Jurassic Park with Sean Fennessey

Speaker 0 Blank Jack with Griffin and David

Speaker 0 Blank Jack with Griffin and David.

Speaker 0 Don't know what to say or to expect.

Speaker 0 All you need to know is that the name of the show is Blank Jack.

Speaker 1 Welcome to Podorassic Cast.

Speaker 1 Great. I had to do it.

Speaker 1 You could have done the Goldblum.

Speaker 1 That's what you didn't go for. Yeah.
You could have done a goldbloom. Well, it has been established on the show over the years that my goldbloom is particularly awful.
Oh, interesting.

Speaker 1 I'm trying to remember that. I've got to be on a bad impression.
Goldblum might be second only to Jarnold Schwarzenegger. You're very bad at Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Is it Wayne Knight?

Speaker 1 Let me see. I'm going to work on it.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Is Wayne Knight 100?

Speaker 1 I'm trying to get. He's got a very particular rasp.
He's hard to approximate. He has, he's inimitable.
I mean, which I guess is why Wayne Knight was Wayne Knight for the 90s.

Speaker 1 I should say, putting a pin in Wayne Knight's ginormous 90s. I mean, just when it was like, you can't say get me a Wayne Knight type.
It's like, get me Wayne Knight or we're rewriting his character.

Speaker 1 I would argue Josh Mostell was in the mix there for the Wayne Knight party. Oh, yes.
He was, but fucking, I mean, the degree to which Wayne Knight bigfooted him. He did.
He did.

Speaker 1 And Josh Mostel probably has like a voodoo doll of Wayne Knight.

Speaker 1 josh mustel had the nepo juice and he had a head start right he's in movies starting in the 70s oh man and he's got an iconic dad and yet wayne knight just said like come on give me space i forgot about josh mostel man and it is we just watched fucking uh jesus christ superstar that's right which he's great in he he sure is and then you just look and the 90s the early 90s in his career sandler's using him he's in city slickers too you're like oh he's in both city slickers obviously Like, you know, this is great.

Speaker 1 And then you're seeing in the 90s, you're like, it's kind of tapering off. And then the 2000s, it's like he was in two movies.
Right. It's, it's, it's over.
Because what happened?

Speaker 1 I mean, I don't know. Wayne Knight, I guess, just market corrected him to use an expression.

Speaker 1 That's right. There's the story I love that when they were casting this movie and when they were planning it out, that Spielberg saw Basic Instinct.
Right.

Speaker 1 And this, the shot of Wayne Knight sweating profusely.

Speaker 1 The interrogation scene in which

Speaker 1 she uncrosses her legs.

Speaker 1 He is what? She does.

Speaker 1 You got to look closely.

Speaker 1 Then what happens? This is why you got to go 4K on basic instinct. Because the first time I saw it on TV, I went, what is everyone getting so worked up about?

Speaker 1 But he is, when you're looking at all the guys in that scene, he's the one where you're like, who is this?

Speaker 1 Right. And the story has always been that Spielberg watched it and went.

Speaker 1 T-Rex cut to that reaction shot. That's a blockbuster.
That he was just like, that's exactly what we need is that guy's response. Which is funny because the movie doesn't even really do that.

Speaker 1 No, he does not. His reaction ends up being so different than that.
He also, the only man truly focused on Wayne Knight in Basic Instinct. I mean, for that to be your takeaway.
Spielberg's story.

Speaker 1 And who? What vagina?

Speaker 1 But he, yes, no, the idea that he like saw that one cutaway reaction shot and was like, we can build a blockbuster around that. Spielberg magic, baby.
But that's also fucking Wayne Knight magic.

Speaker 1 Okay, but when we're talking about Jurassic Park and we should introduce our campaign, a Wayne Knight film. As far as I'm concerned, a Wayne Knight Forks.
No, but it's that thing. It's not.

Speaker 1 Every single actor in this, when they are on screen, you're like, man, Samuel owns this fucking movie.

Speaker 1 And then like Sam Jackson's on screen, you're like, I forgot that Sam Jackson has never been better than in Jurassic Park. Right.

Speaker 1 And then we cut to someone else, and I just feel the same way every single time. Not to crib like

Speaker 1 rewatchables terminology, but this is a hard movie to put through the rewatchables categories. Yes.
I did it once and failed terribly.

Speaker 1 We did do an episode.

Speaker 1 But you were like, are are there like 20 Apex Mountains in this movie? Well, everyone is perfect, right? So it's one of the most perfectly cast movies of all time, plus one of the most consequential.

Speaker 1 And I think we actually forgot to even say the name John Williams in the pod. Right.
So, like, if we were doing it today, it would be a nine-hour episode. Right.
But

Speaker 1 there's a lot to go through here. There's a lot to go through.
This movie is good. It is.
It's good. It's really good.

Speaker 1 It is good. It is funny that, like,

Speaker 1 I'm putting this forward as a theory, okay?

Speaker 1 1970, 1980s, 1990s. In each decade, Spielberg makes a movie that basically breaks Hollywood's brains.
Yes, is the trying to replicate the definitive blockbuster.

Speaker 1 I mean, I guess Star Wars is the definitive blockbuster of the 70s, but Jaws, Raiders, Jurassic Party. Well, because we were talking about, we did our Dune episode on David Lynn.

Speaker 1 I should just say quickly, this is blank check with Griffin and David. I'm Griffin.
It's a podcast about filmographies. Directors who had massive success early on in their careers say

Speaker 1 making Jaws

Speaker 1 as their second or third film, depending on how you count it.

Speaker 1 And we're given a series of blank checks to make whatever crazy passion products they want. And sometimes those checks clear, and sometimes they bounce.
They hook, baby. Sometimes they hook, baby.

Speaker 1 So many series on the films of Steven Spielberg, the early years.

Speaker 1 We're using early pretty liberally. Spielberg origins.
Spielberg origins. How many kids does he have when he makes this movie? Great question.
Let's find out. Two.

Speaker 1 I mean, that's, I feel like the most defining aspect of this film relative to the earlier Spielberg blockbusters is this is now a father. Yes.
Yes. Yes.
This is.

Speaker 1 This is a bad movie. Yes.

Speaker 1 I mean, it is, especially when you read the book, which I assume you have.

Speaker 1 I did on a beach on Long Island in the 1990s, and I thought hard about returning to it for this, and I just didn't have the time. I assume, Griffin, that you have not.
Correct.

Speaker 1 Ben, did you ever read Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park? No. A book that I had to hide under my bed because it was so scary.
Wow. I remember that very profoundly.

Speaker 1 Like, I read the death of Dennis Edry in that book, which is very violent in the book, much more violent than it is in the movie. He gets killed by Sharon Stones for trying.

Speaker 1 Honestly, that is something Michael Crichton would write. We can talk about that in a second.
We'll talk about that.

Speaker 1 But, and I did the thing, like the joke in friends of Joey putting the shining in the freezer. Like, I put the book under my bed.
I was like, I can't even have the book near me. I was so freaked out.

Speaker 1 Anyway, what was that? Oh, oh, the kid. Yeah.
There's not as much overwhelming, like, ah, these kids, we have to protect them in the book that I really like. Sure.
The kids are more of an irritation.

Speaker 1 Well, and that's the closest thing this movie has to like an emotional spine. Right.
Is Alan Grant's journey of learning to tolerate children. Starting a movie

Speaker 1 who's like, I could never have kids. And by the end, is like, I get it.
Right. He learns how to tolerate children and use like seatbelts correctly and so on and so forth.
Right.

Speaker 1 It's not a very Spielbergian book. No.

Speaker 1 Sure, there's spectacle but aside from that man it's a mean book it's his books are fucking mean cricin books are nasty i like michael cricon books as like fun things to read but i recently reread sphere because i'm i have twin babies and i'm just reading a lot of books on my phone right now yeah not a humble brag reading books on your phone that parts good eyesight that's a that's a humble brag uh

Speaker 1 you zooming in and sphere is one of those

Speaker 1 obviously that was in the moment in his life where he could fucking write a book called like I Took a Shit and his editor would be like, I can't wait to get this on every bookshelf in America.

Speaker 1 But like if you, if you submitted Sphere to me, I would just immediately pop back like, do you have a problem with women? What did they do to you?

Speaker 1 I think I Took a Shit was the original title of disclosure, as I recall.

Speaker 1 But talking about it not being a very Spielbergy book, which I just have to take your word for here, it is one of the infamous parts of this movie of like, this is like the most white-hot pitch to hit Hollywood, like arguably ever.

Speaker 1 He had two children, by the way. You're correct.
Okay.

Speaker 1 With Kate Capshaw. And they like throw it out to all the studios as a jump ball.
And every studio goes, like, here's our pitch for what we would do with this text and has their own director attached.

Speaker 1 Warner Brothers makes a play with Tim Burton. Columbia makes a play with Richard Donner.
Fox makes a play with Joe Dante and Universal and Steven Spielberg. I'm obsessed with this fact.

Speaker 1 It's amazing to think about all four of us.

Speaker 1 But all of them make sense in that way where you're like, here's the book as this like median object, and then you could take it further in any one of these directions.

Speaker 1 Okay, wait, we all love this movie, right? Yeah, we all agree. I'm going to call Griffin out as not being a Jurassic Park Super fan.

Speaker 1 It's not totemic for me in the way I think it is for the three of you. It is a movie I have certainly over the years grown to appreciate more and more movies.

Speaker 1 You were never really a JP boy in the same way. I wasn't a JP boy.
I think that's the key distinction. It wasn't one of my movies growing to appreciate it.

Speaker 1 But will you any of those other three sound better to you?

Speaker 1 No. But, well, the Dante one is the one that kind of.
It's very intriguing. But it's,

Speaker 1 and I say this with due respect to Joe Dante. That is a fun, silly, trashy movie.
You know what he did instead of this movie? Was it Matine?

Speaker 1 Which is one of his best movies. It was a great movie, but so different in terms of scope and energy than what JP is.
Yes. Like the Burton version of this movie does not appeal to me particularly.

Speaker 1 That's just kind of an interesting, like, well, what would that look like?

Speaker 1 Donner would have made a slightly worse version of this movie, probably. Donner, I think, probably would have made the more Critny version, wouldn't have pulled it further into his own voice.

Speaker 1 Donner's the most

Speaker 1 sort of like

Speaker 1 hired hand. Yeah.
Yeah, but he

Speaker 1 grounds things in emotion. He's a show craftsman.
Exactly. He's a great studio filmmaker.
He does spectacle just fine. It would probably be

Speaker 1 really fun.

Speaker 1 The Dante thing is interesting to me because

Speaker 1 I have long contended that in particular, Jurassic World feels much more like a Dante homage than a Spielberg homage in a lot of ways.

Speaker 1 And yes.

Speaker 1 And it also is meaner than this movie is. Totally.

Speaker 1 Which feels like a misread of Joe Dante's anarchic humor. Yeah.
Yeah. Right.

Speaker 1 The Burton, I mean, like talking about all the sliding doors here, Burton misses out on this. Then is like, oh, fuck, but I would like to do a dinosaur thing.

Speaker 1 Then Warner Brothers gets the rights for Dinosaur's Attack, the tops

Speaker 1 trading card series. Right.
And that's how he found bundle deal Mars attacks. And they were like, let's do both of these.
And then after Jurassic comes out, he's like, I shouldn't fuck with dinosaurs.

Speaker 1 Let me just do Mars attacks, which I think we all agree is like better for the culture that Spielberg makes Jurassic and he makes Mars attacks.

Speaker 1 It's better that Joe Dante makes Matinee and Spielberg makes Jurassic. Joe Dante has made movies about critters run amok.
Yes. So like.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I just wonder what his, but like, I just would love to see a Joe Dante Jurassic Park. Joe Dante.
Or a Jurassic movie. Yes.
Like, what if Joe and Joe Dante had made Jurassic Park 3?

Speaker 1 You know what I mean? Well that way.

Speaker 1 Where it's like, hey, you know, can you just play in this sandbox and make a silly fun movie that's like not too, we don't have to worry too much about like getting this book right. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Because like Jurassic Park 3, which is a movie we both like,

Speaker 1 is that. It's just, hey, Joe Johnson, you're good with creatures.
You can do some action. Keep this movie fun and light and, you know, blockbuster.

Speaker 1 But Dante would have wanted to dig into the corporate element. He never would have made.

Speaker 1 Why am I fucking... what's Attenborough's character's name?

Speaker 1 What's whose character's name? Richard Attenborough's character. John Hammond Hammond.
Thank you. He never would have made John Hammond cuddly.
Well, he would have made him funny.

Speaker 1 John Hammond is a mean fucker in the book.

Speaker 1 He dies in the book, spoiler alert for the book, being eaten by compies who are not in this movie, but they're in the sequel. They're

Speaker 1 saving their stomach to eat Peter Sturmere in the second film. But as he's dying, he's thinking like fucking kids fucked all this up.

Speaker 1 Like he's mad about the stupid kids that he brought to Jurassic Park. I think all the clamp shit in Gremlins 2 is, in a way, a vision of what he probably would have done with Jurassic.

Speaker 1 Which I don't know, it's still ultimately like when you look at the obvious inspiration for that character in Gremlins 2, Donald Trump, like it's ultimately pretty benign, you know?

Speaker 1 Well, I said it. I said it.
I said his name out loud on this podcast. This is the key difference between, without calling out names, the director of Jurassic World and Gremlins 2, where you're like,

Speaker 1 the satire in Gremlins 2 feels pointed without feeling like nasty.

Speaker 1 The thing is, I would argue that Jurassic Park is probably the hardest corporate satire/slash

Speaker 1 finger-pointing that Steven Spielberg's ever done. I agree.
And it's right on the precipice of him becoming a genuine Hollywood corporate Titan. Yeah.
100%.

Speaker 1 It's fascinating that he would, I mean, he is John Hammond in this movie. Is he not? Let's call out another thing.

Speaker 1 At this point in time, I've said some variation of this stat many times on this podcast, but he signs a deal when Universal decides to transition from backlot tour to like full theme park, which obviously escalates with Jurassic, but when it's founded, it's like E.T.

Speaker 1 Ride, Jaws Ride. Like we're building this on the back of the Spielberg Library.
His deal is he gets,

Speaker 1 it's like 10%

Speaker 1 of all revenue every year in perpetuity, and they can't break the contract.

Speaker 1 So by the time he's making this movie and Universal's making the play for it, part of it is like, and then we can fucking put this in the parks. Does he still own a piece of that? Yes.

Speaker 1 So he's getting that Halloween horror nights money. Correct.
I'm about to be there in like

Speaker 1 every park, every country. Wow.
It's like we so, okay. So here we are in this podcast.
We obviously, as we, I'm sure, discussed before. Our guest today is Sean Fantasy.
Hi.

Speaker 1 The guest of Sean Fantasy, the king. King Sean.
King Sean.

Speaker 1 I changed my name to John Hammond.

Speaker 1 We have a little bit of a message.

Speaker 1 We've talked about Steven Spielberg on this podcast before, his later part of his career when he is a CEO.

Speaker 1 And then when he's sort of an emeritus exec who still like gets that sweet, sweet Transformers money, but is mostly just like, I always wanted to make a musical and I've always wanted to remake this.

Speaker 1 There have been a couple of these now with like, you know, it has happened only because of like big figures entertainment also getting into product lines where you have your like Rihanna's with the Fenty and the fucking Jenners with makeup lines or whatever.

Speaker 1 He for a long time was one of the only like entertainment professionals who was also a billionaire.

Speaker 1 And it was because of all these deals that he's making money off anything connected to men in black, transformers, things he didn't even direct, not to mention his own properties, not to mention Universal Studios deals, like all this shit.

Speaker 1 He leveraged something that very few filmmakers ever did, which is that

Speaker 1 everyone wanted him to make their movie. And so he would grab...

Speaker 1 a piece of it, even if he had no intention of making it, so that he could produce it forever, which, you know, maybe only five people in the history of movies would be able to do that in the first place, but he he did it at the highest level of capitalism.

Speaker 1 I would also argue that for a long time, for several decades, his name above a title as Steven Spielberg presents, even if no one was.

Speaker 1 Steven Spielberg is associated with this movie in the vaguest way. People are like, oh, well, then it must be pretty good.

Speaker 1 People weren't even being tricked in a like Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas way. They were just like, he's co-signed to this.

Speaker 1 That's good enough for us. We were raised on that.

Speaker 1 Is he the first director's name you knew?

Speaker 1 I mean, probably. I think without a question, right? Like

Speaker 1 was the shorthand guy is the guy you make jokes about. You have to like pull a name of a director that anyone knows.
But also like in the 90s,

Speaker 1 half of the shows on Saturday morning, like television, the cartoons are Steven Spielberg presents. Right.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Animaniacs, Tiny Toons. Oh, right.

Speaker 1 Like he had like 10. Totally.
Crazy. There's, I mean, Deeper.
I could get into Toons Sylvania and Prehysteria, but that's, we don't, that's a whole other episode.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 drastic part, I just re your point. Yes, I do.
This is in a way, I'm looking at his later filmography, the most sort of nakedly spiteful about like capitalism and the

Speaker 1 sort of future of business. He never really does that.
I think, I think Ready Player One does that a lot. And I think that these two movies are capstones, right? And I think Ready Player One

Speaker 1 is more like him at the other side of it, feeling a little jaded

Speaker 1 about what he half begotten you know

Speaker 1 and right yes the mark rylance character being like i just wanted to entertain people i'm really sleepy david can you go outside sometimes i can't do his voice you know he doesn't say it that clearly

Speaker 1 even if you don't have an impression i require this kind of single feeling go outside maybe like are you ready to play over people

Speaker 1 criticize ready player one for like oh god they like how dared this movie like invade the shining and turn it into a video game level and i'm like i think steven spielberg is aware of what that's doing.

Speaker 1 Some people might disagree with me. I was going to say, the, the characterization of like,

Speaker 1 you know, a capitalist culture, I feel like this movie is inflating what he starts with Jaws, but Jaws is so micro, a town, a mayor. You know, it's not like a full multi-layered corporation.

Speaker 1 It's not this idea of like.

Speaker 1 spiting God.

Speaker 1 Money is a big concern, but in that movie, it's more about preserving what already exists.

Speaker 1 And this is about growth expansion reimagining what our our life is and what the lifestyle of entertainment can be so like they are definitely in conversation with each other but this movie even though richard admaro is so warm and grandfatherly yes Everyone in the movie is like, what the fuck is your problem, dude?

Speaker 1 Yes. What are you doing here? This is a horrible idea, except for, of course, the blood-sucking lawyer.
Right.

Speaker 1 You know, who even, look, re-watching this, it's like, that character is far less two-dimensional than I remember him being. Janero, yeah.

Speaker 1 Every time I'm watching it, I'm like, oh, he's like a real person. The last couple of moments are him being shitty to the kids, which gives you just enough leeway to want to see him be eaten.

Speaker 1 You're right. It's sort of a bit of a permission structure for it to be okay that he dies.
And Ariana Richards saying he left us is quite.

Speaker 1 It really cuts, you know, to the bone a little bit, like her shrieking that. You're like, Jesus, like, even though you're also like, there's a fucking T-Rex.
Like, what's he supposed to do?

Speaker 1 But like, like,

Speaker 1 compare that to the, the, the way Alan helps and all that, really. I was also going to say, like, Bridezilla personal assistant in Jurassic World, where you're like, Jenner's like a person.
He's just

Speaker 1 running away is a human reaction that is somewhat understandable. Here was my contention I set up and have failed to resolve with in the first 20 minutes of this episode.
No, no, it's my fault.

Speaker 1 Please, I can't finish a thought.

Speaker 1 We did Dune on our David Lynch series.

Speaker 1 That was a while ago. Yes.
Excellent episode. John Hodgman.
Yeah. He really brought the heat.
I love this show. I told you guys that.
This is like my favorite show.

Speaker 1 Big Picture is my favorite show.

Speaker 1 David, what's your favorite show?

Speaker 1 Rogue Post. Yeah, Rogue.
Shapiro.

Speaker 1 We're your guys. Producer Ben's Sleep Time Buck.

Speaker 1 Shapiro.

Speaker 1 I'm sorry. It's Talk To it.
It's out at this point. Talk to us.
I'm all in on Talk Tour. Talk to us.

Speaker 1 We actually, we are pre-recording this podcast, and we pre-recorded a podcast because my podcast partner had a child. Yes.

Speaker 1 We're on the exact opposite end of that.

Speaker 1 This is our first episode we've recorded.

Speaker 1 You're coming back.

Speaker 1 We're off or we're off together. But we recorded a pod a few months ago that has like

Speaker 1 an extended Hawk Tua riff. Right.

Speaker 1 literally 40 minutes on Hawk Tua, and it's not coming out until December. And you're like white-knuckling, like, will she remain the official hall? I think it's like supposed to be the vice president.

Speaker 1 You know, I think it's going to be what could happen here with Hawk Have you guys seen the photos that Spirit Halloween, and this will be many, many months old by the time this comes out?

Speaker 1 Spirit Halloween has a Hawktua end cap. Okay.
It's not just that there's a Hawk to a costume. There are like 10 different products.
Are you serious? Yes. Jesus Christ.
What is the costume? It is.

Speaker 1 Are you ready? It is like,

Speaker 1 it is like an auto mechanics jumpsuit, and it's Hawktua auto-lubrication.

Speaker 1 Spit on that thing. What? That's as like a logo.
But then they also have like shirts and like fucking party.

Speaker 1 That was like a meeting where they were like, we have one day to get this to store. Like we don't have a lot of time.
Because what's the costume? She just has to have her.

Speaker 1 The costume can't be her because she's kind of dressed generically. We have to create someone who exists in the Hawktua universe.
That was figured out over lunch. Yeah.

Speaker 1 That was a quick little short meeting. That was figured out over like the water cooler.
Anyway, I assume we now work for her. Like by April, like she owns us.
This is a Taktua production.

Speaker 1 How did we get to Taktua?

Speaker 1 Dune. You were talking about Dune.
Dune. Jesus.
Finish that thought, please. Yes.
So I was saying that movie comes out the year after Return of the Jedi.

Speaker 1 And we were talking about how in the wake of Star Wars, there are very few attempts to make another Star Wars. They kind of don't start until later in the 80s.

Speaker 1 You have things like Zardaz and Krull and whatever. But people felt so intimidated by, like, how do you build an entire universe like this? That even though...

Speaker 1 Star Wars is obviously the most seismic film of that decade, like Jaws is the first, like,

Speaker 1 kind of classical blockbuster release. It sets the model and the marketing.
And I do think that's the movie studios are trying to rip off more because it feels more attainable.

Speaker 1 Oh, get three good actors. You have one looming threat.
You know, not just the shitty Jaws sequels, but all the things like Orca and whatever.

Speaker 1 I just think that becomes more, even like the airplane movies are kind of trying to do something closer to Jaws, I would contend.

Speaker 1 And then like Raiders is absolutely something everyone's ripping off, even though E.T. is the bigger hit.
Right. But also, Raiders, I feel like, is them being like, I assume if you're an executive at

Speaker 1 Rival Studio, you're like, what the fuck? That's what people wanted? Totally. They wanted like a Rip Roaring 30s like sand adventure.
Like, I didn't see this coming.

Speaker 1 I was making a Space Laser play or whatever. But also, that the breakthrough there is that thing Spielberg says of like, what if you made a movie that was only the good parts? Right?

Speaker 1 Like the start of the like theme park cinema kind of thing. Yeah, my big contention about this movie that we're talking about is that it is

Speaker 1 the end of something and the beginning of something, and the thing that it is the beginning of is still not over. I agree with that.
And I don't know when it's going to end. Yes.

Speaker 1 And maybe it will not end. Yes.

Speaker 1 But whatever Jaws started, which is, I think you described very well, which is sort of like this collection of actors, this sort of high concept, often like creature or fear forward, putting you through the eyes of a young child.

Speaker 1 You know, Spielberg invents a kind of American cinema. This movie is like the absolute apotheosis of blockbusterizing movies.

Speaker 1 And then

Speaker 1 because of digital created characters and figures, we're in like this, we're mired in the schmear. Like everything has just been a schmear in movies ever since this movie.

Speaker 1 I think it's fascinating that like everyone else would try to chase him. And then every 10 years he'd come back and be like, I've come up with a new evolution of the thing.

Speaker 1 And you watch the response at the time and the things are becoming bigger and bigger hits, but critics are like, is he simplifying? Is he becoming more and more childlike?

Speaker 1 Is he becoming more populist? We missed the like fucking Robert Shaw speech from Jaws. Where did this subtlety go? And then, like, this very year, he bifurcates, right? It's this and Schindler.

Speaker 1 You're like, fucking Jaws gets a best picture nomination, Raiders gets a best picture nomination.

Speaker 1 They don't have to nominate Jurassic because they're like, oh, he is split off into serious Spielberg and Entertainer Spielberg.

Speaker 1 And as we covered in our later Spielberg series that was done eight years ago,

Speaker 1 he like has this weird split where anytime he tries to make a movie like this again, it kind of doesn't work.

Speaker 1 And his big tent-poly movies tend to be the successful ones are the like minority report, where the world's like darker, haunted.

Speaker 1 Like he can't go back to just pure joy like this without it feeling a little, I don't know, like he's trying to chase his life. Why do you think that is?

Speaker 1 Why do I think that he just like... not sours exactly, but curdles a little bit, maybe because he did it better than anyone.
And how could you possibly follow?

Speaker 1 But then again, he did follow it up with the Lost World Jurassic Park. And I feel like that's where he's like, you know what? Why am I trying to fucking do a better movie than Jurassic Park?

Speaker 1 Like, why am I trying to do that again? Like, what was I doing? But that's the key difference.

Speaker 1 That's what this is the end of is like Spielberg is not really interested in chasing his own shadow and playing this game anymore. And then yet we are 30 years past.

Speaker 1 Everyone's still trying to figure out how to make Jurassic Park again, both literally and like generally. If you think about his career, right? Yes, you're right.
This is the apex. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Once again, he's created the

Speaker 1 decade-defining blockbuster. But then he also, he finally looked inside.
He gave us a personal, serious film that's also sweeping and epic.

Speaker 1 It's not the color purple or Empire of the Sun, where it's like, why are you trying to make a serious movie? Right. It was the first time where everyone was.

Speaker 1 You know, reverse engineer a certain serious Oscar winner. Right.
He gets his Oscar.

Speaker 1 And then it's like, okay, buddy, what do you want to do? Yeah. He follows it up with, like, I'll do that again, Lost World and Amistad.
He takes four years off and then just does the same thing.

Speaker 1 He's doing the same thing. And everyone's like, not that.
And he's like, you're right. Not that.
Right. I'm going to do shit that's interesting to me.

Speaker 1 It does feel like basically after this, after that, after Lost World, Amistad, he's like, yeah, I'll just, you know, I'll follow the things that are interesting to me. Exactly.

Speaker 1 Which is the end of the thing. But then the start of the thing is everyone else trying to make this.
Right.

Speaker 1 But there's, I think there's a critical thing that happens between Jurassic Park and The Lost World, which is, you know, he create, he co-creates DreamWorks and launches the studio.

Speaker 1 He doesn't make The Lost World for Dreamworks. It's still a universal movie.
Of course, right.

Speaker 1 But I think he's making another straight-ahead blockbuster because he's like, I still got to be Steven Spielberg. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Four-year gap, and I still got to hold on to this thing that is my iconography, my name above the title, like you were saying. And I don't know.

