd have like a drama school showcase, and someone would do a good monologue, and Paramount would be like, fuck, why don't we get that guy under contract?

And now the impetus is on them to figure out how to make this guy's career work in 10 movies.

Because we're paying for him.

And so we just need to throw him at the wall and see what fits.

But then they could just cut you loose.

They could.

Look.

And you had nothing to point to.

It was not a perfect system.

No, it's a terrible system.

Who are we talking about?

No, no, we're not.

Yes, we are.

The problem is.

I remind you, you don't work in this.

Criffin, Criffin, Criffin, we are not.

No, people should be able to have agency in their careers.

What happens now is that people don't work.

I would say the big problem is that it is really fucking expensive.

It is the most expensive art form in the world.

And this is like, oh, Christ.

What?

The problem is that there are less studios.

There used to be like, like, there were the majors, the mid-majors, and then there was, you know, what do you call it?

Poverty row and all that.

There was so much competition.

Movies were desired by the public.

Yes.

yes the reason there are less jobs now is movies are not desired by the public anymore now we can argue like oh they no they are and see how these movies do well but it's like no they release most movies people go to the theaters less there's way more competition for thing that you watch back then there was nothing else you could watch people lined the streets to go see movies they would sit in movie theaters all day watching you know some good movies and a lot of garbage because it was like what else are you gonna do well they also they gutted their own business model in a way that reduced the value of any single project into a product that was part of a library to boost or they did that, but like it's also television got invented and video games got invented and phones got invented.

There's a zillion other things competing for attention.

Of fewer people controlling a greater majority of jobs that has to do with a lot of removal of stigma of what is beneath you or above you and just certain people grinding so fucking hard and like just being like, I'll just do everything.

When people have a hot streak, they just like run the fucking table and block other people out.

But it's just right, but there's less demand.

But I think to this other point, it's like,

it is so expensive to do this work, right?

In any sort of way, especially the work to prove that you're worthy of being paid to do this work.

It is a pay-to-play industry, which is why.

There's another reason it's more expensive.

People are paid fairly because of unions that were created after this.

But now the studios are doing anything they can to circumvent unions.

But back then, there were no unions.

People were treated like garbage and were paid poorly.

No, but I mean

like as compared to like poetry or paintings.

You get some paints.

The capital is

like inherently different.

Yeah, it is really fucking hard to do.

It's just really expensive.

Before signing over your freedom to a studio, the other thing they would do was fucking invest in your career and be like, we need to spend the money.

Right.

to control your publicity and your fashion, your style, and all this sort of stuff.

Increasingly, when you read like fucking Sidney Sweeney complaining that she can't pay her mortgage and people are like, how is that possible?

You're like, in order to be Sidney Sweeney, you have to pay like 40 people out of pocket to do the things that the productions used to do for you.

Right.

And that's the maintain that specifics.

She said that we did a few years ago.

Well, I googled Sidney Sweeney mortgage.

She recently.

So Sidney Sweeney's doing all right now.

Well, that's because she escaped.

That's nice.

But, well, she didn't escape it, but she has more things going on.

But it is another thing that is depicted in Mank when he or when his nephew arrives, and you've got this bullpen of like 40 writers who sit around all day and are just waiting for basically like the lottery ticket to come and be like, you got to sign something.

Do a pass on this.

Right.

Do a treatment on this.

You know?

Yeah.

Mank is also about a man in that system who realizes that system is poison that is destroying America.

Yeah.

That he works for capitalist pigs who will, you know, make art that prevents people from having political thought.

I think

it's not a movie that's like, you know what?

Yeah.

Hollywood is working.

You know, like that's a movie about a guy that ends with him barfing on the floor.

I think we replace one broken system with a different broken system.

And the system right now functions less.

What you are talking about is late capitalism, which is what we live in.

And it is true of most industries now.

And the industry I work into, media, where it's like, people come to me and they're like, how do I

climb this ladder?

How do I, What's the path?

And I'm like,

there isn't one.

Like, I mean, you can do X and Y and you can hope for the best.

But luck is like more than ever humongous.

It's who you know.

And it's that maybe it's, you know, oh, something opens up right when you're lucky or maybe the, you know, sort of some stupid guy.

Yeah.

And this is true in movies too.

It's like, eh, maybe I'll like devote a bunch of money to something.

And then after a while, he's like, eh, well, that money's gone and didn't work.

So I give up.

Like, you know, you'll have little booms like that, which is sort of what like the tech companies are right now, which are good.

But I also, yeah, but it's sort of Apple being like, oh, let's do it.

And it's like, it doesn't hurt them to do it, but there might come a day where they're like, yeah, when they lose interest, it's a fucking nightmare.

But, but it's, it doesn't matter.

That will never happen.

Like, no, of course not.

Of course not.

Cinema being an emerging art form, right?

That America is able to sort of corner right at the beginning and decide this is how these things are made.

But from the get-go, we're deciding this is capitalist structure.

This is machinery

in America.

That's what I'm saying.

Do you suppose that there will be a patriotic film fund, right?

Because it was announced that who's it, Nel Gibson and I don't know, Kevin Sorbo and something were going to be ambassadors to.

But I don't think the government wants to do that.

They like the idea of like people being able to set up something like Angel Studios and make money off of doing that.

I think the only time America's ever been really interested in that is like FDR.

Right.

Right.

Obviously, every other country does it, but that's because forever, or many other countries, for them, it's also sort of like we are producing something that speaks to our country, that makes it interesting for people around the world.

Yeah.

Like, and America doesn't need to do that because, you know, the American brand is loud.

Also, a depressing majority of our population would have absolute ire and disgust at the idea of their tax going to art.

Which, of course, happens in Britain where they're like, I can't believe my tax dollars paid for that crappy movie.

Right.

People can.

Come on, then.

Swing in.

I kind of want to see the patriotic movie.

Like, just like, could it be called the patriotic movie?

Sure.

Like, TP.

Another patriotic movie.

I'm going to say that'd be the sequel.

I'm in favor of seeing it as long as Trump writes and directs it himself.

Well, that's what I'm saying.

Because I love the idea.

He's so busy.

Let's just have him write it.

He doesn't need to direct.

I think it'd be good if we got him out of the office for a little bit, got him on a set.

Got him really hyper-fixated on a project.

But I love the idea.

I mean, we are in a culture war.

So it would be a wartime movie.

Apparently, we're being

first there was the war on terrorism, and now there's the war on culture, or whatever, right?

But there's it's like all the people you just listed off who would be involved, like everyone potentially who would sign up for that kind of project,

it would be terrible, breaking better than ever,

cognitive function top, and it would be exciting to then see that get released and then just have all the people who champion the film, the project, the ideas of the film, then then just be like oh this sucks yeah oh it's good

or try to like maneuver

around but actually it's good if you really think about it i feel like every time i didn't like it the first five times but now i think i get it one of those movies gets made like the christmas movie what was it called war on christmas kurt cameron saving christmas no the one where it's like michael moore has a christmas carol happen an american carol carol It's sort of like, and it comes out and everyone's like, this is bad.

And then it's just like, well, let's never speak of this again.

Right.

Like, it's not like one of of those things where people do try to be like, no, I'm going to watch it.

I liked it.

Like, you know, it's just kind of like.

Well, this is the fallacy every time.

Right.

But, but.

People actually want to see sinners.

Like, everyone wants to see.

You know what I mean?

Right.

And they're not because of politics or any other reason.

They're just like, I don't know.

I heard it was good.

Yeah.

I mean, they go see it.

Right.

There's so much of the

media landscape has been dominated by this idea of like DEI initiatives are being rolled back and like the identity politics era of Hollywood is over and things are now going to to go back towards like catering towards the conservative, you know, Joe Christian audience.

And then you look at the box office, and you're like, three of the top six movies of the year so far have predominantly black casts.

I mean, like exponentially more successful than the movies that in theory are targeting Trump's America.

You can make a Korean animated movie about Jesus that's told by an animated Charles Dickens.

Do you know there's another animated Jesus movie coming out this year?

I made it.

Okay.

It's called another animated Jesus movie.

No, you can do that, and that might hit because people are like, well, the Nativity story is a pretty big one.

And if you release it Easter weekend, it's kind of a game.

But sometimes then there are those more sort of like niche faith movies where they're like, you know, it's about the triumph of the human spirit.

And people are kind of like, pass.

Whatever.

But like, don't let me know when the thunderbolts are in town.

CGI Jesus movie is just barely a movie.

Sure.

But barely passing one of them days.

a movie

success remains under discussed good movie yeah what is one of the it was a comedy

written by john singleton's daughter soraya singleton it's a really really good movie and it's just the kind of movie they used to make more of which is a smaller budget but studio comedy that's very you know kind of lo-fi and funny and but good to your point david my point this is an era where the machinery of Hollywood is working so beautifully and the public cannot get enough movies that's all they got And the idea of.

What are they going to do?

Listen on the wireless?

Right.

We can afford to just have a room full of drunk writers who are just each pitching in a sentence or two.

And they present it to him as just like, this isn't fucking rocket science.

This is one of two wrestling movies we have to make every year.

Sign him a picture.

This is like, you know, it's like worth remarking on.

Do you want a game or a kid?

Like there's a formula here and you decide like, the binary choose your own adventure pathway.

My screenwriter mind, when they said, is it about a dame or is there a dame or is a kid?

And my mind went, both.

And then Burton Fink goes, both, and they look appalled at the idea.

Yeah.

Right.

You need a movie to fit a certain formula because people

are like, yeah, I want to go see

a movie about this.

This will actually work.

Right.

Right.

And you want, it's beyond elevator pitch.

It's just, right.

It's a wrestling picture.

Great.

I love wrestling pictures.

I like to watch wrestling on the big screen.

And the thing you get so much from Lerner's performance, what I think he captures really well, is you're just like, this guy is overselling it so hard.

Yeah, he's laying on.

He's laying it on way too thick of how much he respects artists, right?

In a way you know is

first.

And you're just waiting for the shoe to drop.

And in reality, what he really wants is like how a lot of our biggest budget franchise movies work right now, which is like, we're going to hire someone with a little personality so they can just hopefully put 2%.

personality on our formula.

But by and large, let's just stick to the formula.

But it's also the the implication I have from Barton Fink is: he gets to do this.

You're going to be treated well, put up in a hotel, paid a lot of money.

Then he produces the first script.

We don't see the rest of the movie, but the reaction to the first script is like, no, this is not what we want.

This is way too arty-farty.

You need to learn

how to make movies the Capital Pictures way.

And you get the sense that he will quickly be bumped down the ladder, right?

Like it'll be a little bit more.

He doesn't know how to play the game.

You need to go with the pigs, you know, in the slop and like learn your trade.

Well, this even like you will never be you're never going to work on anything again we just own you you're gonna you're gonna keep on drawing a salary but nothing that you produce i mean this is by the end of it right you're talking about yeah nothing that you produce is is ever going to be used right which the makony character is kind of stuck in that sort of which is why he like his every day is that he vomits one assumes black bile and then it's like okay

time to drink all day like that's how he's dealing and they like pay him with contempt to keep ownership of him sure and you get the sense that this guy probably for the last five years has had one good idea a year.

Right.

Like every year he gives them one dialogue exchange or one notion of how to fix a scene.

Yeah.

But yeah, they're being paid to keep their field fallow.

Right.

Right.

It's basically the deal.

I mean, he didn't, Faulkner didn't write all of his most famous novels had already happened.

Sure.

And famously, he got to Hollywood and was like, can I write Mickey Mouse?

I like Mickey Mouse.

And MGM was like, like, that's Disney.

And he was like, I don't understand.

Quickly.

He didn't really give me that idea.

