Blood Simple with Ray Tintori & Jordan Fish

Black Jack with Griffin and David

Black Jack with Griffin and David Don't know what to say or to expect

All you need to know is not the name of the show with Black Jack

World is full of complainers and the fact is nothing comes with a guarantee.

I don't care if you're the Pope of Rome, President of the United States, or man of the year.

Something can go all wrong.

Now, go on ahead, you know, complaining, tell your problems to your neighbor, ask for help, watch them fly.

Now, in Russia, they got it mapped out so that everyone pulls for everyone else.

That's the theory, anyway.

But what I know about is podcasting.

And down here, you're on your own.

It's a very hard voice to do.

Mm-mm.

Walsh.

Yes, he was just a little quiet.

I feel M.

M.

at Walsh is loud.

I think he's quiet in this.

Well, maybe I'm thinking of the ending, obviously, where he is loud.

So maybe he is quiet

yeah he's louder i saw him on the west end stage once okay

in his uh in his later sort of in his semi-dotage uh-huh like i meant my walsh was always a middle-aged slash older guy in movies right correct classic like was never young right um but then then he was like an old guy yeah like for like a while he lived a very long time exactly yeah and he was in a west end production of buried child the sam shepherd play and one of my favorite plays of all time.

Yeah.

Which has like an old guy who basically just sits in a chair the whole play going,

right?

And he was that.

Great.

I was watching some of the stuff on the Very Good Criterion Disc.

Oh, yes.

And they talk about that they cast him.

He's from Vermont.

Is he really?

I believe he said.

Let's find out.

Or no, Virginia, Virginia.

Totally different place.

I know.

No, you're wrong.

He's from Vermont.

I had it right the first time.

Yes, you did.

Okay.

He was raised in rural Swanton, Vermont,

which is in the top of Vermont.

He played a lot of southern guys.

Northwest Vermont.

Yes, he did.

And this is like...

You think of him as like a southern

sheriff.

This is what he was saying was just like, that's not my way of speaking.

It's not how I was trained to speak.

I've like grew up around this very clipped, precise speech.

And he was like, and I worked really hard to come up with the Texas accent for the character.

And like, people really bought me as it.

And then I watched the different interview on the disc with the Cullen brothers.

And it was with David Eggers.

And he was asking them about how they worked with actors.

And they were like, we had never met this guy before until he showed up on set.

It was the first time we were ever like meeting an actor who we had seen before.

Like everyone else in this movie, we kind of were like meeting through auditions, right?

And so we were so intimidated.

And he comes and he's like, guys, I'm excited to show you this.

Here's my accent.

And he does it for them.

And they're like, we cannot understand a word he is saying.

And we don't know how to talk to him.

We are too intimidated to give him any note.

I would be too intimidated to give that guy a note.

But his voice is so fascinating.

I could not approximate it.

But it's like this very drawly whisper.

The musicality of it.

Yes.

He almost sounds like that voice actor who's in the Disney Robin Hood at times who plays like the sheriff's underlings.

Yes.

Yes.

Who I, in a previous episode, misidentified as Slim Pickens, but it's not.

It is.

Let me out for you.

I'm guessing it is.

Who plays who?

Sorry?

He plays the Sheriff of Nottingham's like

the side guy.

Yes.

He's kind of a wheezy, soft musical voice.

That guy was in movies too.

That Pat Buttram.

Yeah.

Pat Buttram played the Sheriff of Nottingham.

Did you guys see Straight Time?

His performance in Straight Time?

Because I feel like that was their thing.

Like they cast him at all.

And in that one, it's amazing because

he's a scary character who really messes up Dustin Hoffman's life, but he's so soft and he's he's sweet.

And I don't even know if he really is out of line.

He's just doing his job and he's wearing leisure wear with like big lapels.

He's like instrumentalizing his ability to be like a soft, kind of like unassuming, sort of like orderly person.

And then like all of a sudden he like snaps into like, give me your arm.

Let me see if you got any track marks, you know?

So they were both saying that was the performance that led to him, them writing the letter and trying to get him cast in this movie, right?

And it was just very fascinating watching the Rashaman of the two interviews and how he self-mythologizes and how they talked about working with him.

And it does feel like there was some like, if not active tension, a sort of like failure to communicate between the two parties, even though obviously worked out great in the final product.

And he was like, my dad was a cop.

And I got this role in straight time.

And I felt like a lot of people would have villainized this character.

And I wanted to play him empathetically.

Like he's really trying to help this guy.

He was like, I want to not make this character antagonistic at all.

And he felt good about what he was doing.

And then you watched the final cut and he's like, Half of this movie, I come off like a scary asshole.

And then the Cohens are like, Hey, you know what, we like how in that movie you keep switching between the two things.

And he was basically like, That was a failure of me executing what I tried to do.

That half the scenes felt like they got away from me or something.

It's just very interesting to hear this performance is so singular

and it sounds like in a lot of ways it kind of happened by accident is this

i think this is indisputably true but i'll just say it anyway the

the mm at walsh performance it's like a man who gave 100 performances right paris texas you're you're saying they had that's the the harry dean stanton performance in a great uh tapestry of work he was basically saying that like he carved out his career where for like 20 years there were 10 guys where if you wanted three scenes and someone could lock horns with a movie star and they wouldn't try to upstage them, but they challenge them and get better work out of them.

He was like, it was me, Charlie Derning, Harry Stanton.

Like he listed the guys, right?

And I feel like Parisex is that same thing where you're sort of like, wow, I didn't think you could build an emotional story around this guy as a leading man.

And Blood Simple is obviously more of an ensemble piece.

He won Best Actor at the Independent Spirit Awards, even though I would argue he is supporting in this.

It's inarguable that he's supporting in this.

That's kind of crazy.

He won best lead beating Griffin Dunn for After Hours.

We're talking about right before.

That's back when the Indie Spirits, you know, truly were indie spirited.

Yes.

But yes,

it was the first Indie Spirits ever.

And Scorsese and the Cohens tie for director.

Sure, why not?

After hours, one best feature.

Yeah.

I do not see Griffin Dunn nominated.

That's even more insane.

So who's the best?

The nominees are Ruben Blades, Bladys, Blades.

I always say Blades.

Yeah.

There's no accent in it.

Sure.

And also means he has the coolest name in the history of actors.

You guys like Reuben Blades?

You like

Reuben Blades?

I hate finding out that it's actually just pronounced Blade.

I don't know if it's pronounced Blades.

I have no idea how to pronounce his name.

And I'm so sorry.

For a film called Crossover Dreams that I have not really heard of.

Tom Bauer for a film called Wild Rose

and Treat Williams in Smooth Talk.

He is so good.

Have you seen Smooth Talk?

God, he's amazing in that movie.

That would be a worthy winner.

I'm just confounded by them not nominating Griffin Dunn.

How does that happen?

I don't know.

They had like four nominees.

Okay,

from him.

And they don't even, here's the thing, they don't even have a featured actor or whatever.

It's just male leads, female lead.

Right.

So maybe it's just kind of like, we'll just nominate the performances we like.

Because Treat Williams is also kind of supporting.

Because I feel like a supporting actress wins.

This is a great lead actress that year.

Right.

You want me me to bring it back doesn't someone wins for trip to bountiful but it's not geraldine page a movie of course that i once described on this podcast as being like

i've never seen it geraldine page won she did for the trip to bountiful the other nominees were laura dern for smooth talk rosanna arquette for after hours this state of american independent film was really just like we loved after hours and blood simple

we love after hours in every category but best lead actor one of the most lead performance driven movies indeed just the whole movie is that also he's a griff yes and lori singer for the alan rudolph film trouble in mind which i've never seen yeah uh with uh keith carridan and chris chris dofferson um but obviously it's a great movie i have mm mm you've never seen it but it's obviously a great movie it must be sure i have mm walsh say that five times fast nominated for supporting actor though i think this is just the his like most iconic role right

blade runner trying to think of like competition.

But this is the thing.

You could throw at a bunch of movies where you're like MM at Wallace crushes in three scenes of life.

Crushes a scene, yeah.

The jerk.

But this is the movie where his character is like larger.

So that's why I think this is larger than life.

I mean, the complexity of the character.

It's the first fully inscrutable, very layered, very contrasting, very powerful, magnetic Cohen's character.

I think.

I think that's very well said.

And I think hearing them talk about how much they couldn't agree on the character,

by mistake, it kind of helps them identify something that they will try to intentionally, by design, build into the characters and the performances from here on out.

Because everyone else in this movie is a lot more straightforward.

Not in a bad way, right?

But you watch it and you're just sort of like, you can't imagine the Coens placing a character as uncomplicated.

as like um

uh not john doll john gets can John Getz, thank you.

Although John Dahl would have been good too.

Yes.

But you know what I'm saying?

Like the John Getz character feels so streamlined in a way they would never kind of let happen again.

Well, Billy Bob Thornton in Man Who Wasn't There is a little bit of a play on the same thing.

Like this guy, this very masculine cipher stuck in a noir story, but it's almost like they go so inside his brain.

Man Who Wasn't There, you almost want more characters to say to him, like, hey, hey, like, anyone awake in there?

Like, he's so flat.

Well, it's also

the joke.

Right.

Right.

That's the thing.

Exactly.

It's like this guy looking more intense than anyone's ever looked, going on these long internal monologues while like cutting a child's hair versus like,

yeah, Getz is kind of doing something a lot simpler in an effective way.

I mean, the other, I just watching this, I was like, the two movies in their career this feels most twinned with are weirdly no country and burn after reading It's like those two movies are the splits of the two things they're doing in this.

By burn after reading, you mean because of the sort of cuckoldery and assassinations?

That it's another movie based on a thing they love, but I think these are the two clearest examples.

A bunch of overconfident idiots having no idea that they don't know what's going on.

Right?

That everyone thinks they got control of the situation.

Like what's fascinating about this movie is that like

it avoids all the conversations that could clarify things and stop all the terrible things from happening.

Sure.

And I saw someone point out that

Fargo has that too.

It has that too.

Fargo.

It has that too.

It's not as much like unintentional, crisscross, double-cross.

Not as much, but there are a couple conversations in Fargo that would have helped things out.

Sure.

But this, yes, yes.

This has the thing where you're just like, there are a series of misunderstandings based around everyone thinking that they can hold the upper hand.

Yes.

And the fact that M.M.

Walsh never interacts with Getz or McDorman directly is the most interesting thing.

Yeah, she kills him at the end.

The final joke of the movie is she kills him and says, I'm not afraid of you, Marty.

He's the only one who gets it.

Like the entire movie has been this Rube Goldberg mousetrap to get to that point.

And he's the only character who sees it.

They see his hat in his Volkswagen Beetle for like one frame in the first scene of the movie.

That's the only time that they have any type of like an eye line match.

Like the only time that they ever see him throughout the whole film.

And I think that's something that they're, uh, the Coens are interested in because also in no country, like you, Tome Lee Jones, like never meets

Brolin and he never meets Shigur either.

And the second Brolin meets Shigur, the movie just jumps ahead and it's like conflict over, you know?

This is a blank check of Mandavia.

There we go.

It's a podcast about filmographies.

Directors who have massive success early on in their career, such as being nominated for the first ever Independent Spirit Awards and winning best directors, given a series of blank checks to make whatever crazy passion projects they want.

And sometimes those checks clear and sometimes they bounce.

Baby,

this is the beginning of a very long but very exciting miniseries as chosen by you, the listener, in our March Bandis competition.

We're talking about the Cohen brothers.

The series is called Pod Country for Old Cast.

I believe so.

I believe so.

I was hoping you remembered.

I think I remembered correctly.

This is our first episode in the series we've recorded.

We've recorded one before.

Yes.

And today we're talking about their debut film, Blood Simple, joining us on the show, returning for the first time together, but dear friends of the show.

Family, I would say.

I'd say family.

Very much part of the blank check.

When I threw out having them on for this episode, David's response was, they're family.

Well, because you said, should we do guest lists?

Exactly.

We often do the first episode with no guest.

And then you were like, but Ray and Jordan.

And I i was like yeah they they they don't count as guests in the same way they're family and when you're here you're family we like to think of this podcast as the olive garden that's it is olive garden right you guys do have uh never-ending breadsticks we do which most of our guests don't call out would considering how much we're spending that would rock if that was true like that's the it's in our rider it's like by the way unlimited breadsticks have to be wherever we are they have to follow us when i say never ending i mean never ending it doesn't end once I leave your restaurant.

No, they just keep rolling out.

Yeah.

Yes.

You actually have to eat them or it's a problem.

Do any other chain, like fast casual chains?

It's not fast cat, whatever you would call Olive Garden.

Maybe it is Fast Cat.

I don't know.

Have like a tagline as ubiquitous as when you're here, your family.

No, I don't think that's it.

Like those guys really did nail it with that.

I'm loving it.

No, that doesn't count.

Like, what's the Applebee's?

Have it your way.

Eating good in the neighborhood?

Well, he knows it.

I know all of the meats.

Keep asking me.

We got the meats.

I want my baby back ribs.

It's pretty good.

Chilies.

What's the second one?

Currently, it is Savor the Moment.

Well, that sucks.

I agree.

This is what I'm saying.

This can be hard to get.

Yeah.

Outbacks is like, it's always good in the Outback.

And I'm like, guys, try again.

Come on.

Isn't there something?

Outback Steakhouse?

What was the theme?

The song, the jingle used to have a different line at the end of it.

Outback Steakhouse.

Well, there was the,

who was that band?

Of Montreal.

The guy from of Montreal recorded a jingle for Outback Steakhouse, but then when people were like, why did you do this?

This seems very commercial.

He was like, I have no memory of

agreeing to or recording that.

And the lyrics was, it was a re, it was a like redo of the lyrics of Let's Pretend We Don't Exist.

And it's like, let's go Outback tonight.

You know, the world will still be here tomorrow.

That's good.

That's good.

I like that.

Let me say outright that our guests are Ray Centori and Jordan Fish.

Welcome, fellas.

Excellent filmmakers, dear friends, family, but also

co-hosts of the To the White Sea podcast, a years-long project you guys have been doing.

Perhaps coming back soon.

Yeah, coming back this week.

Hey.

Oh, like by the time you hear that, it records

that we release.

There you go.

I said it now.

To the White Sea is like the great unmade Cohen's.

We will talk about it, I'm sure, later in this miniseries.

It is probably there.

I mean, when I'm a teenage boy, and just think of that.

What a fun kid that was.

We all like to think about it.

Reading My Empire magazines,

I was right on like, to the White Sea.

That's the great unproduced Cohens movie.

We're all waiting for To the White Sea.

And like Anakole being like, this might be the greatest screenplay I've ever read.

Whoa.

Right.

Brad Pitt walking to the White Sea.

Yeah.

Possibly.

Gets very close to happening, falls apart.

And then that basically directly leads into what is seen as like the cohens weirdest woolly fallow period before they have the pre-country country right right yeah they dust off uh intolerable cruelty which is a script that they had written basically just to be like we got to make something right like i guess we'll direct this thing that had been a for hire job and then they did uh lady

after that right they do these two studio comedies back to back that i in my memory were kind of received by people as like are the cohen brothers just trying to cash in now

it seemed seemed like it was over forever.

It really felt like it was over forever in a way where

when no country

played at can

no country for all men.

Yeah.

I don't know.

And people were like, you're never going to believe this.

It's good.

There was this sense of almost astonishment of like, I guess we wrote those guys off too quickly.

We'll get to that.

Yeah.

But yes, there was a little bit of like the fear of had they finally lost the shine and the no country is, was it can?

yes can

couldn't remember if it was can or um but you guys have done this project that started when the coen brothers sort of soft split and have been doing their solo projects of being able to like time stamp it and be like here is the at this point complete filmography of the coens who knows if it ever resumes as a team through the prism of this unmade movie and going through the script and doing a sort of radio play version of the script in which of course you had me play the brad pit role had to Obviously,

a beautiful nuanced performance.

Thank you.

He really does do a wonderful job.

But then also using that to sort of like thematically go through the Coens and talk about different recurring themes.

The big point here is that you guys have been so deep in the trenches doing so much research, going through fucking personal archives and micro fiche and reading and watching everything that we said, what a great opportunity to have them on for the first Coen's episode, coast off of all the work they've already done for the last couple of years, and create a really good reason to fire JJ.

Let's fire his ass.

Let's fire JJ harder than we've ever fired JJ before.

Well, all I want to say is that when I...

You look at his dossier and you laugh.

When I go to a restaurant, I want legendary food and legendary service.

Okay, you're asking me to guess.

You're doing the reverse.

I am.

Legendary food, legendary service.

The service is legendary.

Now, having been to this restaurant, which I enjoy,

I remember the service being historically interesting.

It was fine.

Medieval times would work.

That would be

sense in terms of legendary.

It'd be incredible, but it's not.

Michael Jordan's steakhouse.

That would be great, but I have to imagine the service there is awful.

I have to assume this is a sit-down chain.

Yeah.

How wide is it?

This isn't like the population.

It's one of the biggest sit downs.

One of the biggest.

It's a Ruby Tuesday.

Growing

growing.

Growing?

Is it Ruby Tuesdays?

No.

I don't think so.

Well,

you should know.

You're the one quizzing me.

It's growing.

What is Ruby Tuesday sell?

Steak.

Cool.

It's not Red Lobster.

I'm going to abandon this in a second.

Ruby Tuesday's slogan is fun between the buns.

This one is

not joking.

That supposedly is their slogan.

I feel like they're more steak than sandwich, though.

It's not like Hillstone Group, is it?

No.

I don't know.

It's growing.

It's on the song.

It's so weird that they were like, let's name our song after that lovely emotional song by the Rolling Stones.

Like, who listens to Ruby Tuesday and is like, I'm hungry?

You know, it's like, it's a good song, but it's this sort of like sweet, sad song.

If I can circle back, the jingle I was trying to remember was, let's do out back tonight.