Speaker 1 I've not been a, I've never been a big Lost World person.

Speaker 1 I really don't think it's very good. No.

Speaker 1 But I'm not, and I get why he did it. I get why he just said it.
We, We always say the same thing about it, which is it is one of the best directed bad movies of all time. Right.

Speaker 1 There's amazing set pieces in it. I kind of love the cast of it.
I don't even hate the premise.

Speaker 1 I don't love the third act, but like I don't hate the you know something has survived the sort of wild side island that's not a park. Like, that's cool.
Good Arlis Howard. Enjoy his work in that film.

Speaker 1 Great Arliss Howard. The Postlethwaite in that film.
Yeah. Apostle Thwait is absolutely fine cut.
But we talked about that movie. Yes.

Speaker 1 And like, it's funny because Demple of Doom is also him being like, well, of course I can do a sequel. This thing is made for a sequel.
And then everyone's like, we don't like this. Right.

Speaker 1 The thing I would argue he doesn't,

Speaker 1 he either doesn't do it again. He doesn't do it again or he gives up trying to do is the

Speaker 1 Last Crusade, which is like, guys, I'm sorry. Let me just give you a Spielberg right down the middle home run kind of thing.
And like from this point on,

Speaker 1 he either is like sort of, I don't know, he's not interested interested in repeating himself.

Speaker 1 Not too interested. And it feels like when he does,

Speaker 1 not that Amistad is like him repeating himself exactly, but it's a little bit him trying to make another Tony historical epic. He stepped outside of his comfort zone again.

Speaker 1 It doesn't work in the same way. But BFG feels like the clearest example to me of like, that's him making a movie that he's like, Spielberg should make this, right? And Crystal Skull.
Yes.

Speaker 1 And I defend Crystal Skull in some ways. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But obviously, I think he's probably dissatisfied with Crystal Skull. Yes.
And he feels like they want, Lucas and Ford wanted me to do that. So I fucking did it.
Yeah. And there you have it.

Speaker 1 That's what I wanted to make. And it didn't really like go over.
Yeah. And so when they're like, can we do another one? He's like, absolutely not.
Like, I'm not, I'm done.

Speaker 1 Like, and that's him finally making that decision.

Speaker 1 War Horse is the other one that kind of feels like they were like, how can you not make this movie, Stevie? Come on. But then he's.
But that movie's good. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Good.

Speaker 1 good also do you like war horse i do not yeah it's not his best no uh some people get really mad at us for that episode where we mostly just dunk on how everyone wants to the horse we weren't dunking on we were celebrating we're very it's a hot horse sex positive it's a hot horse everyone wants to that horse um i just i look at this movie and i'm like this still feels like the text everyone is studying when they're trying to construct their blockbusters

Speaker 1 But nothing feels like this movie. No.

Speaker 1 No. Nothing feels like this movie.
This is my wildest take. And I don't don't know if you guys are immediately going to push back on this or you're going to get where I'm coming from.

Speaker 1 I watch this movie now and I'm sort of astonished by how quaint it feels in certain ways. Whereas at that time, this movie felt like as big as a movie could possibly be.

Speaker 1 And now our movies have gotten so overly complicated that when you're like, this movie has like 10 speaking roles.

Speaker 1 Like it has ensemble cast, but there are no like unnecessary characters. It's, you're absolutely right.
It's such a strange movie in that sense that it is epic. Yes.

Speaker 1 And yet it's mostly set in like a couple of buildings,

Speaker 1 like sort of tucked away on this island. The modern version.
In an empty, unopened, not ready-yet theme park with a skeleton staff. Right.

Speaker 1 Like this, it looks expensive. It still looks great.
But I'm just like, there is a focus to this that is the Spielberg, like problem-solving clarity.

Speaker 1 Like the thing that he is best at is knowing exactly what the audience needs to focus on at any moment and cutting all the gristle and fat away from it to just like simplify the storytelling.

Speaker 1 In any modern version of this movie, and I'm not just talking about a modern Jurassic movie, but any movie like this today, Samuel Jackson's dialogue is spread across 10 characters. Right.
Right.

Speaker 1 And there is a clarity to the reason why we love Sam Jack in this movie and he makes such an impression is because it's one guy.

Speaker 1 And that one guy is given the space to actually have like a personality and a feeling of like what this means to him emotionally versus like, you know, in the last Jurassic movie, like Caleb Heron, who's a very funny comedian, is like a guy behind a computer for three lines.

Speaker 1 I forgot about that. And he pops up and it's like, oh, this is fun.
They cast a funny person in this movie. And then he disappears.

Speaker 1 And you're like, if you're going to put him here, here's a distinctive person. Give him a lot to do.
There's some really funny stuff in the last Jurassic movie.

Speaker 1 And I, you know, on the big picture, I'm, I guess, known for not remembering what happens in any of the Jurassic World films and force chronology. I do remember.
But

Speaker 1 the characters have names that we all know. I do remember in the most recent film, because there are so many characters,

Speaker 1 there's a sequence where all the characters need to get from one station to another station without getting eaten by raptors.

Speaker 1 And it's like 18 people walking in a line because they've introduced so many people. I would argue that this movie...
one, I completely agree with everything you said, just like David.

Speaker 1 And by the way, at that point in the film, that's us dealing with the skeleton crew. Like they've whittled down the cast to only the

Speaker 1 finalists.

Speaker 1 Justice Smith has been like sidelined.

Speaker 1 I don't know if this is a good story choice or not, but the fact that so few people work at fucking Jurassic Park, it's like it's a park full of dinosaurs and eight people work there.

Speaker 1 Like, what is going on?

Speaker 1 But I think

Speaker 1 should we be like, that's bullshit, there would be more people, or should we be like, no, this is a story about like essentially a startup.

Speaker 1 Yes. Where they're like, yeah, I don't know.
We kind of like, as Malcolm said, kind of backed into like, oh, fuck, we can make dinosaurs be alive.

Speaker 1 But also, the cold open of this movie is like 10 characters, most of whom we don't see again, who like don't talk. The movie does have the excuse of there's a hurricane, everyone left.

Speaker 1 Like, there are, when one imagines there are, there are more people that have left. That's the thing.

Speaker 1 I do wonder if that was almost a strategic choice on his part to be like open with showing a full staff, focusing on one specific area to imply at normal times. There's a little more going on.

Speaker 1 It does help the movie because it does reduce the number of people you need to remember and who is delivering the information.

Speaker 1 It helps a book, too, because in a book, like really, you don't want too unwieldy a group.

Speaker 1 But I also think Crichton in writing this book is like, he's grinding his gears about like, you can't automate things.

Speaker 1 Like, you can't just like, you know, create something like this and then just have a guy program a security system. Like, you know, he's got other gears he wants to grind.

Speaker 1 Is Crichton on the right side of the AI debate? He is. I mean, Crichton is often on the right side of things, except for, like, do women deserve to have a voice in society? And then he is dead wrong.

Speaker 1 Because the whole thing with Sphere is that the sphere brings your nightmares to us, right? Yeah. And like, it's like they find this weird alien.
And his worst nightmare was Sharon Stone talking.

Speaker 1 Things start to truly go bad when the lady goes into this. Has a pinnacle.
Like, that's when it's like, uh-oh. I'd like to fly back there, giant squids.
Please, please.

Speaker 1 Just disclosure is the film. Yeah, that's a great thing.
Disclosure. A virtual woman rapes a man.
Correct. Disclosure is

Speaker 1 him being like, okay, I I thought of dinosaurs, spheres. What's my worst nightmare? A woman in the workplace.
Science run amok.

Speaker 1 The other thing about Michael Crichton is he's like 40 feet tall.

Speaker 1 My other favorite thing is that his estate, and they probably will sue me for saying this, so maybe we should, you know, just put a little marker on this bench. Keep it in double.

Speaker 1 You know, made fuss about Noah Wiley's in a new hospital show. Oh, yeah.
I saw that. It's called like The Pit, and it's set in Pittsburgh.
And it's like, it's basically just just ER2.

Speaker 1 It's just like, no Wiley plays an ER doctor. Okay, get used to it.
And Michael Crichton's estate is like, Michael Crichton created ER.

Speaker 1 So we get royalties from this too because this is clearly just more ER. You can call it something else, but it's fucking more ER, right? No Wiley not allowed to play a doctor ever.

Speaker 1 And it's like, bitch, you were a spec pilot in the 70s that then got turned into a TV show. You don't get to just own hospitals

Speaker 1 for it. Can I play Devil's Advocate for a second, though?

Speaker 1 I am pretty certain that was explicitly.

Speaker 1 It was going maybe to be an ER, like a sequel, right?

Speaker 1 I think it was explicitly developed as an ER sequel. And then at some point, they went, oh, wait, how much would we have to pay the Crichton estate?

Speaker 1 Well, probably not just the Crichton Estate, but it's like we reached out to Eric Collins.

Speaker 1 And I'm just saying, like, fucking Gloria Rubin, hey, you want to come back? And she's like, not for nothing.

Speaker 1 The whole thing was just Wells and Wiley are back. in the medical world.
And I think at some point they did make the decision of like, if we shift this 10 degrees, it's a new thing.

Speaker 1 Does this mean that you can't play another intern? Great question. Without the Reitman family getting a bite at that apple? Like, really, what are we talking about here? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Or just think a movie about drafts. Rick the Intern afterlife.
Like, think long and hard. What you saying? No, I know.
Because this affects your future payday.

Speaker 1 I mean, Sean does a draft on his show every month. Do you think he owes

Speaker 1 the right man to say? Call me Jason.

Speaker 1 I think if I went to Montecito Pictures and was like,

Speaker 1 I want to develop a Rick the Intern lega sequel, he's now GM.

Speaker 1 He's running Island Nou Blar. Right.

Speaker 1 And then at some point, I like went to a different studio and was like, I have a pitch about a former assistant who then becomes a GM.

Speaker 1 But I had started the conversation properly first. That's the thing.

Speaker 1 I think if it was just like John Wells and Noah Wiley were like, you know, it'd be fun to just do a show and not have to pay the Creighton estate, then Crichton's lawsuit would be kind of bullshit.

Speaker 1 I think they were talking with everyone and then sort of went like, you know what, we actually have abandoned this project and we have an entirely new idea. It's called the pit.
It's called the pit.

Speaker 1 Sherry Stringfield's still around? What's going on with her? Oh, God. I love her so much.

Speaker 1 Dr. Lewis.
She was wonderful. What a great show that was.
ER is the greatest TV show of all time.

Speaker 1 Along with the X-Files and Gilmore Girls. And The Simpsons, obviously.
First 10 seasons. Have you ever seen that? And then I guess Twilight Zone? Twilight Zone's a good shout.

Speaker 1 I was going to say, like, I guess like the Sopranos or Madmen. You've made the case recently, The Mad Men's the best.
The Mad Men Rewatch really. That actually is my favorite.
I've seen that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that show really stands up fantastically. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And, but not as good, of course, as my favorite show, The Romanoffs.

Speaker 1 Bring it back. Did you finish? What if I'm like outside? No, I did not.
I didn't finish it. Outside, did you watch Amazon being like, where did Romanoffs season two?

Speaker 1 I really just wish Matt Weiner would stick to movies. It's clearly where his voice plays the best.
Are you here? You are here. Where is he? Great title.

Speaker 1 I have no idea where he is.

Speaker 1 I mean, the Romanovs is the last thing he did. And that was six years ago, seven years ago at this point.
Anyway, Jurassic Park.

Speaker 1 It's a film in 1993 that Steven Spielberg directed that was quite successful. It was the highest-grossing film of all time for a period.

Speaker 1 It was absolutely the highest-grossing film of all time and was beaten by Titanic. Yes.
Yep. It beat, I think it took the record from E.T.
That's the thing.

Speaker 1 It seems he had been the reigning champ for essentially 10 years. Yes.
Like, I don't think anything beat E.T. You're forgetting, I do believe in 97.
Like, Star Wars

Speaker 1 jumps back and release and bumps itself back to the bank. Star Wars has six months of being number one again before Titanic is

Speaker 1 the iceberg to that film's dreams.

Speaker 1 And yeah,

Speaker 1 Jurassic Park. And Sean likes it.
And he selected it when we said we're doing Steven Spielberg. I did.
Kind of a risky choice. Was I the first claim? Like,

Speaker 1 did I get first shot? Yeah. Probably.
My memory of

Speaker 1 your text was 50% of my personality is liking Jurassic Park. Yeah.
Well, I mean, it is. I kind of have to do it.

Speaker 1 And we were talking about Lynch.

Speaker 1 And the other 50% might be liking David Lynch. So I was forced to choose.
But honestly,

Speaker 1 I take full responsibility for my bad Jurassic Park podcast, however many years ago that was. You chose one.
So I'm happy to hear what you're saying.

Speaker 1 How old were you when this movie came out? I was 11 years old. Kind of in the exact sweet spot.
It changed my life.

Speaker 1 You were in the exact sweet spot.

Speaker 1 I actually don't know if there's a better age.

Speaker 1 And I read the book before the movie and did the thing where I was like, whoa, this is not like the book at all. Probably the first like adult book that I ever read.
And it was such a sensation.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's extraordinary. Like that book was in every store.
It was in like sneaker stores. You know, like you could buy it everywhere.

Speaker 1 And still the movie just took my breath away. Yeah.
But I'm with you. Yes.
It was that one of those early things where I was like, I can tell you what's different about the book.

Speaker 1 Like, you know, like, oh, in fact, right. Hammond is kind of a jerk in the book.
And Malcolm dies in the book and all that.

Speaker 1 But it's one of those things. Am I wrong about this? I mean, we have the dossier right here.

Speaker 1 But the movie was so fast-tracked off of the idea that they're making the movie at the time that the book is being published, basically. Possibly.

Speaker 1 Like, I think they're adapting it at the back time of the manuscript. Yeah.
Certainly, right. The rights were done and dusted before the book came out.

Speaker 1 Ben, did you see this film in theaters? I did. You did? Yeah.

Speaker 1 How did it feel? I

Speaker 1 remember just being like,

Speaker 1 dinosaurs.

Speaker 1 They're alive. I can see them.
It was mind-blowing. It was really, because I, as a kid, and I assume like, this is like very much a boy's thing, but growing up, I was obsessed with dinosaurs.

Speaker 1 My daughter is obsessed with dinosaurs. So it's not just a boy thing.
Okay, sorry. Dinosaurs are very, very cool when you're a kid.
And in fact, it's a kid thing.

Speaker 1 David's daughter is particularly obsessed with one dinosaur. I don't know if you've heard about this.
The good dinosaur? She was briefly very obsessed with the good dinosaurs.

Speaker 1 I noticed you an increased number of logs of that film on Letterboxd. Well, David's just working on his book pitch.

Speaker 1 We should do a 33 and a third style, you know, monograph. It's called the best dinosaur.

Speaker 1 Good dinosaurs and better dinosaurs. That movie is such a baffling series of artistic choices.

Speaker 1 Can I just say

Speaker 1 one of the big things I really want to talk to you guys about is how this is actually the only good movie about dinosaurs,

Speaker 1 which is just remarkable because of what Ben just said. I think just every kid loves dinosaurs.
Yeah. Yeah.
This is the.

Speaker 1 Maybe you like The Lost World shit. Sure.
People will defend Jurassic Park 3. Obviously, the Jurassic World movies are huge.
Let's just set aside the franchise for a second. Set aside the franchise.

Speaker 1 This represents.

Speaker 1 I've got a list up. I'm just going to yell some titles at you.
65 recently. Not a

Speaker 1 masterpiece. It was like Adam Driver goes back in time and he shoots dinosaurs.
I was like, this is going to be good, right? That movie is unfortunately a dud. Somehow not even a 65 out of 100.

Speaker 1 Can I add one caveat before you continue to go through it, Dave? Godzilla is not a dinosaur movie. Oh, no, of course not.
No, no, no, no, no. No, Godzilla does not count.
No. The Flintstones.
Now,

Speaker 1 you know, the Flintstones, they use dinosaurs. Sino's very good in it.

Speaker 1 If someone said, give me the list of the 10 best dinosaur movies. How many movies would you need to name before you got to the Flintstones? Three? I'm struggling here.

Speaker 1 I'm on Jay Journey to the Center of the Earth. I guess that has dinosaurs in it.

Speaker 1 I mean, the King Kong movies have tangential dinosaurs. I guess you could call those good, but they're not really about dinosaurs.
But I do think dinosaurs aren't. I think they make the tangent.

Speaker 1 And dinosaurs aren't top-built.

Speaker 1 You could argue that dinosaurs are the most interesting thing in the history of this planet. There's a reason.
We are

Speaker 1 fascinated by dinosaurs. The two coolest things, and they're things that kids tend to be obsessed with, right? Are that what, right? Once, one, dinosaurs once walked the earth.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Giant monster lizards were top of the heap. We didn't exist.
Two is huge. Right.
And we can find their bones. Right.
Two is like there are planets in the sky circling around us. One's red.
Right.

Speaker 1 One is yellow. Where you're just like, did a kid come up with this idea that there's just like a blue one?

Speaker 1 So much of that is still speculative. Like the planet stuff is still futuristic because we don't have like commercial travel to those planets.

Speaker 1 The dinosaur thing is so wild when you think about how overwhelming a concept it is, but it's presented to kids as like, and by the way, this is like done deal, settled matter. Yes.

Speaker 1 Millions of years ago. They're not coming close to your front door.
Okay, there's like one million years BC, right? There's like the sort of old kind of

Speaker 1 adventure, the original lost world.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 There's Lands of Time for God, another one. Ray Harryhausen style.
Yeah. But like, are those really, are those good movies? Like, they're certainly memorable.

Speaker 1 They're good. They're fun.
It's fun to see the dinosaurs. Yeah.
That's what they got. I also don't think his best films are his dinosaur films.
No, no, it's like certainly

Speaker 1 adventure films. Agree.

Speaker 1 Transformers, when they have dinosaurs in them, is pretty good. Well, those have dung-no bots in them.
And I mean, one of my favorite line reading of all Transformers

Speaker 1 is Stanley Tucci is Merlin. No, he's good too, but

Speaker 1 when the fucking thing turns into a dinosaur, the first time. You mean when Gremlock turns from robot mode into beast mode? No idea what you're talking about.

Speaker 1 And Ken Watsonabe, who is, of course, voicing a Samurai Transformer, which we forget about. Not idea.
Swift, what's his name? I don't know. I think it's Swift.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Says, I was expecting a giant car.
That line always gets. That's good.
It's so funny. You know who's a good guy?

Speaker 1 It's such a weird moment of self-awareness where I'm like, the fucking samurai bot.

Speaker 1 He's like, don't we turn into cars? It's so close to his name. It's not Swift, but it's like that.
Drift. Audubot Drift, maybe? I don't.

Speaker 1 Did you see Transformers 1? I haven't yet. I've been away.
I have no idea. You liked it, but I assume.
I did like it. What about Hound is not in it, right? That's my point.

Speaker 1 His character is named Drift. I have also not seen it, but I do like Josh Cooley, who made Toy Story 4.
I thought he did a nice job of it. I really liked it.

Speaker 1 And it has one of the great, like, third-act, like, it's all happening moments in recent movie history.

Speaker 1 Is the second best dinosaur movie, um, The Land Before Time, the Don Bluth film, that was going to be my take. Is that probably like the second most iconic dinosaur movie movie?

Speaker 1 Here's what is really damning. Disney's dinosaur is a mortal lock for the top 10, and that movie is boring as hell.
Right. Both, that's, and that's, I think, what Sean is talking about.

Speaker 1 It's like there have been two bites at the giant CGI dinosaur movie Apple. Both times you're like, well, that's a good idea.
Yeah. This is perfect because dinosaur is so hard to accomplish.

Speaker 1 Let's do it animated. Both movies stink.
But isn't that just even more of a testimony to the amazing power of Jurassic Park? They were like, we don't even, we can't do anything.

Speaker 1 So I won't harp on this because we covered it in our Lost World episode years and years ago.

Speaker 1 But I think the reason this movie is not as like a totemic informative for me as it is for many in my generation, the generation before and after, is my parents are super overprotective, did not let me see this movie for years.

Speaker 1 Oh, for me. I saw Lost World in theaters as my first Jurassic.
And that blew my mind. Sure.
Interesting, sure.

Speaker 1 And I think that movie having the impact of like, holy shit, I am seeing dinosaurs on screen. Yeah, you were like eight when that movie came out, probably.
Right.

Speaker 1 It took that juice where I have that memory of seeing that and feeling like it was one of my first like kind of scary blockbusters I was allowed to see.

Speaker 1 And I had that, holy shit, it's on a big screen. Where then later I came around to this.
Yeah. And then I clearly was like, well, this is better.

Speaker 1 But I didn't have that sort of key emotional discovery. It makes sense.
This is like Jurassic Park by comparison to The Lost World is just is weirdly restrained and small.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 Which it doesn't, it didn't feel that when we were kids, but when you watch it now, like you were saying before, like not only are there few characters, but you're on an island, you don't even really fully understand the geography of where you are.

Speaker 1 Sometimes we go to a new place and we're like, what building is this?

Speaker 1 And how far away was it? And what, and oh, they're reunited? You know, like the mapping of the movie is actually a little bit confusing at times, but it all works out.

Speaker 1 I mean, there are a lot of Spielberg sheets in this, which he like openly talks about, where it's like spatially things change to benefit him in a sequence if he needs them to be.

Speaker 1 He will go against how things were previously established. But it's insane how quickly they get out of this movie.
It is. The premise of this movie is so massive.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And it's interesting that fundamentally it's a movie about like they take one ride on the ride. Yeah.
It goes really wrong. They leave with two deaths.
And the ride is a backlash for it.

Speaker 1 It's a slow trek. Right.

Speaker 1 It's a six flags great safari.

Speaker 1 Three people die in this movie, right? Wayne Knight, Samuel Jackson, and

Speaker 1 Bob Peck. Ray Arnold.
No, and Gennaro, Gennaro, too. Gennaro.
Oh, the lawyer. Okay, so there's four deaths.
The book has a couple extra ones that they cut in the...

Speaker 1 Plus that guy who gets eaten at the beginning of the movie. Yeah, that guy.
Yeah. I mean, whoever that is.
Salute to him. Thank you for your word.
Raptor got him. But like,

Speaker 1 this isn't even a total sort of slasher film of like... Only fucking Alan and the kids make it off or whatever.
You know, it's like most of them leave being like, whew, that actually,

Speaker 1 we shouldn't do that. Like, you know, like a lesson learned.
Like, geez, that sucked. Yeah.
And none of the main characters died. And.
No, I mean, famously, Ian Malcolm was supposed to die.

Speaker 1 Yes, he dies in the book. Right.
And was supposed to die in the script. Yes.
Was originally in production. The plan was to have him die at the moment he gets trapped underneath some bamboo.
Right.

Speaker 1 And while filming, they were like, we're going to fucking kick this guy out of the movie. Is that crazy?

Speaker 2 David, yes. This episode is brought to you, The Listener by by Mubi, a curated streaming service dedicated to elevating great cinema from around the globe.

Speaker 2 From iconic directors to emerging auteurs, there is always something new to discover. With Mubi, each and every film is hand-selected so you can explore the best of cinema streaming anytime, anywhere.

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Speaker 2 the glove to hand pick oh of course david mussolini colon son of the century

Speaker 2 it is it is look

Speaker 2 it's an exciting project but it's really funny to be like guys mussolini here's what's funny about it just to peel back the curtain for a second We get like messages that are like, hey, you guys good with this ad?

Speaker 2 Yeah, here's the copy for the ad. And as shorthand, it was texted to us as, you guys good with the Mussolini ad? And I was like, Mussolini sponsoring the podcast? What do you mean?

Speaker 2 To be clear, we decry Ild Duce Mussolini, Benito Mussolini, the terrible dictator of Italy. But we celebrate Joe Wright and his newest project.
The filmmaker Joe Wright

Speaker 2 has created

Speaker 2 an eight-episode series about Mussolini's rise to power.

Speaker 2 And I will say, not to sound like a, you know, a little nerd over here, but it is actually very interesting to consider Mussolini's rise to power in these times.

Speaker 2 You know, he was sort of the original fascist, and the way that he sees power in Italy is,

Speaker 2 unfortunately, something we should probably have on our minds right now. I don't not try to be a loser right now.
You seem like me right now. This is the kind of thing I say.

Speaker 2 It's a very interesting part of history, and I feel like because, you know, other World War II things became

Speaker 2 whatever, the history channel's favorite thing, you don't hear quite as much about Mussolini's rise to power.

Speaker 2 Yes, no, you're right, unfortunately, sadly tragically frighteningly he's not a hugely this is a hyper relevant time and this is a theatrical hyper visual tour de four starring luca marionelli martin eaten himself remember that beloved member of the old guard that's right the movie i love the episode that people considered normal sequel

Speaker 2 checking notes here great

Speaker 2 calling it a towering performance of puffed up vanity it features an era bending score by tom rollins of the chemical brothers that's cool imagine techno beats storing scoring fascist rallies.

Speaker 2 It just sounds kind of Joe Wright-y. It does.
Joe Wright, you know, he won't just do a typical costume drama. He likes to, you know, think about things in a different way.
Got futurism,

Speaker 2 surreal stagecraft, cutting-edge visuals.

Speaker 2 Guardian calls it, quote, a... brilliantly performed portrait of a pathetic monster.
It's part political burlesque, part urgent contemporary warning about how democracies fall.

Speaker 2 This is heavy ad copy, guys. Usually it's kind of like, eh, shorts, you know,

Speaker 2 critical raving

Speaker 2 A gripping, timely series, The Guardian, Remarkable, The Telegraph, a complex portrait of evil, Financial Times. Yeah.
No, it's Joe Wright,

Speaker 2 one of the scarier people I ever interviewed. I've told you that story, right?

Speaker 2 He knows he's kind of a cool guy.

Speaker 2 We've batted him around. He's certainly gotten interesting.
He's very interesting. He's very interesting.
And he's made some great movies and he's made some big swings that didn't totally connect.

Speaker 2 Totally. That's really interesting.
He actually is a blank check filmmaker, unlike a lot of some people. I get suggested.
you're like, sure,

Speaker 2 it doesn't fit the model. This one does.
This one does. Look, just stream great films at home.
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Bye.

Speaker 2 David.

Speaker 2 Okay, okay. I'll be very quiet.

Speaker 2 Oh, I'm used to it. Producer Ben is sleeping.
Oh,

Speaker 2 Hazzy, Hazy boy is

Speaker 2 getting some

Speaker 2 multiple dashes. What's he sleeping on? He's sleeping on one of the new beds we got from Wayfair for the studio for our podcast naps.
But this is a big opportunity for us.

Speaker 2 We get to do the first ad read for Wayfair on this podcast. No, no, Griffin, you're clearly not listening to past recordings.
Ben did a Wayfair ad for us recently. You listen to past recordings?

Speaker 2 Yeah, sometimes. That's psycho behavior.
It is. Look.
He did that when we were sleeping? Look, apparently we need to talk about how when you hear the word game day,

Speaker 2 you might not think Wayfair, but you should. Because Wayfair is the best kept secret for incredible and affordable game day fines.
Makes perfect sense to me.

Speaker 2 Absolutely. And just try to, David, just if you could please maintain that slightly quiet.
We don't have to go full whisper. I just want to remind you that Haas is sleeping.