And instead, he did, you know, a bunch of movies.

Like, he wrote like 50 movies or whatever, credited or uncredited, that no one remembers.

Here's what I want to say.

Just going back to the plot a little bit, or not the plot, but the flow of the movie.

He famously, Faulkner just want to say that he has a credit on The Big Sleep, which is one of the most incomprehensible screenplays ever written.

Sure.

Yes.

It's a great movie.

But also is constantly cited as like,

this script doesn't even make sense in the movie's great.

Right.

And that's sort of when we start to think about the O-Tur theory and Bogey and Bacall and all that.

But there's a little bit of like, nobody knows.

And I do not know what the answer to the mystery is.

Yes.

No one knows.

I think you can be told.

And even if you're told, you're kind of like, I don't understand.

And they're like, don't worry about it.

Yeah.

Start it, Dad.

Casting Buscemi.

Having Buscemi play it as cheery as possible and not a fake cheeriness, right?

He's not going over cranked, but it's like speaks to the Cohen's already at this point being so smart about how to use actors and their energies of just like, just have Buscemi go straight down the middle, put no creep on it, and that will be unsettling.

There's something about Buscemi just being kind of like quiet and kind that feels a little off.

And also just his introduction back to the shoes ben.

His introduction is Barton Fink walks in this fucking lobby that's empty and then like a trap door opens from the floor

and he comes out of the basement with shoes and you're just like what the fuck is going on underneath this hotel a thing that is never even touched on again like a mystery that is just sort of like quietly seated at the beginning and then so much else happens and you're like is there a whole world of drama going on underground the implication of the shoes outside the door is that these the residents or the transients are leaving their shoes out every night to be

shined and polished and that he's going down there but you're like are there other people down there does buscemi spend every night shining a hundred pairs of shoes yeah it's very it's fairy tale right logic and then he gets up to this room and immediately it's just unsettling he is so he's a schmuck because he's being paid forty thousand dollars a year yes i mean a week a week a week and he chooses to stay at a shitty hotel yes but you don't feel as though he's scrimping and saving in order to start he's not like making phone calls about how he's finally gonna rent some theater back he doesn't know what to do with money it's not like barton finks like, I'm about to go on a shopping spree.

Like, Barton Finks,

I want to see him in Rode.

It would be funny.

He gets turned away by the mean shop girls, and later he goes back and asks them if

they sell on consensus.

Big mistake.

Thank you.

Huge.

It feels like A.

This idea he has of like, I need to be amongst the common people.

Michael Lerner's offering, you know, with Polito, get him a fucking mansion, put him up at the nicer hotel, put him in my guest room.

He won't allow any of that stuff to happen.

John Polito, of course, we love to see him.

The great John Polito.

I mean, just the roly-polius little man.

We'll have talked about him a lot last week.

I mean, right, because Miller's Crossing is his, I think, his biggest Cohen's showcase, right?

Like, obviously, he made a lot of money.

I've heard a lot of episodes, but I promise we won't give him the hi-hat in that episode.

But Polito has been kind of edged out of the Louis B.

Merrill role here, right?

Because normally he'd be the guy who'd be playing the Louis B.

Merrick part.

So there's actually something really, there's like real pathos to the fact that he's meek in this one.

It almost.

The late John Polito, right?

He's no longer.

Yeah, that's right.

It gives Lerner's character a little more power where you're like, if I've seen the first three Cohen Brothers movies, to see Polito be like

simping to this guy,

it's just like, how fucking hot can this guy run?

But the other, the other part of it with the hotel thing,

beyond just whatever he thinks his like artistic philosophical principle is of needing to be in a real place with real people, it's also, to my mind, the recurring imagery of the beach is just like, this guy wouldn't know how to fucking function on a beach.

Well, and he doesn't when he put him on a mansion and he's in his fucking three pieces.

He should be in the middle of the morning.

So there's this idea of the Martin Fink action figure doesn't have other clothes.

He's got the one thing.

The idea of looking at a picture of a beautiful woman on the beach isn't like, that's the escape.

That's the fantasy.

It's sort of like, that's the idea of that being my idea of a fantasy.

That a well-adjusted person would look to an image like that as an idea of a serene thing to strive for.

And for him, he would never be able to enjoy it.

It's also a hilarious, mocking thing to have on the wall of that dingy room where they're like, but for a little color, you know, we'll hang that one picture.

And it's just such a, I mean, it's what the Cohens are so good at in their entire career.

The more you look at it, it's like saying a word a thousand times.

Yes.

The more you read strange things into that weird, cryptic, anonymous image of the back of a woman on a beach.

And then there's like the fulfilled fulfilled prophecy thing.

This is like the David Lynchy thing again to return to, whereas, like, if you want to try to read into this, like, what is the there?

It's not a time loop, obviously.

You don't want to like read too much into it, but

the

girl at the end purposely adopts the

pose that exists, obviously.

Yeah, it's right.

You're mirroring everything.

I mean,

when I saw this movie for the first time,

I guess well over 15 years ago,

I,

and until re-watching it last night, had held on to my interpretation so strongly of, oh, he is in hell and John Goodman's character is Satan.

Or he's in purgatory or whatever.

Yes.

Yeah, I remember like feeling so strongly John Goodman's character is the devil or some equivalent.

And watching it last night, I did not feel that way.

You

know,

not at all.

And that's what it is.

I love this guy.

I don't think I was, yeah, this guy's maybe God.

I think interpreting him as a sort of demonic figure is perfectly acceptable sure i wasn't like what an idiot what a misread i had but it speaks to sort of the weird sphinx like quality of this movie that you can watch it one time and go you know what it's a hundred percent this it's this and this and this is how these other elements support it the coins do not make movies that way i feel right

they are misleads you know they're not like you're gonna miss the point they might be like yeah do what you want and it's so much a reflection of what you're bringing to the movie as well um

ben what do you want to say well what i wanted to share what changed for me is that the first time I watched this, I was so aligned with him.

And you were

frustrated artists like perspective.

New school poetry.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I majored in creative writing.

Not the new school.

Watching it this time around, what really struck me is he's saying he's this like voice of the people.

Yes.

And yet,

is not actually comfortable interacting or being in the space with these type of people he seems to hate people with anybody he cannot handle talking to anybody and then and then is incapable of writing a piece of work that is for those people correct he's uh he's so above yes he's writing the wrestling movie right and he wants to say the whole time that he is like you know has the the audience who would want to interact with that work in mind his is so funny to write what he thinks the people need rather than polemical kind of dick.

You know,

this is the Preston Surgis thing.

This is like this is Sullivan's Travels, right?

Where it's the best moment in film history, but certainly in Sullivan's Travels is when they, right, when they interact with simple quote-unquote art and it moves them beyond anything, you know, Preston Surgis is like one of the single biggest influences throughout the entire Cohen Brothers filmography down to a brother.

Yeah, exactly.

The movie within the movie.

Yeah.

But no, but did you?

Oh, that's it.

That's all I wanted to do.

Although, okay, then I should shut up, wait, get out of here.

Hey, hey, hey, hey, come on.

A palate cleanser, actually.

No, I want to tell you

because this is getting pretty heavy.

Did I ever tell you my story about meeting Brad Pitt the first time?

Brad Pitt.

Bradley Pitt.

Who you've never directed in a film.

Never directed in a film.

Okay, so my girlfriend at the time.

Did you direct Sim Bad Legend of the Seven C's?

I wish.

Okay.

Seven seas in that picture.

My girlfriend at the time was cast as

one of the neighbors in Mr.

and Mrs.

Smith.

Okay, sure.

A film with many a neighbor.

You are in that film as an actor.

I'm in that film as an actor.

And here's how that happened.

The cast agent thought, oh, it would be funny if Chris,

this is my girlfriend Heather at the time, who's going out with Heather, played her husband.

And then

she,

Heather was like, I don't think I want to be like playing second fiddle to the Angelina Delifer, so I'm out of here.

She dropped out, right?

And I was like, who replaces her?

I forget her name.

Lovely, lovely actor.

Oh, Oh, it's Rachel Huntley.

What are you?

Not a name I know.

But you still end up finding her.

And I was like,

I'm not leaving.

I gotta wait for them to fire me.

Brad Pitt as Angelina Jolie.

Yeah.

So then.

Wow, this is the only movie that actor was ever in.

Weird.

Oh, really?

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

It's only MDD credit.

So, so then, so there I am, right, on this set.

And there's Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.

And

I'm playing their neighbor.

So I have a couple of scenes with Brad, which is pretty freaking funny.

And I need need to re-watch this movie because I haven't seen it since it came out.

It's really funny.

It speaks to how much I have always been me, that I remember seeing that movie opening weekend and going, oh, weird, that's Chris Weitz.

That is really.

I immediately clocked, oh, wow, that's the writer and director of About a Boy.

Well, I would have known.

I did see Chuck and Buck.

Not to bring up all your action credits, which you are a bit of that.

You're a titular character.

I was.

Okay, all right.

So you're in as you're

scenes with Braddy Pettit.

So

I'm starting to shoot this scene with Brad.

And of course, it's like, it's fucking surreal, right?

And I want to make it clear to him that I'm not going to be very good in this scene because I'm not an actor.

I'm a director.

Temper your expectations.

Yeah.

So

I go to Brad.

You know, we were just shaking hands and I said, look, I just want you to know I'm not actually an actor.

I'm actually a director.

And I can see him.

take it the wrong way.

And the way that he is taking it is, oh my God, this guy is some kind of freaking lunatic who wants to give me his script.

Right.

Right, right.

So that you're like, really, what I want to do is directly

not like, I am an established director with credits to my name.

So, and I see his soul retreat into the back of his head, like, like it's clearly something that he has done before.

Yeah.

And I realize that I have like lost this moment with Brad Pitt completely.

I am now just a lunatic to him.

And then we do our scenes.

He shakes my hand.

And

actually, I see him one more time.

I see him one more time, which is the

year that Demion Bashir is nominated for best actor for a better life.

And he should have won.

And

he's like telling me what a great time he has.

It's like, oh, I'm hanging out with George and

Brad.

Is that the descendant money ball artist?

Correct.

Okay.

That is, yeah.

George and Brad were nominated for best actor that year.

But of course, we had to make room for Jean Dujardin.

Yeah.

And

his big leading man career since then has proven that he deserved it.

And

so

he, so Demion,

we're at the SAG Awards, and Demion brings Brad by and like introduces us.

And I see it, I see the penny drop, the flicker.

Brad Pitt.

He's like, oh, okay, okay.

Six years later, he's like, oh, that guy wasn't full of shit.

Yeah, no, to his credit, he was like, somehow remembering.

And he's like, oh, yes, we've worked before.

And I was like, oh, God, thank God.

What's so funny, too, is that your function,

Mr.

and Mrs.

Smith, is basically to be like, look how poorly these guys fit in with normal suburban couples.

And my memory is that you're sort of like talking at him, trying to make like neighborhood small talk.

Yeah, we're talking about golf.

Right.

And he's just like not really locking in.

All right.

That was the palette cleanser.

That's fascinating.

Your co-star kind of has a Christina Applegate sort of styling and look to her, but I guess is not Christina Applegate.

No, but I think that's that was they're going to that trope of like suburban children.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

yeah, super interesting.

Yeah, let's pick up back with the plot, though.

Martin Fank he's been

lerner basically just fucking monolithic.

Walks to him, says so much, he's like walks out of there reeling, doesn't even know really what to do.

It's not really until Shalub

calls him, yes, that he even knows what to do.

But then we go to, I've got the movie running, go to the hotel.

Him struggling to write.

He just has the

ambient sound of traffic intro to his screenplay, right?

The sort of the streets of New York.