It was the opposite.

It's leading in.

Okay, but legendary service, growing chain.

Yeah.

Unbelievable.

I believe I read in an article by my colleague Yasmin Taig, the great Yasmin, that it is the fastest growing sit-down chain in America right now.

But it's been around for a while.

It's just having an upswing.

Yeah.

I'm going to wrap this up.

Sure.

Texas Roadhouse.

Oh, was never going to guess that.

So topical.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This is a real Texas Roadhouse of a movie.

It could be the

main set.

We are talking about Blood Simple, the Cohen's first movie, directed, of course, by Joel Cohen and not Ethan Cohen.

I'm going to do that bit until no conversation.

Lady Killers.

Right.

Yeah.

Which is set in Texas

and is a rather stripped down neo-noir.

Did you detect, Griffin, that this film is a bit of a neo-noir?

You know what, David?

You know, there's noirs, but they're black and white and Humphrey Bogart is there.

But then there's the the neo-noirs.

David, I know that you are the film critic by trade, and I'm not trying to one-up you, but here's an observation I made while re-watching the film.

I'd almost call it a neon noir because of how much goddamn neon lighting there is in this picture.

It's a neon boot.

It's a neon boot.

That's the name of the bar.

Yeah.

Similar to Tech Noir.

Yeah.

The film kind of announces

itself with the bar.

Yes.

So here we are,

the Cohen brothers.

Griffin, I'll start with you, but I'm going to ask everyone.

So Ben, you might might have to steal Jordan's mic.

Ben's here too, of course.

When did you first get on board with the brothers Coen, those Minnesota Jews?

It's a good question when I first got on board.

I'm sure.

Because if you're a cine ass at the age that we are,

teenage film fan, yeah, sort of mid to late 90s, the Cohens are dominant in terms of like, that's a director you find quickly, I feel like.

Right.

As you're growing up.

I feel like I was told from a very young age about their importance.

Right.

I'll build to a story briefly.

Yep.

Synagogue, please.

But then

try to think.

My parents tried to show me raising Arizona when I was fairly young.

And I put my foot down and said, I don't get it.

It's not funny.

And then I feel like a couple years later watched it and was like, I get it now.

Quite funny, actually.

I was simply.

It's a pretty winning movie.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But I was maybe a little too young to watch it.

I feel like O'Brother must have been the first one I actually saw in theaters.

I think it's the same for me.

I think it has to be.

I definitely, the Big Lebowski was rated 18 in Britain.

I guess because of like toe severance.

I don't really know why

going on.

I mean, there's a lot of F-words in that movie.

No, but Britain, in Britain, you really only get an 18 for really extreme violence or any sexual violence.

If you say shag, then

they're like, oh, we're all hot and bothered.

No, I mean, like, God bless the British rating system.

Like, 18 really is supposed to signify, like, this is a really, really violent movie.

Yeah.

Not so much like, oh, you might see a Willie.

Can you say, can you circle back and repeat 18 because of toe severance?

It was rated like 18, I think, because of like the toe severance.

Stiller and Tarantino working on a picture together?

Wow.

Really good.

An Apple series, actually.

Oh, okay.

Anyway, so yeah, I think the first film I would have seen in theaters is, Oh, Brother Were Art There.

I would have been about 14 and I loved it.

I'm just trying to remember if I would have seen any of the other ones before then.

Maybe Raising Arizona.

The first time I was aware of the Cohens

is when Frances McDormand won the Oscar for Fargo.

This, I was going to say,

probably same for me.

Yeah.

And my mom

was like, oh, well, yeah, she was going to win.

And I was like, oh, really?

Like, you know, like my mom was like, oh, yeah, she had to win.

And I was like, why?

And she was just like, I don't know, man.

Look at the clip.

Like, she's a pregnant cop.

It's just crazy.

I'd never seen anything like that.

She did a really funny walk to the stage.

Do you remember McDorman's walk for her first

the three best actress wins?

But she's not doing the like, oh my god, thing.

She does this sort of like

it's almost

a post-modern sachet of playing being too cocky.

Wow, and Nicholas Cage is giving her the Oscar.

So that's a fun group.

I think you're right that I

and but like, so the clips from Fargo, and that's in the year that English Patient is not painting the Oscars.

So that's the first year I watched the Oscars live.

And English Patient seems like a movie that wins Oscars to me where I'm like, yeah, it's set in the past and it's it's all orange.

And there's like, you know, war and important things happening.

And then they're like Fargo.

And I'm like, what's that?

And my mom's like, oh, God, it's hard to describe.

You know, this is so, and it looked so different.

Even before her winning, the way they cut Billy, Mr.

Crystal, into the Fargo clips in the opening montage, I think I had that same reaction of, what is this movie?

Like they were doing her puking on the side of the road.

Ooh, it is a strut.

God damn.

She looks like she's about to like push Cage off the stage.

It just felt like she looks like she's entering the wrestling.

She's doing like an elbow, a shoulder thing.

Yeah.

It burned into my memory.

She's so hot.

But I also, I feel like it to your point, like all in a standing O.

Yeah.

All the big ones.

Jim Carrey, Jeffrey Rush.

Karen Space.

I'm at this party

that my parents had brought me to.

And there was that same feeling of like, this was undeniable.

This is her night.

She's getting it.

This is an anointment thing.

And to a certain degree, also like an anointment night for the Cohens, right?

And I think I'm absorbing this context around me, but also in the Billy Crystal fucking montage, you're like, I get the bits for the other ones.

English patient looks really serious, and Billy Crystal's coming in and doing something silly.

Fargo was the only one where I was like, this almost has a crystal tone to begin with.

They're already jokes in this movie,

but it's also violent.

What does this do for secrets and lies?

That's a really good question.

Oh, I got to rewatch those Oscars.

My parents met at the Deauville Film Festival in the north of France, where my grandmother used to work.

And then it was...

For listeners, is the French Film Festival that asks, what if we watched American movies in France?

Correct.

It is.

That's what it is.

I will say, with as much respect as I can put on it, it is a festival that basically has no reason to exist anymore.

Except to correct.

Back in the day, it made more sense.

Well, that.

But that's why I'm saying it no longer has a reason to exist.

I've been made one time, and that's one time too many.

We don't need another one.

Every year that that festival is creating more Gryffindor.

This is a problem.

It's unsustainable.

We're flooding the economy.

It was basically in an era where movies did not have global distribution, were sold off more piecemeal.

Even big studio films were often being released by like local distributors.

And it was basically like...

This fulcrum point between the big summer blockbusters and what were going to be the more serious fall movies, where the studios and independent films all went there.

And it was like this one-shot final leg of a press tour.

Bring all your stars to the north of France to a beach and have them promote the movie and get enough buzz that maybe then you're able to sell off the smaller European rights to these other films or use it as a launching pad before there were kind of global press tours.

It was like a way to trick stars into having a vacation and doing one last batch of interviews or whatever.

My parents meet there.

My grandmother worked there for many years.

I was trying to do the math on this.

I think it probably would have been the second or third year my parents had then, after they met here,

would go every year.

Sure.

Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Basically for their anniversary, right?

It is either the place where Blood Simple premiered or the second festival.

IMDb lists something slightly early in the summer.

The USA Film Festival.

Which I cannot find any.

Well, the USA Film Festival was the Sundance, the progenitor to the Sundance Film Festival.

But it, by all accounts, premieres at Sundance the following January.

Did it premiere there?

Doville would have been, or I'm sorry, nothing plays at Sundance the following January.

It had already done Doville, Tiff, and New York.

Wasn't Toronto like a big turning point for the yes.

It's early in Toronto's shift from sort of the festival of festivals, which is what it used to be too, like the powerhouses.

Doeville happens like one week before Toronto, which is another thing that has killed that festival as like Toronto and Venice have gotten even bigger.

But it possibly was the first place it played.

And at least it was the second.

And my parents and their friend Susan, who was their best friend in the early 80s,

would tell me all the time when I was growing up,

them being there, looking through the like

brochure of all the movies and being like, the Cohen brothers?

There's a noir film by Joel and Ethan Cohen.

Hey, guys, we made a noir movie.

And seeing these like guys walk around and for like five days, this being their joke of like, yeah, we should go see Blood Simple.

And then they went to see it and were just like, holy fucking shit.

It is one of the most profound movie going experiences my parents ever had because they were like, we're mocking the idea of these guys and how shitty this sounds on paper.

Why have two Minnesota Jews made like a Texas neo-noir?

And then seeing it and being like, who the fuck are these guys immediately?

So I also grew up with that where my parents would constantly just talk about the experience of like a thing that basically no one ever got ever again, of like going into a Coen Brothers movie without any reputation.

Because right after this, it starts their run of basically playing this movie playing festivals for like over a year and just building momentum.

And movies don't really do that anymore.

They don't.

So it looks like Billy started off with a Yoda scene.

Because it was like Empire Strikes Back.

It's the re-release.

And then he's doing, he's on the phone with Jared McGuire.

He's shirtless.

I don't mean to stun anyone here.

He's on the show.

And then he switches phones to talk to Brenda Blethen.

Funny.

In Secrets and Lies.

And she's like, oh,

she's telling

some of the secrets and some of the lies.

Right.

And then he's getting a hug from Armin Muellerstahl.

Shine.

Then we got Fargo.

He's got his, you know, he's got the cop outfit on.

She's cute.

And then he's talking to Buscemi.

Okay.

Then he's back to cruise in the locker room.

Okay.

Did they do the wood trade?

They did the total silence scene.

Yeah, they did that scene.

Then they have him, he's in the cave in the English patient with Kristen Scott Thomas.

And then the thing I remember the most, they do the plane crash from English Patient, but it's Letterman going like Oprah Uma.

Oprah Uma.

Yeah.

Which is funny.

Yeah.

Got to bring it back.

And then he comes.

My parents had to lean in and go, he did a bad job.

It's what he did last year.

I saw the Letterman Oscars.

Anyway, Blood Simple.

It is one of the most undeniable debuts in film history, I would say, where you're like, well, these guys surely have made 20 movies to make something this like honed and precise and like sort of

confident.

And instead, it's like, no, they're a couple of squirrely youngsters.

And yet, I feel like when asked, they continue, they forever say, this is obviously our worst movie.

It's clumsy and amateurish.

They say that?

Yes.

They rag on it.

Endlessly.

When they did the director's cut re-release, it was shorter.

Yes.

Because they were like, it was badly edited the first time by them, obviously.

Right.

They view it as like, well, that's the last time we're not going to get everything right because we were still learning.

Yeah, this is a great moment when they're going through like shot by shot with Sonnenfeld, where they, where like

Getz is sitting in a chair on the set of the apartment that the two lovers sort of on the run

moved into.

And he's just like sitting in a chair, and like the wall is sort of like grayish-blue, and he's wearing a grayish-blue denim shirt.

And I think Joel just stares at the shot and is like, That wall

is something that we're not going to be doing again.

Wow.

Ray, Jordan, your Cohen's experience.

Maybe you have covered this on the podcast a little bit, but I don't.

I'm trying to figure it out because

hudsucker was a big deal in my house okay um my mom's friend sheila had one of the cable boxes where you could like where she got all the channels sure uh and then she would tape movies off of hbo and give them to my mom uh in the mid 90s shout out to sheila yeah

and uh

hudsucker was and hudsucker was a movie that we would we would watch a lot That was the first one you think you saw.

It's the closest thing to a family-friendly movie they made.

But I also saw Fargo in theaters and was like really blown away by it.

And I remember just like feeling like it was the first adult movie-going experience in a theater that I'd had in a very distinct way.

Like just walking out of it being like, I can't breathe.

You know, like I've been holding my breath the last 30 minutes of this movie.

I'm going to argue you were too young for Fargo in theaters, Jordan.

You were probably a couple of years older than me, right?

But still.

I was a minor.

I was 10 when that movie came out.

And it was rated 18 18 again.

Geez.

Maybe also because of the severance.

Leg severance.

Fuck, who's the one?

But the thing is, I'm not sure.

Again, I'm not sure which one of them we would watch, which I like I watched first.

And I also don't think I knew that it was the same directors.

I know that when Lebowski came out, I knew that was the next movie after Fargo, and I was excited to see that in theaters.

And I saw like...

And like moving forward, I feel like coming into the city to see a Cohen Brothers movie a week or two before it went went wide was like a big part of like my early New York City experiences because I like grew up right outside the city.

Yeah.

Um to get to see the early platform release of like O Brother or whatever.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think I

was so aware of how much my parents revered them that even when like there was a new Cohen movie coming out like Lebowski.

I was absorbing the sense of like people seem cooler on this one.

Then saw O Brother in theater, which makes sense as like their most family-friendly movie since Hudsucker.

And then after that, I think pretty quickly like watched every one of their movies on DVD or started that project and then would go see every one that came out.

Here's another thing about them.

For a very long time, they were once a year guys.

They were like clockwork.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Where if you're a budding cinephile, it's really easy to be like, I can latch onto these guys.

What's the next Cohen movie?

I'm filling in the backlog and I'm like looking forward to the future.

I would say they're kind of once every couple years

uh in terms of like the spacing between their movies yeah they were very very reliably

working uh all the way up to

i guess

mid-2000s really yeah like it's really the 2010s rather even then it's like it's true grit uh inside luin days davis hell caesar scruggs that's four movies in that decade each of them about three years apart like it's like you know they they they worked very consistently That's look, when they announced that they're, they're sabbatical from working together, I feel like that was the number one thing cited.

Yeah.

Was just like, Ethan feels burned out.

It's been a lot.

Right.

And they would have side projects.

They'd release fiction.

They would do some stage stuff.

Like it's like, yeah, they were busy.

One of them should make a video game.

Yeah, it's a great idea.

Thanks.

Ray, your history with the cons.

I remember the Like the Roma Pizza on 7th Avenue in the 90s was just a shrine to the career of John Toturo.

It was just all signed John Toturo stuff.

So I remember the Barton Fink poster in there, seeing that as a little kid, and my parents being like, this is a movie about a guy who can't write and is being attacked by a mosquito.

So I thought the whole movie was just him V Mosquito.

And then I remember seeing Hutzucker Proxy in a movie theater in LA and my parents being like, wow, they blew it.

Right.

You know, the general consensus on that one.

And like that being like an out-of-body experience, seeing that as a little kid, it's so heightened and cartoonish.

And the whole hula hoop scene, I remember like all that stuff, like the, you know, for kids, like that totally landed on me as like an elementary school kid.

Best joke I ever heard, right?

Right.

Um, and then, yeah, saw Fargo in the movie theater with my mom and my sister.

We were both super young, but it was like just a cultural event.

Um,

and I think it was like it was post-pulp fiction.

There was a sense that, like, well, we can take them to this, like, we can't take them to pulp fiction, but we can take them to Fargo.

Pulp fiction created a new bar of what isn't child appropriate, which then sort of on a curve made Fargo seem like more quaint.

I mean, it's also, it's like, right, it's Fargo does have this weird amount of like Looney Tunes energy.

And as violent as it gets, it's sort of a comedy of manners in the same way.

Yeah.

It's a cultural portrait of like a particular type of, like a particular part of Minnesota.

Like, yeah, but just became obsessed with that, saw a preview of Big Lebowski.

Also, everyone at Big Lebowski was like, that sucked.

Like at the first screening and people were like, why wasn't that like Fargo?

People don't remember that.

I have this very distinct memory of like going over to dinner with

my parents and my siblings to their friends, a couple with a young kid.

We were all like eating pizza together or whatever.

And they had just seen Big Lebowski and were just like, we are befuddled.

Like, what are they doing?

Why did they blow it?

In the same way as Hudsucker of like,

everyone just took them seriously and now they're doing some weird lark.

I I remember at the time, there were like one to two critics in Britain who were like,

I kind of liked Lebowski.

Like, like, and they were saying it in this way of like, I know this is crazy, but I actually think there's some stuff to that one, you know, like, and within really just three or four years, it had completely turned around.

I mean, it was like the DVD, like

supernova thing.

Right.

But like that run of Lebowski to oh, brother

to man who wasn't there, you know, like, it's not like they were out out of critical favor exactly, but it was kind of like, huh, not another Fargo in these guys, huh?

Like,

I remember seeing this in the theaters for the first time when they did the

re-release

2000, I think, right?

2000, the shorter version

with the music that wasn't on the VHS put back in.

I saw it at the quad in an empty theater.

Just me, Joel Schumacher, and Joel Schumacher's assistant.

Wow.

The big three incolumble.

Well, Joel's got to keep their tabs on other Joels.

They got to know what the Joels are cooking.

One of the nicest directors I ever met, Joel Schumacher.

I've told the story many times of him.

He was not so kind to you.

I asked him for

a direction on how to play a scene in a fourth fucking callback I had for him.

And he said, I think acting is a lot like fucking, where if you're asking for help for how to do it, you're probably doing it wrong.

And you were like, I do that all the time.

That's what I said.

He didn't think it was funny.

His hair looked incredible.

His hair was unbelievable.

He had really amazing hair.

Yes.

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 ad space on this podcast, the big thing they want is personal host endorsement.

Right.

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

But something very different is happening right now.

That is true.

We had a sponsor come in and say, we are looking for the coveted Ben Hosley endorsement.

This is laser targeted.

The product.

We have a 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 gotten 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 fucking rules.

It fucks.

It honks.

Yeah.

It's so great.

Let me read you the cast list here in billing order, as they asked, which I really appreciate.

Peter Dinklage, Jacob Tremblay, Tremblay, Taylor Play Page, with Elijah Wood, and Kevin Bacon.

Tremblay is Toxie's son.

His stepson.

His stepson.

Okay.

Wade Goose.

Yes.

Great name.

Give us the takes.

We haven't heard them yet.

Okay.

You got fucking Dinkledge is fantastic.

He's Toxie.

He plays it with so much heart.

Yeah.

It's such a lovely performance.