Speaker 2 I mostly just think of Wayfair as some website where you can get basically anything. Yeah, of course.

Speaker 2 But Wayfair is also the ideal place to get game day essentials, bigger selection, curated collections, options for every budget/slash price point. You want to make like a sort of man cake?

Speaker 2 Okay, fine. Okay.
All right. Sorry.
You know, Wayfair

Speaker 2 stuff gets delivered really fast, hassle the delivery is free.

Speaker 2 For game day specifically, Griffin, you could think about things like recliners and TV stands, sure, or outdoor stuff like coolers and grills and patio heaters.

Speaker 2 Like, that's, you know, that's all winter months. David, you have like basically a football team worth of family at home.
You got a whole team to cheer up. This is true.
You need cribs.

Speaker 2 Your place must be lousy with cribs. I do have fainting beds.
I have cribs. Sconces? Chaise Chaise lounges?

Speaker 2 I'm low on sconces.

Speaker 2 Maybe it's time to pick up a few. This is the kind of thing that would make your home team cheer.
Look, I'm just going to say that Wayfair is your trusted destination for all things game day.

Speaker 2 From coolers and grills to recliners and slow cookers. Shop, save, and score

Speaker 2 today at Wayfair.com. That's W-A-Y-F-A-I-R.com.
Wayfair, every style, every home. David, there's only one shame to this ad raid.
Don't wake Hausy.

Speaker 2 There's only only one shame to this ad raid that I didn't find out about this in time before I already purchased coolers, grills, folding chairs, patio heaters, recliners, bar wear, slow cookers, sports-themed decor merch for my favorite teams, and more.

Speaker 2 If only I'm a football team, Cleveland Browns, of course, Donte Mac, no matter what.

Speaker 2 Okay, that's the end of the ad raid.

Speaker 1 Okay, let me open the dossier. Okay, Michael Crichton.
He was a doctor, became a novelist. He's very tall.
Wrote EO. He was short.
He became tall. Didn't think women should talk too much.
Okay.

Speaker 1 Wrote lots of books.

Speaker 1 1980, he writes Congo

Speaker 1 and sort of stops writing books for a bit and more turns to film.

Speaker 1 Will ride for the film for the rest of my life.

Speaker 1 I insist Congo is good. Congo is fun.
I have seen it so many times, and I know that it is wildly considered a huge, it's considered a huge misfire. I love it.

Speaker 1 It is my friend, one of my best friends, Alex Perlin. Shout out to Alex Perlin, who I know listens to the podcast, is a lawyer, is a public defender.
Congo is his favorite movie of all time.

Speaker 1 He probably shouldn't be revealing it. He might get disparaged.
Possible. His bachelor party was watching Congo.

Speaker 1 Where? That's awesome. We went to Ample Hills.
We had their ice cream making class, and then we went back to his apartment and watched Congo on VHS. That's a very wholesome bachelor.

Speaker 1 He's a very wholesome man.

Speaker 1 Can I just just,

Speaker 1 I don't want to belabor this, but Congo, directed by Frank Marshall, written by John Patrick Shanley,

Speaker 1 who only writes normal movies. Obsessed with writing normal movies.
Alan Daviou. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Edited by Ann V. Coates.
Incredible cat. Like Laura Linney.
Music by Jerry Goldsmith. Fantastic.

Speaker 1 Del Roy Lindo. Ernie Hudson is really fun in Congo.
Tim Curry, Herfamer Hamocha, you know? Del Roy Lindo, like one of the best one-scene performances. Anyway, the point is.
Stop eating my sesame cake.

Speaker 1 He has made me really love Congo through his eyes. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 But Crichton turns to making movies. He's made, he made some pretty good.
Coma is a fun movie. Yes.
Great Train Robbery. Yeah.
Never seen Looker or Runaway. No.
Those are both Tossilic? Right. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
Interesting.

Speaker 1 Looker looks kind of cool. Looker's good.
Looks like Looks could Kill. Oh, it seems that this movie is about cosmetic surgery on women.
I'm sure Michael Crichton had very normal feelings about that.

Speaker 1 But then then in 1983, he thinks of

Speaker 1 this idea as a screenplay.

Speaker 1 He's like, I'm not going to write a novel. I want

Speaker 1 to turn that into a movie. Let's also acknowledge

Speaker 1 West World and Future World have already happened in the 70s. Absolutely.
He's already set up this theme park that goes wrong thing.

Speaker 1 And he said his approach to writing the story was initially about the person doing the cloning in secret, and he couldn't find a way in. And he kind of put it aside.

Speaker 1 And then he was like, No, this needs to be about like the environment where people are interacting with dinosaurs, right?

Speaker 1 He didn't want to do it in like dinos in New York City. Sure.
He wanted it to be in like sort of the natural world.

Speaker 1 And then eventually he's like, I'll write a book, like that, whatever. That's his way in.
And he thinks about the theme park idea, which, of course, he had done with Westworld. Right.

Speaker 1 So he's incredibly prolific from the 60s through the 70s. Yeah.
And then 1980 Congo, 1987 Sphere, 1990 Jurassic Park. He like slows way down.

Speaker 1 Some of this bumps up against the timeline as established in JJ's dossier, which I fully trust.

Speaker 1 I'm just going to repeat what I heard and try to make sense of it relative to this timeline as explained.

Speaker 1 I went to a very bizarre event some years ago that was a 92nd Street Y talk for the release of Michael Ovitz's book, his memoirs, in conversation with Bill Murray, his favorite client he ever had.

Speaker 1 He decided to have moderate, even though Bill Murray is famously someone who has not had reps for 35 years.

Speaker 1 But Ovitz, I think, was his last rep he ever had.

Speaker 1 And Murray asked him at one point, like, what is your proudest accomplishment of your entire career? And he said, getting Jurassic Park out of Creighton.

Speaker 1 And he unpacked that to say, like, Michael Creighton basically had writer's block for most of the 80s. Which I believe is true.
Yes. Yeah.
At least novel block. Yes.

Speaker 1 And like could not get something figured out.

Speaker 1 It makes sense that Jurassic was something that had been floating around in different forms, but then this final breakthrough of like, he's figured out how to frame this story.

Speaker 1 And that the second like he says to Ovitz, here's the pitch, DNA, dinosaur theme park, Michael Ovitz, like rubs his hands together and goes to everyone and is like, I have the greatest project of all time incoming.

Speaker 1 Spielberg, of course, crosses paths with Crichton on ER, which was conceived of as a film. And Spielberg helps pivot that thing to a TV show that was mildly successful.

Speaker 1 Being sarcastic, it was hugely successful. Later Inspires the Pit, America's most successful TV show.

Speaker 1 And that is at one point, Crichton's like, yeah, I finished this book about dinosaurs. Jurassic Park, it's getting proof by publishers.
He gets the early tip-offs.

Speaker 1 And Spielberg's like, would love to read that. Dinosaurs sounds cool.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 now Crichton claims that he basically was like, I don't want to get into some bidding war. Like, if you want to make it, like, let's make it.

Speaker 1 And Michael ovitz said i would love to get into a bidding war let's make a bidding war start as we said warner brothers tim burton columbia richard donner fox jodante like they all these studios uh enter a bidding war for the rights to that movie james cameron also claims he tried to buy the rights makes sense can can can i just pause you for one moment please what would be the contemporary version of this bidding war it'd be like okay so are we trying to think of like filmmakers who are allied with this just like villeneuve and wb right or villeneuvre Chris Nolan and Universal.

Speaker 1 Sure, Chris Nolan and Vilnev and WB. Tarantino and Sony.
No, I'm drunk.

Speaker 1 Would watch it. Yeah, sure.
No, okay, but like Vilnev.

Speaker 1 Your question is: who would be the people pitch for the project if Jurassic Park the galleys were hitting? Look, no, I love it. It's Vilnev and WB.
It's Nolan and Universal.

Speaker 1 Disney is like, I don't know, one of the fucking contiki guys who made Malipis in 2.

Speaker 1 Who now also directed Tron? Yeah, that's what they keep being like, it's one or two of them. I can't remember if they work together or not, but like they

Speaker 1 truly could not tell you if one guy has been making all those movies. They've been switching off.

Speaker 1 Paramount would be like Kaczynski or something. I was going to say Kaczynski for Apple, but or Apple, or Kaczynski doing Tron, also, you know, that all right.

Speaker 1 Netflix is like our new chat bot will be directing.

Speaker 1 It would have been Netflix putting forth Russos, but now I feel like the Russos have, well, I mean, fucking the Avengers five and six being Agbo productions is fascinating to me.

Speaker 1 What the fuck is Agbo again?

Speaker 1 They're a production company that they

Speaker 1 because that was like a fucking name they used in their improv sketch troop in college that they found a funny last name in the gun to your head. Yeah, Avengers 5 and 6.
Will they be good? No,

Speaker 1 I don't think so. I mean, maybe I'll be wrong.
I just think that I think it's,

Speaker 1 I think it's gotten unwieldy. I don't think there's any way to focus things back up.

Speaker 1 But all I'm saying is this way, but I I don't know if they'll pull it off. The whole thing was, oh, we got funding.
We're going to be our own studio.

Speaker 1 Like they were trying to almost do something closer to Dreamworks, making stuff for the streamers and whatever.

Speaker 1 And going back and doing Avengers could be seen as some admission of failure. Oh, we got to go back and play by someone else's rules.

Speaker 1 Part of the announcement of them coming back quietly was these will be an Agbo co-production.

Speaker 1 That Disney and Marvel were so desperate to get them back that they're cutting the company in on it, which is kind of unfathomable.

Speaker 1 It is a big thing to cut them in on i will not defend any of the other things that they have worked on but those things that they made with that company yes i like the avengers i like that successful and i i really like anything

Speaker 1 yeah um

Speaker 1 james cameron yes uh says when he saw the film he realized i was not the person to make it mine would have been more like aliens with dinosaurs uh dinosaurs are more for kids He made a movie for kids.

Speaker 1 His sensibility was right. I think I would have been too nasty.
Classic James Cameron, like weird big dick, like backhanded compliment shit. But right? Like James Cameron's always doing that.

Speaker 1 I'm too much of a big boy for this shit. My favorite thing is how he correctly injected himself into the implosion of the submersible.
He's like, yeah, I knew that fucking thing. Who cares?

Speaker 1 Fuck that guy.

Speaker 1 I'm trying to think who the other people would be, though, that they like put forward. There aren't.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Now, I just, Vilnav Nolan, those names are very obvious in terms of who wants to do a big scale thing. There's this guy Colin Treverer.
I mean, he's a real home runner. It's Trevoro.
Sorry.

Speaker 1 Anyway,

Speaker 1 borrow, you know, like borrow ideas from other people. Right.
Or like sub-borrows.

Speaker 1 Spielberg said he liked dinosaurs a lot. His favorite dinosaur movie.
Like the dinosaur. Oh, right.
And the fucking timeline.

Speaker 1 He's like, King Kong is certainly the, like, the T-Rex in King Kong is the cinematic dinosaur I remembered best.

Speaker 1 When I read the book, the Crichton book, it flashed back to Jaws for me. I was a huge Fray Harry Hausen fan.
I always thought about like,

Speaker 1 you know, making a movie like that. But he also said, I'm trying to make a good sequel to Jaws.
It's shameless. I can tell you that now.
He said that to the New Yorker in 1994. Interesting.

Speaker 1 That he is kind of admitting, like, yeah, this is kind of in my continuum of like creature feature. Yes.
Right.

Speaker 1 And the cast is broader, but you do have the kind of core trifecta thing. Yeah, 100%.
Like, like three good character-y actor people

Speaker 1 rather than like, you know, lunkheads.

Speaker 1 Because it's one of the most fascinating sort of what-ifs with this movie is when Universal spends a bunch of money to buy this for Spielberg, their immediate thought is like, oh, Harrison Ford and Sean Connery is Hammond.

Speaker 1 Right. Like, this should be the most all-star A-list movie possible.
And Spielberg's like, shouldn't we spend the money on the dinosaurs?

Speaker 1 Like, just get good actors, which was basically the Jaws formula. Three people who were not obvious leads for a blockbuster.

Speaker 1 But I also think both of those movies, this movie and Jaws, have the thing that's also the core thing that has always made Star Trek work a lot of the great franchises, which is like you basically have it ego, superego.

Speaker 1 Right. Right.
You have three fun characters that all represent the sort of corners of the psyche. Absolutely.
In

Speaker 1 how to address a humongous problem. Right.
Yeah. A big shark.
There's a, there's a, there's a quote-unquote casting what-if that I think materially explodes that, though. Go ahead.
Which is?

Speaker 1 Kurt Russell.

Speaker 1 He would be sick.

Speaker 1 If it's Kurt Russell in the Sam Neal role, it's a totally different movie. It is.
And I think,

Speaker 1 and I love Sam Neil in Sam Neale, which is maybe better.

Speaker 1 Because Kurt Russell on an adventure, there's not anything better in movie movies. That's a very fun movie.

Speaker 1 I just think that this movie is really special because of Sam Neal, because that's, it's such a curveball to have that guy in that position in the movie. That's like this guy where you're like, huh.

Speaker 1 I'm rooting for this guy. It's not like he's tremendously unlikable.
Sam Neal's a good actor. He's got a good presence, but you are like, wait, this this is the hero?

Speaker 1 Is this kind of like, you know, kind of, he's kind of introverted, like, you know, like, I don't really want to talk to people or like, yes.

Speaker 1 And not in like some squirrelly, like Newt Scamander way, just in a sort of like. Don't get me started on Newt.

Speaker 1 Because like with Newt Scamander, who I think about a lot, I'm like, this movie is setting itself the immense challenge of like someone who doesn't want the camera to be pointed at.

Speaker 1 He can't make eye contact with people. He can't look at anyone.
Who's hiding in his coat at all times?

Speaker 1 And like, oh, what an interesting challenge to have someone, the most unpersonable guy, like be the hero. I think Kurt Russell and the Kurt Russell

Speaker 1 guys. Yeah.
That's fun. Like, that's harmonizing.
Rainbow. Right.
I think Russell would have been a little too winky in this in a way that would have been fun.

Speaker 1 If this was the version we had, I'd be like, he's great in this.

Speaker 1 But there's something about the earnestness of Sam Neal, of him not being the kind of guy who you're used to existing in this kind of movie, him being a little bit like cold and thorny.

Speaker 1 This is like, but this is tombstone breakdown era Kurt Russell. I mean, he's very

Speaker 1 mysterious at this time. He's really good at this time.
But I think, I agree with you. I agree with you.

Speaker 1 Do you not think if you put him in this movie with Spielberg and you're like, you're reacting to dinosaurs, he starts to go a little dragon? He might. He might.
And it's a different movie.

Speaker 1 And I think everything David just said is bang on. Like Sam Neal makes the movie.

Speaker 1 totally unique and unusual. And his evolution as a character is a big part of why you get emotionally emotionally connected to the movie.

Speaker 1 But I just see Kurt Russell, and I'm like, damn, he's like taming dinosaurs. I want to see that.
I want to see that tamer. I mean, the third thing is like fucking Jurassic Park free.

Speaker 1 By the way, the third thing Alan does, apart from learning how to put on a seatbelt and learn how to connect with children, is he fucking fends off the most direct assault on his girlfriend by the sexiest man who ever lived.

Speaker 1 Ian Malcolm is like suddenly training his fucking missile sights on Laura Dern and Samuel's like waving him off.

Speaker 1 This is one of those rare examples of a performance that is like so parodied, so impersonated, so memed.

Speaker 1 And you watch the real thing, and you're like, the real thing is bigger than anyone else's interpretation of it. It's a very big performance.
It's astonishing.

Speaker 1 It's so clear that Steven Spielberg wants to fuck Jeff Goldblum the way he films him in this movie. Yes.
I mean,

Speaker 1 with the Marilyn Mind him,

Speaker 1 it's so funny that they eat their Chilean sea backs in what seems to be like a black box theater with like perfect spotlights illuminating all of them. It's such a

Speaker 1 viewing. I've really actually took in that scene.
I'm like, it's it's bonkers.

Speaker 1 It's bonkers because a lot of Jurassic Park is set in like, and obviously with right, with computers and like, right, a kind of chintzy,

Speaker 1 Disney Worldy kind of, yeah. And then that one scene, Spielberg was clearly like, now let's lick the shit out of this dining room.

Speaker 1 It's so funny because it's, of course, this is Dean Condy, the great Dean Condy. Brilliant.

Speaker 1 Collaborator of John Carpenter as well as Wickette.

Speaker 1 What's Wicket's last name? My joke is that Dean Cunty looks like an Ewok.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 he's doing the fucking pools of light thing that Spielberg's going to take to the ends of the earth with Janus. Yes.
And Schindler's the first Janus. This is the handoff.
Of course. Of course.

Speaker 1 This is when Janus is going to take over after this one. I mean, all of the sort of like correct decisions of Spielberg reads this book.

Speaker 1 He's like, oh, this character feels a little bit like Brundle from the fly. Cast Jeff Goldblum.
Jeff Goldblum's like, I've kind of done this before.

Speaker 1 Wouldn't it be funny to play this against type, this guy's a rock star? And they're like, oh, that would be fun.

Speaker 1 This is the guy who'll give you the color in the first 40 minutes of the movie and then he dies. And then they're like, we cannot kill this guy off.
He is really being introduced to someone.

Speaker 1 You're like, oh, I'm excited for this kind of jerk to die. Right.
Like, he's so high on his own supply.

Speaker 1 The 30 minutes of him just aggressively trying to bed Laura Dern is the kind of plotting you do when you're like, and by the way, this guy's going to be dead in two minutes. Yes.
We're going heavily.

Speaker 1 Literally the drops of water on the hand in that sequence. You're like, it's about to be cursed.
This is his final moment.

Speaker 1 And there's something about the way he plays him. It's the weird magic of Jeff Goldblum where you're like, this guy's a creep and I kind of have no problems with it.

Speaker 1 Where he's just like, in any other setup, everyone is rooting for this guy to be kicked out of the movie. He's the only character, though, who's written with any panache.

Speaker 1 None of the other characters. lines of dialogue have personality.
But that's they're machines to push the story forward.

Speaker 1 The judgment on Goldblum's part, and who knows how much of it was motivated by ego and him being like, I want to be cool.

Speaker 1 But there's a story sense here that is very smart: of like everyone else is just kind of doing their job.

Speaker 1 And Hammond, who's the only other guy who's sort of getting some joy out of it, is trying very hard to do this a funcular Disney thing. You do need someone who's like got swagger.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he pulls it up. He's on fire.
He fights in an incredibly impressive and obviously iconic performance. David, on your spreadsheet, do you have any acting nominations for this movie?

Speaker 1 I was literally in Griffin having the same thought.

Speaker 1 I was watching this being like, I bet David gives this one supporting actor nomination, and I'm trying to figure out who he would pick. I have Jeff Goldblum.
Okay. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Ray Fein, Schindler's List, Jeff Goldblum, Jurassic Park, Tom Lee Jones, the Fugitive, Valcomber, Tombstone, Kingsley Schindler's List. That's a pretty, pretty

Speaker 1 five. Pretty good five.
Yeah,

Speaker 1 pretty boring, but pretty good. Yeah.

Speaker 1 1993, man. Great year for movies.
Yeah. I do.
Piano, Age of Innocence, Groundhog. I mean, an incredible year for Sam Neal.
Yeah. An incredible year for Steven Spielberg.
Sure.

Speaker 1 Laura Dern. This is only three years after Wild at Heart, which we've covered semi-recently.
Yeah. And she's only, what, like,

Speaker 1 she's very, she's quite young, 25.

Speaker 1 25 in this movie? Yeah. Well, someone who started out as a child star, really started acting in her teen years, is then sort of like a young adult star.

Speaker 1 The shift to this movie, you're like, oh, this is an adult person.

Speaker 1 Like from this movie on, Laura Dern is permanently 45 years old, right? Because of how they style her. And now her style is so cool.

Speaker 1 But I think at the time, she's trying to, they're trying to style her older. Yes.
Right. Like, she's got this kind of like professional, sort of workmanlike, you know, thing going on with the cash.

Speaker 1 She has the graviton. I'm saying she likes she pulls it off.

Speaker 1 How many movies do we see like this where you introduce a 25-year-old and the movie says, like, this is the smartest scientist in the world? And you're like, this is a child

Speaker 1 straight off the CBS. This is Hawktua.

Speaker 1 She's not a paleobotanist or whatever the hell.

Speaker 1 If the timeline was shifted nine months, Haley walsh would be in jurassic city right if that happened nine months earlier or jurassic city film nine months later is that what the movie's called no now it's called something dumb it was jurassic city was the working title now it's called like jurassic world

Speaker 1 revival so fucking funny that they were like we're gonna make a jurassic park movie and you're like you are and you're like yeah we we we fucking made it it's got scarjo it's probably fine

Speaker 1 yeah anyway jurassic park go ahead laura dern is fifth only 57 this is the thing because she started out very young. And she's so young in this movie.
Yeah. She's very foxy in this movie.

Speaker 1 I don't know what she says. She's incredibly fucking mega babe.
She's cute.

Speaker 1 Have you seen the meme about how she sits down? Oh, yes. Where she goes, like.

Speaker 1 Yes, at the table in the dining room. Very, very interesting choice.
All right. Back to this dossier.
Okay, Michael Crichton. Wait, another incredibly bizarre choice for this film.

Speaker 1 Michael Crichton, we're on the script. Okay.
We're on the script. Filbert's like to Crichton, like, write me a script.

Speaker 1 It won't be the shooting script or anything, but can you please just take the first pass of turning this into a movie? Crichton agrees.

Speaker 1 Then Malia Scotch Marmo, who co-wrote on Hook, but doesn't get a credit on it, comes aboard. She says her big contribution was fleshing out Ellie Sattler and the kids.

Speaker 1 And then David Kep,

Speaker 1 who had written Death Becomes Her for Zemekis.

Speaker 1 is brought on board and he is the one who's like, we need to have this Grant character have more of an arc and it should be

Speaker 1 the kid thing. Yeah.
Because that is not present in the books. In the books, Alan Grant has no problem with the kids.
Like, he's not like, oh, these fucking kids. Yeah.

Speaker 1 That is them going from like, and he kind of has a chip on his shoulder about children for whatever reason to he loves these two kids is David Kepp's big idea.

Speaker 1 To do endless comparison point here, but it is astonishing how relatively understated his arc is compared to, say, Jurassic World, in which characters keep on calling up Bryce Dallas Howard on the phone and saying, when are you going to stop focusing on your job?

Speaker 1 And why do you keep running this dinosaur party? Or the only joy in life?

Speaker 1 Right. Like, it's one of the things I find most fascinating about this movie is every time I watch it, I have a different interpretation of Sattler and Grant's relationship.

Speaker 1 What is that right now? Right now, I think they have...

Speaker 1 No, I think they have slept together intermittently a number of times and have never been fully committed, but have never had a conversation about whether or not they're not.

Speaker 1 That is how I take it, is that they are romantically involved because they work in this bizarre field where all you do is like sit in a trailer in the Mojave Desert or whatever, scraping bones. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And he's handsome and she's beautiful.

Speaker 1 And so they do a little bone scraping. But yeah, like he's too emotionally stunted to be like, would you like to like get married?

Speaker 1 Right. She's dating a much older guy who is emotionally much younger than her.
Who's intellectually very impressive and is like, what if dinosaurs were birds? And everyone's like, oh.

Speaker 1 And is what I think is the nuanced version of this is like that it's not like she's like, why won't you settle down and have kids with me?

Speaker 1 The idea of kids sort of represents like, when is this guy going to like grow up a little bit, diversify? Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And it takes Malcolm being like, I marry a new woman every year and she just jumped to the top of my list for Grant to be like, uh,

Speaker 1 hello. Yeah.
You know, he doesn't even like say like, we are dating. He's just like, yeah.
When Malcolm's like, are you two? And he's like, yeah.

Speaker 1 And like, that's about as much as he can describe it.

Speaker 1 Right, exactly. Right.
He can't go further than that. Right.

Speaker 1 Because it's a PG movie. pg it is a pg movie which is insane or is it pg13 i think it has to be pg 13.

Speaker 1 yeah it might be pg 13 it's pg 13 in britain it was pg wow i remember that and in the united kingdom of don't you dare and it was a little surprising it's because this movie is very intense it is and it has a severed arm in it let's also just to the point of that conversation call out not the rating but the uh the the relationship dynamics uh goldbloom and dern date for a while after this movie like the scenes you're watching have the juice of this is actually working.

Speaker 1 Yeah, for sure. The hand, the water on the hands, I'm like, they're about to fuck.
Like,

Speaker 1 they are moments from fucking. They call Cut.
Both of them are going to the same trailer. She's giving him none of.
She's giving Sam Neil none of what she's giving Sam Neil.

Speaker 1 With Sam Neil, it's more of a like, oh, Alan, you sweetie pie. Goldbloom just looks so fucking hot.
He does. Insane.
It's crazy.

Speaker 1 It's a shot of him with his shirt open and he's laid up and he's greased up. It's crazy.
It's like professional wrestling.

Speaker 1 There are people in 1993, because like in 1993, I saw this film in theaters. I was young, and then I see Independence Day when I'm 10, right?

Speaker 1 And I'm like, yeah, well, Jeff Goldblum is like a movie star from movies that I see. I know that.

Speaker 1 But there must have been so many people going to see this movie being like, wait, this sort of squirrely guy from like fucking Buckaroo Bansai and the big chill and the fly is like now like Earth's hottest.

Speaker 1 I have a very distinct memory of my father. Yes.

Speaker 1 I'm sure your father was activated by this.

Speaker 1 Yes, Lost World's opening weekend when it had the biggest opening weekend of all time, or maybe when it was at the end of its run, but during its box office run, saying to me, you ever think about how weird it is that Jeff Goldblum's in three of the highest-grossing movies of all time?

Speaker 1 All the big ones.

Speaker 1 He was like, that's just weird.

Speaker 1 At Jurassic Park, Independence Day in nine months.

Speaker 1 Holy Man.

Speaker 1 Holy Man was huge. People forget that.
So Kep says his approach was, yeah, throwing out details. He was like, the minute characters started talking about their personal lives, lives, you don't care.

Speaker 1 You're like, I want to see dinosaurs, right? It's one of those funny little tidbits that like BD Wong is one of like five solo cards. He's on the billing of the poster.

Speaker 1 And it's because they cast him while they were still adapting it and his character's so big in the book that they were like, well, he'll be the fifth lead.

Speaker 1 And then it ends up being one scene, but the contract was locked in. And like the other thing about Jurassic Park is that like it's It's not really a fast-paced movie.

Speaker 1 As much as Kep is saying, like, I simplified, I took things out. The movie has an incredible amount of setup to the point of, now I love the first 45 minutes of Jurassic Park.

Speaker 1 I love to, like, luxuriate in it. Yes.
But if I'm watching it for the first time, I'm probably like,

Speaker 1 can we get to the dinosaur antics? Yeah. And now you watch it and you're like, this movie is explaining every single fucking thing to you that you need to know for the last half of this movie to be.

Speaker 1 perfect. It's like perception shit, except it's the thing that makes Spielberg the king is he knows how to do this in a way that doesn't sound like an info dump.
Yes.

Speaker 1 And also in Inception in Act Three, he's like,

Speaker 1 three other rules I forgot to mention.