He's also writing the same thing he just.

Yeah, it's the sound of the streets.

But here's the interesting thing: there's a really bad translight in the back of this set, right?

It's not believable, and

there is no traffic noise.

Right.

So it's like that's another weird thing about like horror-ish thing about

the movie is that the hotel itself isn't set in any proper atmosphere.

When you say translight, just for our listeners, that's a translucent light,

backlight, a back room.

is semi-translucent so that you feel as though like light is hitting it properly.

But it's like, it's a perfectly bad one.

I think it's odd, right?

Yeah.

And then Goodman appears.

And so Goodman appears for the first time after the learner meets.

Yes.

And it's almost like, you know, it almost could be like planes, trains, and automobiles or whatever.

It's this kind of like garrulous working guy.

He's an insurance salesman.

And he's got that kind of like, oh, a writer.

Like, oh, you know, I wouldn't know about that.

Right.

Like, you know, and Martin thinks of himself as like, oh, well, I'm here to, you know, stir your soul and to understand doing this through you.

And it's just perfect characterization of just immediately he's not listening to this guy.

No.

He's explaining to this guy why he cares about him while ignoring everything he's actually trying to say.

And he's talking about how hard his job is.

Yes.

And then go to the bottom.

The life of the mind, how painful the life of the mind is.

It calls him a working stiff.

Yeah.

That's so fucking rude.

Right.

And he thinks he's saying it with respect as i see you don't think it goes ignored that you live a life of misery

innate condescension to everything he does and yeah like not to jump ahead but there's such a good detail for me in him extending to goodman if you're ever in new york city reach out to my parents they'll give you a meal right which is basically his one act of unambiguous kindness to this guy yes even if it's a little self-serving of like

uh i want to be the kind of guy who offers this up.

And once again, I'm not offering hospitality, I'm extending my parents to you for hospitality.

But I do feel like it's like you'll have you'll have some kind of welcome in right.

I think it's also him being like, I have cred, I have like working-class parents that you can run.

But that also feels like him saying that in that one moment is maybe the thing that stops Goodman from murdering him.

Well, but it, but, but he may have murdered the parents by the end of it, which is kind of interesting, right?

Which, which to me, like this

tie links up with no country for old men right yeah which is that um you know anton sugar goes and and and um

and and kills the the wife of uh

of the protagonist yeah yeah uh is that all real though well we can talk about it we can talk about it's the roller coaster of goodman's performance where he's just vacillating so quickly between like charm and sadness and menace and like you know, emptiness and gregariousness and all this sort of shit.

But I do think the way he plays that moment of Barton Fick extending that to him, like Goodman really slows down for an instant.

You see him really process that and it's like he clocks it.

Like, I have to remember he's one of the good ones.

Obviously, he's going to turn on him by the end of it.

But I think so much the way Goodman plays this is this kind of like, son of Sam.

This is a guy who is like answering to higher voices he is hearing, right?

Of what he feels like he needs to do.

And there are sort of these like moral tests he's imposing on people, which you hear about from these sorts of like serial killers, where they're sort of like, this is the moment that made me realize I had to kill this person, versus this is the moment that made me realize I couldn't do it.

Of course, my favorite serial killer is Hannibal Lecter.

Well, we love him.

The late great, as Mr.

President Trump would call him.

The late great, but you know what?

Very kindly, many other countries are sending all of their Hannibal Lecters to us.

But what I love every day about Hannibal Lecter is that it is canonical.

And as the movie, the books go on, more and more clear, they're like, he kills people if he thinks they're rude.

Yeah, the free-range rude.

Right.

He's just kind of like, you're fucking rude.

I'm going to serve you up for dinner, bitch.

Do you hear when you dig down like fucking serial killer rabbit holes?

There's a lot of that.

I would like to do that.

They're looking for the excuse of someone doing something that they perceive as a social faux pas or rudeness and then saying, like, now I have permission to kill you.

But I don't think he's a serial killer.

I think that's all.

fantasy.

Or whatever.

We can talk about it.

A crucial image after Goodman leaves is the wallpaper peeling, the weird red kind of like flesh-like wall beneath it, right?

Behind it.

Like membrane.

And

the

thick sort of like...

Right.

Everything's too gooey and thick.

Like the hotel is alive, which rocks.

The next thing is Shaloub,

who is the producer type guy.

My favorite thing about Shaloub, apart from everything, because he's so funny, is that when they have lunch, he's got whiskey and milk and he keeps forgetting which one to drink from first at the time.

It speaks to how, like, on fire this movie is.

And this era of like that Shalub's like the seventh best performance in it.

And it's almost undeniably.

And Shalub's one of my favorite actors in the world.

And this is one of his best performances.

And yet, every time I'm like, right, fuck Shalub.

Oh, yeah, he's in this movie.

Yeah.

And he's great.

But there's, I feel like this era of like PTA was doing this and the Cohens were doing this, where there was like a wave of filmmakers who all recognized, like, holy shit, there is an incredible class of character actors who have been doing good, like supporting work in studio films.

And what if you just start building entire movies out of just these guys?

Right, right.

Not just use one of them.

Right.

Have Mahoney, Shalou, Bashemi, you know, Judy Dave.

Well, Judy Dave is a little bit of Michael Lerner, even Goodman.

Yeah, 100%.

The next scene is the

bathroom where he meets Mahoney.

who is a William Faulkner, whatever type of sort of effete southern, not but a sort of like genteel southern man with the bow tie and the handkerchief and all he meets him like puking in like writhing pain the worst puking noises maybe in cinema history

amazing

set up like the chaos of the sounds of the people on other sides of his room in the hotel the constant like speaking of the haunted hotel thing but just that weird thing and you can feel this in apartment buildings as well where you're just like i'm hearing noises that are both too specific and too abstract the line that gets me right first is that he's puking into the toilet and then you see him pick up the handkerchief from the floor.

Yeah.

But it's not that he says sorry about the noise, but he says sorry about the odor.

Yes.

And you're just like, get the fucking out of him.

Yeah.

So bad.

But then, of course, right, Barton recognizes him as this esteemed novelist.

I'm always very discriminated when people vomit in the movies and then

speak closely to someone else.

I feel like vomiting in the movies is one of the hardest things to get right.

It happens all the time.

And there's the classic kind of, you know, tube tube mess in the mouth, which has become almost like, it's like we accept that fake feeling as real.

Because you can't do it real.

I've had to do it multiple times and it is.

Have you always done the tube or have you also put stuff like something in your mouth and you kind of get it?

I've done it three different ways.

I have had three different big vomit scenes.

I've had like fully rigged up.

I've had we're going to comp this in later a CGI.

Oh, I'm just going to.

And I've had you're holding stuff in your mouth and you have to expel it.

Which I would imagine holding stuff in the mouth is the best.

But you can't get much out there.

And

whenever you see that version of it, you're like, yeah, he had like a

sense of

the easiest to play releasing the thing.

It is the hardest to play

everything leading up to that, which to me is almost more important.

Of like, how do you play the build?

Always ask me to fucking puke on screen.

Blank, well, you look sickly.

You look like you're on the screen.

You know what's happening?

I'll call you out.

You have vomited on blank chat.

This is true.

That's That Ben.

I have yet to do it, but Decade of Dreams.

Like, who knows what the next 10 years holds?

During an actual recording, or you made it to

the car ride episode.

Ben did it on Mike in a car.

No, I think Ben actually did.

I turned the recorder.

I turned the recorder off right before it happened.

The only reason it wasn't on Mike was because Ben was fucking fixing it from the inside.

I went to the bathroom.

I did.

Griffin exited and then returned with, I just barfed.

You know what I threw up in Alex Ross Perry's car.

Yes.

Decade of Dreams, the episode I vomited on.

In the car?

Sorry.

Was it cleaned up?

Like,

I was into a coffee cup.

Like a loose shopping.

Ben, no.

No, no.

No, no.

We had gotten Dunkin' Donuts.

I was not in this car.

You finished your iced coffee.

Then you removed the lid and puked into the cup and then put the lid back on and acted like you were going to get away with it.

None of us would notice.

And I called you out.

Even though there were like four to five of you in the car.

That's pretty smooth, actually.

I was definitely, I was resourceful.

And I was was not going to be like, doop-de-doop-dee-doop.

I was going to be like, we need to pull over.

You, Ben, Griffin, you puked entirely in the cup.

Your aim.

Good.

Yeah.

You made no other mess.

Was it like a Venti?

I mean, like,

whatever, Dunkin' Dunkin'.

And then I saw you kind of go like this and turn the recorders back on.

And I immediately said, Ben, I need to acknowledge what just happened.

I called it out.

You know what?

Ben just, he knew it had to be on, Mike.

He knew what, you know, exactly.

I just want to connect a dot here.

Everything is copy.

The episode where I puked, I said, hold on, I'm going to go to the bathroom.

I got up.

I went to the bathroom.

I came back and I went, I just vomited.

You did.

That was our Starship Troopers episode.

And that was the episode.

Which was the episode

after which we met.

Exactly.

Because I love that episode.

He tweeted about it and said, this is a great episode about a great movie.

And we were like, holy shit, Chris Weitz listens to this podcast.

And we messaged you.

If I hadn't puked in that episode, we never would have met.

That's beautiful.

We'll circle.

After that, he meets Judy Davis, who was kind of,

I feel like sort of her peak acclaim, like this is when she's just becoming such, like, she's not an actor people talk enough about anymore.

No.

Because her peak was the sort of early 90s.

I also think she had a notoriously big ego.

And there was a little bit of a...

So do I.

You know the great anecdote about her.

No, it is.

It's one of my favorite Hollywood stories of all time.

that she's working on Passage to India.

Right.

Early in her career.

Maybe her first film.

Certainly her first major film.

This has been her first big movie.

Right.

And David Lean's comeback after 20 years on the bench, and they're having an argument over the way to play a scene.

Yeah.

And she said, Why should I listen to you?

What have you done?

Wow.

And he said, Lawrence of Arabia.

And her response was, I mean, what have you done lately?

Well, she had him there.

It's one of the biggest burns of all time.

I love that she didn't take that line down.

She was like, I'm immediate pension.

Brief encounters, old.

Don't care.

One of the worst lines I've I've ever heard in a movie is from Sex in the City 2.

Great movie.

Lawrence.

I know what you're about to say.

Please go ahead.

When

I forget which character.

Samantha sees a hot guy

and says, Lawrence of Milabia.

Wait, you thought Carrie said that one?

You thought Charlotte busted out Lawrence of Milabia?

Fair enough.

The thing about Sex in the City.

Let me just do a quick note just for the edit.

Christmas spoke.

He said one of the worst lines I've ever heard.

I think he meant to say one of the best lines I've ever heard.

The The thing about

this is you want to just toss me what the runtime on that movie is?

I believe that one is a tight

12 years.

145 minutes.

You were off by one minute.

It's 146, baby.

Yes.

Yeah.

Because Michael Patrick King was like, no, they need another minute.

Not 225, 226.

Yeah.

One of the worst movies I've had to sit through in a theater is

a utilizing experience.

Right.

Sex of City One is not a particularly good movie, but like you're kind of like, yeah, you know, there's some stuff here for everybody.

Whatever.

We're all having, we're all drinking cocktail.

Sex in the City 2 is a little bit of a sort of like, like, yeah, slow cinema, like, art house punishing.

I feel like that movie.

It pushed me into a depression actually watching that movie.

That's fair.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's a thought.

And you haven't exited.

Have you seen Sex in the City 2?

I never have.

You know, it's not very good.

I've only seen two episodes of Sex in the City ever.

Well, then, I think you shouldn't start with Sex in the City 2 if you want to return to the French.

I'm going to start with two.