Bacon is in the pocket too, man.

He's the bad guy.

He's the bad guy.

There's a lot of him shirtless.

Okay.

Looking like David.

David sizzling.

Yep.

And then Elijah Wood plays like a dang-ass freak.

He certainly does.

He's having a lot of fun.

Tell us some things you liked about the movie.

Okay, well, I'm a Jersey guy.

I just got to say, the original movie was shot in the town where I went to high school.

Yes, yes, that's right.

The original film.

Yep.

I grew up watching toxic and trauma movies on porches

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 Ciniverse rescued it and are now releasing it uncut.

But I feel like there have been years of you being very excited at the prospect, but also a little weary.

They're playing with fire here.

Yeah, it's just, it's something that means a lot to me.

And they knocked it out of the fucking park.

Okay.

It somehow really captured.

that sensibility, that sense of humor, even just that like lo-fi, scrappy kind of nature that's inherent in all of the trauma movies and the original toxy movies and they have like updated and in this way that it was just i was so pleased with it it's gooey sufficiently gooey tons of blood tons of goo

uh great action it's really funny it just it it hits all of the sensibilities that you would want in an updated version cinniverse last year released terrifier 3 unrated yeah big risk for them there i feel like it's a very very intense movie and one of of the huge hit more interesting yeah theatrical box office phenomenons the last five years want to make that happen again here

tickets are on sale right now advanced sales really matter for movies like this so if y'all were planning on seeing toxic avenger go ahead and buy those tickets please go to toxicavenger.com slash blank check to get your tickets blank check one word in theaters august 29th yep and ben it just says here in the copy copy wants to call out that elijah wood plays a weird little guy who says summon the nuts can you tell us anything about that moment without spoiling it summon the nuts is in reference to a

psychotic new metal band hell yeah who are also mercenaries cool and drive a van

with a skeleton giving two fingies up on the grill.

And that's all I'll say.

Okay.

And they are the most dang-ass freaks of dang-ass freaks.

I'm excited to see it.

And your endorsement, I think, carries more weight than anyone else's in the world on this list.

Seriously, get your tickets now.

Go to toxicadvengure.com/slash blank check.

Do it, do it.

Hey, blankies, I can't keep track of my financial accounts or what they are friggin' worth.

And by not knowing, I'm leaving money on the table.

And I don't know about y'all, but I hate leaving money on tables.

But with Monarch Money, I can feel organized and confident.

This all-in-one personal finance tool brings your entire financial life together in one clean interface on your laptop or phone, or even the freaks using a tablet.

Right now, just for our listeners, Monarch is offering 50% off your first year.

Using Monarch helped me to identify, I'm not saving as much as I thought I was.

And it was easy to see all of my spending using just one finance app.

Plus, it's helping me keep track of the valuable genes I've buried in various locations.

Using Monarch, I can easily review my finances with a financial advisor and keep a clear view of my financial health week to week week and long term.

Monarch is designed for folks with busy lives.

If you've been avoiding organizing your finances, then Monarch is for you.

With Monarch, you link all of your accounts in minutes and get clear data and categorization of your spending and genes.

Monarch is not just another finance app, it's a tool that real professionals and experts actually love, including being named the best budgeting app of 2025 by the Wall Street Journal.

Don't let financial opportunity slip through the cracks.

Use code check at monarchmoney.com in your browser for half off your first year.

That's 50% off your first year at monarchmoney.com with code check.

I was thinking that I probably saw this for the first time on the DVD release after the director's cut re-release, which means I've never seen A, the longer version,

which I feel like is totally out of circulation now, or B, the VHS version of the longer version.

How much longer is the longer version?

Three minutes?

Okay.

Yeah, but it's not just like they cut one scene out.

They like tighten sequences and change shots, but it's three minutes shorter.

But the other, the VHS version uses Neil Diamond, I'm a Believer, which is a great song.

Instead of the same old song.

Yeah.

quite haunting yeah i remember that re-release i was sort of vaguely aware of the movie i'm becoming vaguely aware of the cohen brothers and all that and the poster obviously for the re-release was the the shovel and i was like so is the i would i confuse this movie and another debut by a crimey filmmaker danny boyle shallow grave oh sure right where i was like man in the 90s or whatever like back in the day people right were digging shallow graves i guess casino also yeah casino i mean i just remember

the rational Shovel movies.

Yeah.

And hey, that's William H.

Macy.

Wall Hang.

Cohen's favorite.

Yeah.

Blood Simple.

I'm going to read from the dossier.

Joel Daniel Cohen was born November 29th, 1953, a Thanksgiving boy, a plump Thanksgiving turkey.

You think he was plump?

No, I'm sure he came out of string bean.

He looks like fucking Spike from Peanuts.

I know I invoked Spike recently on some other episode.

I was trying to explain Spike to Ben, but I was watching all these fucking special features last night and I was like, who does Joel Cohen look like?

And it just hit me like a ton of bricks.

Now he looks like Spike.

Yes.

So

he was born in 1953.

Ethan, Jesse Cohen, arrives in this world,

September 21st, 1957.

They have an older sister, Debbie, Deborah.

Dad, Edward, was a professor at economics at the University of Minnesota.

And they grew up in Minneapolis, right?

Edward was born in the U.S.,

but he actually grew up overseas.

His grandfather, Victor,

so Edward's father

was a barrister at the Inns of Court in London, of course.

Order.

See, I do.

Yep.

I remember when he retired, my grandparents went to live in Hove, which is a seaside town next to Brighton, I can tell you exclusively.

JJ didn't look it up.

Myers.

Yep.

And we used to live in there.

My father actually lived it, grew up in London.

I think he lived in Croydon, Pearley, is a neighborhood in Croydon, which is sort of South London suburbs.

And he had very British tastes in movies.

They would watch all the Ealing comedies and things like that.

Cohen's mother, Rina, is a professor of art history at St.

Cloud State University, which is another Twin Cities place.

They're Ashkenazi Jews.

They're from Poland, Russia.

You know, Edward was in the army.

You must be looking at the wrong dossier.

We're talking about the Cohen brothers now.

They are Jewish.

I will tell you this now.

I'll exclusively reveal to you that the Cohens are Minnesota Jews.

The directors of True Grit.

Edward was in the army during World War II,

and they were raised relatively traditionally, moderately strict.

We, of course, will be wrestling with something I'm sure you guys have wrestled with a little bit when you did your podcast.

The Cohens are a little taciturn,

not huge on kind of discussing their motivations and interests

they'll do a lot of interviews it's not like they don't do press

we would like to gently debunk okay go do it

i would say that they're not film professors no yeah you know of their own work but they've been pretty forthcoming over the years i mean there's many you guys have been delving through too yeah like you've been piecing it all together i think it's interesting that there's this uh received wisdom about them that they like won't explain their movies like kind of on the same level as david lynch or something where it's like no i'm not telling you anything and it's like i think it's mainly just because they sort of embed jokes and sarcasm into their answers a lot of the time like they're jewish is this interesting jewish that's yeah

yes go on um like like in the uh in the preface to this book like they they give some advice to writers where they say keep going until uh until the work is boring to you.

And then that's when you know to stop because it's it's the sort of arena of the amateur who who doesn't have the imagination to quit uh who keeps going and going and then like the question would be is like is that a completely is that completely sincere advice or are they fucking with the reader you know uh but i do think that they you know they'll get on a blu-ray and go through all of blood simple with barry soinfeld like shot by shot by shot talking about how they made it what they were going for so our buddy sean fantasy of the big picture was talking on some recent episode, but it was somewhere in the transition period coming out of Oscar season and going into 2025 movie preview, where he was comparison, epips comparison, he was comparing Brady Courbet to Paul Thomas Anderson, right?

And he was saying, like, as we're getting out of this Oscar season, the thing I think that everyone's exhausted with is Brady Courbet, like, explaining the themes of his movie 8,000 times.

And he was putting that in contracts to Paul Thomas Anderson, who never explains his movies at all.

That when he goes and does press and he'll do long form interviews, he will talk and he'll talk openly about stuff.

But the thing he doesn't want to tell you at all is how to read his movie versus Brady Corbett being like, here's everything and this is exactly how I've intended.

This is true.

Right.

And he was like, it's this thing that makes sense because Paul Thomas Anderson was totally like that when he started out.

He was like such an early DVD commentary guy, such an early, I'm telling you all my ambitions for this and how I want it to be received.

And I'm speaking of the frustration of the elements that are misunderstood and all that sort of stuff.

And he's like, it makes sense if you're a certain kind of film nerd and you grow up like loving movies and then studying their construction and then like learning how to analyze them more deeply, that your greatest dream is to make a movie that people can read as deeply as you've read other films.

And when these guys get the chance where they're finally in that sort of spotlight, it's very hard for them to resist the temptation to start that conversation themselves, which ultimately doesn't do the movie that much of a favor.

And most guys learn to, as time goes on, back off and get a little more elusive.

And what do you say versus what don't you say?

I think what is unique about the Cohens is like they have consistently been in sort of like old master phase from the beginning.

There is no point in time where you're reading clumsy interviews with them where they're kind of exposing themselves.

I wonder if we'll dig up.

Like they have been from the beginning.

And I think that's the difference is a lot of times when we do this show and JJ's digging through, you know, like the quotes from the first couple movies.

He's digging through the shallow grave of quotes from digging early.

He's putting the shovel on the ground.

Sometimes you're like, oh, it's a lot easier to find more information in the earlier stages of their career where they like haven't been as media trained, right?

And they're like less guarded.

And also they're willing to talk about these things like 25 years later with more distance.

And the Cohens like recut their own movie and have spoken extensively about this film.

It's not like they've disowned it or tried to make a mystery box around it.

And they didn't massively recut it.

Sorry, just to jump in.

Yeah.

Like they just, they tweaked it.

They did this, they tightened it up.

They didn't cut whole scenes or put whole scenes in that.

It's just this fascinating balance of them being like, yeah, we're like a little embarrassed by this, but we're also not distancing ourselves from it.

Right.

And I was watching one of these things on the Criterion Disc.

And they just said the thing that they always say, which I think some people think

they are using this to throw people off their scent.

I believe with them it's genuine.

And they were talking about their sense of structure.

And Ethan said, like, I don't know what a three-act structure is.

Like he makes a joke of like, I've heard rumors of this and I've never seen it myself, right?

And he's like, I never think about that stuff at all.

I think we've watched so many things and read so many things that to some degree, we've internalized some innate sense of structure, but we never do that consciously.

And then Joel says something to the effect of our basic writing process is, let's let's come up with enough ideas that excite us that we're ready to start writing.

Then we start writing and we're like, I guess it'd be cool if this happened next.

And then they go, wow, feels like about time to wrap things up.

That they like tend to write straight through from beginning to end once they just have enough ideas percolating and they're not thinking consciously about how to design these things like Swiss watches with the intent of people pulling them apart later.

That's hard to believe.

It is because their movies are so good.

Well,

and they're they are very switch swiss watch like as well like they're that's why i don't believe them i think i'm not calling them liars i feel like the the big story we always heard is in loun davis there's this part where he's driving past akron and there's like an off-ramp to go to akron where he knows he's just found out his son is living who he's never met and they were like we were writing it and we were like oh the off ramp for akron's coming up is lounging to take it and they were like no no no he doesn't take it and just as they were writing they decided like that whole section of the movie movie is not going to happen.

Right.

Like they're that, I love that.

They're not idiot savants, but the way they talk about it.

But they're sometimes present themselves a little bit as idiots.

They're so maddening where you're like me.

Are you guys just perfect instincts?

How is that possible?

And then they'll talk about how prepared they are in terms of shooting.

Right.

They have an excellent reputation.

throughout Hollywood for being incredibly good, on time, under budget, all that kind of stuff.

Like very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, like, right, very disciplined, very story-based.

Two-headed director.

Right.

They're like, we see other directors who get the kind of buzz from showing up on set and not totally knowing what you're going to do.

And that sort of pressure inspires them.

And that's our nightmare.

And we'll change the plan if something isn't working, but we want to come to the set knowing exactly how it should work.

In contrast to the script seemingly coming out of just like, I don't know.

It just like flows out of us and we ask ourselves the questions like, should he take the off ramp?

And then we just go from there.

Another good story in a similar vein is

they wrote all of Fargo up until Steve Busami's character is, quote, humping the escort and then could not figure out what would happen next and like basically put it in a drawer for, you know, six months or a year or something.

Which certainly that does seem to be sometimes part of their process.

Like when they hit a wall, they don't ram into the wall.

They're just kind of like, okay, if it's not coming through us, then we have to come back to it until it makes sense.

They wrote Barton Fink, I think, in the middle of trying to write Miller's Crossing, and they said that that that was

the birth almost of a new process where it was like, instead of trying to create a mousetrap contraption type script, it was like, this is one idea that just came out.

Yeah.

Now, look, Ray,

I don't know if you know this, but the Cohens grew up in a kind of a boring suburban part of Minnesota called St.

Louis Park.

And Ethan said, I like this quote a lot.

And this is a classic Ethan Cohen quote to me.

It was the suburbs, you know?

I cannot think of a single seminal childhood event.

I relate to that so much.

Right.

Someone's like, come on, tell me something from your childhood that might inform, like, clearly your

work is informed by your adolescence sometimes.

And he's just like, yeah, I can't think of anything like 18 years blank.

Joel says, Bob Dylan got out of Minnesota at an early age, and you can see why.

These guys are really roasted in Minnesota.

They don't live there, right?

They live in LA.

Maybe, I want to say.

I don't know.

Back coastal.

Yeah.

By coastal.

Okay.

I feel like they're more New York, though, right?

Maybe.

I don't know.

Where the winds blow.

Recommend everyone check out Pedro Cohen's Instagram page if you want.

I used to be

on Pedro's.

He was so because he was like, he's, is he a bodybuilder, a model, or he's sort of like an aspiring kind of

life.

He is living.

That is the thing.

I remember Katie Rich, our mutual friend.

He's the son of Joel and Francis.

Yes.

Katie Rich was the one who got me into Pedro McDorman Cohen's great Instagram years years ago.

Anyway,

so

when the Cohen brothers are growing up, they watch a lot of movies.

Ethan, we saw a lot of Tarzan movies and Steve Reeves Muscle movies.

Cool.

They liked comedies.

you know, kind of like British Farsi comedies.

Bolling, bowling.

Boing, boing, which is a great play and a kind of an okay movie.

Bob Hope movies, Jerry Lewis movies, Tony Curtis.

They like Doris Day movies.

They like Pillow Talk.

We didn't realize we were watching crap, is what Joel says.

Like, they just loved movies.

They got their hands on a Super 8 camera.

They remade a lot of bad Hollywood movies.

Their most successful in their memory are Cornell Wilde's Naked Prey and Otto Primiter's Advice and Consent.

They said they didn't really understand.

They would edit Win Camera, obviously.

They didn't realize they could edit.

film physically by cutting it up and stuff.

I'm not going to read all of this.

They also made a movie called Henry Kissinger Man on the Move.

I was going to say, that's good.

They bring that up at the Oscars when they win for no country.

I forget which of their three acceptance speeches.

My guest is directing, if I'm true.

But they say, like,

when we were kids, we'd run around in the backyard with briefcases and make movies like Henry Kissinger, Man on the Move.

And what's weird to us is that what we're doing now still feels exactly the same as that.

And I do think that's part of their secret.

And it's a benefit to being a team and a team that knows each other so well and can communicate like wordlessly and has a shared reference base and interest base.

And they always talk about watching movies together and reading books together and like being in tandem like that is that to some degree, I think they're trying to retain the purity of when they made movies as children and would just be like, what's interesting enough to us to be worth the effort of pulling together costumes.

There's a lot of play acting like when they talk about it and don't question it.

Yeah.

People describing seeing them write the script, it's just the two of them, one's one's playing one character, one's playing the other, and they're just doing scenes together.

When they talk about storyboarding it, they're getting up with their storyboard artist, J-Todd Anderson, all acting out the scenes.

Yeah, when we interviewed Jay Todd, he said that the reason he got the job or one of the reasons he got the job storyboarding Raising Arizona is because he was willing to act out the drawing with them.

Yeah.

And there's even in this movie, there's like 40 to 50 shots, which are literally just starring the Cohen brothers shot by Barry Sonenfeld.

There's so many pickup shots in this movie

down to to like that little drip of water that's the very last shot of the movie, all the burial scenes, these, the fight scene out in the lawn.

There is a lot of like just like boost on the green stuff.

Like any movie.

Well, obviously, I imagine the dossier is going to get to this, but like their meeting Raimi is so humongous.

Okay.

Okay, let me hit the gas on the dossier.

Okay.

Okay.

Just because, you know, this is a big episode.

But that's like a real Raimi filmmaking principle thing of just like, just get the shot.

They go to Bard college at simons rock for a minute which is the sort of hippie early college where you can get in when you're 16 years old but then joel goes to nyu uh and studies film there i wanted to keep making movies and that was an easy school to get into he says uh another description of time at nyu is our professors weren't famous directors they'd made a career essentially in teaching uh joel i was cipher there i sat in the back of the room with an insane grin on my face i mean that's all funny i do think like my mom has friends who one friend I'm thinking of in particular, who would always say, like, I went to NYU back when it was bad.

Yeah, like, NYU only became kind of the, like, insane powerhouse.

It became in, like, the 90s.

It suddenly was cooler to want to go to New York for university.

She also needed a couple generations of successful graduates.

And then the film school, right?

There's a track record there.

Right.

And he does, Joel makes a short film there called Soundings.

uh which is about a deaf person whose girlfriend fantasizes about someone else while she's making love to him have you guys seen sounding?

That is not viewable.

This was new to it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This was new to me reading about it.

Okay.

Well, JJ just got rehired.

I'm like, I gotta tell you.

Then Joel went to a graduate film program at the University of Texas in Austin, and he married somebody and then got separated soon after and left the program after just a semester.