Speaker 1 But like, this is such here's how Limbo actually works. I mean, you guys know where I stand on the whole situation.
Yeah, it's just a movie that does not make sense.

Speaker 1 Unlike Mr. DNA, who does a wonderful job making us understand in clear terms what is at play in the film Jurassic Arts?

Speaker 1 It's a perfect Spielberg magic, where he's like making a joke out of the fact that he needs to stop the movie for four minutes and explain the science.

Speaker 1 Using Greg Burson's voice, who is like a legendary animated voice actor

Speaker 1 as Spielberg's idea. This is what it would be in this reality.
This is how to make it palatable to the audience. You're on tour.
It's like you're at the park on tour. It's a brilliant idea.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Laura Dern says she was making a film called Wild at Heart, which we discussed on this podcast not that long ago.

Speaker 1 And she told Nick Cage, who she had just worked with on Wild at Heart, they want to put me on the phone with Steven Spielberg for like a dinosaur movie. So it's like a straight jump, basically.

Speaker 1 I mean, which makes sense, right? Like, and Nick Cage says, and I love this, you're doing a dinosaur movie? No one can ever say no to a dinosaur movie. And she's like, what?

Speaker 1 And he's like, it is the dream of my life to do a dinosaur movie.

Speaker 1 It makes so much sense that Nick Cage in 1990 was like, if you don't fucking get this movie, I'm going to put on a blonde wig and say I'm Laura Dern.

Speaker 1 I mean, this is fascinating because Cage also at this point in time is kind of stuck dead between Ian Malcolm and Alan Grant. He could be Malcolm.
He could be Grant. He could kind of do either.

Speaker 1 He's kind of, he's not quite

Speaker 1 the energy the movie arrives at, for sure. But has he ever gotten to act with a dinosaur? Surely.
Well, he did pay $276,000 for a dinosaur skull. Right.
He's gotten to live with a dinosaur.

Speaker 1 That's right. He has dinosaur skulls in his school.
Where is your dinosaur skull here in this wonderful studio?

Speaker 1 Where is it? I'm boys.

Speaker 1 Can we budget for a dino bone? Now that we've done this episode, it could be a business expense. Oh, absolutely.
Write it off.

Speaker 1 Are you looking up if Cage has ever been in a movie with a dinosaur? Oh, I wasn't. I'm sorry.
I can if you want. I don't believe he has.
That's kind of of a good thing. I can't think of one.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he should. Okay.

Speaker 1 William Hurt turned down Ellen Grant in one of the more insane decisions of his life, possibly. He could play 100%.
Like, he makes sense. I would also contend, like, he's 10% colder

Speaker 1 than Sam Neil. But, like, at the time, that's a very logical choice, right?

Speaker 1 Kurt Russell and Richard Dreyfus were both deemed too expensive because this movie was the budget's going elsewhere, folks, right? And Neil is brought in last minute.

Speaker 1 uh neil says like you know he was going to a job and was basically told like steven spielberg needs to talk to you in like half an hour and two days later he had the part and three weeks later he's in hawaii like making jurassic park yeah um jeff goldblam i assume mostly being cast off of like dead calm yeah i

Speaker 1 He was a guy, the Omen fan. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Maybe not because of like the Omen movie. Right.
I'm like, what's that? Which is bad, but he's, you know, kind of what makes it. I'm saying Dead Calm just because it was a little bit of a crossover.

Speaker 1 It was sort sort of the timing lines up. Like, what was the what is it? I think it's that in red October, maybe.
Sure.

Speaker 1 He's a face, right? Yeah. Yeah.
No, it's interesting, though. It's like, I don't know why he's covered

Speaker 1 a certain amount of this run-up. He's tremendously good in the fucking Carpenter movies.
And

Speaker 1 piano obviously is the same year as this. Like, it's one of those perfect storm moments where he just fully transcends.
Right.

Speaker 1 But yeah, he's a very odd choice for this.

Speaker 1 Goldblum, Janet Hershenson, who cast this movie, read the book and was like, I'm seeing Jeff Goldblum for this role. Now, Jim Carrey read for the part and they really liked his audition.

Speaker 1 And that is another fascinating fork in the road to imagine. But Goldblum was pretty much always their first choice.

Speaker 1 And Stephen, at one point during the meeting said to Goldblum, like, there is some sort of idea of maybe we just merge the Alan and Ian characters into one character.

Speaker 1 Like, why do we have these two leads? Like, sinking out loud, right? And Goblins, Goblin was like,

Speaker 1 don't do that. Like, that's a bad idea.
I know what to do for this character. Make him different.
You know, don't make me just like the hero of this movie.

Speaker 1 Because one of the problems with Lost World is he has to be the hero. Yes.
And he has to deliver lines of dialogue, you know, like that are just explaining shit about what's going on with dinosaurs.

Speaker 1 And you're like, that's not what he's here for. He needs to be the chaos element.
Absolutely. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I think he might be maybe one of the best bad boy scientists in all of movies. I mean, put forth a competitor.
Like, who even comes close? Who's the rival for that throne?

Speaker 1 This is basically him defining that as the type that everyone else tries to figure out how to put in their movie. I mean, Dr.
Frankenstein, he was kind of a bad boy scientist. This is true.
Dr.

Speaker 1 Evil is kind of a bad boy. That's a good one.
Doctor Strangelove. He was kind of a bad boy scientist.
What about Doctor Strange? Do you know that in

Speaker 1 London, a city that David Sims once lived in,

Speaker 1 there is about to open a staged adaptation of Doctor Strangelove, adapted by Armando Ianushi, starring Steve Coogan. Yep.
I was made aware of this by our friend Tim Simons. That is kind of wild.

Speaker 1 Sounds fun. When we covered, you were our guest on that.
I was. I wish them all the best.
That's a huge swing.

Speaker 1 It should not be touched, Strange Love. Probably not.
It is a moment-in-time movie. Should anyone ever try to touch it in a different medium and format?

Speaker 1 Those two guys working together make a ton of sense, but it is certainly a huge.

Speaker 1 Do you guys see the franchise yet? Have you? I've not watched the the franchise. No, is that? No.

Speaker 1 It's either swings or, you know, he hits or misses. Like, it's, yeah.
I hope they let him do a third TV show that has a very expensive premise

Speaker 1 rather than just perhaps the dinosaur shows as well. Yeah.
So John Hammond is a more straightforwardly greedy character in the book.

Speaker 1 Spielberg is like, can you make him a little more like sort of Steven Spielberg-y? Like he's dreaming of a utopia and it's like

Speaker 1 very Disney-esque. I think Richard Attenborough is brilliant casting.
I think he's incredible. Agree.

Speaker 1 He is obviously being cast sort of as a guy that Spielberg probably looks up to some extent, like in Gandhi beat

Speaker 1 E.T.'s assistant Oscars.

Speaker 1 If you like think about them probably spending that awards season crossing paths over and over again, obviously the gauntlet of like fucking awards campaigning was not what it was back then.

Speaker 1 But nonetheless, he's a young gun and Richard Attenborough is the old pro. Richard Attenborough is a great actor, you know, who then becomes an incredibly medium director.

Speaker 1 But at this point, he had not acted in a long time. Probably not.

Speaker 1 I think he has a sort of second wind after this.

Speaker 1 I think he's great casting because he's got the, you know, Santa Claus energy that was then immediately, literally turned into a Santa Claus movie the next year.

Speaker 1 But there's... There is an element to him where you're like, this guy is tricky or like, there is a little darkness.

Speaker 1 He's a bright rock. He's like, hey, he's a cat at Henry Lington plays.

Speaker 1 There's something sinister. He is so.
I don't think it's that classic film director thing where all great film directors are kind of manipulators.

Speaker 1 There's a little bit of sweet talking, saying different things to different people to show people.

Speaker 1 You're right, though. It had been 14 years since he had acted in a movie when he became his family.
It was the human factor, the late Otto Prefinger movie. Yeah.

Speaker 1 You know, he's really good in the movie, and

Speaker 1 the movie's ultimate take, yes, is like, he's a great showman, and he just wanted to put on a show, and he really just didn't know what he was doing, right?

Speaker 1 He didn't know what he was thinking, putting live fucking dinosaurs in the same place as people.

Speaker 1 He basically feels like the entire entertainment industry is now run by John Hammonds who don't know what they're doing. Right.
Aren't thinking about the consequences. Right.

Speaker 1 Or they're just, yeah, I mean, anyway, there's so many jokes I could have do.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 like.

Speaker 1 I do think this is like a movie about like late capitalism, right?

Speaker 1 Or whatever, like that, like, I'm not sure Spielberg is saying that when he's writing the script, but this is a movie about like the end stage of capitalism where like we have the money to do this, so why wouldn't we do it?

Speaker 1 It'll make money. And it's like, because you have no control over this whatsoever.
But also, like, weaponized, monetized perma-adolescence.

Speaker 1 Like, this is one of the movies that starts to create the world that we all are guilty of living in, of just like constantly being obsessed with the things that we grew up with.

Speaker 1 It's like the fucking Edmund Hillary, isn't it? You know, whoever said, like, why do you climb Everest? Because it's there. Right.
Right. It's like, why would you make dinosaurs? Well, we can.

Speaker 1 Someone else is going to do it if we don't do it. Let's do it.
But also, isn't that what every kid has dreamed of? Like, shouldn't I spend all of science, technology,

Speaker 1 all of the financial capital in the world to make little boys' dreams come true?

Speaker 1 I want to be on the record. I think we should make dinosaurs.

Speaker 1 I wanted to have this conversation. I think I bring it up.

Speaker 1 The critical dynamic of the movie is at that dinner table scene, which is so beautifully lit. Yes.
Dr. Ian Malcolm keeps pushing.

Speaker 1 on Hammond and saying, you know, you spent so much time thinking about whether you could, you didn't think about whether you should.

Speaker 1 Iconic speech. And

Speaker 1 obviously, Ian Malcolm is the seer of this film, and he understands from the moment that he gets there, this is a bad idea. And that's the book has the dragon spirals, which is like him, you know,

Speaker 1 dragon spirals? Like a dragon spiral, I swear I've talked about it before

Speaker 1 on this podcast, but it's like a dragon curve, sorry, is what it's called.

Speaker 1 It's like, if you just make, draw a line and then you draw a left and then right, you know, like you keep, eventually you make these shapes that you would never see coming.

Speaker 1 This is like fundamental chaos theory shit, where it's like, you cannot predict where this is going.

Speaker 1 And like the first chapter, you just see a little curve. And by the later chapters, there's a little picture of a dragon spiral because the idea is it's like, they never foresaw X, Y, Z.
Sure.

Speaker 1 But so that's what Ian Malcolm is putting forward. We're not chaos theorists.
We're not DNA geneticians. I dabble.
You dabbled yourself. That's Professor Crispy.
Honestly, that is true.

Speaker 1 He's not Professor Crispy. He is Professor Chaos.

Speaker 1 Should we make... Ben wants to make dinosaurs.
I think we should make dinosaurs. Yes.

Speaker 1 I don't think we should. And this has always been my contention: is what could go wrong? Talk about how few good dinosaur films there are, right?

Speaker 1 It is the struggle every one of these sequels has had is like this is the ultimate one movie concept where you want to believe that all the characters walk away from it and have learned their lesson right and society at large learns their lesson.

Speaker 1 I'm a big defender of the Terminator franchise constantly repeating the same mistakes because I think that speaks to something more fundamental, which is like the abstract idea of technology helping us.

Speaker 1 You could keep falling into different traps with that.

Speaker 1 The dinosaur thing is so specific that we're supposed to believe that every four years, someone else is like, I think I know how to do it right, though.

Speaker 1 It's really funny in Jurassic World when they're like, let's do a pterodactyl. What could go wrong?

Speaker 1 That's the dumbest idea of the history of time. The thing where it's like build a net, I guess, around the whole park.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 No, we should not be making dinosaurs, but if you do want to make dinosaurs, please do make it on fucking Isla Nublar far away from me what if there's so small though then we think

Speaker 1 prehistoria

Speaker 1 what's that so the charles band full moon production where it was little stop motion dinosaur you know what i'm talking about the prehistoria i do franchise yeah with the kid from last uh action hero

Speaker 1 the hero film series you might enjoy the villain of this movie is wayne knight dennis nandry who is just like this i mean again as written by michael crichton this kind of like slovenly disgusting person right like crichton is clearly so kind of like,

Speaker 1 but it's also, it's like, he just doesn't have enough money. Richard Attenborough keeps sort of alluding to like personal choices that led him into which I love.
We don't know what that is.

Speaker 1 What do we think it is?

Speaker 1 And also, there's the thing

Speaker 1 Sam judges the park because he needs money.

Speaker 1 I think he'll have enough money for new glasses. That's the funniest part of the movie.
Yeah, when he's sliding down the mountain. Getting the guy to pick up the tab.
Yes.

Speaker 1 Or his hike, where he's like, don't skimp out the way Hammond has.

Speaker 1 That's how this happened in the first place. There's a dual-pronged thing of like, Nedri's bad with money, but also Hammonds may be underpaying it.

Speaker 1 And I wrote this take on The Atlantic years ago, but the hero of the movie is Ray Arnold, Samuel L. Jackson's character, who is just fucking doing his job.
He is someone who's trying really hard.

Speaker 1 He's got this version of a job anywhere. His job is running a large...
sort of organization security system park, right? He could do it at Disney World. He could do it in a non-entertainment function.

Speaker 1 He got the fucking dinosaur park, right? Like that's the job he ended up doing. He's also doing it humanistically.
This is what I'm talking about. Total character work

Speaker 1 is like every decision you're watching filter through a human face with thoughts and feelings. There is no filtered through the end of a cigarette.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's a perfect performance. There is no line from him in this movie, Ray Arnold, that's like, but isn't it cool that like I run the fucking T-Rex pen? He doesn't give a shit about that.

Speaker 1 And then late in the movie, Ian is like, hey, man, can you go to the other end of the park and fucking turn the lights on?

Speaker 1 because we turned them off and he's like yeah sure i'll get my jacket and then he dies off screen and like right right, which I believe there was a

Speaker 1 sequence. And it like, this is another thing that makes this movie so different from all modern blockbusters is Spielberg still had to deal with limitations.
Right. There was like

Speaker 1 technology messed with things. But they were just like, we're not giving you extra days.
Yeah. That scene is cut.
Figure out which scene you want to cut.

Speaker 1 And obviously we just see his hand, but there's such a tragedy to like, yeah, man, he was literally just here to make all of the things run in this absurd, stupid enterprise.

Speaker 1 I love that solution, though, to just have the hand land on the bottom of the hard shoulder. It's pure like Universal Monster movie, you know, where you're just like, oh, my God.

Speaker 1 Which the movie is, you know, you were saying that it is and it isn't, but it is a movie that he watched on TV when he was seven. Like, that's clearly what he's going for here.

Speaker 1 Three or four things burned into his brain forever and haunted him for the rest of his life.

Speaker 1 Pole fiction is the year after this. Correct.
It is.

Speaker 1 Sam Jack is so good.

Speaker 1 He's amazing. Yep.

Speaker 1 But this is still in his pure character actor mode before paul he'll do anything

Speaker 1 yeah yeah right as much as he's had a few kind of like splashy performances this is still this guy's versatile he's just he's like a five-tool player actor he'll do whatever you ask him to do right the next year he's codified into samuel l jackson yes and anyone who is hiring him wants a little bit of that even if he's playing against type you want some of that.

Speaker 1 Like this is the last moment when he can sort of play this role the way he does. He never worked with Spielberg again, right? Which is fascinating.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he should work with spielberg again like right now like why not right yes and it is one of those things where everyone's like samuel jackson the highest grossing star of all time like jurassic park is just like a footnote on that list yeah anyway he doesn't swear it's weird this is but he's like

Speaker 1 okay he's like a very buttoned down tired you know yeah like focused it's like how jeremy pippin was bald before he had hair like samuel jackson looks older in this movie than he does in later movies of the 90s well it's the opposite pivot.

Speaker 1 He's got hair in this.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I guess he has a little hair, but you know what I mean? Like, you know, he hasn't kind of clammed up, you know, till like anyway.

Speaker 1 Uh, some of the other casting decisions, Ariana Richards, she's told this story a lot, but like they just brought her to an office and they would just scream, please.

Speaker 1 And her scream was the only one who woke up Steven Spielberg's wife from the couch. Wow.

Speaker 1 Joe Mazzello, who had screen tested for Hook and was a little too young for it. He's just got such a sweet face.
Yeah, I've always

Speaker 1 really liked him. I do too.
Like, now, as a grown-up actor, he's still got just that sweet face. But he, off of this, this is like Kubrick sees this and is like, here's the guy I can make AI with.

Speaker 1 And this is when Spielberg starts getting involved in AI is all on the promise of like, Mozello is my robot.

Speaker 1 Wayne Knight, as you said, Spielberg says he watched Basic Instinct, waited for the credits to roll and wrote down the name Wayne Knight. He was basically like, what's the name of that guy? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Can we just like step through the Wayne Knight 90s very quickly? Please. Because even just the fact that he's like ping-ponging between Mad About You and Seinfeld,

Speaker 1 that he's jumping between two NBC sitcoms that are like within the top 10, or not Mad About You, I'm sorry, third round from the Sun.

Speaker 1 But like two huge sitcoms without getting tied down to like series regular contracts. And your beloved Tun Sylvania.
Well, which he's great on. He plays Igor.
He does.

Speaker 1 He closes out the decade with Toy Story 2, probably the greatest villain in cinematic history. He's really good in Toy Story 2.
Even though it's basically just like, yeah, can you do Wayne Knight?

Speaker 1 Like, you know, that guy. But that's the thing.
Like, from this point on, they're just sort of like, I think this is the movie that makes everyone realize they should be using him as a voice actor.

Speaker 1 Right, right. He's right.

Speaker 1 Like, yeah, like he's amazing in JFK. JFK, Basic Instinct, like, Dead Again, Jurassic Park.
I mean, I'm skipping over some other things that don't really matter.

Speaker 1 Space Jam, I think, is where most kids from that was my activator to die for.

Speaker 1 Then it's like, right, he's in Hercules as a voice. Yep.

Speaker 1 He's in Tarzan as a voice. He's the villain in Toy Story 2.
Like, that's just triumphant. He was the voice of the Zoot suit in My Favorite Martian.
Well, of course he was. Remember that? Yep.

Speaker 1 Do you remember that? I don't know if I ever saw My Favorite Martian. It's not good.
That was my birthday movie. Really? Yeah.
Unfortunately.

Speaker 1 That was when no movies came out in February that were worth a damn. Rat Race?

Speaker 1 Yeah. He's fun in Rat Race?

Speaker 1 Yes. What does he play in Rat Race again? Can't remember.
Oh, Jeff Daniels is the lead of My Favorite Martian. Yeah.
And Christopher Lloyd. Got to see this.
Elizabeth Hurley. It's not good.

Speaker 1 I think he hits Rowan Atkinson with his car in a rat race. Yeah.
I think that's his role. Like you do.

Speaker 1 So, Dennis, he plays Dennis Entry. Anyways, phenomenal in this movie.
They filmed the movie in Hawaii. They wrapped 12 days ahead of their 82-day shooting schedule.

Speaker 1 Despite them fighting horrible weather conditions.

Speaker 1 Right. Insane.
Yeah, exactly. They were using like the prop helicopters to actually get people off the island to safety.
They lost the set. Right.
Like, yeah.

Speaker 1 Film is budgeted around $65 million. People claim it actually went way over.
We'll never know because who cares? Like, it made fucking billion dollars, basically. Right.

Speaker 1 Spielberg had gone way over budget and schedule on hook, and I think was like really intent on, like, I am not doing that again. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 every action sequence had been storyboarded like two years before. And Spielberg says that's why we didn't go over, but, you know, over schedule.

Speaker 1 Like we were just like really on top of all that stuff.

Speaker 1 And obviously the big sort of behind-the-hings scene story with Jurassic Park is the

Speaker 1 blending of classic animatronics and CGI, brand new CGI technology. What was supposed to be animatronics and go motion, Phil Tippett's proprietary stop-motion process.
Right.

Speaker 1 And instead, Phil Tippett,

Speaker 1 fuck, I was going to make a joke about his poker face episode, but then I forgot what happens in it.

Speaker 1 Anyway, sorry, go ahead. They build a bus that they have to scan to get the eye contact of.
I don't remember. Okay.

Speaker 1 Excited for season two. Yeah.
No,

Speaker 1 Phil Tippett, who had created Go Motion, which like Ed 209 and the Taunton and Empire Strikes Back and had sort of figured out this evolved form of the Harryhausen craft that also involved like

Speaker 1 motion blur, allowing you to photograph stop motion in a way that more seamlessly allowed it to integrate with live-action elements. That was the plan.

Speaker 1 Stan Winston will build these full-body things for close-ups, for heads, whatever. And then Tippett will do all of this.

Speaker 1 And I think they were using ILM for some amount of pre-vives, or that little bit of CGI is going to blend in there, but that's it. And Dennis Mirin is like, I think we can just fucking make dinosaurs.

Speaker 1 There are the two guys, Spaz Williams, brother of Harlan Williams, creator of Huppy Dog Paltz, and the other guy's name is Mark AZ Dippy, who later goes on to direct Ben

Speaker 1 Spawn. Cool.
And he did a perfect job. They're the bad boys.
Holds up beautifully. They're the bad boys of ILM.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 The Kazden ILM miniseries on Disney Plus, if that hasn't already been Sazlavved off the service, is incredibly good. It gets into this in depth.

Speaker 1 But these two guys were like, we think we can fucking crack the code. Have you seen Jurassic Punk? Do you know about this? No.
It's a documentary about Steve Williams. Okay.
And it...

Speaker 1 chronicles from his perspective,

Speaker 1 everything that transpires as ILM is starting starting to make waves.

Speaker 1 And, you know, Mark and Steve are, you know, Dennis Murin won a lot of Academy Awards, but they are largely credited with effectively, like,

Speaker 1 I don't want to say inventing, but executing what becomes the template for all digitally animated figures in the movie.

Speaker 1 So co-signed. He backed them up.
He supports them. He builds this system for them at ILM.
But those middle guys did.

Speaker 1 And Dress Punks, you know, Steve Williams has had a remarkable flame out in his life. It's like kind of a sad story.

Speaker 1 Both him and Dippy now have just gone on to make shitty animated films. Yes, it's interesting like Dippy directed the fucking Pete Davidson Marmaduke movie.

Speaker 1 Yes, and they talk about that a little bit in the documentary, and it's very sad, but right, not even the theatrical

Speaker 1 the other one, no, and and and did like four direct-to-video Garfield movies.

Speaker 1 Yes, Garfield Gets Real, Garfield's Fun Fest, Garfield's Pet Force, and and Williams did The Wild, which is like one of the most forgotten films.

Speaker 1 Do you think when they were talking to each other, though, Mark A.Z. Dippy was just like, what I really want to do is not reel Leguazamo in.
Just get that guy on the hook and then let go.

Speaker 1 Sorry. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I think this is like one of, this is part of the reason why I'm like, this is the beginning of something, because these two guys come up with this idea.

Speaker 1 They convince their boss that he should pitch it to Steven Spielberg.

Speaker 1 And his boss effectively pitches it to Steven Spielberg, which then more or less sidelines two of the most significant creators of on-screen effects in the previous 25 years.

Speaker 1 Tippett and Tippett and Winston. I mean, this is the people who are in the world.
Tippet famously is the one who said, I think I'm extinct, and they put that in the movie.

Speaker 1 And has talked about, I mean, there's an incredible documentary about him as well. But he basically had like a full-on existential crisis about this.

Speaker 1 Spielberg saw that he was spiraling and basically was like, well, you know what? But they don't really know how to animate

Speaker 1 him the choreographer. Right.
They don't understand performance yet. So you, it became the stop motion was used basically as previs for them to recreate in CG, which kept him employed.

Speaker 1 And then he just pivoted to like, I guess I got to learn computers. I particularly like what Spielberg tells the animators, which is that

Speaker 1 Tippett understands how dinosaurs move, yeah, which is like no one does. Like, we don't know for sure.
Like, this is just, we hope this is how dinosaurs move.

Speaker 1 And also, here's what I contend: you watch Tippett's work, and you're like, Yeah, this guy does understand how dinosaurs move. It feels that way.

Speaker 1 I'm not even talking about this film, but you're like, watch Empire Strikes Back, and you're like, fuck, he understands how a taunt on moves. You're like, tauntaun's not a thing.
You're 100% right.

Speaker 1 He made it up, but you know, he makes the movement feel realistic for the cre the body we're seeing, right? This like oddly shaped thing we're seeing.

Speaker 1 And when people talk about why is Jurassic Park still more effective as a special effects movie than most films we see today, 30 plus years later, I think the answer is that you have this melding of crafts, that you have like Winston at the top of his game, Tippett at the top of his game, and ILM like starting to push through something new.

Speaker 1 And those three concentrations meeting in the middle synthesize to like a really strong language of performance for how the dinosaurs move.

Speaker 1 One thing that I want to say about this rewatching the movie in 4K.

Speaker 1 I also watched it in 4K. The daylight sequences

Speaker 1 don't look good. No.
The nighttime sequences look incredible. You mean incredible.
The CG specifically.

Speaker 1 I would argue that. Especially Neil going to the Brachiosaurus where he's kind of gesturing at clearly nothing.
Exactly. Yeah.
Because the enemy inverse of most movies exactly.

Speaker 1 Things in the dark now look terrible. The lighting is horrendous and the digital rendering is awful.
In the day...

Speaker 1 Actually, like when you're watching a Marvel movie, you're like, oh, these guys make all these bad things. They're fighting.
And it's a fascinating inversion of what we expect.

Speaker 1 And you always are told, like, oh, why does everything look dark and bad? Like, oh, it's CG shit. And you're like, but that's not what I was raised learning.

Speaker 1 I was raised learning like Star Wars look best against the black of space, and it was harder for them to do Hoth and stuff. I know that's preseason.

Speaker 1 And I think it was like Williams and Dippy went to Spielberg and were like, it's going to look better if you do like night. It's going to look better if you have rain.

Speaker 1 If we can have this deflection, like they all strategize together, but there's such intentionality to how those sequences are organized.

Speaker 1 But I do think when you see the sick triceratops on the ground and it's this incredible full-body animatronic, that's like a jaw-dropper. It works completely.

Speaker 1 It's the most magical moment of the early daylight section. But then when you get to like nighttime raptors and T-Rex, the CGI becomes like extraordinary.

Speaker 1 But like they built a gigantic hydraulic T-Rex, obviously, that is so cool. They built Raptor suits that people are inside of.

Speaker 1 They're using every technique. The Dilophosaurus is this amazing creation.
Like

Speaker 1 the rig of it in the car with the frill like is so cool.

Speaker 1 It's like you say, it's just it's everyone's at the top of their game. It's kind of like Total Recall.

Speaker 1 We talk about that with Total Recall too, where you're like, this is the peak of this kind of like effect. Yes.

Speaker 1 That soon will be dying. Like this or practical effect.
There's a shot that I never processed.

Speaker 1 fully that just kind of knocked me out watching at this time, where it's one of the shots in the T-Rex nighttime barrier sequence where it starts with the animatronic head like kind of coming right up to the window and then pulls away and then within the same shot without an edit it transitions to being a CGI T-Rex.

Speaker 1 Like he knows the blind spot that allows him to basically do the Texas switch between the two and you buy them being the same creature.