I'm going to go backwards.

You should, no.

You should start with, and just just like that, and then keep.

Oh, you're right.

That's what I'm doing.

Latest episode.

I'm going to wait for it and just like that to end.

Made backwards, and then I'm going to go memento style.

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Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, No, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's gonna tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

Um, so uh, yeah, he meets Judy Davis, uh, who's his sort of

incredible in this movie.

Just to be clear, I think she basically never misses as an actress.

She kind of didn't miss, but it's this era.

It's like Georgia, Alice, Barton Fink, Naked Lunch, Husbands and Wives.

Like, that's the ref she's amazing in.

Husbands and Wives people kind of thought she was going to win the Oscar.

And

some stuff happened.

It is one of the most transparent on camera.

An actress clearly is just miserable that she's lost.

Watching Judy Davis's reaction in the telecast is is amazing.

But the worst performance.

I think

the ref is kind of the end of Hollywood taking her very seriously, which maybe it's because she was tough to work with.

Didn't she show up in like two scenes in the breakup and be incredible where you're like, this is a nothing part and she's somehow making a full character?

She's in Mary Antoinette.

Oh, sure.

Occasionally she'll still puff up.

She's great in this.

And

she's the, you know, Mahoney's wife or partner or whatever.

This is her assistant, who's also his mistress.

But who's eventually revealed to be kind of his muse/slash?

She's kind of the wife

from the movie The Wife.

What if there was?

Exactly, where she's kind of writing some of the stuff for him.

Yes.

I think part of what makes this performance so effective to me is the way the movie is set up.

You're like, oh, here's the third lead, right?

She's entered.

Yes.

And I assume the rest of the movie is going to be him ping-ponging between

two other

characters.

Right.

We'll play out there.

And then she dies so much more abruptly than you're expecting, but she somehow, within only like three scenes, gives a full enough performance that you feel like she's wedged in your mind as like an important character, where it's that jarring when she's gone.

Right.

Her role is mostly her going, like, uh, Mr.

What's his name in the movie?

Uh, Mr.

Mayhew.

Mr.

Mayhew is indisposed while he's like, Ah!

In the background, like he is the drunkest man ever involved.

Yeah, number one.

I mean, I scream for

honey when I'm drunk.

At one point, he's sing, you know, the one where he goes and peas is he's singing the song, um,

what's, you know,

Old Black Joe, which is like a, you know, a folk song that's about being a slave.

And like, the joke is that he, that's how he sees himself, right?

Is that like, that's, that's the sort of insane mental prison he's constructing where he's like, I'm enslaved to Hollywood.

I can't escape.

Slube yelling about him being a louse and Barton continuing to say, like, he's one of our finest races.

One of our finest louses.

It's the kind of Cohen dialogue.

Kind of like a Judy Davis, David Lean situation.

He won't drop it.

Yeah.

And by the way, yeah, I mean, these guys are like complaining about being enslaved to the system and everything.

Like,

as I complain about studio filmmaking, I'm also conscious of the fact that I should be so fucking watching.

Of course.

Okay.

These guys are successful.

I guess right.

I tried to turn it into a binary thing, but this is what I was trying to get at with the studio system thing of like, it made perfect sense why it needed to be eradicated in the moment.

And now you look back and you're like, fuck, was that better off?

I understand everything that was broken about it.

You know, but it's right, this striving for like,

what would I give up in order to try to eke out a win in this world?

What I am trying to say to you is that what you are really missing is an era where film was unchallenged as a visual movie.

That was a huge part of it.

Yes, a huge part of it.

It's not because the studios controlled everything.

It's because there was no competition for movies.

None.

Yes.

None.

For 50 years.

There's no competition in a visual artist.

Here's the thing.

Apart from a painting.

Well, I've heard, hey, I've seen some good ones in my life.

They're not moving at all.

Yeah, exactly.

They don't move.

Unless you kind of Mona Lisa style, kind of, she's looking at me.

Or if you carve out the holes, like Scooby-Doo style and make it.

It was probably

Pollyanna.

Right.

To be like the great, the golden age of Hollywood was a truly golden age.

No, where I'm like, specifically, a thing I wish that fucking happened.

I'm not even saying this for me, right?

Is that Netflix would be like, we're going to sign fucking like 40 character actors to yearly contracts and just slot them into our projects into these small roles.

But then she would be stuck in making.

No offense, Netflix.

Maybe Chris wants to work in Netflix one day.

Swill!

No one watches.

David, how dare you?

Big Swill.

I've never worked for Netflix, but I personally, I take offense at that.

I did watch a Freagid on Netflix.

I just keep inserting over over Swill like beautiful masterpieces.

Great films.

Best experienced on your phone or a smaller device.

Cocket size, your watch.

What you were saying is correct, Sims, but the reality is that people are begging to be cast in Swill.

Of course.

I mean, because they're like, fuck, there are no other bad things.

So if the system's based around Swill, at least make a system that benefits the people.

Spread the Swill.

I must point out about the Golden Age of Hollywood is that people who were not white were not allowed to make movies, basically at all.

And a movie that I like a lot is Babylon, which is a louder and more obnoxious movie than Barton Fink.

Yeah, you didn't you didn't notice that it had a bit of a sort of heightened yelly tone, Babylon, Grip.

I thought it was a silent high energy.

And that explores some of the interesting ways that Hollywood would try to make movies for black audiences back then, but there was so much racism in the, you know, the way it was presented and the way they treated people and all that.

And that is a movie about sort of what you're talking about of like, man, it kind of rocked back then and we were all kind of in it you know like making these fucking movies but also it was a poison rotting away you know our souls and all that i guess that right right him watching avatar at the end of the movie and being like fuck that's terrible movies rock

but industry you know some notes mezzo mezzo i think that hits me a little bit does barton fink watch avatar at the end of this movie no but it uh what's his name uh calva watches it at the end of uh babylon barton fink should watch avatar barton fink would love avatar

the life of the mind i have a question because we're talking about work and you alluded to it earlier in the episode i'd love to hear about how

this portrays writer's block the writing process i feel like we haven't heard about that uh

man i mean i think everybody's writer's block is different um uh it probably portrays it pretty realistically as sort of a form of torture and all the stuff about the life of the mind is like yeah yeah that's kind of the deal but i wouldn't talk about it in that way.

You have also had a very interesting balance in your career of like getting to make personal things that are driven by your desire to tell this specific story and like doing assignment work.

And I feel like when I talk to you, as much as you sometimes have frustrations of, I took this assignment job, but tried to do the best version of it and I'm unhappy with the final product, you do understand the difference in your relationship to the ownership and the emotional investment versus when it's your thing versus I did a job and then it was out of my hands.

Well, I think it's when it's for another director, like I do feel like I can disengage to the degree that I feel like I owe it to that director as the director's medium.

And so what they want kind of goes.

That being said, I did have a modest proposal

that I want to air on this podcast, which is that there's a little like QR code

on the poster of every movie.

And

if you click on it, you get a PDF of the original script of the fucking movie that you just saw.

Yeah.

So that you know what has happened in the interim.

Not like anyone would ever see.

You a couple times have sent that to us.

Yes.

I want to send it to the world.

And

it is very illuminating.

I want to force their eyes open with you.

I just want you guys to know this was the last thing that I handed in.

Yeah.

When my job was done, this is how it looked versus what you've seen.

But this is like, so that it's perennial, right?

This is the same crap that

is that Barton Fink feeling.

Part of why the movie resonates so beautifully.

Well, also part of the beautiful pain of the shit is like, fuck,

this movie sucks, and it's not what I wanted it to be, and I have no ownership of it, and my name is attached to it forever, and now people will hold me somewhat responsible for the sins of this film.

On the other hand, what's worse?

Not getting the credit?

Exactly.

To move us through the plot a little bit, by all means.

You know, there's another meeting with Goodman.

There's another meeting with Shaloub where he's like, still, I have no idea.

Shaloub has the hilarious idea of like, go watch some dailies from a wrestling picture that's getting made right now.

So Barton Fink just watches like endless takes of a guy going, like,

like, running around the wrestling.

Shalub's innate hostility, immediate hostility to Barton Fink, which is like, it's a similar pitch to Michael Lerner, but it's coming from the exact opposite direction, which is, I'm so fucking angry this guy's taking a liking to you.

My job is to like two guys like you out.

And for some reason, he's gotten fixated on you.

Right.

You're allowed to be bulletproof for a minute.

Right.

Yes.

And you seem even worse as a starting point than most of the guys that get handed to me.

I love that they're also at a New York themed restaurant.

Yes.

Yes.

Right.

It's just these little things where it's like he's like losing his mind.

And it's just, I love like, obviously he's feeling homesick, feeling out of sorts.

And that, and now he's at this like really pretend looking version of home.

Right.

And he thinks the Mahoney character is going to help give him guidance to sort of understanding here's how someone else has balanced these two things.

And what he realizes is this man is in hell.

He's in hell.

He's not functional.

He's not producing good work.

His life is in shambles.

Everyone surrounding him views him with resentment.

And perhaps he's not even really writing most of the work that Barton Fink attributes to him.

He looks like shit, too.

He really, they captured, like, he really is going downhill.

But it's good to what you're saying of like, right, it's a system that only allows a certain type of person to work on movies at all.

Here's Judy Davis, whose life is like cleaning up this guy's fucking vomit and not getting paid properly to write all of his work.

You know, like she has to basically like puppeteer this guy weekend at Bernie style into getting anything published or produced.

And then when Barton Fink realizes that and puts it together, he's angry at her.

It's such a good choice from Taturo that he's like yelling at her in the hotel.

She's self-righteous about it, too.

Right.

That he's calling her up to think that she can help him, but also because he's clearly got a bit of a crush on her, right?

And here's the scene where he needs something from her and wants something from her.

And the second he starts to put together that maybe she's the mind behind his last 10 to 15 years of work, his response is, wait, admit it, you wrote all of it, right?

Like accusatory, as if she committed a crime, right?

As if she's stolen something from him.

But then he's also like, why aren't you taking credit?

Like he's angry at her for not having pride.

Well, he's not understanding, not wanting the credit, I guess.

And also not understanding the system.

right and not long after that is when she comes to his hotel that that is the scene he yells at her into the right right it's all part right before they sleep and then they make love uh and the camera does go into the drain and chris thought that was a little maybe over the top

down the drain uh and his life is going down in a nightmarish moment wakes up and this is sort of where you can start to think about the movie entering a more surreal zone.

He calls her and begs her to come over.

She says she can't because she has to do work with him.

He falls asleep and then he wakes up to her knocking on the door and she's there.

I think if you want to be

on the second half of the movie, it didn't happen.

It's in that moment that the transition happens.

I would say, just to talk about the whole of Barton Fink, the moment you can really point to is when the walls catch on fire and yet the hotel is not consumed, where you can start to be like, methinks reality is blurring in Barton Fink a bit.

But I argue it's a build from there.

No, no, this is where it begins.

Fucks him.

Fucks him.

Fucks him.

He dies, And then Goodman, you know, he gets Goodman to come in and get rid of the body.

And Goodman is just alarmed, but also just does it.

Yeah.

And here's a great detail.

Another big puke.

Another off-camera puke.

Yeah.

Here's another great detail of like weird snapshots of different eras of Hollywood culture.

He says to Barton something to the effect of, this is bad.

Even if they eventually clear you in the court, you'll be ruined forever.

Yeah.

Which is clearly an analogue to Fatty Arbuckle.

In this era, this is like the earliest days of Hollywood scandals, where if you were accused of something, even if you won the case and cleared yourself in the court of law, the public wouldn't touch you ever again.

You were forever soiled.