Ethan went to Princeton and studied philosophy.

Okay, King.

Our comrade Melissa Tuchman,

who has some affiliation with Princeton, has put in a request for Ethan Cohen's thesis on Wittgenstein.

So in three to four months, we may be able to read it from the archives.

That sounds fun.

It's 45 pages.

It's the longest thing he wrote before the Blood Simple Strip.

That's crazy.

Well, that's like academic writing.

Yeah, there's a lot of stuff about college.

I'm going to move on.

Yeah, they wrote their first scripts together while still in Roden School.

A movie they written that was never produced was called Coast to Coast, which was sort of a screwball comedy.

Ethan, for the plot details here, it had 28 Einsteins in it.

The red Chinese were cloning Albert Einstein.

Okay.

And then after they graduate, they moved to New York City

and

they feel like this is when they actually start to get to know each other.

Like obviously three years' difference when you're a kid is big.

By now, they're both grown up and they become real pals, apparently.

And

Joel works as an assistant editor for Edna Ruth Paul.

Ethan works at a temp agency as a typist.

You were telling me, Ray, I think the data entry.

Data entry at Mises.

Eventually, maybe, right.

And then Joel starts work on Sam Raimi's film, The Evil Dead,

as an assistant editor.

He'd been fired from another movie called Nightmare.

And he says that Evil Dead's obviously an inspiration.

A lot of stuff in our film, like the camera running up the front lawn, is Raimi

inspired.

Raimi's first impression of the Coens.

Edner, our editor, says, you got to read these guys' scripts.

And I go, oh, God.

You know, Joel's brothers was just a statistical accountant at Macy's at the time, and I thought it was probably going to be awful.

And then I read it and I thought, wow, these guys know how to write scripts.

Okay, thank you, Sam.

Really interesting.

Hey, I think it's interesting.

It is interesting.

What I think is interesting about thinking of that moment in time is like Joel has successfully started getting work in the industry.

He's doing film work.

He's bottom of the totem pole editing the lowest budget horror movies, but he is employed working on films.

And then he's got this mystery brother with this day job who they keep saying like they write scripts together,

who on their face, I think were received the way my parents received the idea of like, who the fuck are these guys making a neon noir?

But Raimi was one of the first to sort of like give them the shot.

read it,

notice that they were good.

Yes.

And then I think what they're they're getting from Raimi in such a huge way is like, this guy just went out and fucking that's the thing.

He had financed his movies by like bothering dentists in Detroit or wherever is the same Raimi did.

And they were like, Well, we could probably do that.

Right.

Like, can you get like 60 financiers who each are contributing less than $10,000?

And you can just keep knocking on doors, you might have enough to make a movie.

Now, Raimi had essentially made a short film called Within the Woods that was his proof of concept.

They decide to do something similar.

So, over three days, they shoot sort of a trailer for Blood Simple.

Right.

It's rent a camera.

Did you watch this, David?

Yes, I did.

You guys, I'm sure.

Legendary.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's basically.

And of course, most famously, Bruce Campbell is in it.

He's playing the MM Walsh analog or is he a Hideo?

He's playing Marty.

Yeah, he's playing the Dan Hideo.

But in it, it almost seems like they have the Visser character because the guy who's playing the guest character has this long fur codon.

He's a cowboy.

He's like much more of a cowboy.

Like he's got kind of looks like the cowboy in Mahollen Drive.

Seriously.

Yeah.

You basically,

Monty Montgomery, you basically don't see actors' faces in this.

They were like, our thing is rather than make a proof of concept short film, let's make a trailer as if we have made the finished film.

Because correctly, they were like, no one wants to read shit.

Both like people in the industry and...

dentists who will maybe give me a couple thousand dollars don't want to read shit.

They said they had the script.

Only one guy actually read it who was a urologist and he handed them back the script and it was covered in blood.

I think he invested, though.

He did.

He did invest.

But he was like, if you say to people, like, hey, can I show you something?

And we showed up with a 16 millimeter projector.

They shot the trailer on 35.

But then they like knocked it down to 16 so that it was in a format that was easy enough to then like prop up and show people.

Super cool because you can walk in with a little 16 millimeter projector that's like a suitcase, like a little briefcase.

And we're like, this will just get people's attention.

And they would like book screening rooms in New York City.

and they were like

well we know you usually charge by two hour blocks how much can we get 15 minutes for and then just like funnel people in and out and show them this thing the trailer is even more raimy than the final movie yes but they talk so much about i mean a i think it's got inside

it's got the bullet holes through the wall right the rainy cam

but i mean it has images that are going to be

you know pivotal to the feature you don't really see any extra face because they hadn't cast people, but they're like showing you some of the images they have in their head.

And then they're doing kind of crazier Raimi camera work.

And what's also interesting is it, it feels more horror than the final film.

And they talked about like Raimi was their model of this working, but we also saw other people getting to make horror movies at this number.

It felt like the easiest way to get a little bit of money was horror was seen as a safer return on investment that didn't cost a lot.

And so they're finding this midpoint in their mind between like, we're interested in like Dashwell Hammett type stuff.

Can we like find a way to mash that up with horror that will trick people into giving us money?

The final image of the trailer is the moon looms up and turns red.

It's pretty cool.

The tagline, just to clarify, is

Julian,

whatever.

What's the last name?

Come on.

They might have changed his name in the trailer.

No, it is.

Julian Marty thought he'd hired the murderer,

thought he'd hired the murderer of his wife when in Texas you you get what you pay for.

Blood simple.

Anyway,

they

do, and Sonnenfeld's obviously involved,

raise about half a million dollars, which is pretty crazy.

They say the movie eventually ended up costing about three quarters of a million dollars.

Back in the day, to be clear, it was fucking hard to fund the tiniest movie because film shit is so expensive.

And you can't just put things on an iPhone or whatever.

You know, they raised some movie money in in New York, as, you know, the screening room thing you were just talking about.

And

they wanted to make an entertaining movie.

Like, this trailer is for an entertaining movie.

It's not like we're going to make an art film.

It's like, we're going to make a fucking thriller.

This Edgar's talk, he kept asking them where it came from.

And they were just truly like reverse engineered from.

what feels like the easiest to get financing for, what feels like the easiest to sell people on actually going to see in theaters, what gives us the greatest chance of return on investment?

And they were like, our two overriding goals were make our first movie, just knock down that door and have made a film was one.

And two was not fuck it up to a degree that we can maybe get to make a second film.

But this like isn't coming out of any burning like, we had the most incredible idea for a story or this is something we want to say.

It's what's so fascinating about this movie is that they were just sort of like trying to find the midpoint between what interested them and what they thought would work as a calling card.

Now, I would say this film is coming out during a neo-noir boom.

I don't know if you guys would agree with that.

They're very conscious of body heat while they were prepping this movie.

Yeah, things, right?

Things that they thought were kind of cheesy in body heat that they wanted to avoid.

Yeah, they didn't want like halation filters on the lenses, right?

Like really sharp, right?

Yeah, because body heat

is kind of a sweaty movie.

Have you guys picked up on this with that one?

It's kind of got this kind of like sweaty, sexy thing going on.

It was a result of the body heat.

So hot.

Yeah.

And, you know, the Bob Raffleson Postman Ocean rings twice remake, which is like, to me, the epitome of kind of a bad neo-noir, no offense to it, where it's kind of just like, you know, that kind of like sexy noir?

What if they like fuck and we see it?

And it's kind of like, you know what?

Sometimes things should be left to the imagination.

Like that's the magic of noir, right?

But there's lots of good noir and there's like Thief, and then there's stuff like Blade Runner, you know, that is sort of adjacent or whatever.

But they are like, we're not really inspired by those kinds of movies.

We're more inspired by, like, the literature that those kinds of movies are inspired by.

So, James M.

Kane is obviously the number one guy they referenced for Blood Simple.

Obviously, guys like Chandler and Hammond as well, but Kane is the big thing, but they're not making a whodune it.

Like many a noir obviously has that as the driving plot thing.

They're just making a double-cross movie, I guess.

Although in some sense, there is a whodunit aspect to it, just because the characters are so confused.

The characters definitely do not know whodun pretty much anything in this movie.

It's not a whodunit, it's a what happened.

Yeah, right?

What the fuck is going on?

Everyone trying to make sense of what's happening around them and then coming to the wrong conclusions about what they think led to that.

Yeah, it's the exact, actually, it's the exact opposite of a whodunit.

It's like, you know, who did it and they don't.

But you don't understand what they did or why.

And everyone's just reacting.

So Jameson King, just to be clear, wrote Of Postman Receipts twice.

Anyway,

so

they

make this movie.

Oh, wow.

Okay.

MM Walsh was in written, it was written for him.

You know, they'd seen him in straight time.

And he said he

was.

He'd gotten into a fight with his reps shortly before this because he found out about some other projects that had been offered to him that they passed on without telling him.

So he said, Any single thing that comes in for me, you have to send it to me immediately.

I want to make the decision.

But it's one of those things where, like, the timing is perfect for this script to hit his eyes.

A month earlier, he never would have seen it.

And maybe two months later, he would have been like, actually, you can start filtering shit again.

But it's like right at the time where he's like, any single thing that comes in the mailbox for me, I'm looking at.

And he just says, Why not?

Like, truly, who he's like, why not?

He says they were horrible at directing actors because they never worked with actors before.

A way he puts it that I think is really funny is Joel would be like, why don't you look over there?

And he'd be like, why am I looking over there?

And they'd be like, just humor me.

Just fucking look over there.

You know, like, they weren't good at that.

I'm humoring you by being in this picture.

Pretty much.

He insisted that they pay him in cash because he thought that he was.

The whole damn movie is just to humor you, he said.

It's just funny.

It's so Cohen's or whatever.

It's like for them to be like, I hope we can get Emma at Walsh.

Like that's, that's the coup for them.

Totally.

But

he's being paid in $100 bills.

Most of the money you see him waving around in the movie is his salary for the movie, where he was just like.

A, I'm taking cash because I don't think these guys are good for it unless I have it in hand.

And B, I don't want to leave the cash they're giving me in my hotel room because I'm worried that the staff will steal it.

Sonnesfeld having no filter was like, you were paying him four grand a week.

So then you have to imagine by like week three, he's walking around with 12 grand in cash.

But you can stuff him into his, you can see the outline of like bills all over his wardrobe.

He's wearing his entire salary in every shot of this movie.

So Fran McDormand is in the film.

And Joel Cohen, I don't know if you guys know this, actually ends up marrying her.

They have a long relationship.

You guys aware?

Okay.

Can we double check that?

And he was looking at going to a lot of theater, trying to find people who are interesting.

He sees Holly Hunter in a play called Crimes of the Heart

and they

want Holly Hunter.

Good taste.

Yeah.

And of course they'll end up working with her.

She ends in this film.

She's on the phone.

She's on the phone.

You might notice her voice.

She's got a bit of a distinctive twang.

And she's like, I'm doing another play.

I can't do your dumb movie.

But you know who you should look at.

But I am roommates with Fran.

They were were living in the Bronx.

Make me a movie about Holly and Fran and the Bronx, by the way.

And Kathleen Baines.

The third roommate.

And Fran had barely done anything.

Dan Hidea.

Hidea.

Hidea.

I always say Hidea.

I got it right.

Just came in and they were like, yep.

Ethan says, quote, you know it when you see it.

Joel, I don't think we could have imagined the quality that Dan would have brought to it.

I don't know where Dan Hidea is in his career.

I think Cheers is in 84.

I think 84 is a big big year for his.

All about to start happening.

Yeah, because he's in Buck Rubanzai the same year as Blood See People, and he'd just been in the

Hunger.

I mean, like, he's a guy who plays a lot of cops.

Like, yeah.

Hello, Jordan.

You don't have to raise your hand.

You can just interrupt us.

We just talk all the time.

We interrupt each other.

Yes.

They have said also that they wrote this character with Martin Scorsese in mind.

Interesting.

Like, if you imagine

his entire character being an extrapolation of the taxi drives.

Like Gorsesi's character in taxi driver.

Hidea is my favorite performance in this movie.

I think he is.

He's really fucking extraordinary.

I find it to be like.

I mean, M.M.

at Walsh is awesome.

He's awesome.

It's an iconic work.

That's the right.

Iconic is the thing.

But I'm like, and no disrespect, no backhand to M.M.

at Walsh.

I think what Hideya is doing in this is so fascinating.

I find it so deeply affecting.

It is a performance that truly haunts me.

He's on the ground and he's crawling around.

Like, I think we were, we watched it on a big screen at Ray's office, and I was just like, off big screen, Ray.

All right.

I think Ray just turned to me and was like, what he's doing right now is so incredible.

It's like how wounded he is, like, how pathetic he is.

At the same time, he's like an animal.

And I don't mean that in like what like, I mean, he's got a hairy chest.

Okay, fine.

But, you know, like, there's something just sort of like primal about him there's like taxidermy dermied animal animals yeah taxidermied there's taxidermied animals all over his house and uh he has a dog like there is something like there's it's an association with him the speedo shot or the the still photo yeah what do you mean speedo he's wearing a two-piece wool black wool bodysuit he's wearing one of those old-fashioned uh bathing suits that's like covers your whole body just made out of brillo pants yeah

um

We just did Clueless very recently on this podcast.

And Amy Heckerling said her whole thought was, I want to cast someone who would usually play a hitman as Cher's father, right?

It is like the inverse of this.

This guy seems so intense and so menacing and so criminal to have him play like a sweetheart lawyer, but speaking with that level of gruffness and intensity to his daughter will be very funny.

Hideo just looks intense when he shows up, right?

It's not just his physical appearance, but also like his energy, literally his eyes and everything.

Cheers this same year.

He's just like, coming, Carla, come on, like yelling everything.

Speaking of criminal, his performance in Dick as Richard Nixon, criminally overlooked.

Yeah, I was going to say, I hope you weren't accusing him of being a criminal because he tells you that he is not a crook, in fact, in that movie.

Rewatching at this time, I had this specific thought of what is interesting about Hidea, both.

The character as written and his performance is that it's sort of an anti-Sidney Street, right?

Where it's like, here is the guy in the prime position of power within the structure of this movie.

This is a very small movie with a very tight cast, and the most capital anyone has is owning this bar and also having someone legally tied to them in marriage, right?

And yet, from the beginning, this guy has no effect on everyone around him.

It's true.

He holds the power.

He does, undeniably.

And yet, everyone's like, shut up.

Fuck you.

Fuck off.

Right.

Like, Like no one respects him.

No one takes him seriously.

And also

he like

the failed attempt to pick up the woman at the bar.

Sure.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Everything he does kind of fails.

It fails.

Right.

It's like, here's a guy who actually, it's not that he's Sydney Green Street in his mind.

It's that he is technically occupying that role.

And yet.

He is so uncomfortable in his own skin.

He is so self-loathing.

He is so sensitive, really, right?

Like everything like hits him that he cannot like sell the confidence of his actual position in a way that makes other people allergic to him.

Like people are grossed out by him.

That scene is a lot longer in the shooting script.

And he like, he's like, hey, do you want to go see the Oilers and the Rams at the Astrodome with me?

And like Maurice comes by and he's like, just give me the usual.

And Maurice brings him a glass of milk.

And he's like, no, come on.

And then like Maurice goes to pour out the glass of milk in the sink.

He's like, no, pour it back in the bottle.

It's this extended.

It's almost like a Mikey and Nikki's kind of scene.

What's also that he clearly goes like, I know how a guy like me is supposed to act.

He walks into the bar and then just goes up to a woman and basically says like, you're fucking me now.

And he cannot sell it.

And she just goes like, no, thank you.

And he takes a second stab at it where he's like, I don't think you understood what I was saying.

And she's like, yeah, I'm not interested.

And you can see him short circuiting that he doesn't know how to like handle this.

And yet this is probably every fucking night of his life, right?

Like this kind of archetype of like the gangster with the wife who hates him, who he finds out is having an affair and it like sends him into a spiral of jealousy where the there is always the like, yeah, but this guy's fucking everybody.

He's not angry that his wife is disloyal to him because he believes in the sanctity of marriage.

He's just jealous in a way that he can't control.

And this guy's even more pathetic where it's like he wishes he was fucking other people and he can't pull it off.

So part of it is just like, I'm jealous and possessive.

And also, I can't make anyone else fall for me.

I tricked just one woman.

Right.

He's the most small time version of, right, like, yeah, he tricked one woman.

Yes.

So then M.M.

at Walsh says that when he got the script, he was like, oh, is this my chance to do a Sidney Green Street thing?

Right.

So he reads the character as like, well, I'm in sort of like middle-aged, I'm like, probably going to transition the later starter.

Like, I need need to start thinking about who I want to be on screen in my 60s and 70s.

Is this a chance to sort of do this?

And it's the opposite where it's like,

can you like have a guy who on the outside seems like Buffalo Bob from like the Howdy Doody show, is dressed like the man in the yellow hat, right?

But like inside, he secretly is this kind of like menacing heavy.

And so you have these two guys circling each other who both have this disconnect between how they read to other people and their actual power within their lives.

And Hideya is just like so sad.

It is such a sustained, like, control

energy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It is my favorite moment in this entire film is just him having to walk past the like lover's rock lineup of teenagers all laughing at him.

Incredible.

With his finger in like the little sling.

Yeah.

And they notice it and they bully him.

Right.

And you're just like, there's so much in the inherent dynamics of like, why is MM at Walsh asking this guy who's about to hire him to do a hit to meet him at like the teen makeout point um and mm at walsh with his beetles somehow is like able to at least get these kids to humor him this woman's like this young girl's talking to him for 30 seconds and like the second Dan Hidea enters the space everyone's like what's your shut the fuck up fuck you

uh he's a bit off putting as much as i love dan hidea the actor if i met this character I might not want to hang out with him.

But

it's the anger and the sadness and the fact that he's not able to even

cover it up with bluster.