Speaker 1 Spielwork. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And obviously, famously, he finished editing this film, but post was not done. They had to do lots of effects and he just starts doing Schindler's List and would like color correct this movie at night

Speaker 1 over satellite or whatever.

Speaker 1 He's kind of said said that's one of the things that helped him from like totally falling into the depths of depression during Schindler, that there was some kind of balance.

Speaker 1 Um, and then he goes to John Williams, and John Williams is like, Yeah, I can crank out some bullshit for you. He's literally soaring epic this theme.

Speaker 1 I think the music, so obviously, John Williams' music is most important to Jaws, Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, right? Indiana Jones, and Indiana Jones, right? Yeah, and this one,

Speaker 1 in some ways, his theme is kind of incongruous with this movie. Yes.
Because it is this triumphant theme for a closed, shitty theme park that goes wrong at the first death.

Speaker 1 But that's why it's important because, like, the theme is like, this is the projection of what

Speaker 1 Hammond thought this would be. The majesty of it.
100%. You watch the T-Rex sequence, which I feel like people agree is like the high point of the movie, right? It's like the most kind of, yeah.

Speaker 1 There is no music in that entire sequence. Of course not.
It's all the roaring. It's silence.
Right. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Like there aren't even really like that many instances of Williams doing like a tension theme in this movie. It is tough.
But yeah, definitely not.

Speaker 1 There's sort of the like, this is the Jurassic Park entrance gates music. But the movie is, it does have, we're getting to the island, we're leaving the island.

Speaker 1 Triumph is essential for both of those things. So it's a very unusual score for him.

Speaker 1 It's very, very brass forward, very trumpet forward, which is not something you usually, it's not as symphonic as a lot of his scores usually are. And

Speaker 1 it does seem like it's like taking the piss, I guess, a little bit. I don't know if did they have a conversation about that? Was he just like, here's what I got for you? Good luck.

Speaker 1 Like, I'd like to know a little bit more about how they landed on this style. It's very interesting.
It certainly sounds like that's what the last 20 years of their relationship has been.

Speaker 1 I don't know when that starts, where Spielberg's like, I just trust you. I think it's a little bit of that.

Speaker 1 I mean, I think he wanted to convey a sense of awe, clearly, right? And wonder, which he can do in space. Oh, Superman is the other one.
Those are the five. Those are the five where you're like,

Speaker 1 like, I mean, the whole thing I think with John Williams, with Superman as well, is what Brian Singer does, Superman Returns. He's like, I'm just doing the John Williams music again.

Speaker 1 Like, I don't want a new score. I would contend that it's not one of his best scores, but like, in terms of

Speaker 1 if you can, well, no, that is one of his best scores. That is one of his best scores.
No, what I was going to say is, like, Home Alone might be the movie

Speaker 1 where his score adds a full star. It does.

Speaker 1 It's so weird. It is the most transparent.
That's another one where they're like, so this movie is about a little fucking eight-year-old beating the shit out of Joe Pesci with like Pesci with metal.

Speaker 1 That movie doesn't have that score. It's like,

Speaker 1 shall I conjure Christmas on a crisp December night for you perfectly? So a tear freezes on your cheek? Powerful musical embodiment. You realize that he's just like shooting marbles at a criminal.

Speaker 1 But this is what I'm saying. If it doesn't have that score, that movie's a disaster.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 And E.T. is like a masterpiece, even if it doesn't have a single second of music.
Oh, E.T., I forgot about ET. What's the matter with me? That's more important than any of the other ones.

Speaker 1 Except for Jaws. Jaws is the most important for Star Wars.
The craziest thing about his career is that he was making film and TV scores for 17 years before Jaws.

Speaker 1 Yes. And then Jaws, he's just like, doo-doo, you know, and Spielberg's like, I'm paying you a salary.
What is this? Yeah. And he's like, no, it'll be good.

Speaker 1 And then George Lucas is like, you're the doo-doo guy, right? Can you do like maybe just like bring back Aaron Copeland for my sci-fi movie? And he's like, yeah, sure, in my fucking sleep. Also, JFK.

Speaker 1 Oh, such a good score. Incredible.
But that's Mr. X.

Speaker 1 We had this conversation, Griffin, when he got that Indiana Jones and the clock

Speaker 1 score. Yeah.
You know, and he got the Oscar nominee. I'm like, oh, the Oscars are so lazy.
And they put that on. And I was like, this isn't 11 out of 10.
I know. Absolutely amazing shit.

Speaker 1 I know there was a lot of sort of autopsying of the underperformance of the

Speaker 1 Salt Park and the circle of nonsense. I was going to say, Indiana Jones, sorry, and the circle of nonsense.

Speaker 1 I think calling it Indiana Jones and the clock of bullshit might have been where they went wrong. That might have been a thing that turned off audiences.
Can I be honest?

Speaker 1 Indiana Jones and the clock of bullshit. Please be honest.
Five comedy points. I liked it.

Speaker 1 You liked Islam of Destiny? I liked Diana Destiny. I didn't really care.
I'm going to get back to it soon, but I did not love it. I think that has flaws.
I like sections of it.

Speaker 1 And these sections I don't like turn me off so hard, even more so than Crystal Skull, which is also a movie I like sections of.

Speaker 1 I basically love Crystal Skull.

Speaker 1 And I think Crystal Skull really, on rewatch, really eats Dial of Destiny's lunch in the choice. A lot of choices are made that I think are interesting, and Dial of Destiny is light on choices.

Speaker 1 The thing I like about Dial of Destiny is the last act, where there are finally some choices. Yeah, I wish the last act was like the second act.
Yeah, and maybe the first act. Got it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I just think the last act is like as bold a thing as you can do. I think the last act is really interesting.

Speaker 1 But I think when we have like Phoebe Waller Bridge in a fucking casino with him, I'm just like, this is like from Solo. Yeah.

Speaker 1 You know, this just like knockoff, like, right, like, just like rent a Disney movie from recently. Basically, a five-act movie, right? The first act I don't give a shit about at all.

Speaker 1 And in fact, creeps me out. The like

Speaker 1 deep fake de-aged.

Speaker 1 Which lasts for 25 minutes. I don't like that.
It's too long. Then the New York section I like.
I like old indie,

Speaker 1 but it's a little sad.

Speaker 1 My note was I just wanted him to stay at the Battle of Syracuse. I didn't want him to come back if he had stayed and he was like i want to live inside

Speaker 1 i don't push back on him staying i push back on him dying i didn't want him to die but i him staying is kind of an interesting choice although

Speaker 1 then what are we it's like there's some pottery and he's just kind of sitting there like like actually see it i just need to see him like you know who is just imagine someone brushing off some pottery with at the time i wish the movie opened in new york yeah didn't have the flashback yeah done even and started time traveling like an hour in the horse thing though is incredible That sequence is great when he gets on the horse and is racing through the sun.

Speaker 1 I'm going to have to rewatch it. The New York section, I love it.
I'm going to have to rewatch. I think it's pretty good.

Speaker 1 People are really, really hard on that movie, and they're not hard on much worse drak and watching. I like New York and I like ancient Rome, and everything else kind of is for the birds.

Speaker 1 By the time this comes out,

Speaker 1 A Complete Unknown will have come out. On this very day, a new Complete Unknown trailer came out, and I almost threw up watching it.
I haven't watched it. You're really stressed out.

Speaker 1 But I feel stressed out. I saw this.
This is how I feel every time there's a new Toy Story movie. Like, don't fucking play this.
This is disgusting to me. That's how I felt watching it.

Speaker 1 I went to see The Substance with my mother, which was a very fascinating experience.

Speaker 1 Yep. And she turned to me during the Complete Unknown Trailer and just went, he doesn't have the arrogance.

Speaker 1 That was her take on Timmy. Too winsome.
Which has been sticking with me. He doesn't have the arrogance.
New trailer tries to sell that hard. I'm not sure it gets there.

Speaker 1 Anyway, by the time this episode comes out, Timothy Chalon is probably one best actor. That's probably true.

Speaker 1 If Timmy she's he's not going to, so thank God he won't do it. But make your prediction.
What were you about to say?

Speaker 1 No, it just, it would be crazy if like another music biopic performance in a shit ass movie wins and then people are like, what happened there almost immediately after get against it. Yeah, seriously.

Speaker 2 David, what? This episode of Blank Check with Griffin, David, a podcast about philamographies, is brought to you by Booking.com. Booking.
Yeah. I mean, that's what I was about to say.
Booking.

Speaker 2 Yeah. From vacation rentals to hotels across the U.S., booking.com

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Ben, who's like, what's an example of someone I know who maybe has a very particular set of...

Speaker 2 Bringing me in, and there's only one other person in the room. There's one other person in the room right now.
My sickness is so rude. I sleep easy.

Speaker 2 I'm definitely not someone who insists on 800 thread count sheets. No.

Speaker 2 That's an example of a fussy person. But people have different demands.
And you know what? If you're traveling, that's your time to start making demands. Maybe you've got

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 You're traveling and I need a room with some good soundproofing because I'm going to be doing some remote pod record. Sure.

Speaker 2 Maybe you're you're in Europe and you want to make sure that's very demanding to be in Europe. You got air conditioning.

Speaker 2 Well, I can 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Look, they're 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 for you?

Speaker 2 You want one of those in the recordings, dude? That'd be great. You want to start, you want to be.
I'll be in the sauna when we record.

Speaker 2 I was going to say, you want to be the Dalton Trumbull, a podcast. You want to be Splish Splash and what's going on.
You look good if I had a sauna and a cold plunge.

Speaker 2 And while recording, I'm on mic, but you just

Speaker 2 as I moved to the

Speaker 2 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 ad.
Booking.com. Booking.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Ben. What's up, Griff? This is an ad ad break.
Yeah. And I'm just, this isn't a humble brag.
It's just a fact of the matter.

Speaker 2 Despite you being on mic, oftentimes when sponsors buy ads based on this podcast, the big thing they want is personal host endorsement. Right.

Speaker 2 They love it to get a little bonus ben on the ad read, but technically, that's not what they're looking for. But something very different is happening right now.
That is true.

Speaker 2 We had a sponsor come in and say, we are looking for the coveted Ben Hosley endorsement. What? This is laser-targeted.
The product. We have copy that asks, is the product a porch movie?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 excited to see it. But Ben, you texted us last night.
This fucking rules.

Speaker 1 It fucks. It honks.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's so great. Let me read you the cast list here in billing order, as they asked, which I really appreciate.
Peter Dinkledge, Jacob Tremblay,

Speaker 2 Taylor 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 of them yet.
Okay.

Speaker 2 You got fucking Dinkledge is fantastic. He's talking.
He plays it with so much heart. It's such a lovely performance.
Bacon is in the pocket too, man. He's the bad guy.
He's the bad guy.

Speaker 2 There's a lot of him shirtless. Okay.
Looking like David.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I just got to say, the original movie was shot in the town where I went to high school. Truma.
Yes, yes, that's right. The original film.
Yep. I grew up watching toxic and trauma movies on porches.

Speaker 2 Yes. With my sleazy and sticky friends.
It informed so much of my sensibility. Your friends like Junkyard Dog and Headbanger.
Yeah, exactly. Making Toxic Crusader drills.

Speaker 2 And so when I heard that they were doing this new installment, I was really emotionally invested.

Speaker 2 It was in limbo for a while before our friends at Cineverse rescued it and are now releasing it uncut.

Speaker 2 But I feel like there have been years of you being very excited at the prospect, but also a little weary.

Speaker 1 They're playing with fire here.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's just, it's something that means a lot to me. And they knocked it out of the fucking park.
Okay.

Speaker 1 It somehow really captured.

Speaker 2 That sensibility, that sense of humor, even just that like lo-fi, scrappy kind of nature that's inherent in all of the trauma movies and the original Toxie movies.

Speaker 2 And they have like updated it in this way that it was just, I was so pleased with it. It's gooey.
It's gooey. sufficiently gooey tons of blood tons of goo

Speaker 2 uh great action it's really fucking 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 the huge hit more interesting yeah theatrical box office phenomenons the last five years want to make that happen again here

Speaker 2 tickets are on sale right now advanced sales really matter for movies like this so if y'all were planning on seeing toxic advenger go ahead and buy those tickets please go to toxicaver.com slash blank check to get your tickets blank check one word in theaters august 29th yup and ben it just says here in the copy wants to call out that Elijah Wood plays a weird little guy who says summon the nuts.

Speaker 2 Can you tell us anything about that moment without spoiling it? Summon the nuts Nuts is in reference to a

Speaker 2 psychotic new metal band. Hell yeah.
Who are also mercenaries. Cool.

Speaker 2 And drive a van

Speaker 2 with a skeleton giving two fingies up on the grill. And that's all I'll say.
Okay.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Seriously, get your tickets now. Go to toxicadvenger.com/slash blank check.
Do it, do it.

Speaker 1 Okay, let's talk about the film.

Speaker 1 This movie opens with a very Jaws-like sequence, right? The sort of you're not seeing the dinosaurs. A sequence you kind of always forget.

Speaker 1 I would say. Even as someone who's seen this movie one million times, you always forget it opens with creepy music

Speaker 1 over these kind of of ominous titles and then this, right, this kind of like monster, monster sequence. Right.
Yeah. Characters we're largely not going to see ever again.

Speaker 1 It's silence and faces and roars and brutality. Yeah.
Do we need this?

Speaker 1 I do think it's how it's

Speaker 1 taken the way we were saying of like. The movie takes so long to get to the action.
Yes. Not in a complaining way.
It just does. You need a little action up there.

Speaker 1 So maybe you just need a little kind of activation at the start.

Speaker 1 Such a cliche structure now. Yes.
This thing, this like little tease of the world we're going to go to with some violence that maybe it just feels more rote in the aftermath.

Speaker 1 I think here's what specifically helps,

Speaker 1 what the sequence helps with in the rest of the film. One, setting up that we're not going to see this much staff later.
We're not going to see all the different departments. Right.

Speaker 1 They're setting up why they need in safety inspection and like experts, right? I guess that's the sort of right. I also think talking about the cynicism of this movie,

Speaker 1 there's something very pointed in like it opening with a death that is never commented on again, right?

Speaker 1 That the movie starts to be like, oh, when Hammond's grandchildren are in danger, for the first time, he's starting to question the morality of what he's built.

Speaker 1 But you're like, there has been this sort of rounding error in setting up this park of like, how many fucking guys have died just trying to transport these dinosaurs? Right.

Speaker 1 Just like literally figuring out the basics of like, what do we keep them in? Right. I think there's a helpful extrapolation in watching this sequence and being able to then copy paste in your mind.

Speaker 1 Like, so this has probably happened 100 times. This is happening simultaneously across different parts of the park every day.

Speaker 1 This is also just a point that the movie sort of makes and then has to just, and then we don't worry about it because everything goes wrong. But like, this would be largely bad, right?

Speaker 1 The park experience, they're nowhere near. like figuring out how it works because it seems to be basically like, okay, you see some brachiosauruses or something, right? They sort of,

Speaker 1 they're easier to see because they're chill, right? But then the T-Rex experience is basically like, drive by this paddock that's probably like a fucking thousand acres.

Speaker 1 Maybe we drop a goat over there and we'll see some trees rustle. Like, what's the plan? Well, as a frequent attendee of the zoo, yes, my young child, right?

Speaker 1 This is kind of what it's like to know what the zoo is like. Where you're like, you go to the tiger cage and they're like, God, tigers are sleeping.
Sorry, come back next time.

Speaker 1 There'll be another $40.

Speaker 1 You know, like, that's kind of how they do it. But the suggestion is that you can see that.
I think I saw one.

Speaker 1 What's that?

Speaker 1 No, the suggestion of like oh i think i saw one yeah right exactly i guess you're right keeps you on the line it's just like you're not gonna how are you ever gonna see the raptors they're like hunting animals that like hide in the grass yeah yeah it's what you just said they haven't really thought this through yet they're still like field testing and don't get me started on jurassic world inventing an invisible dinosaur you want to see the dinosaur

Speaker 1 What is the thinking there,

Speaker 1 my friends? Why would you make it invisible? It is wild. Because they can, David.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I always cite Dan Harmon's rant about in that movie, Chris Pratt saying, like, so you invented like a new kind of dinosaur that turns invisible and is crazy. Seems like a bad idea.

Speaker 1 And just Harmon being like, if someone has to say that out loud, your movie is fundamentally fucked up. Like, we know.
You don't need someone to say that.

Speaker 1 And this movie has the way better version of it, which is like Malcolm being like, you're grappling with forces you don't understand.

Speaker 1 Like, you know, that's he crystallizes in a much more interesting way but also that hammonds like the thing is the wonders that we all like get to be close to and possibly touch these things that have always felt mythological but as you said the thing that's so compelling to children is this was real like from a young age you're starting to have these like mythologies popped of like well that's like fantasy

Speaker 1 this is like fairy tales and then you get all the things show up for let's say things are eliminated but you're like dinosaurs are the one thing that feel magical to you as a child and remain real even though you don't get to make contact with them.

Speaker 1 It feels like Hammond's like, oh, there's some degree of like people want to feel the danger.

Speaker 1 But they even talk about they've built in this thing of, what is it, the fucking lyceum, like the thing they don't have in their DNA strand that can deactivate the dinosaurs if they get off the island.

Speaker 1 That is, yes, that's true. They need a particular enzyme that they only get from the park and they'll die.
But like. Versus the Jurassic World movies are like, we have to make these more dangerous.

Speaker 1 How do we make them deadlier? You're like, the takeaway from this would be these people still are on this like quixotic quest to figure out how to tame dinosaurs.

Speaker 1 And they think if we neuter them a little bit more, they'll be safe. We can control it.
I mean, right. Why would you make it?

Speaker 1 Jurassic Park is a movie about, right, science thinking it can control nature, and it can't. Jurassic World is a movie about like mega sequels are out of control.
And every sequel has to be more

Speaker 1 like T-Rex with knife teeth.

Speaker 1 I mean, so yeah, so we begin with

Speaker 1 the raptor sequence where we don't see a raptor. We just see death and chaos.

Speaker 1 And so, okay,

Speaker 1 let's meet Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler, you're paleontologists who are out on a dig. How do we get to know Alan Grant? How about he's just like an absolute demon to this like kid who snarkies

Speaker 1 little Velociraptors for being small? That's one of my least favorite fucking online fan theories. Oh, that he like turned out to be Chris Pratt? Yeah, oh, and for that.

Speaker 1 How do we let these things into our life? I know. Whoever posted that originally, I hope, is in Guantanamo.

Speaker 1 Now, this movie, obviously, and the book made Velociraptors famous. Yes.
Velociraptors are actually smaller than they were depicted in the movie. They're more like kind of turkey-sized.
Interesting.

Speaker 1 And it's Dionicus, I believe.

Speaker 1 Okay. Correct me if I'm wrong.
That would be more like this big

Speaker 1 sort of pack-hunting animal, I guess. But also, I think like...
It makes them the coolest dinosaurs in a way. They definitely weren't before the 90s.

Speaker 1 This is like their fame. Obviously, there's a fucking basketball team called the Raptors because of this movie, right?

Speaker 1 But yeah, every kid our age grew up being like number one coolest dinosaur is the Velociraptor. Right, which is just them doing the math of like, we need to have dinosaurs who can walk through doors.

Speaker 1 We need dinosaurs who are the exact right size to be a little bigger than kids. Well, and also like, let's, this movie is just like, can we make alien for eight-year-olds? Right.

Speaker 1 Because, like, that's what the Velociraptor is, where you're just like a perfect killing machine that has no feelings.

Speaker 1 Whereas the T-Rex is a hero in the movie, basically. Do we think they overstate the power of the raptor? Because

Speaker 1 it's a Allen scene where he's talking about, like, you know, then they're fucking closing in. Yeah, but is it that basically PR of them being like, people are going into this movie.

Speaker 1 They don't know shit about raptors. We need Alan Grant's instructional at the beginning of the movie to be telling you how deadly a raptor is.
So you have that in your back pocket. That's what I mean.

Speaker 1 Like, are they

Speaker 1 relative to what we actually believe is true of raptors? Did they make them more of a killing machine? Yeah, they make them into xenomorphs. Yes.

Speaker 1 But I do think it works in the movie because anytime someone is outside in the last act of the movie, you are scared. Right.
And that sequence where Ellie, you know, where

Speaker 1 the hunter guy, fuck with the hunter guy's name. Moldoon.
Moldoon. Moldoon.
Is like, we're being hunted, Bob Peck.

Speaker 1 And she just runs. And Spielberg, we're just, you know, and she does the thing where she swings from the tree.
And you're like, she's got five seconds. You believe it.
Right.

Speaker 1 Before like a raptor is just going to take her out. But it's, it's the fucking classic Spielberg shit of just like, don't introduce pieces onto the chessboard too early.

Speaker 1 Don't introduce anything that is irrelevant. You know, like you set up the idea of the Raptor that is just sort of seems like a toss-off of like showing how bad this guy is with kids.
Right.

Speaker 1 But it's like, no, the last act of this movie is going to be the raptors. They can be indoors.
Right. They can be anywhere.
They're fast. They're small.
Yeah. But also the raptors, it's like.

Speaker 1 They're just true villains that you can't root for. And the T-Rex is kind of a hero that you love in this movie, right? That's a good point.
He gets the victory in the movie.

Speaker 1 He takes down the raptors they don't get any victory they don't take down right they don't kill one dinosaur in this movie that is all the little bens of the world are like t-rex man t-rex is the man absolutely and like he's huge he's got a big ass jaw yeah his roar is the coolest like bit of sound design in the movie obviously we should say she she she although yeah well they're all women right yeah this is a although some of them are some of them are uh flip-flopping with that frog dm that's what's going on right yeah making eggs um like finds a way.

Speaker 1 Blah, blah, blah. That was pretty quick, didn't it? Yes.
Would you think evolutionarily

Speaker 1 taking a little bit more time? How long this has all been going on?

Speaker 1 I think if you dive deep on that. Vision R D was pretty intense and drawn out on Jurassic.
Five years, 25 years. How long are we talking here? I think

Speaker 1 dinosaurs. I think between five and ten is my guess.
Five and ten. Okay.
Yeah. Like, I think these dinosaurs have been on this land in some form for multiple years before our characters are visited.

Speaker 1 That's our heroes. An important part of this story.
Obviously, the Gennaro character is introduced because he's there to really check up on behalf of the investors as to how this is all going.

Speaker 1 But it's like,

Speaker 1 we're good. Like, they made the dinosaurs.
Like, the investor should be nervous if they can't make the dinosaurs. Why don't you make them? Like, we're good to go.
Right?

Speaker 1 Isn't the idea that Gennaro is. He doesn't know.
Well, why is he? Why is Hammond not telling anyone that they've got hundreds of dinosaurs on the side? Looks right.

Speaker 1 These are all fair notes. And I think the best way to think about it is because he's afraid of corporate corporate plundering, right?

Speaker 1 Like because he's afraid of what will happen, that someone will be like, wait, he actually, the crazy guy did it? You think there's like lots of NDAs here for all the employees that are in the city?

Speaker 1 I mean, you have to fill in blanks here, but that like Hammond is coming off of a Disney world level success where he, dare I say it, has blank check status, where he's going around to people and he's like, hey, here's my new project.

Speaker 1 You can buy in. I don't tell you anything about it.
Like he's going like Mike Lee rules. I need investors.
There's no script. I pick the cast.
He does kind of like

Speaker 1 it when the cut is done. Mike Lee would have been great as John Hammond.

Speaker 1 A little grouchy. Yeah, I think they would have had a grouchy or closer to the book, possibly.

Speaker 1 But that's my read is that like he has had some series of successes that are so undeniable that he goes and pitches a blind project that's like, it's going to take 10 years.

Speaker 1 I need this amount of money. You have this percentage.
I don't tell you what it is until it's done. And Gennaro is the first guy on behalf of all these investors who is seeing the thing.

Speaker 1 Not just seeing it, but for the the first time being like, that's what the concept is. Isn't it weird that all of our P.T.

Speaker 1 Barnum figures are just into tech and politics now and they're not into making shit that we like that's funny? They like tweeting. It sucks.

Speaker 1 They're just like, the best thing you can do as a rich guy is to fucking use your. This is my fucking megalopolis as a benevolent act.

Speaker 1 Sure. Because I'm like, this is what all weird rich men used to do.
Right.

Speaker 1 Gaze into my mind. Yeah.
And you're like, whoa. Okay.

Speaker 1 Right. I'm like, whether or not you like it as irrelevant.
This is like the best way people can spend money. Your mind is full of John Voigt's boner? Yeah.

Speaker 1 You love Hudson Yards?

Speaker 1 This is my big take is Megalopolis is about Francis Four Copeland. The famous roll.

Speaker 1 He did it.

Speaker 1 He responded to Hudson Yards the way Gennaro looked at it. So at Jurassic Park.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 yes, everyone is brought to Jurassic Park. But really, we only see Grant and Ellie getting the pitch.
Like the kids show up out of nowhere. Ian shows up basically out of nowhere.
Gennaro, you know.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 they get the hard sell and they love it. They see the Brachiosaurus.
They're amazed. It's the most famous Spielberg face of all time, right? Is the two of them seeing the dinosaur.

Speaker 1 He gives you several consecutive him physically turning her head. Brilliant.
And you already have a little bit of like, she's calling out the plant-like. Yep.
Is this incompatible?

Speaker 1 Right, you just got this because it looks cool.

Speaker 1 Questions that start to be like... Maybe I'm a dumb movie watcher, but I think it was literally this time around where I realized she was a paleobotanist.
She's a paleobot.

Speaker 1 I was like, she's a paleontologist, just like this other guy, but that's not what she's doing. She's there for the plants.
She's all about the plant life.

Speaker 1 Which I guess they're also creating, by the way. They don't even get into how they're creating.
Well, she talks about the different distinct plants. But like, where, how are they doing that?

Speaker 1 Good point. Cool.
Where's Mr. DNA for that one? Plant DMA.

Speaker 1 Yeah, see, I'm mosquito. And I'm like, all right, fine, a mosquito.

Speaker 1 The mosquito thing, when I did finally see this movie at whatever age as a child on TV or VHS after Lost World, the sap thing, I was like, holy, because I just saw Lost World on its own.

Speaker 1 And I was like, I'm just taking this as a given. They brought dinosaurs back.
I didn't know what the answer was. The SAP thing, I was just like, this is the smartest movie solve I've ever seen.

Speaker 1 And I still kind of feel that way 30 years later. Is Crichton's idea, right? I mean, Crichton completely came up with it.
That's the billion dollar idea.

Speaker 1 It's Crichton taking real science and combining it with pseudoscience, which is like what he would do. And it's really clever.
It's perfect, like pulp logic.

Speaker 1 Taking an idea and then bridging it with essentially fantasy. Because I think this is like, it's like, there's no DNA that old that you could ever find.

Speaker 1 You could find old DNA, but not 65 million years. That's ludicrous.
And even if you did, right.

Speaker 1 You can't this just then be like, boo, boing, you know, like it turns into all the DNA or whatever it is the idea is. Like, but missing pieces, just so

Speaker 1 it does matter. We're all the DNA sequence in the movie, the mystery, that you're just like, yep,

Speaker 1 this can happen right now. And I love that I completely buy this.
The carousel of progress.