And now, I think, just an interesting counterpoint, we're in this sort of anti-cantile culture movement.

Yes.

And basically, anytime anyone, there is like release documentation of their crimes, you immediately see 8,000 people in the comments go, well, what happened to innocent until proven proven guilty?

I'll wait until I hear all the evidence.

Like, you can, someone can be found guilty, and they're still like, well, but we all know the legal system gets things wrong.

Whereas in that day, there was this puritanical nature of like, we don't want to know too much of our stars.

The veil cannot be pierced.

And especially if any idea is implanted in our head of them doing something untoward, even if we find it's not the case, we're not getting that image out of our head.

It's over.

There is this moment, again, when we're talking about dreams,

that whereby Barton opens the Bible to Daniel 2,

where he reads a passage about Nebuchadnezzar's dream.

It's not like as much as the Cohens are like, I don't know, maybe.

Obviously, there's a lot of allusions to things.

The camera zooms in on a passage in the Bible about dreaming.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then the first verse

is his

joke becomes like he goes to the top of Daniel 2 and it's faded on a tenement building.

it's his stupid fucking intro that he can't lose.

I think the Cohens are as good with sound as anyone in the history of movies.

Without a doubt.

It is like.

I mean, we did just cover, of course, David Lynch, another master of that.

Yeah.

More loud.

But I think part of their magic is they always know how to like really put a focus on Foley work that is just 10% over cranked.

It's just a little overstated and a little overly crisp, but every single movement and texture needs to have a specific sound associated with it, which is so powerful in terms of evoking like specific feelings in you in a way that I think a lot of filmmakers undervalue in terms of going for realism or saying, like, we don't need to hear every creak of the readjustment or whatever it is.

But then they'll also, as you were saying, Chris, make these decisions of like not hearing sound outside the window of the hotel.

Yeah.

Where then when there is silence or an absence of something in a Cohen's movie, it's that much more unsettling of like, why is it this quiet?

Yeah, everything has been called through.

Nothing is by default.

Right.

Versus being able to hear the wallpaper.

This is also where Goodman's character leaves him a head in a box.

Sorry, just a box with nothing.

Just hold on to that box for me.

And then not long after the two cops appear, classic kind of Hollywood 30s, you know, like guys in hats and jackets, you know, right?

Like, who are like, that guy's not who he says he is.

He's a serial killer called Madman Munt.

I also, I think we should even say, though, that John Goodman basically does all of the hard work.

Yes, which is removing the body.

He does all of the manual work, especially.

Like, right, like he gets rid of the body.

And Barton Fink is not even really that like thankful about it.

I feel like you don't like this guy.

I feel like you got a problem with Barton Fink.

But also, Ben.

He's the voice of the people.

He is not.

I think he's trying.

It's bad manners not to thank the person who's disposed of the corpse that you found in your bed.

You should at least say at least verbal thanks, if not a tip, sure.

Like a crisp 20, you know, and a handshake.

But also, this is a key question: like, is he the one who murdered her?

Yeah.

And is his helping of Barton Fink helping to set him up?

By the way, that's the most got that.

If you're going to take it, that's the most straightforward kind of like.

He's basically making a trap for him to incriminate him, part of him, part of which is him being that helpful.

The way I sort of take Barton Fink, not again, to be like sort of like, this is what the movie means, is I'm like, no, I mean, like,

Charlie/slash Carl is in his imagination.

And it's like, initially, it's this patronizing vision of sort of like, yes, this is the kind of guy I'm writing for.

The guy who's like, oh, well, you know, I'm an honest Joe and I'm an honest fucker.

I'm just going to have PLC.

Control your hair.

And then as he starts to curdle in madness and get, you know, hate that he's writing this movie, he starts to.

He's like, he villainizes that guy.

Exactly.

Like, they're just, like, they're just monsters.

And not only that, like, he's disgusting.

He can't stop sweating.

Right, exactly.

Before he literally becomes a serial killer and an embodiment of hell.

And then, right, first it's the serial killer thing.

And then he's, right, he is a demon.

Like he's a demon.

I'm going to tie it to the kind of the film thing, which is like he's imagining an audience or a potential audience, like there's a subject in an audience, right?

And like.

When you go to these marketing screenings, part of the reason I think that

obviously they're asking the questions that they're asking of the audience in order to try to maximize the profit that you can make of it.

But if you look at the questions, basically they're treating the audience like a bunch of fucking fucking morons.

Right.

Right.

And they don't say it, but it's like, how can we get money out of these fucking morons?

Yes.

Yes.

It is kind of astonishing.

I mean, it's the truth.

A couple of times I've done it.

There's questions basically are like, did you get this?

Yeah.

Does this make sense?

Did you track that this was happening in the end?

Do you know how it works?

It really doesn't affect.

My experience in TV was almost always having these conversations with executives where they'd say, like, you try to argue for why you thought

the integrity of a thing, you wanted to convey a certain way, how you want to execute it, what you were trying to say.

And then their response is always almost verbatim, something to the effect of,

no, no, no, no, no, we get it.

We love it.

I'm just worried about them.

I have been shown movies by studios early, like, well, before they're screening for press.

in these screenings where they're essentially like, can you tell us if people will get this?

Yes.

Like, and we're not going to take your on fact here but like we are we're trying to see we think people are not going to get this and they will usually show me a broadly appealing film that is not that hard to get it

the thing i find fascinating about the no no no of course we get it and they always have like and we know what she's going for or we know what that guy wants but like does it make sense and mark variants tv executives while you're inside the belly of the beast right is like

Either it is very clear that they assume everyone in the audience is an idiot and they're a genius.

That's the assumption, right?

Right.

And they can't be making things at their own level because their level of intellect does not reflect the target audience of the product.

Or they clearly don't get it.

Like they literally just don't understand.

You get into these arguments sometimes where you're like, oh, you actually just didn't get that's the same character.

Yeah.

I mean, that's only happened to me once, but there was a movie.

I don't know if I should say it.

I probably will just say it, which is The Little Stranger.

A good movie.

Oh, yes.

Where I had a conversation with someone who worked for some, I forget if, I honestly, I forget if it was a studio or for public.

I remember you being like, where they were like, I had to explain the ending to them.

Not in a patriot.

I was like, no, but the ending was this.

And they were like,

ah.

And I was like, oh, you don't know that that's because the ending's kind of the whole movie.

That movie got totally dumped for someone who had just directed a best picture nominee.

And I remember you saying to me that like you had had that conversation with them and were like, I think it's good.

And they were like, really?

It's good.

They were truly like

used.

Now, it's news to me.

After

the disposal of the body and all that, there's a scene, I think.

First, Barton writes the script.

He puts plugs in his ears and he writes a script.

He goes into a Cohen's-s flow state and just vomits it out.

And then a scene that's kind of pivotal is that he goes to celebrate by dancing.

And he gets in this fight with these guys who are about to ship out to the war.

Right.

An impossibly square-jawed man.

Yes.

Hilarious, like action created.

Great casting.

And so much of this.

It's a scene where Barton is clearly like, I hate these fucking jocks.

And you're like, the guy says, like, hey, can I dance with her?

I'm shipping out tomorrow.

Right.

Like, you're like, oh, he's actually

dogging him at all.

Right.

Yeah.

But then he starts dancing.

He's like, I am a writer.

Right.

It's contempt for the audience.

And then that's where he's like, I serve the common man.

And they all start beating him up.

I'm like creative.

It's like the worst.

Yes.

Worst thing to do.

The other part of it is like throughout the movie, there have been a bunch of like anti-Semitic slurs thrown at Barton Fink almost always by other Jewish characters, right?

It's like the self-loathing Jewish heart of the entertainment industry that is sort of like, we are trash and we need to have contempt for ourselves as we make art that reflects the goyum, what we want to be, right?

And yet when these guys attack him, the slur, as it were, that they are throwing at him is 4A.

Yes.

Right?

No, 4F.

Not 4A.

4F.

I'm sorry.

That they're constantly mocking like, you're, as you were saying, good enough to fit to Critter Wars.

This feeling that all the capable men are about to leave the culture and we're going to be left like with fucking self-loathing weasels like this guy.

And then the movie ends with its final

long sequence: he returns to the hotel, the cops are there, they've read the script.

One of them kind of likes it, one of them doesn't.

And then Goodman reappears.

The walls catch fire.

Goodman shoots the cops.

And then monologues at Barton.

Can you pull up in the dossier?

JJ had a good section about how they execute the hallway gag.

I can bring that up.

But that was a dangerous

pain in the ass.

They, in 1991, were like, well, obviously we'll have to do this with CGI, which I can't imagine how bad it would have looked at the time.

But they were just like, I don't know how we could safely execute this.

And it's why I want you to pull this up because it's just like astounding that they got it.

It was wondering how they did it and that no one died.

Yeah.

Trying to find this.

It's in the dossier?

Yeah.

So why are you looking at it?

He says, look upon me.

I'm thinking about the bits that have been sort of

taken magpie fashion by other movies.

It's felt like witness me a bit.

Look upon me, and I'll show you the life of the mind.

Yeah.

And then there's this weird moment where John Goodman's character says Heil Hitler, right?

Before he shoots the second game.

But I do not think that this is the key to unlocks anything, actually.

No, but it's like that's what's happening in the moment: this monstrousness is creeping, you know, around the edges of the world.

He also brings up the thing

from their first meeting, which is that Barton complained about the noise.

Yeah.

And like he's like saying like that he's still wounded by this.

Now he did just shoot a bunch of people.

His sympathies might be, you know, but like that he's like, and you just complained about me making noise.

Like I'm, you know, right.

Like he, he starts to speak aloud and castigate Barton.

Goodman, you know, and he says, you don't listen.

That's kind of cool.

And Goodman's a character whose like ears are literally like causing him pain.

Why would that there's like goo like leaking out of his ears?

And he's going to doctors, he's trying to get this fucking thing figured out.

And yet, like, he's still trying to listen to Barton.

I mean, it's it's real, like, acting is reacting shit, where the shifts between Goodman doing his sort of like verbose Cohen's runs, and then when he sort of pulls back, and you can just fucking watch Goodman process whatever flowery shit Martin Fink is going on.

There's such a universe of reaction within him.

It's a freaking amazing performance.

We said that at the beginning.

Why can't I find this?

Okay, where is it?

Let me look it up.

Yeah.

Maybe, I think you must have found it somewhere else.

I think it's not in the dossier no offense to JJ.

Maybe it's on America's Most Trusted News Source, Wikipedia.

Possibly.

We skipped over the poolside scene.

Oh, yeah, then I wanted to see.

I saw a section learner scene where he's in the bathrobe.

And I wanted to shout out John Polito.

We love him.

He's like, has that guy ever had hair?

Yeah, he was born here to come over here.

Here's the great thing.

And so pinned not to talk about this in the Miller's Crossing episode, but we'll just do it here because you asked me to do it.

He's got six Cohen movies.

Yes.

John Polito.

We're going to have a lot of wonderful time with Mr.

Polito.

He did, I believe, a random roles with the A.V.

Club

about 10 years ago before his

untimely passing

subject for that.

And he said that he had known the Cohens when he was younger.

Maybe they had gone to see him in a play.

Okay.

And he read the Miller's Crossing script and was like, I got to play this guy.

And have you seen Miller's Crossing before?

No.

That's sort of his biggest role.

You will have seen it last week, but he's playing more the learner type in that movie.

Right.

Okay.

And he reads it and is like, I got to play this fucking part and had his agent submit him.

And the Cohens respond like, oh, he's not the right type.

That's not what we're looking for.

And to Pol as Polito tells it.

In five years, he had gained a lot of weight and lost all of his hair.

And he was like, the last headshot saw me was, I was a pretty boy.