He is uncomfortable because you're just like, Jesus Christ, this guy's an open wound.

And it's all ugly.

We haven't mentioned John Goetz yet.

What do we think of John Goetz's?

I know, but we haven't really.

This is one of his earliest performances, obviously.

And he does not go on to fame in the same way as everyone else, but he's a pretty reliable working actor.

We talked to him on one social network even where it's like he's become a pretty reliable older, you know,

great.

Yeah, but it is funny because he's

right.

He is ostensibly the lead of this movie.

And yet it's sort of, although it sort of is a cipher.

I think his highest points are like post-burying Marty the morning, that look on his face, like, oh my God, I've just buried someone alive.

I think he's very, very good at conveying that feeling.

But I feel like if you look at Brolin in No Country for All Men, you just see like, okay, what is this like,

like

masculine guy, but like with, you know, some charisma, you know, with some like Burt Reynolds charisma added to it.

They are obviously,

you know, they have the benefit of starting with the Cormac McCarthy book on No Country, but you, it, it's why I kept thinking about that movie while watching this one is like

by that point, 20 years later, they know how to make the guy at the center interesting, even when it is this kind of blank slate tact turn.

Like, right.

Yeah, because I didn't notice until the rewatch for this that, like, that first scene is them telling each other that they have an attraction.

Like, that's the beginning of their relationship, is the first scene.

That's the first time they hook up when he takes a photograph of them.

And I don't feel like you feel that through the, like the way they're behaving towards each other.

And it's important for the setup of the movie to know that they are tentative around each other.

So

he just inherently doesn't have leading man energy.

And I don't say that in a negative way.

There are movies I think of, like one from the heart, where like casting Frederick Forrest is like a disaster because you're like, he needs to be in the Harry Dean Stanton role.

And this guy trying to play leading man is like throwing the entire movie off its axis.

And like Getz is not like that at all.

It feels probably like they wanted that out of him, where it's like...

Part of the intrigue for them is placing just some guy in the middle of a movie like this who is not carrying himself like a noir leading man.

That part of it is that this is the one guy who, like, halfway through is like, what the fuck have I gotten myself into?

I don't want to be in this film.

But they also said, like, a big thing about this movie that makes it such a miracle.

And the way you were saying, David, of like, where the fuck did this guy, these guys come from?

How is this not their 15th film?

Is that they basically establish their key crew all from film one, right?

Like they have Skip Leaves

and they have Sonnenfeld and and they have Carter Burwell, and they have Francis McDoyne.

Wonderful score, like perfect Carter Burwell, minimalist theme, like that you can't shake.

So melodic.

They find so much of the team, like right there from the beginning.

And Skip Leaf Say, who's their like incredible sound artist and works on every one of their films.

And who has a pretty cool name?

Let's just say.

Phenomenal name.

He is maybe the most established of everyone they're working with.

He brings in Carter Burwell.

Right.

Yeah.

He knows Carter Burwell just as like a music friend.

Is this just one of the music half-animation?

Right.

Right.

Is it like everyone's coming aboard, and the more people that get at it are kind of like, oh, these guys seem to know what they're doing.

Hey, come aboard.

Ray?

No.

Everyone's like surprised it turns out as well as okay.

Everyone is kind of like, all right, maybe this is just a dumb lark that, you know, we're doing.

Because Leaf says like working on big movies in lower positions, but he like actually has some stature as a sound guy, if not being the lead, like

he's got a resume.

Right.

He had a little more of a like i thought the script was interesting it's worth taking a chance on these guys i think the carter burwell thing is like this guy's smart maybe i can like throw him a bone i think they might get along well carter burwell was doing animation and he was in this band called thick pigeon i went and listened to the thick pigeon chat thick pigeon album that he recorded in the middle of doing this score thick pigeon like with like guys from new order and just really like an experimental he said he just wrote all of the melodies off of watching 20 minutes of the film And basically, they tried to hire, I think, three other people first, and then they came back to him.

Yeah.

I mean, he showed up with that melody.

I can't imagine, you know, like it's interesting, though, because the music he made is like, like, what I listened to is a lot more like monotonous and intentionally atonal than his film scoring work, which is really very appealing.

Like, so melodic.

They did this sort of like bake-off audition thing, right?

They asked him to come in with some stuff.

He came in with like 10 different pieces.

The melodic piano thing was one of them.

But there was more electronic stuff and more conventional thriller score stuff.

And they were like, We like that.

Can we work on that more?

And he gave them a bunch of stuff.

He was just like, There wasn't a traditional spotting section.

I was like watching a cut, and they were sort of like, I guess that's 60 seconds we need there.

I gave a bunch of stuff and they re-edited it and placed the music in different places than I had intended.

And he was like, I was angry at them.

I was too inexperienced to actually get upset about it but if that had happened to me on a studio film i probably would have made a bigger stink in a way that would have killed my entire career versus like trusting them long enough to see that it ultimately worked out in everyone's favor but it feels like everyone's relationship to them was like that and mem at walsh was like i don't know what these fucking guys are doing um but the thing skiplife said was like

Reading the script, it was so sparse.

It was like so tight.

There was like no emotion in it whatsoever in the way the characters are written.

And he's like, any sort of emotional nuance in that film is what the actors brought to it.

Like there was kind of nothing on paper for Fran's character.

And she came in and filled all this stuff.

And it feels like it teaches them this lesson of like, A, we got to give actors room to work and like fill in those gaps.

That strikes me as a thing that so much, so many young directors have to figure out how to actually work with actors.

And then, so they're seeing like, oh my God, she's finding stuff where we didn't give it to her.

And then they said about John Goetz, they were like, we watched the movie now and they're like, wow, we were doing him no favors.

We gave him nothing to play.

The character is basically just an audience surrogate and a thriller, which means he needs to be behind the eight ball.

He has no idea what's going on.

The whole movie is watching him walk into rooms silently and trying to figure stuff out.

And they were like, we think he's really good.

And as time goes on, we're more and more grateful for the favor he gave us of like doing that well in a way that informed us that we need to actually give actors more playable things from now, here on out he he also has a really big challenge in the like the last third of the movie because they set up this idea that uh muri says to abby uh stay away from ray he's gone crazy and so it's a challenge for the actor because he's got to seem completely bewildered trying to reach out to her trying to protect her from like whatever sort of like unclear threat there is, but also he has to play it in a way where he's giving her the like crazy hooks to grab onto where she can misread one of his signals and be like, oh, actually, he might be the person who wants to kill me.

So like, that's tough.

That's, that's, I would imagine that that's really hard.

And I think what he does very smartly is rather than playing like a movie version of crazy, he is playing the sort of slow burn shock of having killed a guy and watching a guy die, right?

Like there's some sort of like delayed trauma bomb happening within him that is just making him seem a little unhinged.

And the big thing he's playing is, you know, Marty early on goes like, at a certain point, she's going to say to you, like, I'm not doing anything funny.

And it's like, when she says that to him, that's the moment that he stops trusting her.

They lose faith in each other, basically.

I mean,

our beloved producer, Ben Hosley, always talks about,

who's not on mic as much in this episode.

We don't have

enough microphones.

Adjust the microphone over to Jordan.

But Ben, you love to talk about the bag full of money movie that makes you think, if I were in this, I'd do everything right and I'd end up owning an island, right?

Right.

So you hire an assassin in this movie, like I would hire a good assassin who would do his job and then we would shake hands and part ways.

I mean, I wouldn't hire this guy.

You don't want to hire me?

I can't do him either.

You don't want to hire like Pork.

As soon as I saw like four flies on his face, I'd be like, no, thank you.

The movies that I feel like you often point to.

often point to and say, I would know how to do this better are the things like a simple plan where, like, a very kind of like all-American, button-down, milquetoast guy starts like his morals slip away.

He starts losing perspective and judgment, getting caught up in his own, like, how do I maintain this?

How do I hold on to this?

Now you're killing more people and all this sort of shit, right?

And you're like, I would just be normal.

Cool as a cucumber.

John gets in this feels like the opposite, where you're like, so used to the movies like this making people get into this like Walter White-esque slipping into a like morass of evil

to hold on to what they have.

And instead, this guy, the more things get bad around him, the more he's just like, oh, fuck, I hate this.

I hate being here, right?

Like, he's fucked up too deeply

to ever fix it, but he's not doubling down on it and making it worse in a certain way.

Obviously, he kills Dana Daya, right?

But like the last 20 minutes, he's just sort of like, I don't know what the fuck to do anymore.

Why does Visser

do what he did?

Do what he do?

Because Dan Hide insulted him.

Yeah, because Dan Hidea is just a pain in the ass.

Yeah.

Because, I mean, like, it's just a lot of trouble in the 80s to be photoshopping is all I'm saying.

Yeah, he has to do that by 2000.

Does he like manual photoshopping, like drawing little blood stains on people?

He might have even used his own blood.

That's, yeah, maybe he did.

Because, like, this is a movie where nobody's like, hey, this is why I'm doing this, by the way.

Not that I need anyone to do that.

I don't want that.

I don't want some monologue, villainous monologue or whatever.

And the first time I saw it, I remember being confused when Getz shows up again, where I was like, I thought they were dead.

Right.

Where I fell for

his thing.

Ben, before you hand the mic back, I forgot to ask you.

Your Cohen brothers thing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Where are your first Cohen Brothers guys?

They are filmmakers my dad really loved.

That checks out.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like Fargo was a favorite of his.

This, look, all of us being like 80s, 90s kids, it checks out that we all have the same story, which is my parents told me these guys were important.

Absolutely, the Cohens were one of those filmmakers that they did talk about because also they're like quote-unquote serious movies that are entertaining and funny.

Like, as much as they were seen as like these guys are high artists, and this is like high falutin shit, on the other hand, it's like it's silly and it's exciting,

David.

David, what?

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

Booking.

Yeah.

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

Booking.

Yeah.

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

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

God, I'm trying to think of anyone in my life.

Perhaps even in this room.

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

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

Who's one other person in the room?

This is so rude.

I sleep easy.

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

No.

That's an example of a fussy person.

Look, people have different demands.

And you know what?

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

You know, you've got...

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

Any kind of demand.

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

Sure.

Maybe you're in Europe and you want to make sure that's very demanding to be in Europe.

You got air conditioning.

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

Yes.

You got to have air conditioning.

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

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

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

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

You do.

You love selfies.

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

Look,

again,

they're specifying like, oh, maybe you want a sauna or a hot tub.

And I'm like, sounds good to me.

Yeah.

Please.

Can I check that book?

You want one of those in the recording, Stupid?

That'd be great.

You want to start.

You want to be.

I'll be in the sauna when we record.

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

You want to be splish, splash, and it would look good if I had a sauna and a cold plunge.

And while recording, I'm on mic, but you just

like, ah, like as I move to the

kinds of demands that booking.com booking.

Yeah.

Yes.

You can find exactly what you're booking for: booking.com.

Booking.

Yeah.

Booking.com.

Book today on the site or in the atmosphere.com.

Booking.

Yeah.

Here's the basic plot overview of this movie.

Because it's not like it's told out of order.

It's not like a Mento-style obfuscation, but they just withhold certain information from you at certain times.

As much as it is like following into the basic thriller playbook of like the audience needs to be a step ahead of the character.

So the tension comes from us knowing the thing that they don't know and being worried about how it's going to go down.

This movie does withhold key bits of information from the audience as well.

So it takes a while to figure out even what has gone wrong.

But John Goetz is having an affair with Frances McDormand, who is married to Dan Hidea, who is a pathetic man who owns a bar.

She wants to leave him for her.

He has hired a private eye who has found photos of them sleeping together in a fit of rage, I think spurred on even more by the fact that he cannot fuck anyone else.

That he's the man.

Let's say the man is Rizless.

There is an astonishing lack of Riz in this guy,

decides to put a hit out on the two of them to get his ultimate revenge.

He makes this mistake of sort of lightly mocking M.M.

McWalsh, who tries to present himself as almost like the Andy Griffith show version of a private eye assassin, right?

Like he's couching everything everything in this sort of like folksy cuteness.

So when Hideya takes a swipe at him, you assume is this guy so kind of oblivious and good natured that it's just bouncing right off of him.

Instead, he breaks into their home, takes a photo of them sleeping, and manually basically hand

tints it.

He photoshops it in the

literal original meaning of the words.

To make it look like he has murdered them in bed, that there are bloodshots on the sheets,

which then

his plan is to then just rob Hidea,

take all his money, which he knows the location of when he goes to get paid.

He also steals Abby's gun, which is basically a frame.

He's doing that to frame her.

That'll tie it all up, essentially.

It's like, this was a lover's quarrel.

That's what happened here.

But when you're asking why he does it, it's like the ego is bruised.

He has the line later where he repeats the thing that Hidea said to him about like looking dumb or something like that.

He says now he looks stupid, which I've watched the movie a few times.

I don't think that Hidea ever calls himself.

I never call him dumb.

No, no, Visser is the one who says, you look like an idiot or you're, I think you're an idiot.

My read on it is he just thinks that Marty is not trustworthy, that this is not a good guy to keep a secret with.

And so it's actually cleaner.

to take the money from him, frame the lovers and leave.

And then it's a totally tied up.

But also

Hideya in that car scene isn't like flat out insulting him, but he is doing snarky under his breath shit.

And he's giving him an attitude that is clearly, I think you're dumb and I'm smart.

He's treating him like shit.

I mean, he's like,

when he gives him the money, he pushes across the table with his boot.

Yeah.

You know, and he's like, don't come for me.

But it's also, it's the no country, it's the Fargo thing.

It's the like, all this for a little money that they're obsessed with, which is like

the promise of such a small amount of money can make people lose their fucking minds where you're just like, this is absolutely not worth it.

The other thing too is, I'm not exactly, I don't think this is the point where, where Visser

fully decides to do it, but it might be the moment that makes him cross the threshold is when Idea says, I put a call in and the less you need to know about it, the better.

And at that point, if I'm putting myself in the detective's mind, I'm thinking, oh, he's involved with the mob.

He got funding from somebody who now understands the workings of this situation, which is funny too, because what he actually did is he put in a call to Muris being like, you stole the money from the safe.

Right.

It's, yeah, it's one of those things where watching it the first time, you think, is there a bigger conspiracy going on here that's slowly going to get unfurled?

And instead, you realize this guy just made too big of a play.

Right.

Was just sort of like, I don't trust this dude.

And I guess I could make five times times as much money if I just kill him.

And I think my plan is foolproof and no one will see through it.

Don't hire a hitman.

Yeah.

Because like,

you know, they're, they kill people.

They do.

So they could kill you.

This is an interesting take, David.

You know what I mean?

Like, they're already comfortable killing people for no particular reason.

This is very similar to the beat in no country too, where they go out.

to visit the scene of the firefight and Sugar just shoots those two guys that have hired him.

And you're like, why?

Why is this movie about this Hitman suddenly about a Hitman who's going total chaos mode?

And I always forget that he kills those two guys.

Although, the interesting thing about Visser is he doesn't really come off as that psychopathic.

Like, when you realize that he didn't actually kill them and

he

did these fake frame job photos, it sort of feels like, oh, this is a guy who will choose the sort of more weasely fake out path as opposed to like actually just pick up a gun and shoot somebody.

But then he immediately picks up a gun and shoots Marty.

Right.

And the other big mistake he makes is thinking that he's dead, right?

Which is another thing that coincided was like a big animating idea for them in this movie.

And I think it comes a lot out of Joel editing horror films, watching what Raimi's doing, seeing that like grow as its own sort of cottage industry of the 80s horror films and whatever

in the early part of the decade was he was like, all these movies present it like killing people is like one move and it's done.

And obviously sometimes you shoot someone point blank in the head and they like fall down and it's over.

But even some of the like trailers and marketing materials for this movie use the tagline of like, death takes a lot longer than you'd think or something like that.

That that was their big set piece idea was like, can you have a guy who thinks that he's closed off the loose end and killed a guy, but in reality, it's 15 minutes of the movie that are going to have to silently play out with, like, fuck, this is taking longer than I thought.

I think there's some versions of this movie that have an opening title card that talks about like a quote from like Hemingway or something about like how hard it is to kill somebody.

Actually, easy.

Shoot them right in the head.

Bang.

Which I'm sure

you guys know this, but the opening MM at Walsh narration, which I butchered, was not in the script.

They had him having the final line at the end of the movie.

They put it together and they were like, feels like it kind of needs something at the beginning.

And he was like, we just wrote that.

We just came up with something.

We brought him in to do ADR,

handed him two pages of paper.

He read it cold one time.

And I think part of it was that, like, they don't tend to make movies with conventional narrative structures where you're following one character the entire time.

They are so into ensembles and they're so into sort of the arc of the movie is the incident

rather than you following one character through incidents.

It's like, how does this incident progress and affect everyone around it?

And Carter Burwell, when he lands on this like piano melody, they go, oh, fuck.

All these scenes of characters in silence, and we have this movie that already has these open spaces and people looking and listening and considering.

If we're playing the same theme across all these characters, it does start to bring them together.

It like unifies them in a mood and a feeling.

And I think they have the same thought of like, if we put MMW saying something at the beginning, what it is is almost irrelevant, it starts to bookend it and frame it a little bit more as this guy's

worldview.

Roger Ebrund, when this film came out, not to put Hosley on blast again, but this is, I think, what is the most potent idea in this movie.

He said, a lot has been written about the visual style of Blood Simple, but I think the appeal of this movie is more elementary.

It keys into three common nightmares.

One, you clean and clean, but there's still blood all over the place.

A Shakespearean nightmare.

Two, you know you have committed a murder, but you're still not sure quite how or why.

That is really true.

That's great.

Right.

That you're like, I think he's dead, and I think someone did it, but I don't know where he is or what happened.

Classic Ebert observation.

And three, you know you have forgotten a small detail that will eventually get you into a lot of trouble.

You're obsessively overthinking, like, but did this, you know, yes.