Speaker 1 You're the rotating audience seeing the glimpses of these different like offices and then i mean i love them interrupting the ride like them being you know atenberg being like do you get it do you get it and then at a certain point they're like wait a second like are those g-rex eggs like how do i get this bar off of me

Speaker 1 and which is what i think they all play very well is if you've devoted your life to these studies and then you find out like wait a second this guy has been doing this shit for eight years in private some asshole just has like a grow light They have like a low girl in uniforms.

Speaker 1 Like this has just been happening?

Speaker 1 The merch is already on the shelf.

Speaker 1 Is there anything like that happening right now in the world?

Speaker 1 This is, I mean, I think this is what is part of what makes this premise so compelling that none of the sequels can replicate is the discovery.

Speaker 1 David and I talk a lot about Men in Black as another franchise we're obsessed with where none of the sequels can overcome the problem of the reveal of of the first time someone finds out your info.

Speaker 1 Holy shit, this is going on the whole time. I mean, Men in Black is a 97-minute movie where the first hour is like, let's explain what the men in black are.

Speaker 1 And then they're like, okay, now one sequence and we're done. Bye-bye.
And you're like, I'm perfectly satisfied.

Speaker 1 But anytime you can build a movie premise around, hey, you, the average civilian, had no idea this has been going on for years.

Speaker 1 It's like

Speaker 1 money from you guys. That's how I felt watching JFK.
I was like, so the paramilitary forces of the United States of America.

Speaker 1 The graphic design is like, I think, so important to the movie. Oh, yeah.
It's so good. But this is the like Spielberg, like, fucking universal easy way.

Speaker 1 Where it's like, you would buy.

Speaker 1 Whereas I think a lot of movies like this, I'm like, that wouldn't be successful. So the book cover, it's not because the logo is from the film.

Speaker 1 It's not from the books, eventually start using the logo, but the original book cover was just this. Exactly.
Which is the silhouette is already compelling. Yeah, it looks good.

Speaker 1 It looked good at, I don't know,

Speaker 1 like

Speaker 1 you tell me. The logo.
It's also evocative. I love when you get to the merch store, you have that painting shot of the merch store.
Well, of course you would. Well, of course I love that.

Speaker 1 But all the dinosaurs are brightly colored where there's that sense of like, well, kids don't want to buy the realistic looking ones. The T-Rex has to be purple.

Speaker 1 So they are shown the park. They are impressed.
And then they all sit down and are like, this is disgusting. You have essentially defied the laws of God.
Right. Like, what are you doing here?

Speaker 1 And also, there seem to be only like six employees. Is anyone like watching the store essentially?

Speaker 1 And when you have lines like Muldoon being like, I told you to put fucking locks on the car, you're like. Nobody thought to put locks on the car in the theme park.

Speaker 1 Like, but you kind of buy it as this is kind of like a half-assed operation in some ways because it's all been about making the dinosaurs. We'll figure out the rest later, right?

Speaker 1 I once helped launch a a startup. It's extremely hard, and there's a lot of things that you forget about.
It's not easy to just think of everything, and especially when you're making dinosaurs. Yes.

Speaker 1 You got to think of a lot of stuff. And that's, I mean, launching the ringer was as hard as cloning dinosaurs for man.
And now we are dinosaurs. But did you ever, it all worked out perfectly?

Speaker 1 Did you ever, in the process, consider whether or not you should?

Speaker 1 I think about it every day now, actually.

Speaker 1 As you build

Speaker 1 video-ready podcast studios or whatever, yes.

Speaker 1 A paddock of sorts.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 interspersed with this, we do have the scene where Dennis Nadri meets with a character that will later be played by Campbell Scott. Right.
And in this film, it's played by a convicted sex offender.

Speaker 1 Oh, really? That's why he doesn't come back.

Speaker 1 I don't think that's the only reason why he doesn't come back. He doesn't make a huge impression.
I'd argue that's the main reason. Cameron Thor.

Speaker 1 Well, I'm just, I imagine they were like, let's get a big shot actor here. But yeah, okay, who got Cameron? But also, we legally can't bring this guy to set.
Oh, boy. Sad story.

Speaker 1 um but yes but yes he's introduced earlier than ian malcolm than the kids yeah like the the sort of this is this is the wrench in the works this is all the spielberg shit where he just has such a good innate sense of like

Speaker 1 what order audiences need to process information in this place is dangerous yeah alan grant is not good with kids yeah dinosaurs exist but also like nedry's gonna die at the halfway point yeah so we need to introduce him early yeah you can't just introduce him when the characters would meet him for the first time.

Speaker 1 You have to start developing this, laying track for this. Yeah, um, Wayne Knight is phenomenal in the scene with Dodgson, him saying Dodgson's here, so funny.

Speaker 1 Yeah, him cackling at the uh, the spray can is so good because that's how I would react to that.

Speaker 1 Where I would just be like, What is this James Bond ass shit you made for this like active subterfuge where I'm basically just putting some embryos in a freezer?

Speaker 1 But no, it's this like adorable, like it works, you know, him putting the foam on the uh

Speaker 1 pie. Sean, we're like, I saw Space Jam with my dad and my brother, and I was like, holy shit, people can be like that.
Like, I was just like, to me, it was like I had just seen a T-Rex in real life.

Speaker 1 I was like, Wayne Knight, my dad's like, he's in a ton of stuff. He's a human cartoon.
Do you think Barbasol paid to get their name on the can?

Speaker 1 I think so. Okay.
It's just like, it's so huge for Barbasol. Huge.

Speaker 1 It's an interesting question. That was my shaving cream of choice circa this time because on Halloween.
Oh, sure.

Speaker 1 You know, that we were sort of all shaving creaming each other in the local neighborhood. And then the parents were like, that's going to wipe the paint off of my house.
Don't put that on my house.

Speaker 1 I imagine it's like

Speaker 1 the E.T. Reese's Pieces thing, where MMs was like, we don't want E.T.
eating MMs. He looks ugly.
And then Reese's Pieces laughed all the way to the bank.

Speaker 1 Like, if they go to Gillette, Gillette's like, what? You're fucking smuggling DNA inside our can. We don't want that association.
Like, Barbasol's kind of like a little bit more of an old-timey brand.

Speaker 1 They're not hip. Yeah, right.
And they get the bump from this. I just feel like it speaks well of them that their product still works with embryos.

Speaker 1 And then it's really just what? It's one night, the rest of the movie, right? It's like

Speaker 1 Nedry fucks up the park in the evening. I think another bit of brilliant Wayne Nidery

Speaker 1 is

Speaker 1 his like.

Speaker 1 seething arrogance when he's sitting there at his console and he's like, no one could do what I have done.

Speaker 1 Two million lines of code or whatever and then his pathetic performance is like i'm just uh going out to uh going to the vending machine to uh yeah don't mind if some things turn off and i'll see you guys later

Speaker 1 right now just like i'm sure you guys know how very normal

Speaker 1 she's like i hate this man i wish him to stop speaking also he's the hubris is hitting like a day too early right he should start feeling this cocky after he's sold the embryos right but he's already just sort of like i'm the master of the universe but to get out and do what he needs to do he needs to shut down the security in the entire park.

Speaker 1 He's just going to have to go with it. There's just no way to get out.
You can't just like turn off one door. You'd think he could just turn off one door.
This is a dinosaur pull. This is the hubris.

Speaker 1 He's not thinking through things clearly. He's just convinced that he can pull it off.

Speaker 1 What is his, like, if it were to go successfully, how is he supposed to hand it off to the guy at the boat and then get back to his desk in 18 minutes?

Speaker 1 He's not getting on the boat, right? He's just making a handoff to the boat. Yes.

Speaker 1 And I guess he then gets gets a million and a half right that's the number yeah it's like a good amount of money but it's like he should have asked for a lot more right it's probably worth billions as corporate world-class corporate espionage too like huge i don't know if it's illegal in costa rica but i mean isn't he going to prison for like probably i mean but also isn't what they're doing illegal like this is the other cool question i mean this is why i asked uh if uh who who was on your supporting actor ballot because like yeah there's an argument the huge choice and the obvious choice and the undeniable choice in a lot of ways.

Speaker 1 Wayne Knight is so fucking effective in this movie. And in a way where you're just like,

Speaker 1 if he's 10 degrees smaller, it's not popping in the same way. And if he's 10 degrees bigger, it like unbalances the whole film.

Speaker 1 It might even be a matter of like two degrees in either direction and he's off. And you're right.
He plays the balance, all the arcs of like.

Speaker 1 You're just, he probably only has whatever, 10 minutes in the movie. It's, it's just a really, it's a Deion Waiter's-esque performance.
I'm just just going to keep doing rewatchable terminology.

Speaker 1 But everyone in this movie is Deion Wadersing it up, right? Even B.D. Wong, sure, he really just gets the one scene, right? Fucking that scene is so,

Speaker 1 this seems like a good person. Right.

Speaker 1 And he seems to be almost just kind of doing this out of love. Like the hatching scene is this like lovely scene.
Right. Right.

Speaker 1 And right. And it's just, you're like, this is, this is a huge mistake.
And of course, the best part being they have hatched a Velociraptor. Right.

Speaker 1 Where they're like, so what is this cute little thing? And it's like, God's perfect killing machine. And we're going to start feeding it so it gets big.

Speaker 1 He makes such a huge impression that Trevoro decides to make him the Emperor Palpatine, Obi-Monkenobi of his trilogy. I think they can't decide which one it is.
They keep going back and forth.

Speaker 1 I think it's partly that BD Wong. sort of just had such a long, impressive career, right?

Speaker 1 Like, and like, so by the time the Lega sequels come around, it's like, that's a, that's a fucking vein to tap. Bring back B.
D. Wong, right?

Speaker 1 Well, I think, I think the other part of it, I think there's some just sort of hard math of it of like, okay, we bring back one legacy character. Right.
Like, Malcolm Sattler and

Speaker 1 Grant all did sequels. Uh, Attenborough's dead, right? Like, Nedry's dead canonically within the film.
As is Sam Jackson. Like, the kids, like, no one's going to recognize.
Right.

Speaker 1 You're like, by default, I guess B.D. Wong is the most powerful person to bring back.
You're right.

Speaker 1 And then, of course, then they brought back the real stars, locusts.

Speaker 1 Love those locusts. Love those locusts.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And, but, you know, the film is perfectly structured, in my opinion, in that you are getting all of this explanation in the middle of Spielbergian Wonder, the Triceratops, the Brachiosaurus, the egg hatching, and all that.

Speaker 1 He's just got like such a good eye on the clock of like, without feeling schematic of like, okay, every 10 minutes there has to be awe. Right.
It doesn't feel as like diagrammed as that.

Speaker 1 Right, which again, not to keep bringing up the fucking Jurassic Worlds, but those movies had that problem. The classic MCU thing of just like, yeah, it's been 20 minutes.

Speaker 1 Time for an action sequence. But also just the feeling of like, why is Ephraim Khan in this movie? Like, what are we accomplishing by including his character?

Speaker 1 He gets killed off, and you're just like, I, this felt like a waste of time. Yeah.
He doesn't really add anything to the narrative.

Speaker 1 Those movies are setting up so many things where you're like, I don't know if this is seeding for future films or these are the vestiges of a previous draft or what.

Speaker 1 And this movie, it's what you said, Kep came in and was just like, fucking focus it, narrow it down. And what I love about, so the, everything pops off while they are on the T-Rex tour.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And I love that everyone is on the T-Rex tour. They are all awed by the majesty of the science.
They are not that interested in the park. Right.
Right.

Speaker 1 Like, they're actually here to evaluate a theme park in a way. And he's like, take the ride.
And the ride sucks. And they're all just sitting in the car.

Speaker 1 And the movie's energy is starting to be like, what's what's going to, you know, are we going to get to something? Yeah. Right.

Speaker 1 Like, it's perfectly timed within the structure of the movie for them to finally

Speaker 1 for shit to get real. The perfect storm of all these elements colliding at the same time, namely a storm happening at the same time that Nedri is pulling his shit.

Speaker 1 It's everyone on the beach at Amity Island. And that's what it is.

Speaker 1 They've all gone to the beach. We know something's going to happen.
Yes.

Speaker 1 And the T-Rex shows up, and it is the most like consequentially like, it's just like the expectations for the T-Rex could not be higher in this movie. And the movie, like, surpasses them by so much.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Is that right? Yeah.
I, I, is there anything? I was convulsing in my chair at 11 years old. I, I couldn't believe how cool it was.
Is there anything like that since Jurassic Park?

Speaker 1 I'm fucking

Speaker 1 with you. Avatar, legitimately, when I, the first time I, I've told this story many times before.
The first time I saw Avatar

Speaker 1 at the Lincoln Center AMC, and I, my jaw was on the floor. Look.
On the floor. We, we stay in avatar in this house.
We love avatar. I don't think there's not one thing in avatar.

Speaker 1 It's not the one thing. I mean, as much as I have respect for the mighty Ikra, of course, and To Rukh Mecto.
I think as soon as we get into that first night sequence, look, I fucking

Speaker 1 panda.

Speaker 1 Like, Titanic is similar in terms of like Titanic when, to me, the most, like, the most like, I can't believe I'm seeing this moment in Titanic is the water coming through the dome. Sure.

Speaker 1 Where you're just like, that's real water. Yes.
Like, those people are being drowned in one billion gallons of water.

Speaker 1 Yes, I agree with you that, like, Lord of the Rings is sort of like maybe the Balrog, but like, there's not quite anything great.

Speaker 1 But it doesn't feel the same. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's the one, and what's incredible about it is they basically pulled off the awe-inspiring, positive, romantic version of this moment with the reveal of the brachiosaurs and like nailed that.

Speaker 1 And then for the second time, like 45 minutes later, they do the inverse of that, which is like, what is the ultimate terror? I, I don't, I don't think there's

Speaker 1 surety. He's so majestic.
Yes. She.
She's so majestic, the T-Rex.

Speaker 1 And yet, in the entire sequence, you're also just like, this is completely out of control. This is an animal.
Right. Right.

Speaker 1 Like, and the way it behaves is so perfect where it's just, where it bites the underside of the car, right?

Speaker 1 Like, it's like, you know, like things like that, where you're just like, right, this is, they have no control over this. Like, it's just rampaging around like any animal would.

Speaker 1 It looks like a puppy in a way.

Speaker 1 Wasn't there, wasn't one of the key T-Rex facts that I learned as a kid that they have small brains, that they're not smart, that there are smart dinosaurs in this world, but T-Rexes, while great killers aren't

Speaker 1 intelligent. I think there's tons of debate over this now, but at the time, that is what we learned.
Right. That they were stupid.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So that animal instinct that you're talking about, where it like, it's actually not good at hunting down all of this raw flesh that's served into it.

Speaker 1 But that's what's scary about it, too, is you're like, you can't pathologize this thing. Right.
Right. Right.

Speaker 1 But you kind of love it. The Raptors, you're like, I'm terrified of those things.
Get them out of here. Shoot them in the head.

Speaker 1 Which is why world making the choice of like, they're our friends now was kind of a bold one in a way, but then it's also just kind of annoying to me. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Because I just want them to be the xenomorph. Like, if there's ever the fucking alien movie where there's, there's someone who's like, I have tamed an alien, I'm going to be so mad.

Speaker 1 I would say it is inevitable. It feels inevitable, right? One day there'll be some, they'll do the walking dead thing as someone's got an alien on a chain.
Right. Romulus, yay or nay?

Speaker 1 Didn't see. I had twins, bro.

Speaker 1 I give it an okay. I put it right in the middle.
I had a good time while watching it. I'm a soft yay.

Speaker 1 I'm a soft yay. The softest of yay.
You see, Romulus? Possibly. I did not.
I don't even have a good excuse. I just was kind of like, well, get to it.
There's some Ben stuff in it for sure.

Speaker 1 There's some real Ben stuff. It's gooey.
It's got to be gooey. I'm sure there's chains.
I mean, if Fenne Alvarez like remade Keiton Leopold, it would be like full of goo.

Speaker 1 Like, it'd be like, where'd all this goo come from? He's like, like, I can't help it. If you were in Zipless in Seattle, it would be full of goo.
It's really dark in this chamber. Oh, boy.

Speaker 1 I kind of love how Jurassic Park is a little gross. It is.
Very gross. I like how it's sweaty.
Sweaty, rainy, gooey, slimy. Snotty, motion.
She's just going to say dinosaurs sneezing on kids.

Speaker 1 Big, big poop diamonds, you know? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Even that is just like, it's a movie. that goes out of its way to not blarp its characters, to take back an old terminar terminology, right? I mean, this movie is no lost in space, to be clear.

Speaker 1 Of course, but you got to like split up the crew into a couple little smaller teams.

Speaker 1 I'm just like, she needs to stay and focus on the poop is such a good way to split her off to be able to have splinter units that doesn't feel like the movie's disregarding her.

Speaker 1 No, I think she has, I mean, people have to do it. And she says

Speaker 1 that she has less of an arc, but obviously Alan's is really the only arc because Malcolm gets pseudo-killed off. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean, the movie doesn't actually kill him off, but it's sort of like, okay, bye, Ian. He just gets to be the vocal constant.
She's just like, I was right.

Speaker 1 She's the one who's like going out and actually facing shit.

Speaker 1 Like, she, in a lot of ways, is the most conventional action hero of the movie because Malcolm's laid up for the second half and Grant's primary thing is keeping the kids safe.

Speaker 1 She's like going out and solving shit. Her limp is burned into my mind.
You know, her dragging her leg running towards Sam Neal. Yes.

Speaker 1 I mean, and Dern doing that face that she does in every David Lynch movie, the sort of strained face, like,

Speaker 1 uh, is perfect. I, the stuff with Alan and the kids, I feel like at the time, critics were like warm

Speaker 1 in love with this movie, but right, it's part of their like, I saw Hook. This guy is cooked, man.
He can't help with this treatment.

Speaker 1 Everyone was like, this is better than Hook, but like, he's, he's, uh, he's been domesticated. He'll never make a movie as nasty as Jaws again.
Raiders has like more grit and edge. 100%.
Even E.T.

Speaker 1 has this sort of darker energy to it, even though it's about kids and stuff. And like,

Speaker 1 I watch this stuff now, and the stuff with the kids, I think, is very, very very effective

Speaker 1 because the kids are not really annoying. Yeah.
Ariana Richards does a great scream.

Speaker 1 And like, yes, okay, it's a little annoying when she says it's a Unix system. I mean, it's an awesome moment.
It's like a meme now. Very hacker forward film.
Yes.

Speaker 1 It's really funny at the moment where you're like, oh, they're giving her something to do. Great.

Speaker 1 But like

Speaker 1 Mozello saying he threw up. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It always gets me because there's a T-Rex. He doesn't need to explain why he threw up, but it's such a vulnerable kid thing to do.
He's embarrassed. No, I mean, and like Alan being like, that's fine.

Speaker 1 It's okay. Like, it's such a, it's like a moment you would have it like a daycare, but it's like after a T-Rex knocked a Jeep over a cliff.

Speaker 1 I talk a lot about time I spent with my little cousin, who I love. He's a great kid.

Speaker 1 And it was just startling to watch this movie and be like, man, they really nailed this age group. Right, what that kid is like.

Speaker 1 When I hang out with him and he just wants to tell me facts that he's just learned or ask me questions about the facts he hasn't gotten an answer to.

Speaker 1 You know, like we have a shared interest. Do you know what I know about dinosaurs? And what do you know about dinosaurs that I don't know? My news.
Like, that's what we talk about myself.

Speaker 1 He's the same way. He loves dinosaurs.
And every time I see him, here's my new favorite. That's what I know about it.

Speaker 1 That's just going to be a golden era for me as a dad because I have so much useless shit in my life. I'm like, I like hanging out with this nine-year-old.
I don't know why you're using it.

Speaker 1 Who's Dr. Doom? And I'm like, who's Dr.
Doom? Here we go.

Speaker 1 Let's go.

Speaker 1 But I think the stuff that the

Speaker 1 kids mostly works, and it's also not a huge part of the movie. You have the tree sequence, which is nice.

Speaker 1 And you have the fence sequence, which is, you know, intense. Scary.
Right. Yeah.

Speaker 1 The other thing, too, I think related to the critics point that you were making is historically critics who are often older, usually in the back half of their life, if they are of some stature in the culture, are terrible on horror.

Speaker 1 And this is a horror movie. You know, it has all the hallmarks of a horror movie, structurally, all the big scare moments.

Speaker 1 It is a very high-minded science fiction adventure movie, but it's a roller roller coaster movie. But at its heart, it's horror.
And middle-aged critics stink on horror. They almost always do.

Speaker 1 I'm very conscious of this as I get into that phase of my life because you've lost a kind of essence of what appeals to young people who love to feel this way.

Speaker 1 And this is a movie made for young people to feel, make them excited and make them understand.

Speaker 1 like the way you felt when you were six when you discovered dinosaurs that you could still have that when you're 60 in john hammond it's a it's like a brilliant fusion so i don't i i tend to not take criticism of deep genre very seriously, no matter when it's come around.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 unless you're looking in like Fangoria or whatever, you know,

Speaker 1 like where there were appreciators of genre as it came, right? Like, yeah, no, I mean, Pauline Kale, like, loved Spielberg. We'll talk about it.
It's one of her earliest champions.

Speaker 1 And then, like, when Raiders comes out, she's like, he's become this fucking machine guy. Like, I hate this shit.
This is just a theme park now.

Speaker 1 And there's no, it's so funny to read her Raiders review where she's just like, there's no exhilaration in it. And you're like, it's Raiders at the lost.
It's built for it.

Speaker 1 It's the most exhilarating ride of the year. Are you out of your mind, Paulie? Even though you see those reviews from the time of Raiders, they had to like fucking nominate for best pictures.

Speaker 1 They were like, we can't deny this, right? Whereas this time, they could because of Schindler's list. Exactly.
If there isn't Schindler's list, do they have to nominate this movie?

Speaker 1 That's a great question. I would contend.
Yes. In the way that there were the sort of undeniables, like Beauty and the Beast, you know, where you're just like, you know what?

Speaker 1 This is a seismic enough moment in film culture. And like the audience has made their opinion heard.

Speaker 1 I do think that's gotten nominated for best picture if Schindler isn't in the same year and the Academy is like, great, Spielberg has made this easy for us. You know what? We get to split him in half.

Speaker 1 Let me throw the question to the two of you and Ben can answer it too. And we'll talk about Schindler's List next week on Blank Jack, obviously.

Speaker 1 Do you have this over Schindler? You're doing in 1993 top 10. You're a critic.
Do your top 10. I mean, obviously, you can also just do your Spielberg.
How old a critic am I?

Speaker 1 You know, your Sean Fantasy right now. I'm saying, like, do in 1993.
And I like this film more than Schindler's List. So do I.

Speaker 1 I certainly understand the magnitude and importance of Schindler's List, not just to Spielberg, but to the history of, you know, to world history.

Speaker 1 This is one of the most watchable movies ever made, and Schindler is a movie you have to prep yourself for. Well,

Speaker 1 I'm going to argue on that episode, one of the things about Schindler's List that's kind of crazy is how fucking watchable. Very watchable.
I agree.

Speaker 1 But it is a movie that you have to be like, okay, I'm ready. No, you're not just going to be like, should we do 45 minutes of Schindler? Like, yeah, no, no, for sure.

Speaker 1 The interesting thing about that Oscar question, whether this movie would be nominated, is that this is the year that the fugitive was nominated.

Speaker 1 Which that is the same exact thing that you're talking about. Where it's like, this is pure

Speaker 1 Hollywood Entertainment, and it's so good. We cannot not recognize it.
How do we not recognize just the most robust kind of Hollywood filmmaking?

Speaker 1 But the butterfly effect, if Schindler comes out the following year, then I think Jurassic gets Fugitives Nom in that sense. I fully agree.
Right? Fully agree. I think so.

Speaker 1 I think, I mean, we'll get to our final rankings. I think I put Schindler above this, but i put et and jaws and maybe close encounters as well above schindler

Speaker 1 i would agree that those movies are above jurassic park for me in the sort of like faux objective point of view it's impossible for me to disentangle my relationship to movies with jurassic park it's impossible yeah yeah

Speaker 1 but i think i do have raiders and jaws over jurassic

Speaker 1 yes Jaws, yes, Raiders.

Speaker 1 But I do think as time goes on. Yeah, maybe you're right.
For me, for me. Yeah, I don't know.
Well, I don't know. I don't know.
You know what? I'll redo my list. And we're not even talking about AI.

Speaker 1 Like, there's a fancy. AI is my number one.
No,

Speaker 1 yeah. So, you know, we did this bifurcated thing where we covered everything from Lost World to, at that point, what was the ending point? BFG.

Speaker 1 We've covered everything else that's come out since then as a catch-up episode. In that ranking, you put AI number one.
Yeah. It's my number one.

Speaker 1 And I can't remember if I put AI number one or number two. I might have put catch number one.
You'd love catch. But I also saw AI again recently, was playing at phone form, and I'm like, this is.

Speaker 1 I've seen AI so many times. It was such a big movie for me as a teenager, which is why it was weird and stupid.
It's huge for me when you're in it.

Speaker 1 You both put AI at number one. I think, you know what the difference is? We both put AI at number one.
I think you said AI is your favorite Spielberg period. It's my favorite Spielberg period.

Speaker 1 What did I have at number two, Ben? Minority Report, Michael Jackson. My best prize, Saving Private Ryan, Catch Me If You Can, and Griffin, you're

Speaker 1 number two. It's Catch Me If You Can.
Three, Bridge. Hell yeah.
Four, Tintin. Five.
That's my first die. My favorite.
He's got a nose for a good story. I now, Lincoln is only higher.
Sure.

Speaker 1 Lincoln is pure, pure drugs to me. Yeah.
Just like every time I watch that movie, I am like, this is fucking molten ecstasy. I love this so much.

Speaker 1 As Lincoln is like arguing with his wife over their dead son, I'm just like, yes.

Speaker 1 I'm like,

Speaker 1 give me a fourth blanket. It's cold in here.
In 2022, after Westside Story, we did a top five Spielberg episode. Yeah.
And my top five was, it was me and Amanda and Joanna.

Speaker 1 And it was five was Minority Report. Four was Raiders.
Three was Jurassic Park. Two was AI and one was Joss.
Wow. Amanda and Joanna both had Jurassic Park at number one.
I mean, I think that's

Speaker 1 that's it's for our generation, it is the Spielberg movie. Yeah.
Right? It is. I think so.
For the millennials. That's the funny thing.

Speaker 1 If you read the reviews, I know you're sort of a cuspy millennials. I'm still officially millennial, but I have some Gen X traits.
You had elder Schultzman,

Speaker 1 excuse me, elder statesman critics like Pauline Kale. Sure.
Who she's retired at this point, I think. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I was saying, had discovered Spielberg as an adult and were commenting on the later periods of Spielberg's career as an adult, right? Right.

Speaker 1 But the time this movie is coming out, you have a lot of critics who grew up on Jaws and are now going, like, well, it's fun, but it's no Jaws. There was a lot of fun.

Speaker 1 And they can feel the corporateness of this movie. And yeah, they were like, this feels corporate.
This feels diagram. This feels kind of broad.

Speaker 1 Didn't make the record for the most corporate corporate tie-ins. Right.

Speaker 1 It's the beginning of, not the beginning, but it's right at the middle, I guess, of all of them. Right.
Yeah. This is sort of, this movie feels strategic.

Speaker 1 This is an entire lifestyle experience, is this movie coming out this summer. Right.