And they thought of me as this like Italian hunk.

Oh, damn, he kind of was.

And he was just like,

I have so comfortably transformed into this different type of performer that I'm owning and loving.

And I have to sell the Cohen brothers that I've become the perfect Cohen Brothers character at.

Which he sure had.

But they had him in their mind as like a pretty boy.

So he did have that era.

But yet, the second he started looking like John Polito, that's when he really started working and never stopped.

It is from Wikipedia Griffin, but I'm sure this is true.

They built an alternate hallway in an airplane hangar, putting gas jets behind the walls, obviously.

And sort of incrementally with each passing step following him.

Correct.

As Woodman's walking.

uh through the hall running through someone on a catwalk is opening all the jets just like precision timing every take they had to rebuild everything they had a second hallway ready for pickups yeah that is expensive so i was thinking about like the But my guess is like largely this production was not that expensive beyond like costuming.

Like they're doing a lot of location stuff.

The hotel is really good.

It shows their targets.

I'm sure Dennis.

I think he just made the argument.

Like it's worth spending the money on this.

This is where to put the money.

And it sure is because this had two.

It curved into my memory.

It's a fairly compelling scene.

If CGI flames, the movie would fall apart in a CD.

It would be a bit of a bummer.

And so, or whatever post-production kind of like optic, I don't know what you would would do.

And it's not just that the imagery is so powerful, but it's also like watching Goodman crank his performance all the way up to the maximum volume while surrounded by real fire.

Yeah.

It feels so real because you're like, he's actually having to do this surrounded by this level.

I'm sure it would have been a scary.

It would have been, there would have been a long fucking safety meeting beforehand.

Nobody would be quite sure if things were going to blow up or not.

Is the set going to catch on fire?

You'd be pretty, pretty, pretty amped.

But like miracle of movies that they got it.

After Goodman's incredible monologue, he does something that I think is really cool, which is he pulls the bed spring apart, you know, the bed frame apart, and the camera zooms in on his face in what's become sort of a meme almost, right?

Like it's

his training.

Yes, that particular image of him.

Yeah, you're right.

And then he does say, right, he visited the family in New York and the package isn't his.

And he goes, like, this, and that's the end of him.

And then he walks into the flames.

This is his last line.

Isn't it Hail Hitler?

Or it's right now.

No, he says Hail Hitler before he shoots the guy.

Oh, you're right.

The second last thing is, the package I gave you lied, it isn't mine.

And then he just goes like this.

Rocks, he should have won an Oscar.

I think he's too scary.

That's my assumption: is that the Oscars were like, I don't know what to make of this.

It's too weird.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I do.

I do just think the movie was a little too heady for them at the time.

It is a weird movie.

It just feels like this guy was like,

we talked about how quickly, like, Roseanne's season one, springboards to always springboards to the Flintstones.

Like, America just immediately was like, we're buying anything

with this guy.

He was clearly so beloved within the industry.

It still is, but was right out of the gate.

It just feels like an obvious, like, kind of.

But he only makes one movie next year, which is The Vape.

But then I feel like by a couple years later, and obviously he's making Roseanne, his sort of like, he's in a lot of stuff career starts, right?

Where it's like, Goodman's a pretty reliable, like two, three, four movies a year.

This is the era where they were like, I guess he has to be a leading man, right?

I guess we have to construct vehicles around him.

What's the right source material?

What's the right projects?

And then he, I think,

like

transitions to an area of flexibility of like, I'll just do anything.

I'm happy to play the lead.

I'm happy to be in one scene.

I'm happy to be the second guy.

And the Cohen's always used.

I'll do comedy and indie and drama and action.

And yeah, he's just, he's fucking

not only is he, you know, the classic Sims, when's he bad?

When is he bad?

I was watching it last night and I was like, has this guy ever had a moment that is less than great?

You know, I genuinely.

I saw him on Broadway in the front page,

which was this sort of all-star

cast thing where it was like fucking Nathan Lane

John Slattery and Goodman, where you're like, Jesus, any of these guys could headline a Broadway play, right?

You know, like, what the fuck is going on?

And it was that weird sort of phase in his life where he suddenly lost a lot of weight.

Yes.

And his energy changed a lot.

He got so bad.

He was kind of rueful.

And it's not like he was bad in it, but you were kind of, I was remembering being let down by like, he was a little muted.

And it was sort of like, that's weird.

In a play that's mostly people like screaming at the top of their heads.

Or top of their lungs.

Sorry.

I just, but I never, I have certainly never thought he was bad.

I have never, I've I've not seen every single thing he's done, but I have not, in my mind, consciously witnessed a false moment from him.

What about Blues Brothers 2000?

I think

that's good in it.

I re-watched it recently.

I believe you.

You guys see everything.

I want to say

I've not seen Blues Brothers 2000.

And I watched it like six months ago.

I was like, it's time to reassess.

Well, to an extent, David, it's your job, right?

So

you always seem to see everything.

Right now, it is.

my job.

I'm just sick.

Yeah, doing great.

But it's hard.

Is it hard to keep up with movies with children?

And I sympathize, David.

Well, that's true, but you just have to, in my opinion, when you're a parent, you do have space for kind of like one extracurricular thing, basically.

It's kind of what it is that you pick, right?

I don't know.

The final two scenes, coda scenes are so, so good.

Michael Lerner in his like Mussolini costume, where he's like had a general costume rigged up for him.

That's when he's turned on Fink, where he's like, this is too farty.

Good side gag when he turns around because you think he's in a tan suit and then suddenly he's covered in metal.

So funny.

Yeah.

And in a days after being chewed out for his whatever terrible script, he goes to the beach.

He sees the lady from the painting.

He's got the box.

And she goes like this, you know,

and that's it.

And he says, you're very beautiful.

Are you in the pictures?

And she says, don't be silly.

And

I had a false memory that what she says is, don't be silly, nothing good comes of the pictures.

That would be way too obvious.

Yeah.

But that's what I took away, actually.

It is the takeaway.

Yeah, sure.

No, I think this movie is about how writing is fun and easy and pictures are easy breezy and right.

It's good.

Hollywood.

I mean, they're no business like show business.

They talk about it.

A lot of the quotes that JJ put up in the dossier is they're just like, a lot of this stuff just comes out of us organically.

Like it does feel like so much of their incubation process is they start to hone in on a couple things they find interesting.

And it's like, huh, that's an interesting historical moment.

This is an interesting place.

What about a character like this?

What if we wrote for this guy?

And then they get to a point where they have like eight elements they find compelling.

And then they're just like, let's just see where it goes.

And there's an episode of, of course, my favorite

web series, The Russo Brothers Pizza Film School, in which they have Josh Brolin on.

This is the Russa Brothers have a show where they interview people who worked on movies and break down storytelling and screenplays.

And they are guys who think about storytelling in a pretty formulaic way.

They are

of how much they feel like they have figured out the scheme of how to make stories.

Because the first movie they ever made, Welcome to Collinwood, is a, you know, very, very straightforward Cohen Brothersy kind of movie.

Big deal on Madonna Street room.

It's very Cohen'sy, right?

And they're talking to, they didn't, unsurprisingly, the Cohen brothers did not want to go on pizza film school, but Josh Brolin did.

And they did a no country episode with them.

And they were trying to apply their screenplay logic math, right?

And being like, look, it doesn't seem like it, but if you actually break apart the script and you stopwatch it, there is this very deliberate construction.

And Josh Brolin was just like, look, I've worked with them a couple of times.

I've talked to them a lot.

They do not think that way.

They just like, they start on page one and they get to the end and they write what's interesting to them.

And they are not thinking about what it would take to keep the audience invested or how you're swinging their alliances or any of these sorts of things.

I think so much of their magic is just they know how to make every single scene interesting.

Even with these movies that are oddly shaped, does not feel

hard to identify, they're able to just always isolate and circle what is the inherent drama and comedy of this scene in a way that is really playable, that is surrounded by them working with the best craftspeople in the world, where you're just on board leading in, trying to figure out what the fuck is going on yeah i agree i think i think they're organically and um multifariously excellent yeah um film was at 91 can um big competition there i would say is keshlowski's double life of ferron hink uh also uh lars von trier's europa

yeah uh is um homicide the mammoth movie which is really good jungle fever

uh Bill Duke's Rage in Harlem.

There's good movies.

There's not movies.

Boys in the Hood played out of competition.

Sure.

I mean, obviously there's other stuff like that, but it was in certain regards.

Film and Louise was the closing film.

Right.

It was a good year.

But it's not a lineup where you're like, oh, damn.

Like, it's a lineup where you look at it.

You're like, well, Barton Fink is the best movie of the year.

No, we should acknowledge that Polanski was the head of the jury.

He was.

And this is a very Polanski-inspired film.

And I think it's part of why there was this backlash.

But it was a unanimous jury victory.

It was.

And Lars von Trier.

Lars von Trier

said thanks very much to the midget and to the rest of the jury.

Insulting Polanski.

That's weird.

That guy never says off-the-cuff stuff at hand film festival.

The film got made $6 million in America, released by Fox, which means, of course, Barton Fink will be in Avengers Doomsday.

He's joining the cast.

He's going to be one of the Spider-Man villains, right?

Hear the strains of Tarter Burwell's score as the camera pans over.

It got very good reviews and three Oscar nominations, but certainly was most.

More polarizing, I would say.

Yeah, I mean, this is the rude era of Toturo kind of being snubbed for this.

And then Quizhow really is what should have been his like makeup nomination.

And in both cases of these movies, there's kind of like the surprise, oh, they nominated this other guy instead.

They nominated Michael Lerner instead of John Goodman.

They nominated Paul Schofield instead of Taturo.

Rosenbaum and Hoberman, who are the great critics of their era, both hated it.

Yeah.

And sort of Hoberman sort of is like, they both have this kind of like, what is this?

Is Cohen's self-hating Jews shit?

You know, they're both like picking at that very early on, which to me, again, I'm like, get over it.

And to be clear, I deeply respect those men and they inspired me to the work that I do.

But

I think they're looking at it the wrong way.

The thing that always happens with sort of prodigiously talented filmmakers, which is like, oh, we get it.

You know how to make a movie.

The craft is impeccable.

But is that all this is?

Some like whiz-bang contraption, some like construction to impress us with your like knowledge of the medium.

And it, I just, it still happens to this day.

It always happens when people come out of the gate hot and they have a couple successes in a row, and there starts to be a dialogue of like, are these people starting to make the case for entering the pantheon?

There is always a percentage of the critical community, even more so now that it's just open to the fucking internet and social media

who just go, I need to take this guy down.

We cannot put this new person on the same tier as like

established masters.

A lot this year.

And yet, to your point, when you're like, I feel like they are the greatest living filmmakers, not you, because you have always been so open with us, but like increasingly over the last four or five years, we will hear about filmmakers we admire who listen to the podcast.

And we're like, holy shit, that person listens.

That is crazy.

And then we get in touch with them.

And the way we get in touch with you, part of it's the show's gotten bigger.

They're more worried about there being more ears on it.

But people will say, like, I kind of feel uncomfortable coming on and talking about someone else's work.

Sure.

I don't want to shit on stuff.

And the flip side is

I don't want to like call dibs on a big movie because I'm expecting your guests want to hear an Alex Ross Perry-style 20-page horror syllabus.

And if I don't know the whole movie backwards and forwards, sure, I come on.

Right.

It has been interesting.

And who knows, this is early in the series and things can change.

But we've like circled back to filmmakers who have been weary for the last couple of years.

And a lot of them are like, oh, oh, I'll do the Cohen's.

They want to jump in.

There is a thing.

Because they're unimpeachably great,

really.