No.

The lighter, yeah.

I mean, the Vista leaving his lighter is like.

Now, Ebert saying those are the three common universal nightmares seems to imply that we all think about killing people all the time.

Oh, God.

But what I actually think he's saying in a Huzley way is that we all watch movies like this and start to think, could we pull it off?

And it's just about deceit, right?

Even if it's not murder, right?

Where you're just thinking about it.

Oh, could I weave a web of lies?

Could I, could I get away with something?

Can I end up with an island?

And what would happen?

And how would I do it?

And where would it start to go?

And it's the postmodern riff of this movie: okay, this is how it actually would go down.

Everything would just kind of be sloppy and meaningless.

Because, like, in a Chrome Brothers movie like Blood Simple, you should, you could watch this and be like, well, all of these characters are essentially kind of worthless.

It's not like these are lovable characters.

So, what do I care what happens to them?

Let them all, you know, shoot each other.

And

instead, you're like with them.

You're not exactly rooting for characters always, but like you're kind of just like you're in that experience that you're talking about of like, huh, what would I do?

And huh, like, what would happen next if I, you know, whatever.

Like, it's a movie designed knowing that audiences watch these types of movies that way.

And when they're skipping over information, it's taking advantage of the fact where it's like placing you in his headspace of, I don't know why I just killed a guy.

You know, you have Getz walk into the office, see Hidey there, step on a gun, think mistakenly that he's the one who just shot him when, in fact, he has been lying there bleeding out in a chair.

And it's just like everything spirals off of that.

I think just one thing that I would just want to say about like the like all the performances in the movie is that

I think something that's generous about the movie and possibly like related to the fact that it was their first movie where they wanted to give kind of juicy rolls to everybody is I really do think that there's moments in this movie where every

every character feels like they're the main character Like, more so than I think any of the Cohen's other movies.

Although, I do think that is kind of a thing that carries through for most of their career.

Fargo kind of has three leads and, you know, sort of three support, like, right?

Like, it's like you could argue, well, McDorman's the lead.

Yeah, sure, but she's not in a lot of the movie and she kind of shows up late.

You could argue the same with the

vanishes from the movie.

It's the braid.

They love the braid.

You can watch the restranded braids.

Yeah.

Well, actually, buscemi's the lead like buscemi's actually maybe in more of the movie than you think he is or whatever you know yeah exactly i would just say though that like marty coming back for an extremely extended dream sequence where he has this strange almost touching heart to heart like menacing slash touching heart to heart like that feels like

a little bit like

Are you like, why are you bringing this character back?

You know, it's like the shot of the blood, like, out of a bucket, like, hitting the floor is so good.

It's hitting every part.

It is actually, yeah, you're right about that though.

It's giving one extra crazy horror thriller moment that the movie maybe needed.

Yeah, it's a good pop for the movie energy-wise, and it's a good reminder of the thing you're talking about, the sort of the guilty frenzy that builds up.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes, Griffin.

No, I just, I, yeah, I saw that Ebert review and it hit me very hard where I'm like, I do think that is

fucking good at boiling something down like that.

But also

the admitting we all think about this, right?

Like part of the buy-in of this movie isn't that we all sit around plotting murder, but we all like Ben,

read a noir novel or watch a movie or whatever and think about how you would handle it.

And this is like a movie in which the people inside of it are trying to act like people in a movie and they can't get it right.

They're sort of like, I know my role in this story and I just have to do this and it will all work out.

There's also just a doomed, it's like once you have the affair.

It's like once you start a relationship where you threw someone else under the bus at the beginning of the relationship, like they're never going to trust each other.

And that's the thing.

Like, when he comes to see Marty, he's like, One day she's going to say, I'm not doing anything funny.

And then when she has the dream, you know, they're saying, I love you.

And he's like, you know, you're just saying it because you're scared.

And that's what Ray says to her at the end.

It's just their relationship is haunted in a kind of final destination way from the beginning.

They like they did

the touch the monkey paw, you know.

Tedea is totally in their heads.

Yeah.

He's gotten into both of their heads.

He's in my head, too.

And my heart.

Okay.

So what else do we discover before the iconic famous ending of this film, which I feel like is the most famous part of the movie?

I think the two most famous parts of the Tour de Force performances, there's the 20-minute burial scene.

The burial scene.

The ending.

I feel like those are the standouts.

There's no dialogue other than the radio.

Yes.

There's like 15 continuous minutes that play out without any of the primary characters speaking.

Yeah.

That is just kind of process.

And that's what, when you watch this movie, you're like, yes, this is a Cone Brothers movie.

It's about people on the edge and sort of idiot criminality spiraling out of control.

But at the same time, you're like, it barely has any dialogue.

Like, it doesn't have that kind of the flourishes we associate with them later in their career.

It basically only has five characters.

The only guy we haven't mentioned is Sam Art Williams, who plays Maurice, and I think is incredibly good in this.

He's great.

And is kind of the one neutral party in this movie.

I was going to say, you keep wondering whether he's going to break in a direction and he kind of doesn't.

Almost every scene of his in the script is cut in half.

And the movie ends with an action sequence where he fights Julian.

He fights the dog.

That's how it's written.

Yeah.

He fights the dog in the room with the beige billiard table and he fights it with a Q.

That's fascinating.

Because it feels like in the final product, his function is to remind you: like, these people are all caught up in some shit that is kind of in their heads, right?

It's like a weird combination of like anger and like lust and jealousy and paranoia that's animating all of them.

And he's just like a guy clocking in and clocking out and doing his job.

Yeah, he's like, he's, he's the uninvolved.

These characters exist in a real world.

Like, this world is not inherently evil.

They're making decisions.

This movie is not funny.

Now, I'm not saying it doesn't have funny moments.

And there is that dark, dark, black humor of the Coens like there.

But like, again, you don't watch this movie and see raising arizona coming no it's a wild swing right uh and you don't see but like fargo is an interesting contrast to this movie in that it is so funny it has a luminously heroic character in the middle of it versus super good right right And like, nonetheless, has so much, you know, what common DNA.

It's just like the arc of their career is interesting to think about.

And it is interesting to think of them watching this movie and being like, oh boy, like, you know, because it's like Stanley Kubrick made fear and desire, and you're like, nice, try Stanley.

Like, maybe take another cut, you know, right?

Whereas the Cohen brothers are treating this like they're fear and desire, where they're like, this is so amateur-ish.

Like, that's crazy.

Please, Jordan.

Well, the only thing I would add is that, like, the Cohens have different modes that they're in, and you see it throughout their career.

So, like, there's definitely movies like Fargo where dialogue and character interactions and funny voices is like a big part of the meal that they're serving up.

But then if you watch No Country, which is probably

in the long run, the movie they're going to be most remembered for.

It's a great question.

I think about it a lot.

Very little dialogue.

Obviously,

there are memorable dialogue scenes, but huge stretches of that movie is just like a guy putting gear together in order to trick somebody else or do like cat and mouse stuff in a hotel room.

Yeah, and the script, I mean, To the White Sea is nothing but that opening stuff from No Country or the 20-minute silent sequences where you're just watching almost like dialogue scenes that are happening silently between objects and a person's face, watching them build one version of a thing.

Which I think they are better at than any other filmmakers alive.

Yeah, and you can read it in the script.

It's like that whole scene where he's cleaning up the murder scene.

It's all like, you know, he tries the windbreaker and it says, this isn't going to work.

And then it's like, he adds the towel.

It's like, this is going to work.

It's all like.

Step forward, step backwards.

It's very trackable.

Silent conversations with objects is a great way of putting it, where I'm like, no country is one of the best like shot reverse shot between human face and inanimate thing movies I have ever seen, where you understand exactly what they're thinking and what they're looking to do.

But I remember

Wes Anderson always talks about on Bottle Rocket how

he would lose certain arguments, not even arguments, but like.

producer, line producer, you know, first aid, whoever comes along, go like, Wes, we're running behind schedule.

We have to move on.

Or we don't have time to prep this.

We just need to shoot this

rather than holding up and waiting for the wall to be finished, you know, painted the right color or whatever it is.

And he's like, I watched that movie and it drives me crazy and it causes me physical pain that I, all I see are the things that I like conceded at the final moment as good enough.

And he's like, it makes me so physically, viscerally uncomfortable that I made this commitment to myself from that movie of just like, I am never letting something film until it's ready ever again.

Like, I do not want to have a single second in any of my movies that irritates me in this way, where I feel like I didn't get what I wanted versus owning the mistakes of misjudgment, but executing it in the way you had it in your head.

And I think Blood Simple is like a little similar for them, where they just look at it and they were like, from this moment on, we were just never going to let anyone make us move on.

But on the other hand, like something that they talk about in their sort of like,

let's say, contemporary or like

when they hit their stride is that part of the process is

as much as the movie is storyboarded to all hell and like, you know, every single moment is storyboarded, that's not what the actors are looking at.

So when the actors get to set,

they block the scenes.

And like the way Deacons

describes it is, and yet somehow the blocking ends up being exactly like the storyboards.

Right.

But I will say,

maybe that's something they learned from this, where they're like, possibly

the performances just feel too chopped up, or it's like it's not giving the actors room to breathe.

I don't know if you guys found this, but that the storyboard artist they hired kept drawing the Frances McDorman character naked.

So she kept asking to see the storyboards.

And they were like,

just really go off of whatever you want because they were so embarrassed.

Obviously, they start dating like right after this.

But the last shot of this movie with M.M.

at Waltz's POV of the dripping of the faucet, right?

You notice if you watch it closely that they have to replay the shot backwards.

Joel

refers to it as rock and rolling that frame.

He said we had to rock and roll that frame.

They just didn't get a long enough like shot of it.

They basically just make the drip go like to the left and then to the right and to left to right and then it drops.

And they do the same thing when he shoots Hide, actually.

They do an optical to make him just like totally freeze for a second longer.

Yeah.

But there's stuff like that where I wonder if that came out of necessity.

Oh, yeah.

We don't have the piece we need in the edit.

So how do we like fudge it to make it work?

It's hard to direct a drip for a pipe.

But that probably drives them insane now.

Versus like today, they would just be like, we spent three months figuring out how to film the drip before we got to set.

Yeah, there's lots of stuff like that in Barton Fink with like drains and drips.

Yes.

I mean, in the famous drain shot that Robert Deacons makes fun of them for, which we talk about on that episode.

Oh, as this series goes on, you got to check out the Deacons website.

Every single film, he publishes his lighting plans and you can really, really understand what he's doing.

I know this is not a Deacons film, but as the show goes on, you got to get into the, you know, just the department heads, Jane Muskie, Dennis Gastner, Jessica Shore, just like the transition from their...

production designers, their DPs.

It's so trackable with their movies because they'll go through phases with like a production designer or they'll go through phases with a DP.

But yeah, gets so excited for the Deacon stuff.

It is crazy that they only made three films with Sonnenfeld because it feels so impactful that these three guys like all started together.

And then Sonnenfeld obviously figures out how to take the style he develops with them and puts it onto like the biggest studio comedies imaginable.

And then they sort of transmute it into something new with Deacons and the other DPs they work with later.

But like Sonnenfeld is such a designer, but I don't feel like his style with the Cohens is ever quite as

immaculate in the Blockbuster.

I mean, I guess he's still, he's got a lot of the rushing, you know, camera stuff.

But also the like the big wide-angle lens.

Yeah.

And really good sense.

Yeah, a lot more money to throw around too for most of his movies.

Was there a lot of money in Men in Black?

Was that Wild West?

That was an indie, right?

That one they made.

The notorious thing about Sonnenfeld is on his studio movies, his direction is always slower, flatter.

Are you serious?

Yeah, because it's like this thing that they developed with the Cohen's of like, can you develop this visual style where if you have a compelling actor in the middle of the frame, the least they're doing on this wide of a lens will end up amplifying.

The Adams family has Ryle Julia and Christopher Lloyd in a like not slower or flatter competition almost, right?

You know what I mean?

Like, I guess Men in Black is like the height of that for him, where it's like

telling Tommy Lee Jones to do nothing, which is awesome and works.

And Tommy Lee Jones is what the hell is happening to me.

And then he sees the movie and he's like, oh, I get it.

Yeah.

Although Tommy Lee Jones is the Gene Hackman style actor, where he's like, yeah, I hated making the movie and thought the guy was an idiot.

Then I watched it and I was like, oh, it was pretty good.

Well, I think they had this, they like developed this style together where no matter how seriously the thing was being played at the center, things feel a little funny and off.

There is like some innate black humor just to the actual lensing of these movies that then Sonnenfeld carries over onto movies that are more explicitly funny, which then makes it less funny as his career goes on.

Like when you watch fucking Nine Lives and it's a Kevin Spacey talking cat movie that's shot like this.

Normal movie, I bet.

Right.

Now you're like, well, we're just in like bug nuts world.

Right.

Yeah, the ending is rocks,

and it is funny.

It's so, so intense in the theater.

I've seen this movie in a theater, like you are like truly, truly gripping your seat and then him laughing being like, oh, you didn't even know who you were fucking shooting.

Like

rocks.

It's meaningless.

And also Emmett Walsh cracking up as he's dying.

Like it's just a great character detail.

Like early on when

Hidea, Marty says, like, I know what rock to turn over to find you.

He loses it and he says, that's very good.

Yeah.

What rock to turn over?

Good one.

Just blow out the mic on that.

It sounds like he's blowing it.

He's blowing it a lot and and then at the end when she says i'm not afraid of you marty he like he has to get that last line in where he says uh

i'll what does he say like ma'am i'll be sure to tell him if i see him yeah yes yeah yeah yeah which is great the image of she has pinned his gloved hand with the knife right that has crossed over into her room on the windowsill all other parts of his body are still outside of her view on the other side she's like aware of this guy here just by by his bloody pinned, writhing hand.

And then he's shooting through the wall.

And this weird, like, here's a physical reminder of the guy who you're fighting with, only through one anonymous appendage.

And then the sense of danger that is like leaking through on the other side and this like weird, like cackling laugh.

Yeah.

And just as like showmanship, it really does end with a sequence that feels like Terminator or Halloween.

It has that great like final girl feeling.

And also just the ending is like someone who's wounded, who can't see you, who's shooting at you.

It's like so hard for her to know, should I go to the left or should I go to the right?

You can shoot in any direction through one of those walls.

Yeah.

And what's so great about the visual is that they, they put individual lights on each bullet hole pointing in different directions.

So it looks like the basically.

Like the light is the trail of where the bullet went, which makes no sense based off of how light works, but it's a perfect kind of Looney Tunes,

like just escalation.

It's like swords going into like a magician's trunk.

And that will carry over to Raising Arizona.

Like that, that energy does occur.

Oh, hey, Ben.

Ben's leaning in.

You're just deep in thought.

Ben's kind of doing a neighbor and home improvement thing over his mouth right now.

Wilson.

I've been on the record.

I love dirt.

This could be a good series for you, by the way.

Poof.

I know.

A lot of dirty bags of money.

Yeah.

If you're digging at night, something really fucked up is happening.

If you're digging in the dark, it's like

100%.

Two guests.

I need to hold back.

I pass the mic over to Jordan.

I don't need to enter the conversation.

And you're just sitting there.

You're like, this has to be shared.

And it is a thought we would never get to in eight hours.

But what a profound statement.

You are right.

Has there ever been a good night dig?

No.

No.

I mean, unless, yeah, maybe you're like really desperate to make a shelter.

Well, yeah, this is what I'd say.

It doesn't have to be nefarious.

Right.

But if you're doing benevolent night digging, your life's in a bad place, right?

Like there's a reason they literally call it the graveyard shift.

Like the worst kind of working position you can imagine is you are being paid to dig graves at night.

And you're like, look, this is a job.

Whatever, I got to pay the rent, but yet

this is the least desirable

job anyone could possibly have.

Right.

So you're either trying to get away with a crime, something's gone horribly wrong, like you're trying to get out of a jam, an existential jam, a threat,

or you just, you've got bad options.

Or you're like a woodchuck.

I suppose if you're a woodchuck, he came up with the one

to his own role.

But it's pretty, yeah, it's pretty limited.

It's pretty bad.

Yeah.

Have you guys,

we're all, I know we're all like, grew up in the city for the most part.

Have you ever dug?

It's a good question.

Why would I have ever been digging?

I don't think I've ever really dug.

No.

Why would I be digging?

What would I dig?

I played digged.

I know you buried some genes, Ben.

I'm aware that you did that.

It's come up on the show.

And I've dug a lot of holes in my life.

Why?

Putting in fence posts.

Sure.

Never had to put in a fence post.

Never had anywhere to put a fence.

Helping my dad garden, planting a shrub.

So I've done that.

I think of that as that's, that's pretty, that's little dig.

You're just

the little trowel.

But I'm talking big boy.

I've maybe helped my grandma.

Slam it down with your boot.

Yeah.

Chopped wood.

Yeah.

Have I done much digging?

I don't know.

Ray?

No experience.

Shakes his head.

Jordan.

Every year, my dad and I and whoever happens to be around before the Passover Saturday.

Bernie fish?

Yes, we go out to the side of the house and we dig up some horseradish, which will then

the horseradish for the Passover Seder.

Bitter herb, yes.

Wow.

Like around 4 p.m.

Okay.

So right before Sunday.

An evening dig.

You've got to get out.

An evening dig, but not a true night dig.

I mean, I could imagine, though, something messed up happening and having to do the dig at night.

It'd be a bad sign.

Yeah.

Anyway, that was just a little dig corner.

That's all I had.

Okay.

Well, it was invaluable.

That's the sound of the fully electric Audi Q6 e-tron and the quiet confidence of ultra-smooth handling.

The elevated interior reminds you this is more than an EV.

This is electric performance redefined.

Welcome to Only Murders in the Building, the official podcast.

Join me, Michael Cyril Creighton, as we go behind the scenes with some of the amazing actors, writers, and crew from season five.