Speaker 1 And their argument was: none of this has the stickiness and depth of Jaws, which works so well as a character piece in a drama.

Speaker 1 And I'm like, you could dress up as any of the nine human leads of Jurassic Park for Halloween, and people would know who you are. Now they would.
You're like, now they would.

Speaker 1 And the costuming is not like super broad.

Speaker 1 But you're right. Like Hammond, Ellie.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I've talked about this with the podcast, The Ride Guys, where we're like, there's all this Jurassic shit.

Speaker 1 It's wild they don't have people walking around dressed like Sam Neal because people would lose their fucking minds. That's a good point.
Just in the blue shirt.

Speaker 1 No, it's very

Speaker 1 Galaxy's Edge style thing. Yeah, that would work.
Man, remember Bridge of Spies? Yeah, do you remember? Absolute, absolute jack of a movie. So good.
Unbelievable. Do you like Bridge of Spies?

Speaker 1 Of course. I mean, he's

Speaker 1 completely. He's still as powerful as ever, in my opinion.
Westside Story and Fableman's is it's obscene how good those movies are for where he is in his life. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It is just the thing, too, of like everyone talks about. Was it? I was watching fucking.

Speaker 1 What was that sound? I don't know. That sounded like a ghost in the walls.
Did it not? Yeah. I don't know.
Spielberg's listening. Was that a pipe thing? Yeah, probably.
Yeah,

Speaker 1 I don't know. Okay.
I don't know.

Speaker 1 John Hammond's spirit calling out to us, create once more.

Speaker 1 Five comedy points.

Speaker 1 I was watching a bunch of videos of Tom Hanks speaking at Oxford.

Speaker 1 Sure. This went viral a couple of years ago, maybe a year or two ago.
I just went deep onto this and

Speaker 1 talking to students and asking questions and whatever. And he was talking about how much for him he is like a director.

Speaker 1 actor and it's all about the different collaborations and there are multiple people he's worked with multiple times they have very different styles, and he likes that flexibility and whatever.

Speaker 1 And they were like, What's it like working with Spielberg? And he was like, Here's like the defining story of working with Spielberg.

Speaker 1 Is like on the post, I had done like four movies with him already at that point, or whatever. A lot of the other actors were really nervous about working with him.

Speaker 1 The script was so like word-dense and so precise and accurate that we had to get it right. And the actors were like, Tom, can we please do a rehearsal and work on this?

Speaker 1 It was one of the scenes where like 10 of the primary actors in the Washington Post office are all like fighting back and forth and whatever.

Speaker 1 And he was like, sure, I'll be like sort of the team captain and I'll help run all of this.

Speaker 1 And they work it and they get it word perfect and they feel good about the rhythm because he's like, Steven expects you to just show up having done your work. He's not going to hold your hand.

Speaker 1 You got to show up prepared.

Speaker 1 And they get to set and Spielberg's like, you know what might be interesting is if the shot is the man carrying the package with the Pentagon papers and we track him over to the desk and he drops it off.

Speaker 1 And the entire thing they had worked for like two days, none of them are in focus on camera at any point. He shot the entire sequence in one shot.
None of them are ever in focus.

Speaker 1 And he's like, that's the thing with Spielberg is he is like the most incredible, like multi-dimensional problem solver of he's just like a genius.

Speaker 1 It's innate where he gets there and he's like, what's the most important thing? What is the thing I need to convey in this scene, whether it's information or feeling?

Speaker 1 Well, then also he just knows how to visually think about things. Totally.

Speaker 1 In a very, very innovative way. Like even at his advanced age.
It's not like he's fucking Clint Eastwood, but he's an older man. He's still kind of unparalleled.

Speaker 1 There's so much verve to something like Westside Story. Like, and like, it would just be so easy for him to phone some of these movies in, and sometimes he does, and it's called the BFG.

Speaker 1 And most of the times he does not. Very rare, though.
And, you know, as I know you can attest, father of 100 children.

Speaker 1 I'm the father of just one child. And I'm like, I need a sandwich and a nap most of the day.
I need sleepy.

Speaker 1 Now, obviously, look, I had this conversation with my dear pal, Caitlin, about the Mets, about Lindor after his daughter was born, was like playing baseball the next day. And she's like, that's crazy.

Speaker 1 He's an alien. He's an alien, but I'm also like, yes, but of course, he's also a wealthy athlete.
He has a lot of help. He can get support for family.

Speaker 1 You just did the trap episode five days after your twins were born. I did.
That's a that's a that's breaking news. That should go into the hall of fame.
Uh, yes, that was, that was, but that was hard.

Speaker 1 That was hard. But I sound okay on it.
But you also had also been training for that episode for

Speaker 1 writing the profile. Your whole life.
Most episodes don't get that level of preparation. The stress of,

Speaker 1 like, will I finish that article and see Trap and all that stuff as my like, anyway. We knew Trap was so close to fucking Dews.
Really close. It's almost like you planned it.
Yeah. God, the butcher.

Speaker 1 Fisher point. I'm sorry.
I don't remember what you're saying.

Speaker 1 Are you talking about Metz, the guy who played on the door?

Speaker 1 No, no, no. There's no point.

Speaker 1 I was just saying, like, Steven Spielberg has, he has the resources at least to be a parent with lots of support, one assumes. Oh, totally.

Speaker 1 He's not going home and being, you know, changing every diaper. Maybe he is.
Maybe Spielberg is calling out. He's also just gotten more irons on the fire in his world than we do.

Speaker 1 You know, they'll have podcast people who are having a very calm, quiet experience in a quiet room. Like hundreds of people are reliant upon him every day.

Speaker 1 Yeah. He like still kind of moves mountains with his every word.
It sure seems that way.

Speaker 1 And something like The Post is a movie, obviously, that came together like immediately because Spielberg decided like, I think I'll do this right now. Like, right?

Speaker 1 Like, some of his movies take a long time to get made. I mean, this post

Speaker 1 do it. Or even to a certain degree, post-West Side story of like him slowing way down.
Sure. taking long gaps now.
He's finally committed to a new movie. He's doing the David Kepp movie, right?

Speaker 1 But that on paper sounds like a little bit more of a classical Spielberg movie. It does kind of sound like him being like, you know, I didn't do an event movie for the 2020s yet.
Right. Fuck it.

Speaker 1 Why don't I? I could not be more excited. I

Speaker 1 couldn't either. I mean, so if we're saying, like, Jaws is that in the 70s.
It's Josh O'Connor and.

Speaker 1 Look, the guy, Kathy, I forget who the family is. Like, Emily Blunt? Yeah.
Yeah. Is it Emily, Emily Blunt, Josh O'Connor? Oh, my God.
I mean, get out of here. There's someone else good in that.

Speaker 1 Oh, Coleman Domingo?

Speaker 1 Keep going. This is wonderful.

Speaker 1 If you're just thinking of

Speaker 1 this kind of movie, right? So in the 70s, it's Jaws. In the 80s, it's Raiders.
In the 90s, it's Jurassic Park. Yeah, like I'm not even mentioning close encounters or E.T.

Speaker 1 like other gigantic, you know, like in the 2000s, is it minority report? Is that the closest or is it war of the world? I think it's actually catching me if you can.

Speaker 1 It's kind of legacy actually is catch me if you can. Because that was a it's not the same kind of genre thing that we're talking about, but it is in a way.
It's kind of like a mouse hunt movie. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And it was a huge hit. But it was sure was.
It was a huge hit.

Speaker 1 But that's the reason why we had this this idea to just do the back half of Spielberg years ago was like his post-Oscar career is fascinating and the choices he makes when he feels like he's been validated at the highest echelons.

Speaker 1 What does he have to prove anymore? And like this notion in the early 2000s of, oh my God, Tom Cruise and Spielberg are going to work together. That's going to be the biggest movie of all time.

Speaker 1 The two ultimate crowd pleasers. And they make two movies that are like dark and haunted.
Right. And War of the Worlds did not underperform, but Minority Report kind of did.
They both were.

Speaker 1 I mean, Minority Report is, in my opinion, like his second best movie ever. I love that movie.
It was death.

Speaker 1 AI, Minority Report, War of the Worlds on paper are like these classic Spielberg movie incoming. Third best.
All three movies rule.

Speaker 1 But it definitely felt like they were received a little bit like, this is less fun than I thought it would be. Yeah, 100%.
Like, I mean, that's what's fascinating about his post-9-11 especially. Yeah.

Speaker 1 He becomes tinged with darkness. And by the time, then he does Tintin and Warhorse.

Speaker 1 And you're like, oh, he's sort of doing like more of an old old boy adventure thing but war horse is quite a sad movie yeah tintin is not uh and then when he does ready player one

Speaker 1 that movie's a hit like it was it was an unambiguous hit but it was kind of the first time it felt like eh i think people are more interested in a different kind of product at this level now right yeah like that movie went over fine yeah but by that point it's like nah people are seeing the the superhero things and like that that's now the sort of definitive version and of this kind of energy.

Speaker 1 And Lucas are doing interviews and saying like, hey, this whole thing's gotten out of control. The blockbusters are going to collapse.
The studios are like

Speaker 1 cruising for Barus and of course.

Speaker 1 You look at those quotes and they're insane where he's like, the problem is they make 200, like 10, $200 million a year. And when three of those start bombing in a year, they're fucked.

Speaker 1 They're fucked. They can get away with one bombing per year.
But what you should do is, and again, I know this episode is coming out six months from now or whatever.

Speaker 1 But like what you should do is make a 200 million dollar courthouse musical yeah that's money walls it is the story of warner brothers in 2024 yes you know this is the summer of furiosa and horizon and joker you know joker to folio dick it's what they have uh they had beetlejuice which was like an undeniable fucking home run for them and made for like a reasonable budget and then they made so few films you look at like furiosa being a thing that was largely funded by like you know village road show and like australian film industry And then like Horizon was a pickup for them.

Speaker 1 Trap was like a negative pickup for them.

Speaker 1 And then Joker was one of the only movies that they really put all their muscle behind and built themselves. Yep.

Speaker 1 After mostly selling out on Joker, people forget that Warner Brothers divested itself of a lot of Joker because they didn't believe in that movie and then made a billion dollars.

Speaker 1 Anyway, and so for Joker 2, they were all in him and it was a pile of dog shit. Nobody wanted to see.
I want to tell the story quickly. Okay.
We should talk about the end of Jurassic Park. We should.

Speaker 1 This is a little link to the end of Jurassic Park. Talking about like Spielberg being a next-level problem solver.
He's making this movie around like historic hurricanes. Yes, crazy hurricanes.

Speaker 1 Hitting.

Speaker 1 Right. They're losing days having to like

Speaker 1 evacuate. And I think at certain points they lost sets entirely.
And we're just like, well, I guess we just have to move on. We can't get any more days out of that location or whatever it was.

Speaker 1 But there's the story of him just trying to figure out how to get as much footage as he could. What's the latest point we can safely evacuate without wanting to put anyone's life in danger?

Speaker 1 I think being conscious of like, I can't be John Hammond, but how do I squeeze as much out of this safely?

Speaker 1 And so like he's filming while sending Kathleen Kennedy to figure out how to get people off the island onto a safer place.

Speaker 1 And she like finds her way to Honolulu, gets to the airport, is trying to find anyone who can transport the amount of people they still have.

Speaker 1 And she flags down a guy and is like, you, you have like a plane. Can you fly me out? Wait a second.
You look familiar, don't you? And he was the fucking guy who played Jock Lindsay

Speaker 1 in Raiders of the Lost Arc. Right.
A man who was a real life pilot

Speaker 1 because they need him to fucking fly a plane on camera. And then he gets two lines of dialogue.
Right. And he was like, oh, yeah, no, of course I'll fly you out.
Lovely. You took care of me, Kathy.

Speaker 1 Wow. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's just crazy to think of like Jock Lindsay flying out the entire cast of Jurassic Park to safety, almost mirroring the end of this movie. It feels like the end of the movie.

Speaker 1 It's weird that a movie like this that is so clearly at the absolute center of of culture would have an imperiled production.

Speaker 1 You'd think that they would have just built a new soundstage that could have replicated. No, it was nothing like that.
I know, I know. I'm watching even Spielberg making a dinosaur movie.

Speaker 1 It's like, okay, buddy, but try to keep the budget under 70 million. I was just thinking this while watching it, where it's like, oh, this is like as big of a budget we give, but there are limits.

Speaker 1 You know, you read quotes and you're just like, no movie will ever cost $200 million. Was something people were saying in the early 2000s.
But like George Lucas being like, fuck it.

Speaker 1 I do Phantom Menace, basically basically self-funding it with merch sales. Like that was, that's the beginning of like, okay, like, I guess people are writing blank checks to themselves.

Speaker 1 But yeah, exactly. Like, this is still an era where the most powerful person in Hollywood making the most like slam dunk blockbuster premise and being like responsible with his days and his budget.

Speaker 1 He's like, can I have Kurt Russell? And they're like, Kurt Russell's going to cost a million dollars. Right.
They're like, if you get Kurt Russell, you have to lose 20 shots of dinosaurs. Yeah, right.

Speaker 1 We're cutting one of those raptors. Sorry, buddy.
And if you lose a location or you lose days, then you're like, I guess we cut out like Samuel Jackson's death scene.

Speaker 1 And he's really smart about like, okay, what's the best, most effective way to make like a gift out of a mistake? How do you make it more impactful that you don't see him die?

Speaker 1 And that's revealed later. He's still working within like boxing himself into corners.
Yeah, or kitchen counters. Should we talk about rafters in the kitchen? Sure.

Speaker 1 Cool sequence. Here's a take I had.

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 1 Like We have largely avoided this, but like it is hard to talk about Jurassic Park in some ways where you're like, the raptors in the kitchen is a really effective and terrifying sequence.

Speaker 1 I just find myself saying like this was cool a lot of the time watching it.

Speaker 1 This is the mirrored, you know, when she's hiding in the sliding doors and the mirrored shot and where the raptor runs right into it. I'm just like, that's just cool.

Speaker 1 That's such a cool idea for a movie shot. And falling over too is so perfect.
You're like, the weird clumsiness of them is sort of terrifying in a way.

Speaker 1 And the way they're, you can hear their claws on the metal where you're just like, again, you're like, this is wrong. A raptor shouldn't be in a kitchen, right? Raptors belong in 65 billion years ago.

Speaker 1 Excuse me, David. Anyone can cook.
Don't say a raptor shouldn't be in a kitchen.

Speaker 1 It's my gusto.

Speaker 1 Even just explaining, well, like, unless they can open doors and then hard cut to a door handle opening, you know, like the most dumb shit but effective, emotionally engaging filmmaking. So brilliant.

Speaker 1 Here was a thought I had while watching it this time. And I don't mean to put the two franchises on the same level or or put any of those films on the level of this film in particular.

Speaker 1 But I was watching it and I was just like, this sort of like haunted house, like pressure cooker, the dinosaurs here, the person's here, hanging on the silence of, as you said, like the sounds of the claw tapping and the feel of like the pressure

Speaker 1 posing in. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That is a thing that, like, you know, Lost World nails in that one sequence dangling over the cliff, but it's the most supersized version of it.

Speaker 1 And it feels like the later films don't even try to really emulate. It's become an entirely different thing.

Speaker 1 I do think it's kind of the secret juice to the quiet place movies is they are the best modern evocations of what works so well in Jurassic of just like tight cast, good actors.

Speaker 1 You characterize them well, and it's just about like, you know how these creatures work?

Speaker 1 You put them in long sort of like... One of my big problems with that franchise, which I think is like...
A solid, all of those movies are watchable. I agree.
I like all.

Speaker 1 I'm a big defender of that series in part because of what Griffin is saying. I don't think any of them are masterpieces, but that is why they work.
They're good because of the humans.

Speaker 1 I find the monsters boring and kind of boring to look at. I like how they work is fine.
But they're also trying to do the same Jurassic Park thing of like, don't show them too much.

Speaker 1 Like show some restraint. Don't answer too much.
It's a good example of like what a digitally created creature.

Speaker 1 It's limitations.

Speaker 1 Because if there was a practical version of that creature in those movies, it actually would be more effective. It would be

Speaker 1 more effective. It would be so cool.
And the fact that they can move supernaturally fast is lame. I agree.
I agree.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Sorry. What are you typing? My wife's asking how it's going.
This would be nice.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 We mentioned it, but I feel like there's so many stories about this. It's not in the dossier that the decision to have the T-Rex re-enter and sort of quote-unquote have the hero moment

Speaker 1 was a later decision. Sure.
And is a brilliant one, right? Where it's like, how do we do it? How do you get raptors? How do you kill?

Speaker 1 Because if it just ends with them shooting raptors with shotguns, that's kind of lame. And what's smart is also you kind of show how meaningless this is.
Yeah. You're like,

Speaker 1 these dinosaurs had no specific ire for these humans. Right.
They're just sort of like out for blood.

Speaker 1 But, but this, like, it feels, it finally clicked for me watching it this time that it feels very Godzilla of like, you know, Godzilla starts out as like the most terrifying thing you could ever imagining happening to humanity.

Speaker 1 Right. And then Godzilla exists as a franchise for decades that is introduce a new monster and the only way to solve it is for Godzilla to kill that monster.

Speaker 1 Like, come on. Is Godzilla our friend? No, Godzilla is still scary.
We still can't control Godzilla. But if Godzilla can knock down Hidorah, then we're fine with Godzilla.
I mean.

Speaker 1 I'm not that versed in the Godzilla movies. And I have the Big Criterion booklet,

Speaker 1 you know, thingy, right? Yeah. It's a beautiful, which is such a wonderful thing.
Yes.

Speaker 1 And as I slowly watch all of my discs, I'm like watching every disc that I've never seen before or barely remember, right? So I recently had to watch Rambo Last Blood. Great.

Speaker 1 Because I bought like a Rambo box set. And have you seen Rambo Last Blood? Horrendous.

Speaker 1 A truly congressional inquiry level. Like what the fuck happened? Wildly racist.
So racist. Exceedingly unnecessarily violent.
Where you're like,

Speaker 1 why does Rambo have to be so racist?

Speaker 1 Very, very confusing. Like, even though the earlier ones are sort of like somewhat paternalistic about like the people in other countries, this one's just like, no, Mexicans are scum.

Speaker 1 But also, a franchise that was like built on how disillusioned he was with America. Yeah, and this is such a contained story.
It has nothing to do with going overseas and murdering people.

Speaker 1 It's just very strange. He's like Rambo 4, Rambo, right? That one.
It's kind of bad, but it's got like awesome throat ripping and shit. And you're like, yeah, this sucks, but like, who cares?

Speaker 1 Rambo 5, you're like, this is like mean-spirited. Like, this is horrible.
Anyway, i will one day watch all the godzillas but my experience of godzilla is only movies about how godzilla is so scary

Speaker 1 you know what i mean this is why i'm making this analogy is you're right in the later films where godzilla has to defeat a greater threat yes part of what i think is so fascinating about godzilla movies is that godzilla still remains scary yes that it's still like okay he's at least like

Speaker 1 we we share a common enemy right but we can't control this thing and this thing's existence in our world is like terrifying right and i think Spielberg nails that moment of like there is triumph in, oh my God, great.

Speaker 1 The T-Rex is solving our problems. It's distracting the Velociraptors.
We can literally just drive away. That's

Speaker 1 the difference. That they're in a fucking room with a T-Rex.
There's a difference, though. Like, Godzilla is,

Speaker 1 while they share this sort of like man's misshapen creation origin story. Godzilla is like a vengeful god.
Like he is out to take,

Speaker 1 you know, to take back what was rightfully his, you know, to get revenge for what has been done to the world. A representation of our worst, you know, creationist

Speaker 1 post-the-war.

Speaker 1 T-Rex is just a fucking eating monster.

Speaker 1 It's just, I'm hungry, get out of my way,

Speaker 1 which is way scarier. Like, there's no intentionality other than like, I need food in my belly.

Speaker 1 So, it is, it's very satisfying, I find, when the raptors are getting, get taken out. And shout out to that raptor that tried to jump on T-Rex's back.

Speaker 1 He takes a real effort.

Speaker 1 Yeah, get the fuck off. He took a shot at it.
He throws him into a skeleton.

Speaker 1 But the T-Rex is

Speaker 1 a power unto itself. Yes.
Oh, God. It's so good.
And then the banner coming down. The banner coming down.
Just like that's just shield for me. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Fuck you.
Just made you come.

Speaker 1 Just like a monkey. Don't do that anytime.
That he has the judgment to execute properly, where if anyone else did it, you'd be like, you're fucking gilding the lily here.

Speaker 1 And it's like he just knows the right speed for the banner to fall, the timing of when it should start. And of course, Williams' score being like, I've been here.

Speaker 1 We've mostly been chilling, but like, don't, I'm, I can't pop this score again. They get in the copter, Alan's sleeping.
Yeah. And everyone's like, by the way, Hammond, hate your park.

Speaker 1 Zero out of 10 F minus. And he's like, agree.
See you later. You end on Laura Dern quietly processing everything, looking at everyone.
Everyone's walking. It's all on her face.

Speaker 1 Everyone walks out so happy. Yeah.
Who walks out of this movie unhappy? But like this movie just settles itself. It's like, you know what they need to do? They need to leave the island.

Speaker 1 The second they're in the helicopter, two lines of dialogue, dialogue, three maximum.

Speaker 1 And then it's just looks. There's no like John Hammond holding a press conference, announcing his apology to the world.

Speaker 1 Remind me, what is how does the book end? Isn't there like more about what they do to the island? Am I misremembering that? The island like falls apart more significantly.

Speaker 1 Like there's like a fire from what I'm right. Like it's like the island is more powerfully destroyed and like Malcolm is still on it.
And I think they like fucking napalm it or something.

Speaker 1 That's why they just. And that's why you're like, Malcolm's dead.
And that's why when then they told Crichton, like, write a sequel, buddy.

Speaker 1 It better be called Jurassic Park 2 and it better have dinosaurs in it. He was like, I don't like sequels.
And they were like, yes, you do. Like, they had Kakashaka.
There's a $5 million machine gun.

Speaker 1 And they're like, by the way, Jeff Goldblum completely rocked in that movie. So he's the star of the next one.
And he's like, I killed that character off. And they're like,

Speaker 1 undo it. And in the sequel novel, he's just like, yeah, I didn't die.
What? Who cares? Like, five the napalm. napalm.
Just dodge the napalm, I guess.

Speaker 1 But the novel also ends with some kind of like clever kind of movie-esque report of like, and then weird reports of like odd migrating animals in Costa Rica

Speaker 1 like behaving unusually. And you're like, oh, it's so refreshing that this movie is.
And they don't do that here. This movie doesn't like feel the need to tie up any loose ends.

Speaker 1 It doesn't feel the need to set up new threads for sequels to pick on. It just ends because the humans have made it off the island.
It's over. Like, which, by the way, Jaws does as well.

Speaker 1 Like, Jaws, it's just like the shark's dead movie over. 100%.
Let's go. We don't want to show them getting back to land, hugging their wives.

Speaker 1 Both franchises inspired several unnecessary, often uninspired sequels. So this, I think, is a fascinating quote from Premier Magazine, May 1997, when Lost World is coming out.

Speaker 1 Spielberg said, I didn't think it was a perfect film, and it wasn't so close to my heart that I need to protect the integrity of a follow-up by preventing anyone else from doing one, which I certainly had the right to do.

Speaker 1 Among the films that I really think are good movies and that I've directed, it's not even in the top five.

Speaker 1 But there was such an outpouring of demand from the public, thousands and thousands of letters.

Speaker 1 And so, after all those years of denying them the sequel to E.T., which he famously considered and developed. But was also like, I can't find a way into that.
Right, yeah.

Speaker 1 I couldn't face the same nine-year-old now saying, okay, so you're not going to make a sequel to E.T., I understand how personal it was to you. So, why are you not making the sequel Jurassic Park?

Speaker 1 And I had no answer to that. That because this movie was kind of just like pure

Speaker 1 exercise for him, he was like, well, there's nothing like sacred that I don't want to touch upon. The only other thing he sequelizes himself is Indiana Jones, which is designed to be a franchise.

Speaker 1 And part of Lucas like bringing him on was, you have to commit to make three. I want these to be ongoing.
But he steps away from Jaws. He like kills his own ET sequel.

Speaker 1 This is the only other time that he does it. Do some show lore for me right now.
What is your version of the lost world?

Speaker 1 What is the thing that you've thousands of letters about that people desperately want you to do? Oh, another performance. And you're like, eh, I guess it's a money? It's another performance review.

Speaker 1 Oh, let's do one. Yeah.
Of what? But we haven't found the right thing.

Speaker 1 In the early days of the show, when we were doing, when we were purely a podcast about the Star Wars prequels, we started doing a thing called the performance review where we would go through every cast member and rate them pass or fail to judge whether or not the acting was good in those movies.

Speaker 1 And then we did it again for the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe on Patreon. We had an episode where we fight with Chris Cathedral about the last Jedi for an hour.
Yeah. Yep.

Speaker 1 But we also find a very convincing Sebastian Stan lookalike on Reddit, who does it. The discoveries in those episodes are great.

Speaker 1 And people are often looking for when will there be another thing they have covered in its entirety that feels well suited for a performance review.

Speaker 1 We're also arguing about the performances of like the 80th credited actor is still interesting. Okay.
And I don't know what it is. Yeah, I don't know.
Jurassic Park?

Speaker 1 Like, you could zoom out and do whole Jurassic franchise, but I don't.

Speaker 1 It's the fast movies, is it not? Well, if we cover the fast movies, I argue we almost have to do a performance for it.

Speaker 1 And it's so perfect for that because there are a lot of like, oh, I forgot about Kohlhauser. You know, I forgot about like

Speaker 1 this guy who's only in a couple of them or whatever. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I feel like that's the one I've seen. Stall lunch orders, obviously.
Everyone's always demanding that one. That's our psychotic.
That's our ET2 night skies. That's the one that people think they want.

Speaker 1 and they're they should be thanking us for never doing what's that on the rewatchables because you guys did pull fiction so what is it now it's probably

Speaker 1 almost famous though for the season

Speaker 1 almost famous no and juliet liman who i've worked with for many many years has said if she is not included in that episode she will immediately leave the company until it is published so that's a bold threat that she's made um

Speaker 1 uh i don't know there's probably a couple of other soccario for chris oh you gotta do that Because Chris is waiting for Sicario. He has not received it yet.
He's waiting for his night vision goggles.

Speaker 1 But I'm wondering if there's, is there a movie that people have been waiting, like a singular film? From you guys.

Speaker 1 Yeah, because it's different with like the director Prism, where people are like, I want this whole series. Lynch was a huge one.
So what's the next huge one after that?

Speaker 1 I mean, PTA. PTA.
Yeah. I mean, there's right.
There's the obvious tier of like PTA, Wes, Tarantino.

Speaker 1 Then there are the sort of personal, like, people want to to hear David Goham on Peter Weir, me go ham on 70s altman,

Speaker 1 Ben goham on Ernest Dickerson. Yeah, man, bones, bones, baby.

Speaker 1 Bones back in the news here in October, you know. People are watching bones again.
They're digging it. Bones.

Speaker 1 Oh, wow. Yeah.
No, it is back. Okay.
Great. I love it.
Was it a porch movie? Bones? Yeah, it was. Was it a porch movie? You think that thing was watching doors?