You can't say, like,

I'm looking down on this movie.

They're endlessly talkable movies, open to like endless interpretations.

And it also feels like, even though they are still alive and still working, whether separately or together, they are on a different tier.

It feels like they're basically accepted as like living masters now.

They're in the Pantheon,

not contemporaries, in a way.

Before we play the box office game, we must acknowledge that, jokingly or not, the Cohens did to Josh Horitz bring up the idea of old fink.

Yes.

A sort of semi-jokey sequel where they were kind of like, he's in his, it's at the 60s.

He's, you know, he's teaching at a liberal arts college.

Teaching at Berkeley.

And he ratted on everyone to whoever.

It's as close to Huak Shame.

And he like

Toturo

said,

I'm down.

Right.

We have talked about it, at least jokingly.

About 15 years ago, both parties said we can't make it until he's a little older.

Right.

Now, Toturo is having, not that Toturo is never not having a moment, but he is having a bit of a moment from Severance.

The Coens, it's time to get back together.

There's multiple things where they've been like, let's make a sequel, but they're kidding.

But this is the only one I'd actually want to see.

Like, Taturo, of course, made his own weird Big Lebowski sidequool that no one was asking for.

Well, but they used to, that also was one of those projects projects that they would kind of joke about.

Right.

And the answer was, eh, we weren't really asking for this.

Right.

I think it feels like a real movie.

That doesn't feel like a dumb pitch.

I think it's, it's why everyone goes, like, are they just fucking with us?

Because they have a tendency to fuck with the public in that way.

Right.

Yeah.

So anyway, that's out there.

Yeah.

Who knows?

Yeah.

But like I'm saying, Tutoro's hot right now.

Irv.

We're all obsessed with Irv.

I mean, they are very perverse, right?

That's another thing I love about them.

Yes.

Don't want anything, Cole.

They got sex stuff going on.

I remember many sort of brains of theirs.

I remember before I really knew their work that well, like reading a forward to maybe it was that screenplay, but written by their editor, and I didn't know that they worked together under an assumed name.

Roderick Jaynes.

Yeah, Roderick James.

And Roderick Jaynes was kind of dumping on, like, damning with faint praise.

Yes.

And being a bit anti-Semitic about it.

They've created this fake character.

One of their movies, there's a commentary track where they hired an actor to play Roderick Jaynes, I think.

And I think

I think it was the

Blood Simple.

The director's cut of Blood Simple.

And Jaynes talks about how it's better because there's less boring stuff in it.

That's the rare director's cut that is shorter because they went back to their first film and were like, we were fucking idiots.

We'd know how to make this better.

No.

They famously, who knows if it's true or not.

When they got nominated as Roderick James for Fargo, we might bring this up on the Fargo episode.

They were like, what do we do?

Like, Roderick James has been nominated for an Oscar, and they wanted to dress up Albert Finney in like a weird costume and have him be Roderick James, but then they didn't go through with it.

Yeah.

But anyway, the boxing.

Do you remember when Adaptation was nominated and they were presenting the nominees and they actually showed two Charlie Kaufmans on the screen?

They created a graphic for Charlie.

Oh, wait, that was my year.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You were nominated.

Who did you guys lose to?

The piano.

The pianist?

Sorry, the pianist.

Not the piano, right?

Yes, the pianist.

That's somewhat of a surprising win.

Funny to imagine, though, in the same category, there is like

Chris and Paul Weitz showing two real brothers and Charlie and Donald Kaufman showing a fake brother.

It's funny because, right,

people thought the hours or Chicago was.

You definitely thought the hours.

I could tell you who thought the hours was going to be.

David was David Hare.

You guys caught everything up until that point.

He had a Judy Davis moment.

Right.

And right.

Adaptation and About a Boy, the two best nominees in that category were probably kind of a pleasure to be nominated or whatever.

Well, absolutely.

And then the pianist won, and that was the first sign of like, oh, this is,

oh, shit.

You know, and then it won two other big Oscars.

There was a wild energy to that night where for like three minutes you were like, the pianist is winning this.

That's a winter fiction.

And it was shocking almost

to the presumed front, right?

And the guy gets up there and he's like, hey, Chicago.

And you're like, I mean, Chicago's a B-plus.

I guess let's go home.

Bunch of people gyrating in lingerie.

How dare you.

Chicago is pretty good.

I think Adaptation should have won that year.

Well, it wasn't nominated, so that was the biggest thing.

Oh, for a screenplay, it would be an amazing, obviously, but for best adapted screenplay, adaptation would have been pretty cool.

They've given it a sound adaptation.

It's freaking great.

He wins two years later for Eternal Sunshine, another good movie.

Also, very good.

No, that's also the year that El Motavar wins original screenplay, which was also surprising because

he didn't give him.

Spain didn't nominate him.

Spain had not submitted him for foreign film because Spain gets in weird fights with him.

But then he got the surprise writing and directing

an incredible movie.

One of his best movies.

But then him winning was still shocking.

He did beat out Todd Haynes, which was a little sad because that was probably Haynes' shot.

Yeah.

Who are the other three?

Gangs of New York, which was probably not going to win.

Cox, Zaley, and Millenurgan.

Most adaptation.

Yeah.

Ichimama Tambien, which was like a great nom, right?

I guess that was.

Gangs was a original.

No, this is original.

This is what I'm saying.

Ganges was classified as original because the book it's based on is a fact book.

And I guess they pulled so much it's has from different animals they made a lot of sense and then

uh my big fact requires

which i think there was some thought of like will that will that get a win to acknowledge the like triumph of this movie but then i think everyone was like let's not be crazy like yeah take it easy yeah

this film came out august 23rd 1991

seasonally appropriate in terms of you want it to be muggy yes but not really when you want to release this movie i don't know when you release this movie but it's these days would probably be more of a fall award.

It's stuck in Hot Off the Can't Heat.

They were like, Let's strike while the Iron's muggy.

And

it's opening

release, obviously.

So it's not in our top 10.

Number one at the Box Office.

I'm sure Ben's seen it.

I'm sure Griffin's seen it.

Perhaps Chris has seen it.

It's a satirical film.

But you jump to Ben first.

You think this is in the Hosley canon?

Maybe.

Satirical.

1991.

A spoof of

famous Hollywood movies of the time.

Hotshots part due.

It's Hot Shots.

Oh, the first one.

I've never seen the first one.

That doesn't surprise me either.

Much like Under Siege and

whatever, where you got the sequel a lot because it was on TV more.

I definitely watched Part Du many, many times.

And then I was like, if this is part two, I can't imagine how good the first one is.

And I recognize that.

It's going to be one half as good.

I had not seen Top Gun.

Sure.

And Hot Shots Part Doctor.

Hots Part Do is just action things.

It's making fun of everything.

Hotshots one is just a top gun.

And I was like, I don't get any of this.

Oh, sure.

Hotshots, it's

pretty funny.

I watched the first one recently.

It's funny.

But two is better.

Yeah.

Well, two is a little more like, let's just be ridiculous.

I feel like.

It's a garbage plate.

Right.

In a good way.

Number two at the box office.

So, Chris, you don't care about hotshots?

I haven't seen it.

I didn't see it.

Number two is a rom-com

movie star, I guess, rom-com.

It's not a bad movie.

It's all right.

It's a movie star.

It's kind of a classic formula.

It's 1991.

It's a classic formula.

You know,

it's got a bit of a TV vibe to it.

It's not, it could, it could happen to you.

No, but which is kind of an interesting movie.

Yeah.

It is kind of an interesting movie.

No.

You know, it's a...

What if a big shot kind of got taken down a peg?

You know, big city, small town movie.

Oh, it's not Doc Hollywood.

It's Michael J.

Fox and Doc Hollywood.

Doc Hollywood?

A fun movie.

It's just the classic, like, what if a big Shot's car broke down in a small town?

Right.

That's fantastic.

That's true.

That's very cars.

But this time it's Big Shot Doctor.

10 years later.

And he's got to become like the community doctor to earn his way out of it.

10 years later, they cracked the code and they said, wait a minute.

Can't walk?

I don't know.

It doesn't.

It makes sense.

Don't worry.

It's like cars is Doc Hollywood.

You're fucking stepping on

the joke I was going to tee up.

I was going to say that 15 years later, they finally cracked the formula.

And so get rid of the guy.

Just make a car breaks down on cars.

it's like he crashes into a fence and they're like you have to be a doctor for 30 hours of community service to make back the car offense first cars and then you know what to one document would it's insane you know what ben he kind of learns that like life at a slower pace with sort of like you know more sort of down-to-earth folk has got some appeal because you know who plays

Before he was a guy in Hollywood who had sunglasses and he might kind of like look down the sunglasses, perhaps at a lady.

And he would be in a rush.

He's in a rush.

He's got a cell phone.

But this is why cars are so smart because what's faster than a race car?

The ultimate rush.

Woody Harrelson basically plays the mater in that movie.

Yes.

Woody Harrelson is the folks.

Who's the love interest?

It's Julie Warner.

Julie Warner.

Who's playing sort of the Sally Carrera?

Right.

Did not have a gigantic career.

Yeah.

Who's the Doc Hudson in that picture?

David Argenstires.

Oh, of course.

Who's fun?

It's a fun movie.

It's a Sarge.

Who would you say is the Sarge in the film one?

Moving on to the third film, Mr.

Rowland.

We covered a very popular action film.

uh-huh been out for two months it's a sequel we certainly is it terminator two judgment day it's correct yeah good movie the highest grossing film is a good movie number four at the box office is a movie i have vaguely heard of okay um it stars an oscar winner it's a drama

i think it's based loosely on like a real guy's recent war

uh he would have won in the 80s yeah probably the last five or six years but i think his career is starting to curdle okay uh famously a bit of a tough cookie this actor this actor is a bit of a tough cookie.

Oh, I feel like I know.

What is it?

I know.

If you guessed this movie, no, I can't guess the movie, but is it George C.

Scott?

No.

No.

No.

George C.

Scott.

He's already.

No, he's with him.

No, no, no.

George C.

Scott's still with us, I think.

Yeah, George C.

Scott, his final film is Angus,

which is later.

He died in 1999.

No.

No, this is an actor.

He was a huge asshole.

I mean, but he was a big movie star.

He was a very good actor.

Not Dreyfus, but you're close.

Who's the other one?

Not Dreyfus is time.

Who's the other Oscar winner from that era who is a huge asshole?

It's not John Voigt.

No.

Oh, is it William Hurts?

Yes.

A man Rob.

I'm the first of the opportunity to play the Red Hulk by mortality.

Poor Mr.

Hurt.

And that's right.

I'm going to keep bringing up the Red Hulk.

You can't stop me.

The film is.

The film is.

I'm going to tell the listeners what I got you for your birthday.

You got me a...

It's sort of like a Pez dispenser, but for lollipops in the shape of the Red Hulk.

It's like a lollipop protector.

It's a plastic red Hulk.

I guess so.

It's like you go to a little lollipop and then

store it away.

Just mindful.

You love sucking on a lolly, but your least favorite part is that once you start, you can't stop.

There's no pause points.

So true.

And I said, what if the skull of the rolk we've been recording for so long could protect the lolly is called the doctor.

Birthday present.

You still haven't said thank you.

Thank you.

Oh, you're right.

I definitely said thank you.

It came from the heart for me.

You're pretty drunk.

Oh, no, I give it to you during the day.

And I wasn't even that drunk in my birthday drink.

How long are we running, Ben?

Are we heading for record territory?

Gentlemen's 310.

It's a long time.

Yeah, we're getting.

Yeah, we're getting.

The film is called The Doctor.

Has anyone heard of this film?

No, it's like a doctor.

I don't know about it.

What's it about?