The audience should never stop suspecting anything.

How can you not be funny crawling around on a coffin?

Catch Only Murders in the Building official podcast.

Now streaming wherever you get your podcasts and watch Only Murders in the Building, streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney Plus for bundle subscribers.

Terms apply.

I'm going to tell you a little bit about the release of the film.

So MM Walsh, of course, says the film had a huge impact on his career.

His price went up like five times.

He says I was the guy everyone wanted.

He or it's a funny call.

At one point, he gets a call from Joel Cohen

saying, hey, M.

I guess you call him M?

They say that when they met him, they didn't know how to address him.

And they were like, is he M?

Is he Emmett or is he a small man?

This is Michael Emmett Walsh, to be clear.

But they called him M.

Can you blow smoke rings?

And he was like, I guess he tried.

He made himself sick.

He wasn't a smoker, tried, trying to, he didn't really do it.

And they were like, don't worry, we came up with a little machine for it.

And he tells a different story in the criterion thing.

But then when they shoot the scene,

okay.

Yeah, no, here's

the machine didn't work.

Yes.

And so a little prof girl was like, I grew up with four older brothers in the barn.

Give me a cigar.

I can do it.

And she starts beautiful, like blowing beautiful smoke rings.

And then she starts barfing.

Yeah, perfume.

Cigars are pretty disgusting to anyone, but especially a little girl.

And Waltz throws that out as like, that's the movies right there.

A 20-year-old puking after getting to unite screen cigar smoke rings.

A cruise spotlight.

They had an overqualified key grip on this movie who they said was like an LA guy who had moved to Austin because he was afraid of the big one earthquake happening in L.A.

And he was doing sheetrock and he was so bored.

But basically they're like, we had this small movie, but we had like a big A-list key grip.

So all those like flying, like when the camera moves over the drunk guy at the same time, I was going to say, all the the kind of animated flying camera stuff is just like they have this extra muscle behind them that is out of size with the scale of the movie they're making.

Like boom your camera up, I'll just say.

Yes.

It's a big deal.

I feel like that shot in particular and that camera move of jumping over the drunk is like the moment where I have to imagine people at film festivals, like my parents, but also this fucking year-long run of them doing like a global tour of this movie.

The moment where every screening people lean forward and go, who the fuck are these guys?

But also that's the moment where all the pieces have been set on the playing board and then it's, he's going back to the bar and she's like, don't go back to the bar.

And he goes back.

So it's like everything is set up.

And I almost feel like that moment is being like, you know, this mousetrap is perfect and the camera is just like moving over it.

So they don't want to disturb a hair.

It's just such a funny flourish with so much personality.

And yet, if you're seeing it at a film festival and you're probably someone who works in film or studies it immensely, the second that shot happens, you go, fuck, that's complicated.

The fact that these guys would take the time to set that up when it just kind of feels like something to make themselves laugh immediately tells you a ton about them.

Film was shot over the course of eight weeks.

I haven't mentioned that.

In Texas.

Now, Joel had spent a little time in Texas because he went to UT, but I think just a little bit of time.

But they kind of loved it as a sort of swerve from the urban feel of most noirs.

I mean, this is a thing they're always saying is like, these are just genre films.

We're working in well-established genres, but we're just trying to make things off the hump and specific all the time.

So they're just like, this is the opposite of rainy New York.

So it's a great place to do a noir.

Now,

Joel is credited on this film as the director.

Ethan's credited as the producer, largely due to DJA regulations.

We talk about this a little bit on our Barton Fink episode, which is with someone who has run run into these DGA regulations.

They do become an established DGA duo by the time of the lady killers.

JJ points out that the Farrelly brothers did this quickly.

I do think sometimes you can just do it.

And my guess is they just didn't bother.

to sort of like make the effort to be like, hey, can we be, you know, right?

They just kind of set up.

They got rejected at first.

And then I was, we're like, I guess we won't get approved.

And their ongoing success probably made it easier for other siblings like the Wachowskis and the Fairleys and whoever to hit the ground running and get approved the first time out.

They

say Joel, they joke, like, oh, Joel's taller.

That's why he's a director.

But they seriously say that the credits don't really reflect the collaboration.

And Ethan does plenty of the directorial stuff, and Joel does plenty of the production stuff, you know, whatever.

Like, everyone who works with them calls them the two-headed director.

They're like, it is the most bizarre symbiotic.

I'm a two-person school of fish.

Right.

They move simultaneously.

Yeah.

I was just going to say, it's funny that with driveway dolls, like as soon as you get into the interviews with Ethan and Tricia Cook,

like they'll just be like, yeah, we co-directed it.

Like, just funny that they're like recapitulating that exact thing,

like

having the credit be a little bit wrong.

So here's another thing we'll get into in the Barton Fink episode, not to tip the hand too much, but it sounds like if you successfully get the DGA to approve the idea that you are a true team, that's not a thing that can be untangled and retangled.

Yes, you're not a team.

You can't make a new team now.

So Barry did throw up a lot.

I think you referenced that briefly, Ray, because you've been throwing up a lot, not to call you out.

Similarly, out of nerves, right?

Like Barry was very nervous, but obviously the film does turn out to be pretty good.

They were very inspired visually by The Conformist.

Oh,

and The American Friend, right?

Which is a great movie.

That movie is so well shot.

They also said they had a disc on location a laser disc player and they had just seen road warrior so they were watching road warrior that kind of laser talk about road warrior a lot as one of their like evergreen biggest inspirations of just like this is just pure filmmaking right yeah i don't know if george miller broke through for like the american public like as a name at that point but You just see this time again, like with James Cameron or any action director at that time just being like, I want to do what George Miller is doing.

Like, it's just like, you truly was your favorite director, his favorite director at that moment.

Um, they have this film, no one wants to release it.

Every studio is happy to watch it, um, because there really aren't a lot of like independent 35-millimeter films.

Like, you know what I mean?

Like, this is still an unusual American product.

There's not much of an indie scene.

Everyone sees it and is basically, how would I sell this?

Like, this is like an art film about murderers.

And it has no stars.

Right.

Right.

And it's like pitch black.

Yeah.

Yes.

And at one point they meet with the Crown International Pictures, Mark Tensor, and he liked it, but he had no money.

And he said, don't worry about my screwing you.

I don't have time to screw you.

And Sam Raimi,

they went to Sam Raimi and they were like, should we do this?

And he said, yeah, in six months, he's going to come back to you and say, hey, I found the time.

An incredibly good line.

Good, good, good line by old Raimi.

Probably a good call.

I mean, I don't know, but

interesting little like possible meta.

That could have been how it went.

Instead, it goes into TIFF and Circle Films, which

distributes their first three movies.

Which had started out as like a bunch of different theater owners.

Ben Baron Holtz

is into it.

And

so they said it was the, he said it was the debut film that impressed him most since Eraser Head.

Speaking of people we recently covered.

And then it went to New York, which was a really, really big deal back in the day.

Not that the New York Film Festival isn't a big deal now, but I feel like it used to have a more primo place on the festival calendar, whereas now New York is more like, yeah, you know, stuff's already been at Venice and Telluride and it's like getting here.

Well, that's the thing that's really changed is the like film.

Film Festival has flattened this, yeah.

Festivals wanting premieres and exclusives.

The idea of a movie like this playing at festivals for over a year and each festival not being possessive of like, well, that's damaged goods because this other place got to it first.

That, right.

It was like prominence in terms of like the headiness of the jury or the selection committee or whatever versus like this film is either good or bad based on what festival it's premiering at relative to which is the best launching pad for an Oscar campaign.

Yeah.

Right.

Like now New York Film Festival has become like, these are movies that already are pre-approved, basically, by and large.

After the New York Film Festival premiere, Janet Maslin of the New York Times, one of its film critics, gives it a good review.

That back in the day is just huge.

Obviously, that's important now, but back in the day, very important.

Goes to Sundance, early Sundance, nonetheless, won the grand jury prize

there, which only helps its buzz.

Pauline Kale took a big shit on it, as she did to any movie released post-1980, essentially.

But

Roger Ebert was a huge fan.

And it made movie,

made money, like decent money.

I think it made about about $2 million, which is obviously a big return on investment for the investors.

And everyone basically likes it except for Joel, who says it's pretty damn bad.

And Sondenfeld agrees, the pacing too slow.

I could have shot it better.

These days we do it for 10 times the price and it would be 8% better.

That's kind of a funny line from Sondenfeld.

He knows he's actually...

a little being a little silly criticizing it like he's not it's not like sondenfeld's like oh yeah the guy who made rv would have a better better take on this.

And they don't, they don't hate it.

They don't, it's not like there's a lot of directors.

They have affection.

They're for sure.

It's sort of like, oh, it's like cute.

We didn't know what we were doing.

Yeah.

Could I, could I, just real quick, like the Pauline Kale

pan is interesting just because her main take without the benefit of, you know, being able to read the future is it seems like these guys are just trying to make this movie.

as a calling card to make studio films.

Yes.

She's like, this is too derivative.

Like, it's like, I can see all of the influence.

And I just think it's interesting in terms of thinking forward of like what, where the Coans are going to go, because as much as they are making films that are extremely to their own standards, they also do make movies that are commercially minded and like audience minded.

Yes.

They don't,

it's a great way to think about it.

It's like, they make challenging movies, but even Barton Fink, which I think of as maybe their most challenging movie of pretty much that they ever made in a way, like their artiest movie and we i am also thinking of it because we already did this episode is incredibly watchable and put you know like has velocity even though it's about a guy sitting in a room going crazy and like i remember watching as a teenager and being like wow this is heady and i watch it now and i still think it's so brilliant but i was like damn this thing moves like thunderbolts like i love it it kind of reminds me of like 90s uh re-listening in 90s albums where you're like oh yeah this was so stripped back.

And now you listen to it now and you're like, wow, that was extremely produced.

Yes, right.

There's a thing that Carter Burwell talks about, like him and Skip working together on this movie, kind of establishing a thing, which is like, we need to let the audience know by what we're doing with the sound that this movie isn't one thing or the other.

It's not just this harsh, dark thriller.

It's not just a comedy.

And I do think they established that in this first movie is like, you're not going to be able to pin down.

exactly what this is, but you're going to be entertained.

They get even better at it as their career progresses.

And I also think

their most beloved movies are the ones that find the like perfect balance between those tones.

But it is my favorite thing about them that they always like, in the most dramatic scenes, will find a way to put in something funny.

And the funniest scenes find a way to put in something that's like very terrifying and heartbreaking.

They also talk a lot, just process-wise, like they will take things to a point where it gets more locked down and they will walk it back.

So that it like there's

in Barton Fink, they're were like there was a scene in the script where you like there's a point in the movie where it's pretty clear you're going into his fantasy but then there was a beat almost like in brazil where you go outside of his fantasy and you see what's really happening to barton and they were like that just locks it down too much that makes it resolved and if you just leave it more enigmatic then it's something that stays alive in the audience's head right i was trying to find there was one review they were talking about that they remember hitting really hard that basically described a a movie as having all the depth of a resume and the soul of a bloomingdale's window you know okay but i was trying to remember whose review that was i can't find now it's just joel saying i love this review yeah it wasn't kale okay kale says uh blood simple has no sense of what we normally think of as quote reality and has no connections with quote experience and then she says at the end nobody in the movie making team or in the audience is committed to anything nothing is being risked except the million and a half she's doubling the budget but this is like this was the strike against them.

And then I found Rosenbaum did a

piece like 15 years later, 20 years later, explaining why he still thinks he's right about Blood Simple being shitty.

And he wrote, remains mired in a smart alley film school sensibility.

Like this was the whole thing that everyone threw at them when they didn't like them.

It's like, we get it.

You guys are clever.

You're smart.

You've watched movies.

You know how to move the camera.

You have nothing to say about humanity.

You don't think there's anything personal about this film about a marriage falling apart that Joel wrote while his marriage was falling apart?

Awesome energy.

I think they're sincere filmmakers.

I agree with you.

But I think this is where their ref that I was referencing is tacit or whatever.

It's like, you do have to think a little around their jokiness and their kind of like straightforwardness to dig into like, yeah, actually, right.

These guys are not just kind of like, oh, no, we just sit down and write the movie.

Who cares?

Like, I'm like, no, you're motivated by your own feelings and the conversations.

Like, I don't think they just sit down and they're like, what if if a guy's name was barton fink oh good idea where where when would he have lived i don't know the 40s okay let's keep going you know i guess there's this weird balance to me of their them feeling like incredibly earnest nihilists if that makes sense like there is a a real emotional sincerity to them being fascinated by this question of like is this truly all meaningless and so often their movies are built around that these characters doing these like making these decisions that make zero sense in pursuit of a thing that's maybe going to ruin their whole fucking life.

Um, and I think

that got written off as being condescending and just like they don't care.

This is all them like shaking up an ant farm and like laughing at stupid characters doing stupid things, um, which combined with their just like technical proficiency in craft is just like, okay, so these guys are just like jerking off.

They're just like torturing characters and showing me that they're good at making movies, which like over time, I think people

calm calm down.

But we, we also have been talking about anytime a young filmmaker is like very quickly anointed as not just this is a good movie, but this might be a major voice, there is like 30% of the community that immediately needs to be like, false idol, fuck you.

I need to take them down.

We cannot immediately like put them into the firmament.

Should we play the box up this game?

Sure.

Do you guys have anything else you want to say?

I mean, I just want to say, like, for some reason, the scene that's coming to mind to sort of respond to what you you just said is uh

the scene at the end of true grit where uh rooster uh just carries

uh carries haley steinfeld for like you know the whole way and it's like hallucinogenic and this is maybe their most nakedly emotional movie maybe yeah and then and then but then at the end of it too like where um

you know where she doesn't actually get to see him later like

It's just, it's hard for me to imagine anybody seeing that and being like, these guys don't have like a sense of like like heart.

Well, that seems so emotional, but then the movie ends with her being like a bitter woman who has never gotten over these events, and the film basically cuts off mid-sentence.

Sure, yeah, no, they're yeah, they're aware of audience expectations and not necessarily wanting to give people like the Hollywood ending, so to speak.

But that is also their only blockbuster.

That movie was so

massive, and it's especially by their standards, yeah, but also by anyone's standards.

It's like a fucking $160 million grossing

like adult Western that we made like 300 worldwide.

Yeah, I mean, I'm not, I'm not right.

Yes, I'm not disagreeing with that.

And it clearly is that there was like a level of emotion in that that people connected with more on top of everything else.

Box office game.

So this film came out 18th of January, 1985, right after Sundance, I guess.

It does not open in the top five.

Number one at the box office is a film we've covered.

An action comedy.

Action comedy.

It's been out for a couple of months.

Okay, since Beverly Hills Cup.

It's Beverly Hills Cup.

Do you guys like Beverly Hills Cup?

Love it.

The best.

It's pretty good.

Which came out at Christmas, so this is now like...

Late January.

It's been out for about eight weeks.

It's made $122 million.

It's run on the table.

No complaints.

Number two at the box office

has been out for about three months.

It was a Halloween release fitting its horror genre.

Okay, horror and quotes and air quotes.

No, no, no.

It's a horror film.

Okay.

quote.

One of the most iconic horror films ever made

launch for a studio is it the house that Freddie built.

That's right.

And the picture is called a nightmare on Elm Street.

Yes.

Yeah.

The original West Quaven.

West Quaven.

West Quaven's Nightmare on Elm Street.

Elm Street.

Do you guys like that movie?

I like it.

I met him one time and he claimed that he did all his writing while he was asleep in lucid dreams.

He was like, during the day, I have errands to do and I have a family and I have stuff to do.

So I I just go to sleep, start a lucid dream, build the world of the film around me, hang out in it for like six hours.

I wake up, I write everything down in like 15 minutes, and then I have stuff to do all day.

So is Freddy ghostwriting his movies?

This motherfucker went to sleep.

Freddy Krueger just starts typing away with those fucking knife fingers and then he wakes up and he's just like, oh yeah, something came to me.

Freddy Krueger is real.

Freddy Krueger's real.

He was looking to get into pictures.

He invaded West Craven's dreams.

Must be hard for him to type on the typewriter.

Yeah.

Do you think he only uses the other hand?

I love that film very much.

I think it's very scary and very, very cool.

And you like Freddy Kruger as a person.

You endorse

personal life.

Freddy Kuuga.

Freddy Kuuga.

It's an interesting film

in terms of

the franchise it spawns.

A lot of it is not there.

Right?

Like the sort of the jokiness of Freddy, the like sort of like kind of buzzby, like the musical sequence kind of vibe of a lot of the kills in the later movies.

I like both two and three more.

Sure.

I like two and three a lot.

I think one is more scary and impressive.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then, right, when you get to, I like the whole series, but when you get to four or five, you're like in goofballs, McGillicuddy town.

Yes.

Right.

Um,

that random street is number two.

Number three at the box office is

a we've we've mentioned it before.

I feel like we've probably done a box office around this period because I remember this one.

It's a drama

with two big stars, an Oscar winner and a younger male star who's

pretty big at this point.

It's not loose cannons.

No, and I don't even know what that is.

That was a big swing.

If I'd been right, it would have been impressive.

What's loose cannons?

Sheen Hackman and Dan Akron.

Oh, that's right.

No, that's 1990.

That film.

This film is 1994.

Bigger Oscar winning star.

like an older star, old?

No.

No, just older.

No, no.

The Oscar winner is a stakeout.

No, no.

The Oscar winner might be throwing you a little bit.

The Oscar winner is a lady.

The Oscar winner is a lady.

And

the man,

well, he's in a film we just discussed.

There's a Cohen influence.

He's in a Cohen influence.

And the man is the younger star?

Yeah.

Well, I feel like that.

Yes, he is.

Yes, he's eight years younger than her or seven years.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

She's won an Oscar.

He hasn't.

No, he's kind of at the start of his big run as an American movie star.