Speaker 1 You think there was a fucking roof over Ben's head when he was watching Bones? Fan of Bones. I said, fetch me another blanket.
I've got more bones to watch

Speaker 1 uh this movie was a very big hit it opened june 11th yeah 1993 50 million dollars which i think was a record at the time

Speaker 1 uh it grossed well

Speaker 1 wait a second because i don't want to get fooled here by the re-releases or whatever it grossed about 350 million dollars yeah domestic it's now at 415 and one bill worldwide

Speaker 1 i think it was slightly under for its original release that was re-released several times push in the 2010s when they started re-releasing American Blockbuster Classics in 3D was like, get these movies back in American theaters, but also foreign markets were not as developed.

Speaker 1 Right. Titanic.
A ton of money in the United States. Right.
Never got to play in Asia. Like all these things.

Speaker 1 This is a version of the kind of hidden money of Hollywood that there is like constantly churning up an extra 50, 75 million dollars against these properties.

Speaker 1 They did the 20th anniversary Jurassic 3D, which by the way, I think that conversion is quite good. And the JAWS 3D conversion is also quite good.

Speaker 1 Unsurprisingly, the way that Spielberg just shoots and blocks and edits things works pretty seamlessly in 3D because he just builds that kind of depth into his compositions and isn't frenetically

Speaker 1 cutting in a way that would disorient you.

Speaker 1 The 3D re-release made like 40 million here and made like 400 million everywhere else.

Speaker 1 Yes, it was just short of the domestic record. E.T.
kept the domestic record at $359,

Speaker 1 but it beat it worldwide. Got it.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 Spielberg, as you say, does agree to do the sequel because he's almost like, I don't give a shit about Jurassic Park, which is kind of interesting.

Speaker 1 And I also think you're right that, like, in spending four years building DreamWorks, he needs the guarantor of like, I need to remind everyone that I'm Steven Spielberg before I go off and start making some weirder things.

Speaker 1 I think Lost World is a very flawed movie, but it does have very effective sequences and some fun casting.

Speaker 1 I think Jurassic Park 3 is tons of fun, but disposable. I think all of the world movies are quite bad, but the J.A.
Bayona one. Excuse me.
Show some respect for our guest here. Thank you.
But the J.A.

Speaker 1 Bayona one has the only good idea, really, of all of them, which is the Haunted Battle. The sequence is sort of fun.
It has sequences.

Speaker 1 I had Jay A on the big picture for that movie because I love to interview. I had Fede Alvarez on for Romulus because I love to interview filmmakers like that when they get put in the franchise chair.

Speaker 1 And I agree.

Speaker 1 Like he brought the orphanage yes to jurassic and that's just the one time where you're like this is something it's a take yeah he had a take it's not totally effective but there are things about that movie i like i i mean i think if they had hired jay bayona to develop his own jurassic movie from scratch i probably would like that movie that movie is tore between two poles of this weird franchise management of the idea of the sanctity of the jurassic world trilogy and just letting a fun director make a fun dinosaur movie.

Speaker 1 Society this no, that was good.

Speaker 1 Dominion is like a completely insane film. It's almost like it's uncohit.

Speaker 1 Dominion is so incoherent. It's sort of astonishing.
Still made a billion dollars. Yeah.
Jurassic Park open number one. What's number two, Griffin?

Speaker 1 Can you just tell me? In June 1993? Yes.

Speaker 1 What's number two? Is it a new release? Has it been out for a while? It's been out for three weeks. It is a star-driven action film that is good.
Is it Lethal 3? No. Okay.

Speaker 1 Stars not. It's not the fugitive? Nope.
Okay. Distributor, please? Sony Columbia.
Sony Columbia. Star-driven.

Speaker 1 It's not. High concept, you know.
In the line of fire? Nope.

Speaker 1 Star-driven. It's a big star.

Speaker 1 A sort of a minted star, a recent star. Minted star, kind of an aging star, but this is his last gasp, I think, of true A-la-stardom.

Speaker 1 He makes some very fun action pictures in the early 90s before becoming a parody of himself. He was always a parody of himself, but true.
Is it Cliffhanger?

Speaker 1 It's Sylvester Saligan in Cliffhanger, the Rennie Harlan. Yeah, I'd argue that's his last, like,

Speaker 1 a

Speaker 1 studio blockbuster. Demolition Man is the same year.
Uh-huh. And I would agree that's that's the end of him being in fun, good movies, right? Yeah.
Would you agree, Sean?

Speaker 1 Did you peep that Demolition Man arrow box at David? Have a soft spot for Walter Hill's A Bullet in the Head.

Speaker 1 That's later, but sure. Film I like.
There are not a lot of films from the next 30 years of his career that I like.

Speaker 1 That's arguably him pivoting to being a bit of a B-movie star. Yes.
After being one of the most Titanic movie stars who could get anything made at any budget level. Cliffhanger, though.
Excellent.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Very enjoyable.
Cliffhanger is very fun.

Speaker 1 Cliffhanger and Demolition Man Rock. And then writes the specialist, Judge Dredd, Assassin's Daylight, which is sort of okay.
The other ones I just mentioned are not.

Speaker 1 Copland is him being like, What do you think? And then, but then when he doesn't get an animation, he's like, Then thank you. I won't try that.
Right, that's a bad one.

Speaker 1 And then he goes to straight to DVD, and then he's back as Rambo. Jesus, talking a lot of Stallone.
Okay, number three at the box office is a comedy, okay,

Speaker 1 sort of an odd couple comedy.

Speaker 1 Is it house?

Speaker 1 No,

Speaker 1 I was putting out the one sitter. Well, I was like,

Speaker 1 neither guest nor sit.

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 1 It is. So it's not really.

Speaker 1 Okay, okay. Oh, so the hint was wrong.
It's not really.

Speaker 1 The thing about me calling it an odd couple comedy is it is that, sort of. But you know what the movie is? Yes.

Speaker 1 The stars became a couple, and there's a very famous thing that happened involving them that was sort of sanctioned internally because they were a couple, but is now something you hear about and your jaw hits the floor.

Speaker 1 In the history of this show, this is one of the funniest movies to try to get.

Speaker 1 I know, even. Can you restate what you just said? It's like, so

Speaker 1 the two stars of this movie, I believe, became a couple, right? Did they start because of this movie? Okay.

Speaker 1 I'm not sure.

Speaker 1 It might have predated that, but yes, they were.

Speaker 1 And one of the male star then did something,

Speaker 1 not for film, but he did something that was seen by people. It's sort of a promotional act.

Speaker 1 And it's something that you're not supposed to do. It's an offensive thing.
Two huge stars at the time. But he kind of, quote unquote, could do it back then because he was dating the woman here.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God. I think that's what, you know, really? What the fuck is

Speaker 1 it?

Speaker 1 It's not Hugh Grant or Eddie Murphy. No.

Speaker 1 It's a TV star whose movie career was not nothing, but like he never quite was a movie star. He got permission because permission is, to be clear, kind of strong because what he did is not good.

Speaker 1 I have solved it. Yes.
The film is called Made in America. That is correct.
And you are speaking of Ted Danson's Friars Club in Blackface

Speaker 1 speech. Correct.
To tribute his then-girlfriend, Whippy Goldberg, who he had left his wife who was in a coma for. Was that right?

Speaker 1 Didn't he have a wife who was gravely ill? I'm not sure about that part, although it's possible.

Speaker 1 It's just funny that everything about Ted Danson, I feel like, is now just such a beloved celebrity, right? Like actor two, good actor, like really

Speaker 1 an iconic TV person,

Speaker 1 but his partnership with Mary Steenbergen is so beloved. And then like if you go back, you're like, oh, some bumps in the road here.

Speaker 1 Those photos are astonishing of him in the full getup and whoopee like clapping. Like he was in like minstrel blackface.
Like it wasn't just like they like.

Speaker 1 tanned his skin or what like he's like it's a parody i guess of blackface but that was when you see pictures of it you're like what the fuck is going on is ted dancing this was not like a kentucky fairgrounds event in 1958 this is 1993 that this happened he's insane ending his run as the star of the most beloved sitcom in the world crazy thing that happened like 11 seasons of triumph but no no that's right i was struggling with made in america because maiden america is like what is it it's that like made in america is there's a dna test and she is she related to ted dancer no no no no no no it's will smith is her son, right?

Speaker 1 And Ted Daniel donor. Right.
So it's sort of an odd colour. And he's like a huckster-use car salesman.
Is that right? Yeah, he's like a, you know, oh my God, I got a cowboy hat. And she's like, what?

Speaker 1 I'm Woofie Goldberg. We're so different.
He wants to meet his dad, and then they meet, and they don't get along, and then they do fall in love. I've never seen it.

Speaker 1 It's also, yeah, it's just a Richard Benzerman movie. Will Smith's first movie? Is that so? It's certainly his first significant movie.
It gets after six degrees of separation.

Speaker 1 Interesting. Maybe Maybe right before it? Yeah.
It's the same year. Wow.
I'm not sure which came out first. It's right before it.
Just a reminder: this film made $100 million at the box office.

Speaker 1 Made in America made $104 million worldwide. Wow.
$50 at least in America. And Richard Benjamin is one of those guys where it's like Richard Benjamin made some big movies.
Like he made hits.

Speaker 1 He made my favorite year. He made like mermaids, right? But he also made like some true stinkers.
Yeah. Richard Benjamin found

Speaker 1 Westworld, but also director of Marcy X. I enjoy Milk Money.
Oh, I've never seen that.

Speaker 1 Where the real classic hooker with a heart of gold formulation starring Melanie Griffith and some young boys and Ed Harris.

Speaker 1 Charming films. Very good in Last of Sheila.

Speaker 1 Richard Benjamin. Yeah, no, he's a good actor.
Yeah, no. Married to one of my all-time crushes, Paul Apprentice.
Oh, wow.

Speaker 1 So that's number three. That's a wild movie.
Yep. Number four at the box office is not a movie I am that familiar with.

Speaker 1 It is from Disney, but it is a grown-up legal thriller.

Speaker 1 So, was it a touchdown on a Hollywood Pictures release? What do we mean by that? It looks like it was Hollywood Pictures and starring two, you know, real R-rated actors. You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 I've just seen this for the first time this year. You know what this movie is? I do.
I've seen it, and there's a reason why I saw it related to an episode that we're from a director.

Speaker 1 Quite a big deal

Speaker 1 to you, but also to Hollywood, a great director, but he's also a director who made one billion movies. So sometimes

Speaker 1 it's a Sydney Lumette movie. Okay.

Speaker 1 You know what I mean by two actors where it's like, if they're in a movie, the movie is rated R, those two stars. A million percent.
Yes. Is it they don't show up for PG? What's this movie called?

Speaker 1 Guilty as Sin? Correct. That's it.
Don Johnson and Rebecca DeMornay in Guilty as Sin, written by Larry Cohen. How is it?

Speaker 1 Unworthy of the talent surrounding it. Sure.
It's a real B movie. And it's like within an era

Speaker 1 of 90s erotic thrillers and stuff, right? Also, easily the schlockiest-looking Lumet movie. Very out of shape relative to what he normally should.

Speaker 1 I love, you know, Tom Johnson absolute flames this year in Rebel Ridge. That guy is probably making my ballot.
Well, have you seen Rebel Ridge? No, his last 10 years have quietly been on fire.

Speaker 1 I feel like he's one of those guys where he's kind of like Brandon Nimmo.

Speaker 1 Where I'm just like, I don't want to hear a thing about who you vote for or why. I just want you to give fantastic, workmanlike performances on screen.
I don't want to be

Speaker 1 reminded of the things I already know about you. I love you so much in movies, and I don't want to think about anything else.
Thank you very much.

Speaker 1 He has very comfortably settled into, I'm just a shitheel and everything, and it works everything.

Speaker 1 I feel like it kind of starts with Eastbound and Down, where you're like, who is Kenny's dad going to be? And then the reveal, you're like, that's weirdly perfect.

Speaker 1 He's in on the joke. And then he's just had this really good bounce and stuff.
He's great in Nimes Out.

Speaker 1 Wow. Anyway, you watched every Lehmet for that episode? I did.
What do you put at the absolute bottom?

Speaker 1 The last of the

Speaker 1 blah, blah, blah hot shots. The last of the mobile hot shots.
Yeah, with James Cobra. That's your deadlife.

Speaker 1 He's terrible. I've never seen that.

Speaker 1 I love Live Braverman is

Speaker 1 hard to watch. I have a lot of blind spots.
I'm probably holding more against it because of

Speaker 1 context. Gloria for me feels like really bad.
It's so pointless. And like, why did you do this? So pointless.
Yeah, he's got some real stinkers. Yeah.
But also like 10 of the greatest movies.

Speaker 1 The top 10 is incredibly incredible. He made a lot of fucking movies.

Speaker 1 Number five of the box office came up on our draft that we did recently with Sean. Comedy? Our president draft.
That's right. Is it the movie Dave? It's the movie Dave.

Speaker 1 The best president movie ever made, in my opinion. A very, very fun film that was a very solid hit.
You've also got in the top 10, Menace to Society. I recently watched my Criterion 4K of that.

Speaker 1 Congratulations. Incredibly impressive film that is so, so, so upsetting and dark.

Speaker 1 You've got Life with Mikey. Yeah.
That's

Speaker 1 Michael J. Fox, right? As a child talent agent.
David Crumholt's debut film.

Speaker 1 Friend of the show. Never seen.
You've got Hot Shot Part Du. I don't think that's the title.
Do you want to take a second take on that? Hot shots.

Speaker 1 Hotshots. Parte deu.
He's going to do it like that. Yeah.

Speaker 1 If Ben's giving it a thumbs up, I'm also giving it it a thumbs up. I've seen both Hot Shots movies, but not in a long time, and I cannot remember which is which.

Speaker 1 I've seen Hotshots Part Duh probably 15 times, and I think Hot Shots one time. Hot Shots

Speaker 1 is the one where he's got the chicken on the poster. It's the Rambo.
Right. Yes.
And Hotshots One is more of like a top gun thing.

Speaker 1 Hotshots one is like straight up Top Gun, and Hotshots Part Duh is everything. It's just action movies.
Right. It's the number one

Speaker 1 American film featuring the word duh in the title. And number two is Joker fully a duh.
Okay,

Speaker 1 what was the final domestic gross on Hotshot's part? Duh, and will Joker have out-grossed it by the time this episode comes up? I think it will because the final gross is 38.

Speaker 1 And as much as Joker 2 is underperforming, it's underperforming in the Marvel set. It opened to 37.
Right.

Speaker 1 Number nine of the box office is another

Speaker 1 erotic thriller of some renown at this point. Sliver, the

Speaker 1 William Freken. I'm sorry, that's the Philip Noyce movie.
William Freakin is Jade. Right.
Jade is unhinged. Sliver is bad.
That's what it is. Sliver is Billy Baldwin? Yes, and a Joe Esterhaus script.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 Sliver is awful.

Speaker 1 I'm ready for a reclamation. But like, everyone's reclaiming every piece of 90s erotica trash right now.
And some of them, like, Jade, you're like, Jade has juice. Jade is a flawed movie.

Speaker 1 Also inspires one of the greatest jokes the movie is. 40-year-old version.
You like David Caruso and Jade? David Caruso is amazing in Jade. Did you know that Sliver is based on an IR 11 novel?

Speaker 1 Yes, I did. And I recently watched Sliver.
I do not know why. I cannot remember what I was thinking watching that movie, but it's...
Doesn't it have a good idea about surveillance?

Speaker 1 Yes, William Baldwin is the head of the apartment building, and he has cameras that look at people. And there's this sort of voyeurism thing.
Yeah, that is a good idea.

Speaker 1 Worked for the Dark Knight and Morgan Freeman, you know? It's good and just good. No questions asked.
Not good enough for Sliver?

Speaker 1 Helps him catch the Joker. Yeah.

Speaker 1 To go full circle back,

Speaker 1 talking about Jurassic being

Speaker 1 like the blockbuster that people are still trying to chase, I think the only three things since then that have similarly made Hollywood go, how do we replicate that?

Speaker 1 Are the Dark Knight, Avengers, and Endgame.

Speaker 1 Right, right, right. And in all cases, every time they tried to follow it, it like danger.

Speaker 1 I think there are some caveats to that. Okay.
I think Lord of the Rings, Avatar, and Twilight are all so

Speaker 1 influential in particular ways. Maybe not quite the same where Jurassic Park just felt like it ate America for six weeks.
Yes.

Speaker 1 But those three movies I always think of because there have been so many, you know, there is no Game of Thrones without Lord of the Rings. There is no.

Speaker 1 Lord of the Rings is at the tippy-top of influence for sure. And here's the other thing.

Speaker 1 Outside of Avatar, all of those are adapting huge pre-existing material that's existed in the culture for decades.

Speaker 1 Avatar was adapting Ferngulli, so that's pretty huge too.

Speaker 1 The fact that Jurassic Park is like, here's this book that came out, the movie's going to be out in six months. Right.
Right. Right.
Is very different.

Speaker 1 Speaking of adapting huge material, number 10 at the box office, of course, is Rocky Morton and Annibal Jenkles' great Super Mario Brothers, in which Bob Hoskins looks like he wants to die every minute he's on screen, and John Leguizamo is having fun.

Speaker 1 Isn't the story that John Leguzamo on set was like, you ever play the game? And Bob Hoskins was like, what game?

Speaker 1 No, it's better than that.

Speaker 1 The story on set is that they were all drinking heavily, is what Leguizamo and Hoskins say particularly.

Speaker 1 No, there's this amazing clip of Hoskins being like, oh, I told my kids, you know, got Super Carrier brothers. And my kids were like, oh, the game.
He was like, what game?

Speaker 1 And they showed me this game and they see this guy going big, big. And I was like, I played King Lear.

Speaker 1 What the fuck is this?

Speaker 1 And it's so funny. Did you get that box out? No, should I?

Speaker 1 That movie is really... So ingrained in my heart because I saw it as a kid and was just like,

Speaker 1 I love this, which is so insane because obviously it does no effort at really adapting what those games are. Look, our friend Patrick Willems did a really good video that was like a hostile movie.

Speaker 1 Yeah, let people make sloppy adaptations again.

Speaker 1 It was like, don't we have a certain romanticism for the era where people didn't care about the material?

Speaker 1 Not just the era where they didn't care, but where studios were like, it better not resemble this

Speaker 1 video game in any way. Right.
And they're like, yeah, no, we want to do like a steampunk lizard movie. Studio like, sounds good.

Speaker 1 Buy a beloved thing and be like, now, obviously, this thing is for losers, emergents, And Illumination. And anything that resembles it.
Right.

Speaker 1 They're like, yeah, we need this movie to have gears and bombs and shit. And then, like, now Illumination makes Super Mario Brothers.

Speaker 1 And that movie basically is just like sucking your dick all day about, like, don't you love fucking Toad? And I'm just like, I don't care about Toad.

Speaker 1 I'm dreading the day my daughter discovers Princess Peach. Like, it is fucking curtains that day happens.
It's going to be Princess Peach all day.

Speaker 1 Yeah, because Princess Peach is tough because you like, I know they empower her now and she's an adventurous character. She's a girl boss, Princess Sweet.
She's wearing a pink-ass dress.

Speaker 1 Her name is Princess Peach.

Speaker 1 And she talks like this. It's tough to kind of.
She's the witch from The Witch, you know, Andy Sailors.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
Oh, God. Mariosa is Princess Peach.
I do like

Speaker 1 Super Mario Brothers, the movie. I do like it.
That's a film. I like it.
Yeah. And Samantha Mathis is really hot in it.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And Tennessee Hopper's having fun. Yeah, we're done.
We're done. We're done.
We did a long time on Jurassic Park. It was great.
It's beautiful.

Speaker 1 Hey, I i want to shout out one thing at the end here please the video game on sega genesis video game is fun i don't think i played that what was the what was the idea it's a platformer right you know it's a scroll side scroll yeah

Speaker 1 yeah you could play as dr grant or as a velociraptor okay what yes that's right yeah what did what was your mission if you were a raptor to eat kids i think you were just basically fighting other dinosaurs okay it pretty much was like the same character you could just swap out.

Speaker 1 You know what I'm saying? You would have different like fighting techniques.

Speaker 1 I always ask this when I talk about 90s games. Better or worse than the Simpsons arcade game.
Well, that's the best game I've ever made.

Speaker 1 Is that not the greatest experience you had as a kid playing an arcade game? I think I had the Simpsons Bart versus the Evil Mutants game that is so fucking hard. I don't think I played it.

Speaker 1 It's like if Super Ghouls and Ghosts was harder, like it's so difficult. And I must have played that first level a million times just because I was like, this is a Simpsons video game.

Speaker 1 I'm enjoying it. Was that on Genesis? I think it was initially on like the Master System.
Maybe I had it on a Game Gear. Can I talk about the toys for one minute? Yep.
And then we're done. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Much like the bidding war for the rights to the movie itself, when the book went on the market, everyone was fighting for the toys and then they got the rights.

Speaker 1 And then they were like, wait, what did we just buy? What is proprietary? Anyone can make dinosaurs. You don't need a license for that.
Right. Right.

Speaker 1 And it is one of the smartest strategic branding things.

Speaker 1 Kenner and Hansborough held on to the license for like 25 years until eventually Mattel took it away in the Jurassic World sequels.

Speaker 1 But their big innovation was come up with a logo, which was the JP stamp. Do you remember this?

Speaker 1 All the dinosaur toys had this logo that was like a J and a P combined. And the ads were all like, look for the JP to know it's a real Jurassic Park toy.

Speaker 1 They created this attitude of, yeah, sure, you could go to a museum and buy a fucking figure of a T-Rex, but if if you don't have the JP stamp on the schoolyard, that's not the real thing.

Speaker 1 It was really, really smart. But also, this movie was so fast-tracked that they started making the toys of the human characters without any reference material.

Speaker 1 So, this is what Wayne Knight looked like. Right.
That's an iconic. That's my favorite example.
He looks like an actor. All of them are really funny.

Speaker 1 And then, like, a year later, they went back around and made them look a little more accurate, but that's the best one. Yeah.
Yeah. That's really funny.

Speaker 1 Jurassic Park. Sean, thank you.
Any final thoughts? Yes.

Speaker 1 I've just, you know, I always feel blessed to be able to pot with you guys. Oh, come on.

Speaker 1 I really

Speaker 1 should obviously listen to the big picture and to the rewatchables. Thanks.
I set my clock to it. It stabilizes my week.
I think

Speaker 1 it's just a shame we're not on the same coast. You know, I feel like it's nice to be here.
You've built a very special space. We like our special space.

Speaker 1 I'd like to doff my cap to Ben for all the fine work he's done in crafting this space. Ben really is

Speaker 1 some innovations in this performance style. You know,

Speaker 1 I've made a pot or two in my time, and not quite in this formulation that we're in right now.

Speaker 1 And now I'm going to take it back to me into the great city of Los Angeles and say, hey, at Blank Check Productions, they might be onto something.

Speaker 1 We will, because we'll post pictures sometimes of us recording. People are like, why are the desks so far apart?

Speaker 1 I've always imagined most photos I've seen a podcast where everyone's crammed around one table. And that's what we always were back in the day when we were at other studios and other networks.

Speaker 1 And then coming out of the pandemic, we recorded in Ben's living room

Speaker 1 where we had to assemble and disassemble equipment very quickly. And our beloved editor started giving you notes and being like, you know what?

Speaker 1 If you moved further apart, if you went to these corners, if you had furniture relative to this, it was sort of a long exploratory process that landed on Ben realizing this works.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
It's fantastic.

Speaker 1 What a pleasure. Jurassic Park.
Jurassic Park. Does it get any better? Is it better or worse to do just a truly five-star masterpiece? I think the best episodes are like Rollerball.

Speaker 1 Like, I think the episode to do that's most fun as a guest is usually just some absolute dog shit. Yeah.
But Jurassic Park is fun to talk about. Yeah.
Like,

Speaker 1 I think if you were doing Raiders, that'll be hard. Who's doing Raiders?

Speaker 1 Well, let's not say it in case we're talking about it. But we have to show who wants to do it.
Yes. Okay.
So I'll come back for like Quintet.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's what you want to do. You want to put your name down for Quintet? That's the chess one? Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. I've never seen that.
Arctic human chess.

Speaker 1 So you still get to do Paul Newman, which I love. Yeah.
And then just the fiasco of fiascos from my favorite. Yes.
Patient did like three fiascos with Album, but that's number one. He did two.

Speaker 1 He did Buffalo Bill and Quintet back-to-back.

Speaker 1 And on paper, it's like, oh, how cool. Paul Newman knows that he should work with Robert.

Speaker 1 Anti-Western and like sci-fi concept movie. And it's like.
Arguably his two worst films? Could be. Yeah.
Could be. Buffalo Bill is really boring.
I've seen that. It is so boring.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 You know what's really boring? Quintet. Quintet.

Speaker 1 I'm imagining the riffs and the bits and the quintet part. Quintet.
Quintet. I'm calling it Quintet.

Speaker 1 That should be the thing that children are writing us letters demanding we.

Speaker 1 Well, now Sean will be on it. Great.

Speaker 1 Don't have to do the credits, Griff. I know.
No, I know. I wasn't going to do that.
I was going to say something different. Thank you for being here, Sean.
Thanks, guys.

Speaker 1 Tune in next week for Schindler's List and a movie that will hopefully be easy enough to talk about. I think so.

Speaker 1 We're going to have a guest who feels very strongly about that movie and has a lot to say. Yeah.
Yeah. And is a friend of ours.
Okay.

Speaker 1 And as always,

Speaker 1 we were so preoccupied wondering if we could make this episode over three hours, we didn't consider whether or not we should make this episode over three hours. I agree with that.

Speaker 1 Wait, where's Marie? You want her here? Just like in a box?

Speaker 1 I've not met Marie. Wow.
You should meet Marie. You should meet Marie.
What the hell? I think I was sitting in the same row as her at the screen of queer that I was at. She was down.

Speaker 1 And I was going to say something.

Speaker 1 Should have said hi. Thank you.
So, but the way this is interesting. Talk about our listeners, assuming we're all crowded around one small table.

Speaker 1 Do you listen to the show and think that Marie's just in the corner every episode? Even though she doesn't watch.

Speaker 1 Sometimes it happens. I love Marie.
Marie rules. Marie episodes.

Speaker 1 I eagerly look forward to them. So I was hoping she would be sitting in the room.
Next time, let's get Marie in here for you. I don't know.
Let's all hang out. I'm getting on a plane now.

Speaker 1 So it's not impossible anymore.

Speaker 1 You literally have your bridge. You brought my back.
You're bright. You're going to JFK? I am.
You're taking the helicopter?

Speaker 1 You're going to have to explain to me what's the best way to get there from here. So

Speaker 2 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 Barty Salinas.

Speaker 2 And our associate producer is AJ McKeon. This show is mixed and edited by A.J.
McKeon and Alan Smithy. Research by J.J.
Birch.

Speaker 2 Our theme song is by Lane Montgomery in the Great American Novel, with additional music by Alex Mitchell. Artwork by Joe Bowen, Ollie Moss, and Pat Reynolds.
Our production assistant is Minnick.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Join our Patreon, BlankCheck Special Features, for exclusive franchise commentaries and bonus episodes. Follow us on social at BlankCheckPod.

Speaker 2 Subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Checkbook, on Substack. This podcast is created and produced by BlankCheck Productions.