What if there was a fucking doctor?

It's got William Hurt, Christine Lottie, Tinkins there.

Okay.

Perk Inns.

Elizabeth, that is.

Oh.

Adam Arkin.

Yep.

I don't know.

Whatever.

It's one of those things where it's like the movie got fine reviews and made $40 million.

And you're like, $40 million for a movie I've never heard of that's clearly stupid.

In 1991, that's what I'm saying.

I've been been going through this thing where like that fucking uh i watched all the vacation movies because of doing european vacation with heckling right i didn't i hadn't watched the gold scene daily when we had recorded that episode watched it after the fact what did you think i thought it was okay it's a moment i really think the first 20 minutes you're like hell yeah this is funny and then you just kind of lose it their stuff it's wonky uh and it's just emblematic of a crisis point for uh studio live action films and i think of that movie as being seen as a big disappointment and like a big failure then you look up you look at it you're like it made a fucking $150 million worldwide.

Not bad.

People were like pulling their hair out of the fact it only ended up at like 67 domestic or whatever.

Number five at the box office

is a neonir thriller.

Um, it is a director who we could cover, but he's made a lot of movies at this point.

Freegan, no,

uh, freakin''s dead, so he's he can't make any more movies.

This guy's a lot of people.

Oh, oh, oh, oh.

Well, it's not Soderberg.

No, not Adrian Lyne.

Not Adrian Lyne.

The fact that it's a neonoir is a bit of a trick.

That's not his main turf.

It's his second film.

And I do feel like it's him being like, hey, I got more in me than what you think I do.

But he did make a lot of more epic costumey stuff.

Interesting.

But he's also an actor and he's also the star of this film.

Not Ron Howard.

He made too many films at this point.

He's also the star of this movie.

He sure is.

And he's made a lot of them.

It's not a Clint Eastwood, obviously.

He's an actor

director who's made a lot of movies.

That's interesting.

Because a lot of these guys were throwing out direct infrequently.

He, in the 2020s, has already made four movies, and he's got another one coming.

And does he still star in most of them or does he mostly make him?

He is.

He's pulling back on starring in all of them.

He did recently make a franchise for himself.

He did recently.

That he is the star of, and he made three movies.

He recently made a.

And he directed all of those?

He sure did.

Who is this guy?

You know him.

You love him.

He recently won an Academy Award.

He recently won.

Hollywood's highest honor.

Lead or support it.

Screenplay.

It's Kenneth Branagh.

Kenneth Branagh.

And it's Dead Again?

The film is dead again with Emma Thompson.

This is a perfect example.

Really good movie.

Like a really

fun, like super fun

early 90s thriller.

That is a perfect example of everything you just described.

You're like, this is impossible.

No one possibly fulfills it.

Well, the craziest thing is that Bran is like, I'm going to direct my ass off at Bibbico.

And it's like, and by the way, I'm sneaking in those Poirot movies.

And guess who the star is?

You'll look at Adam.

Right.

You're like, by the way, very nice man.

Incredible amount of energy as well.

He's always

fucking five movies.

You see Tennet, him doing those monologues?

He's great.

Do you know he was directing two Poirots while filming Tennis?

Doing Tennett?

Like

when he's doing phone calls, right?

He's like a

little bit

of scenes and he just cut around it.

Yeah.

Venice needs to be more haunted.

I'll talk to you in 10 minutes.

Dead again.

Fun movie.

Other movies in the top 10.

We've got the John Claude Van Damme twin picture double impact,

which I've never seen.

Me neither.

Bet you it's good.

We've got the

Mickey Rourke sort of tail end of his movie star career, Harley Davidson and the Marlborough Man.

He always cites that as the movie that single-handedly killed his career.

To which I would say, I think there were a couple steps in that process.

Yeah, there's a behavior as well that you might want to point to.

One bad movie, and suddenly people stopped picking up the phone.

Maybe you were like, also, the punches you were throwing.

There is Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, another big hit of that year.

There's a comedy I've never heard of called Pure Luck, starring Martin Short and Danny Clover.

Yes.

Wow.

Like a copy.

French director.

Nadia Tasse.

Had a bit of a Burton Fink experience and has spent the last 25 years, 30 years being like, this is why Hollywood is bad, relating everything back to her experience.

I make my film pure luck, no one understands.

Yes.

I believe it's a buddy cop movie.

Yeah, looks like it.

Or, or Glover's a cop.

Yeah, Glover's a cop for sure.

And Martin Short's like a suspect or a witness or whatever.

He's a psychologist.

But the whole thing is that he's got like

cosmically bad luck, that like cartoonishly bad things keep happening.

Uh-oh.

Number 10 at the box office is a film called Defenseless.

What is that?

No idea.

1991 film called Defenseless, directed by Martin Campbell, starring Barbara Hershey and Sam Shepard,

legal thriller.

Okay.

I don't know.

Got bad reviews.

Because you need a defense.

Yeah.

Legal defense.

If you are defenseless.

But if you're in love and you're defenseless against someone's charms.

Stakes are high.

Yeah, very good.

All done.

Got to pee again because we've recorded for so long.

I hate to pee as well, and I've just been holding it in, and I'm not looking for applause.

I just want people to know that.

Chris, anything else?

Let me see.

Do I have anything to add?

No, I'm just really glad to be back on the main feed.

I just feel like you go through these cycles.

And by the way, always happy to receive these texts and give you pep talks, which are often just like, Chris, you're a good guy and you do good work.

This industry is frustrating.

I don't think you should give up.

But

you will go through these cycles.

And they will both be in terms of like the nature of the industry and your experiences working on things.

But also,

you have

one of the strongest moral backbones of anyone I know.

I truly mean that.

And you often will just text and be like, I am just so disgusted by like this behavior I'm seeing or this attitude or this thing.

And I just don't know if I want to be around these people.

I want to be in Hollywood, but not of it if possible.

Yeah, let me see.

Actually, you know, when I when I think I've been in kind of a meta cycle of like 15 years-ish kind of in the wilderness in a way of like trying to react to that, you know, kind of devastating experience of the golden compass and kind of always sort of over hyper-correcting in some other weird way.

And I think the one movie that I really think like that is a good movie is

A Better Life.

Yeah.

The movie that Demon D Bish started in, which is unfortunately still relevant.

And I'm like, okay, okay, that was a good one.

That was a good one.

But I love Operation Finale.

Thank you very much.

It is part of what is so unique and fascinating about your exact position is you like have spent the last 15 years in a very successful welder.

Funk.

Right.

Like, you know, but it's, it speaks to the weird reality of this industry of like, you constantly are like looking in the mirror and going, like, what am I doing?

And yet, from the outside, because I know you're a real person who just like the mere kind of credits or like box office numbers does not make you feel good.

It's right.

You're striving for things and you have things you want to say and whatever, but it's like that this is an industry that can make you feel like a failure when you're a success.

It is kind of funny.

And that forces failures to pretend they're successes.

Right.

No, it is kind of funny that way.

And I,

yeah, yeah, it's very strange.

I think what I've come to is that in order to actually do the thing that I want to do, whatever that may be, it's probably going to be independent and very small scale.

And actually, you know, I had a call with Alex Ross Perry the other day.

He's very kind about this in terms of sort of who I only know via the via blank check.

So there's this kind of blank check extended.

You guys met when we did the big night commentary.

Yeah.

You were leaving from doing the Rogue One commentary.

And I didn't get to play the Keep role-playing role play.

Which was a bummer.

Yeah.

Someday.

Yeah, someday we'll get it back to you.

Certainly, he's someone I'm also having these fucking text conversations with all the time where we're just like, we feel like we missed the industry.

Like, it's like the fucking Sopranos thing.

Like, you ever feel like you got in too late?

Yeah.

Like, the best of it was over, right?

And as much as you want to go back to the studio system, clearly.

Apparently, yeah.

I just want the trains running on time.

I'd like to go to the 70s, maybe.

That's where I really want to be.

I think that was

the right balance between the two extreme poles of what the industry has been.

And there was a little bit of the best of both worlds.

But it is, I mean, I talk about this with like all of my friends of sort of my generation where it's just like, we feel like we got in just in time to watch it all get gutted.

That, like, the dream jobs we thought we were aspiring to, not even could we not get them, but they stopped existing.

Well, but you know, I take a lot of energy from you guys and from this podcast, I gotta say, uh, that, like,

all right, that's enough.

We don't need any pry.

You don't want to share

deflating.

Um, no, but it's a decade of dreams.

And like, it's time for, it's time for the, you know, members of your extended family to come back and, you know, and attest to.

Well, you're welcome back back anytime.

Truly, thank you very much.

And hopefully, you come back sooner.

I would like to very much.

Did you notice, by the way?

Yeah.

Oh, he's the application to retire bit is up on the wall.

That's right.

It's on the wall.

Although I do feel like still feel really guilty about that.

But we had to,

I think I couldn't come up with any more cool shit for night eggs.

I was dancing as fast as I could.

I believe that night eggs might be going back redevelopment.

Yeah.

Yeah, we'll see.

You know, but I think it was a good time to put it down, and we could always pick it back up when the time comes.

Yeah, with the proper formalities.

Chris, I believe by the time this episode comes out, the full season of Murderbot will be out here.

August 3rd.

Will it have already been in the middle?

August 3rd,

it will have already been seen, but

binge away, please.

I really like it.

I think it's good.

You very kindly invited Ben and I to the premiere.

David.

David, but I knew that he was going to be a bit more.

You know what's a crazy decade of dreams thing when we met you you had three kids and david had zero now he's catching up

yeah

well i know david is really against the great replacement you know anyway

i had a dinner with you and your wonderful wife and griffin uh like the day that or the day before i was getting sleep training my first child yeah and it's a dinner that really lives in my memory because it was also no i'm serious because it was also an early like covid dinner like it's like i hadn't had dinner with people much like it we're just starting to that was maybe my first dinner after having my fucking gallbladder surgery yes that's right

like your gallbladder was at it was like the first night out I remember where it's like I can eat a variety of foods again and the other big thing I remember that night was I was waiting to get a message back from my doctor about whether or not I was allowed to drink alcohol yet And the word, did the word come in?

It didn't.

And I was like fucking white knuckling.

And I was like, I can't like fucking four more days before my my system can process it

yeah look at look at all the midsummers deco dreams memories

look look at the time uh but people should watch my robot uh Ben and I got to see the first two episodes it's it's very uh I feel like it exists on a bit of uh Verhoeven yeah there's a bit of a continuum but with maybe a little bit of that Weitz brothers feeling a little bit more of that heart It does have some heart.

Scarzi is very good in it.

He's quite excellent in it.

And I will say this.

He's a pretty good looking guy.

He's fairly good-looking.

It was pretty absurd to watch him on a big screen and then see him in person and be like, both make me feel like a piece of shit.

He is a specimen.

We must be done.

Yeah.

This is in the top 10 longest episodes.

Hell yeah.

I don't like that.

That's a non-profit.

I actually think that

the fans appreciate it.

No, again, I lost one.

I love it.

And that's what we do it for.

We do it for the common people.

It's podcasting.

And for you, Don, the working step out there.

Chris, thank you for being here.

Thank you.

Look forward to having you on again on the show.

Thank you all for listening.

Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe.

Tune in next week for Fargo.

Or no, I'm sorry, the Huntsucker Proxy.

My favorite.

With guests to be deep.

Yeah.

And as always, we're just looking for a little bit of that blank check feeling.

Blank check with Griffin and David is hosted by Griffin Griffin Newman and David Sims.

Our executive producer is me, Ben Hosley.

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.

Burch.

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 Minick.

Special thanks to David Cho, Jordan Fish, and Nate Patterson for their production help.

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