He's, you know,

like

he's just emerging in America as a big deal.

This is not a really big, remembered movie, but the Oscar winner does get a best actress nomination.

For this film.

For this film.

She's already won one, but she gets another nom because she's a big actress.

Like, she's a really respected actress.

Jessica Lang?

No.

No.

No.

But that's a good guess.

Yeah.

Like, someone who like racked up like six noms, you know, over the career.

In front, like Diane Keaton.

No.

But I'm getting close.

It's not Mayor Roll, obviously.

No.

Aggro, I'm being.

This film was shot by Wilmos Gigmund.

Okay.

It's the director is one of those guys who made

big movies, but I feel like is not as respected an auteur these days, like a Mark Rydell or higher.

Well, when you say Mark Rydell, you've really nailed it in that it is Mark Rydell.

It is Mark Rydell.

So, in fact,

so it's like a perfect comp for him in a way because it's him.

Okay, for a Mark Rydell type, it's kind of like right.

Yeah, they were kind of when they made this movie, they were like, Could we get Mark Rydell or a type?

And they're like, Oh, we could just get him.

So, he's kind of Rydell-esque.

Yeah, he's Rydell.

He's Rydellian in his work.

Um, okay, it's a Mark Rydell picture with the actress.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

Fuck.

All right, I'm going to give this.

No, no, you have to give me one more clue.

Who's the distributor of the picture?

Ah, the distributor.

What if this unlocked?

Universal.

It's a universal Mark Rydell picture where the actress has an Oscar.

The lead man is eight years younger.

Is it a romance?

I think it is.

It's sort of like a drama, you know, about like

bad shit happening to working people in America.

America.

Oh, fuck.

Oh,

I think, I'm not, I don't think it's a period piece.

It might be.

I don't know.

I'll never watch it.

You'll never watch it?

Well, I never say never, but it's not high on my.

Give me one of the two actors.

Sissy Spacek is the actress.

Colemaner's daughter?

Nope.

That's the movie she, of course,

one for.

It's not Raggedy Man.

No, no, because that's fucking,

of course, that was her husband.

uh that was jack fisk it's mark right sissy spasic she's older the guy's the guy's popping the guy's the guy's he's the beginning

hot now he's a bit problematic it's not mel gibson it sure is mel gibson sissy spasic mel gibson mark ridell yep the film is called the river

okay

Yeah, I know what you're talking about.

The second you say it, I picture the poster in my head.

It's like they're in a river.

They're like, oh, this fucking river.

To get there.

I could have done that for five hours and I wasn't going to get there.

They're farmers, and it's like about flooding

the Tennessee Valley.

Right.

That's like a video box I remember seeing being like, wow, that looks serious.

And like, right, it's just like, it seems very serious.

It seems very serious.

And like that, the

tagline is like an epic love story of today.

I mean, unsurprisingly, it was a huge flop.

Okay.

I mean, I think it was like relatively well received.

It's like his.

Yeah, this poster is like him saving her from the river.

Right.

It's his follow-up to on Golden Pond.

So like he had juice.

That was huge.

It was huge.

The pond, but like he was like, pond, what about a river?

This water is moving.

He cracked his knuckles and he was like,

hold my pond.

Yeah, but not a movie that's remembered.

It's just one of those things.

Like, like I'm saying, Nicole, I'm like, am I ever going to watch The River?

No, you're right.

You know what?

In fact, I actually think you will never watch.

Probably not.

Yeah.

Number four.

Okay.

at the box office

is not a movie i know i know the stars

um it's a rom-com directed by a legendary comedic director who made a lot of movies with this guy the star is it a correl rine or a steve martin movie no

okay but although people got mad at us for not mentioning dead wind don't wear plaid during our johnny dangerously episode and i didn't think about the fact that those movies came out around the same time and probably did kind of cancel sorry for making a big deal out of that yeah is that you yeah apologies it might alt you jerk

Okay, wait.

So this is a different

director and star work together a lot, team.

Yeah, they work together a lot.

This guy is a big comic star of this era, but he exists in many eras.

He exists in many eras?

But he's having like, he has a hot 80s.

Is it George Burns?

No, but who else has like a really hot 80s?

Who booms in the 80s?

Is it Rodney?

No.

We love him, though.

But is it a man of an advanced age?

He's a little older, but no.

Okay.

Okay.

I'll tell you what he's not advanced in.

Height.

Okay, so it is Dudley Moore.

There you go.

And it's a Blake Edwards movie?

That's right.

And it's not

the one with him and Daryl Hanna?

No.

What's that one?

I think it's always

called Crazy People or something like that.

Sounds like a great title.

Okay, so it's not 10, obviously.

No.

It's after that.

Yes, it is.

And this one, is it Mickey and Maud?

Mickey and Maud.

Okay.

And who are Mickey and and Maude?

Well, he is Mickey.

Nope, he's neither.

Okay.

This movie sounds good.

It's got two ladies.

One of who has been on this podcast.

Amy Irving.

Amy Irving.

Okay.

Maud.

Who's Mickey?

And Reinking.

Oh, of course.

The legendary Denta.

Yes.

Yeah, I don't know much about it.

And what's Dudley Moore doing?

He's an overworked tabloid reporter.

Great.

Happily married to Mickey.

Okay.

And then he interviews a young cellist, Maude, I feel like, and starts to have an affair.

Dudley Moore has this huge 80s that were like a series of comedies mostly predicated on

this guy might be getting a dangerous amount of pussy,

right?

Like all of it was just like, hello, and everyone's like, let me at you.

He can't stop.

Absolutely.

This was Anne Ranking's last acting role in a film.

Wow.

It's been remade in Bollywood a couple times, or in India, I would say.

Maybe not always in Bollywood.

And yeah, not a movie.

It was a box office system.

The poster is him marrying both of them.

Hey, only Dudley.

Number five at the box office.

This has been a great box office game.

Is

it's a teen movie, I think.

Okay.

You're not very familiar.

You don't see it.

I've never seen it.

Oh, right.

It has a bit of a

odd trivial part of film history.

It was the first ever PG-13.

Huh.

Because everyone always says says Temple of Doom and all that, but they're the ones that inspired.

Now, it was not the first released because that, I believe, is Red Dawn, but it was the first to receive.

The rating, yes.

Um,

which distributor?

The distributor, of course, is 20th Century Fox.

Fine folks at 20th Century Fox.

Okay, and it's a it's from a very established comedy director, made a zillion movies, kind of a Blake Edwards type, kind of a Blake Edwards.

Just a new comic director who made a ton of movies, yeah.

But he would make this guy would make more of your emotional comedies.

Comedies with heart.

Yeah.

He probably described it as like, the comedy should have hot.

He'd probably like yell it.

It's not Herbert Ross.

No.

It's not Gary Marshall.

It is Gary Marshall.

It is Gary Marshall.

Is it the Flamingo Kid?

It's Matt Dylan as the Flamingo Kid.

People like that one a lot.

I've never seen it.

It's about a working-class boy who works at a beach resort and learns valuable life lessons.

Hey, he learned some lessons.

It might stun you to learn that Hector Elizondo appeared.

Oh, wait a second.

Security.

How did this guy end up on set?

Surely he wasn't invited.

Richard Crenna.

Okay.

And

Jessica Walter.

It's fun.

Sounds fun.

I don't really know much about it.

Okay.

Anyone ever seen the

Cabana Boy?

Is that what he said?

Yeah, he works at a resort.

Okay.

That's the box office game.

The rest of the 10 is.

A passage to India, new this week.

Sure.

What have you done lately?

I forget when we referenced that story, but it's somewhere.

Oh, get ready.

It's a call forward.

It happens in three episodes.

A film called That's Dancing, which was a compilation of Dancing in Film.

Okay.

Protocol.

It's a Goldie Han movie.

Yes.

That's, it's, well, a Herbert Ross.

Yes.

Did she become a cop?

It's like a DC

thing.

She like stops an assassination attempt or something.

Crate.

Yeah.

Starman, which we've covered.

And the famous bomb, the cotton club.

Oh, sure.

It is great that Goldie Han just had her thing carved out for like 15 years where it's like,

Goldie shouldn't be here.

I'm a dumbass.

This is the last place you want her.

And yep, she's going to kind of figure it out.

Blood simple.

Yeah.

An auspicious beginning to a great career for the Cohen brothers.

Are there things that you guys want to seed in our heads to think about as men who have been deep diving for several years now into their work as we go on this journey chronologically.

Well, I think we've touched on a lot of it over the course of this conversation.

Like the first episode we did was about opening monologues, and that's certainly here.

And then the second episode we did was called The Meticulous Montage, which you could also call like a methodical montage, which is definitely...

a big part of this movie and a big part of many other movies.

It is fascinating how much it does feel like all the pieces are here.

Like we kept comparing this to other films in their filmography and you're just sort of like all the interests, all the obsessions, right?

All the stylistic flourishes.

Yeah.

And I think the goal is, is like

some interview where they're like, why are your movies so violent?

And Ethan was like, you mean dramatic, right?

Right.

Right.

And they're just like, we want to make this dramatic.

We want to make it specific.

Anytime that someone's like, what are the themes underneath this?

What are you trying to say about society or America?

They're like, no, no, no.

We're Americans.

We're expressing our American-ness through trying to make a film that's very specific and very dramatic.

They talked about this in that Eggers interview where they were like, foreign critics, especially in Europe, tend to have hugely political readings of our movies.

And it is transparently just that we do not think we have enough of an understanding to set a movie in any other country but the one we've lived our entire lives in.

And here it's not viewed as some overarching statement about our country and our culture.

but there it is always taken that way.

And there being any other country.

And when they tried to write Gambit, it was just a complete,

you know?

Yeah.

I don't actually stand by that.

I think there's a lot more going on in that movie.

Also, I think the thing to look out for, when we talked to their storyboard artist, he was like, it's basically two things at all times.

It's either surprise or suspense.

Like we're just toggling back and forth between those.

And that's, that's basically the whole thing.

Yeah, I think

if you, if you're watching their movies and you're, and you're just watching like, or suspense versus surprise, or moments where suspense turns to surprise, I think you can get a lot out of it.

I kind of just want to do the thing about the gun, though.

I kind of just want to walk through the thing that I figured out yesterday.

Say this.

Can you say this?

Will you please say this?

So, I've watched the movie a few times, and I only put it all together on the very last viewing I did, which is just that early on in the movie, they go to Marty's house, the two Abby and Ray, and she goes there to pick up bullets from a box that fit the gun that he gave her.

And so she finds exactly three bullets that she puts into her gun, which has is a six-shooter.

So, and then when Visser steals the gun from their house, he checks the barrel, and you see that there's three empty chambers and then three bullets.

When Visser shoots Marty,

he shoots one bullet.

Sure, when Ray

hits the gun,

a bullet goes off.

Yeah.

Then when Marty clicks the gun when he's getting buried,

he clicks it three times.

And the last click is like right as Ray is taking the gun out of his hands, like very gently and in a way that the Cohens describe it as like the Michelangelo Sistine Chapel shot of like God and man touching their hands.

But like,

if you track that, you realize that by the end of the movie, when Abby takes Visser out,

and she doesn't even know this, she had exactly one bullet left in the chamber

in the revolver.

It's just like a great example, though, of like sort of the

intricacies and the details of a plot that could actually make the movie a lot more thrilling.

Because when I figured that out, I realized like Ray has no idea that he's like, he seems pretty, he thinks the gun's empty.

But when you're watching it, you're like, oh, if if Hidea had gotten one more shot off, like he would have.

But that's also, right.

Like, as meticulous as these things are, they're also sort of about how meaningless these things are.

Like, it is absolute happenstance

that he doesn't get shot by Hidea in that moment because he doesn't know that he's grabbing a still loaded gun from him.

And that McDorman doesn't know that she only has one shot to actually hit the guy.

Right.

It's a mistake on his part also to not check the gun like several times throughout the movie.

What was the other point you said you wanted us to tee you up?

Well, no, no, you don't have to be a good one.

We're not going to do it.

No, no, we're not going to do it.

But no, these are beautifully made poetic movies and they're made with a level of care that, I mean, me and Jordan have just found like basically every episode of our show, we do two pages of the To the YC script, which is this like $200 million action film.

But every two pages, you can be like, okay, what's going on in these two pages?

And then pull out scenes from other Cohen brothers films and like everything tracks.

Like every detail is there on purpose.

There's never like a story about their shoot where they're like oh, yeah, we shot with this other actor for a long time or we shot for two weeks and we threw all this stuff out They're just are these are intentionally made films all their collaborators were really teed up to do good work with them always They never talk about a feeling of misstepping on any film past this like regardless of what the public perception was They're never like we had this idea and then we got into the edit and it didn't work.

So we had to exact the whole thing out right that's what I'm saying.

I think you can just hold these things up to the light and even examine different different movies against each other and the themes, even though they're like, we did a lot of this very instinctually.

Like when they talk about their process, they're not like, oh, we went and made notes on all these James M.

Kane books and we're like, oh, let's make a master document where we can synthesize.

They were like, we read all those books at the same time.

And then we just kept talking about them forever until we were able to instinctually kind of write in a James M.

Kane mode.

But just all of that intention together adds up to these films that just track that just every piece is in

its place for a purpose that i think will

lead to five months of exciting conversation here on blink show no these are we were very excited that they won because it's just like great all of these movies are fun to talk about they're the best can i just say that like i i just the the premise of my life is that they're the best you know these are the best directors i like every one of their movies yeah i find every one of their movies interesting

to talk about, to watch, to think about.

And to watch endlessly, like the rewatch value of these things, it's like every single time I've done a rewatch of all their movies, it's a completely different experience.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Excited to do it.

Thank you guys for being here.

Thank you for kicking

this voyage off on a good note.

Thank you so much for having us.

Of course.

It's such a pleasure.

Hey, you guys are family.

To the White Sea.

To the White Sea.

New episodes coming out.

Everyone, check this out.

This is like the most bonkers bonanza action movie they ever wrote and we're going through it.

But as you said, you'll like

jump into something in that script and be like, what is the recurring motif of the big guy and a little guy in Cohen Brothers movies?

Oh, yeah, there's building an episode out of like these elements, right?

What is the through line across the career?

We did a whole episode on distant fathers.

We did an episode on sneaking around, an episode on teamwork.

Yeah.

Act breaks.

What is it?

Why do you sort of intuitively make this jump from act one to act two?

David and I have Cone Brothers, big guy, little guy energy.

Sure.

Yeah.

Cohen brothers also kind of have Cone Brothers, big guy, little guy energy.

Well, that's, they say Joel got to direct because he was the bigger guy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You and Jordan are basically the same height, so it falls apart there.

Ray's got a few inches on me.

Really?

Let's just be

hair height, though.

You do a mini think.

You got a little hair height working for you.

I was a little eraser head.

When me and Jordan directed the Porches video, we based our storyboards off of the Blood Simple storyboard.

Really?

Yeah, we did.

did, which is each page.

We had a little drawing of the frame, and then we had a bird's eye view of the set and where the camera is going to go and where the actors went.

Like, we love these guys.

We really, we model our craft off of them

on almost a daily basis.

Such a good job on the porches video, but now I'm thinking, did we miss an opportunity by not having that video end with Ben discovering a bag of money under the porch?

And it's spiraling out into a 90-minute narrative.

Fuck, that would have been a nice payoff.

Maybe that's our fundraising trailer, what we already made.

Yeah, there we go.

Sure.

Okay.

Yeah, let's talk offline uh thank you guys for being here thank you all for listening please remember to rate review and subscribe tune in next week for raising arizona yep it is wild that's their second like as wild as it is that this is their it's a master stroke yeah to go raising arizona your second film yes yeah right they they go right they go they go to hollywood basically they try to make a commercial studio picture it has everything that this movie doesn't have yeah so many ways right it's the counterpoint that then the rest of their career is like toggling between those two modes, usually within the same movie.

Um, so yeah, tune in next week for that.

And as always, David, what's the email you're currently reading?

I'm not reading an email.

You look very deeply and thought of whatever's on your screen.

I'm just, I'm seeing Bring Her Back tonight, and I was just like, What's that about?

So, I brought it up.

We'll give a shout out.

This weekend, we're all going to Ben's wedding.

Oh, hey,

yeah, get married,

Ben.

Because I've ported this.

Oh, guys, let's be done.

Then we have to end the show.

This has let's be done energy.

This is what I'm saying.

What I'm saying is, because I have mangled this setup and we need to end on something strong, Ben, is there anything you want to say on the record?

Your last episode as an unmarried man?

Uh, fuck.

I don't know.

Um,

I had a lot of.

I was up to a lot of nonsense, and that was really fun.

Do I remember a lot of it?

No.

But damn, did I shine bright as hell as a fucked up guy?

And I'm glad that I made it this far and I met someone who really is great.

Love can be,

love can happen to you.

Feel that in the bottom of my heart.

It's beautiful.

Beautiful words, man.

Love can happen.

Blank Check with Griffin and David is hosted by Griffin Newman and David Sims.

Our executive producer is me, Ben Hosley.

Our creative producer is Marie Bardy Salinas, and our associate producer is A.J.

McKeon.

This show is mixed and edited by A.J.

McKeon and Alan Smithy.

Research by J.J.

Birch.

Our theme song is by Lane Montgomery in the Great American Novel, with additional music by Alex Mitchell.

Artwork by Joe Bowen, Ollie Moss, and Pat Reynolds.

Our production assistant is Minic.

Special thanks to David Cho, Jordan Fish, and Nate Patterson for their production help.

Head over to blankcheckpod.com for links to all of the real nerdy shit.

Join our Patreon, BlankCheck Special Features, for exclusive franchise commentaries and bonus episodes.

Follow us on social at blankcheckpod.

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Checkbook, on Substack.

This podcast is created and produced by Blank Check Productions.

World is full of complainers.

That's not it.

Too Michael Jackson.