Raiders of the Lost Ark with Brian Michael Bendis

Blank Jack with Griffin and David

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

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

Podcasts Why did it have to be podcasts?

Great.

I don't think I nailed it.

I've I sometimes I'm able to pull a surprising Harrison out of my pocket.

Needs to be growlier, even at that age.

Snakes, snakes.

Podcast.

Fuck.

It is tough now.

I think I'm better at doing older Harrison.

Yeah, go ahead.

It's tough when he's

Thunderbolt Ross seeing a snake.

Snakes.

Why does it have to be snakes?

You know, my joke is that he's going to turn into Red Hulk when they're like, we have to make the military more woke.

He'll be like,

right?

That'll be what it is.

I don't even know.

Is Thunderbolt Ross right-wing?

He is, right?

Look, we have a guest.

I want our guests to answer this.

Not to put him on the screen.

Is Thunderbolt Ross a Republican?

You know, I love this podcast so much that I immediately went to, I wonder what thing we're going to talk about that I couldn't predict.

And right away.

Right away.

Thunderbolt Ross right wing.

Have you ever written for The Big Man?

Have you ever written Thunderbolt Ross, the best character in the Market?

Yeah,

in actually,

I have.

Oh, sure.

I did a, believe it or not, a weird little mini arc in Avengers with the great Walt Simonson.

Yes.

And with with Red Hulk front and center.

I had this, like, I wanted

for a minute, right?

He's in the Avengers as Red Hulk, right?

I forget.

Something.

Yeah, something was going on.

But so, yes, but no, I did not in my heart lock down the politics of the time.

It just had him in mission.

So I can't speak to the.

Does the modern universe have Democrats and Republicans?

Like, does that come up or is it sort of like we don't?

Well, kind of but like mostly from a different universe than the one we live in now so it's not even i i don't even know if people would like refer to that in that way you know what i mean that's why i'm so excited to see a captain america movie that's about the president if you see it as an air force one sequel i think it is deeply exciting and a huge swing and i i appreciate that kind of thing and let's say just incredible weave on uh uh thunderbolt ross's ideology yeah well we don't really know we don't know

We were very, very focused on where the mustache went when he turned into the hawk.

So that was a much bigger issue for us as a group.

Where does it go?

I'll say this.

I guess

Brave New World is what it's called now.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's coming out right around the time of this episode, maybe a little bit.

That's right.

It's coming out in February, right?

I was, not to be like a pedantic nerd, I was very thrilled in the trailer where there's a line where Harrison Ford's like, they told me if I wanted to be president, I had to lose a mustache.

Oh,

interesting.

Right.

We haven't had a mustachioed president since maybe Roosevelt.

But that sort of solves the Red Hulk mustache issue where they're just like, well, he just shaved before he ever became the Red Hulk.

Right.

I'm not joking.

It was a large conversation in the Marvel Retreats.

Where does the mustache go?

Where did the size of land on the logic?

I just went, listen, not every fight's my fight, and I moved on with my life.

Like, there's there's a lot of stuff.

This is not for me to solve.

Yeah, I'm trying to get Miles Morales into the 616.

It's, I've got, I've got my, I've got my lane.

I've got a, I've got issues that I was dealing with at the time.

Red Hulk has a gun, right?

That was part of this thing.

But it was like, it's like, you know, the Hulk.

And I'm like, yeah, I know the Hulk.

He's incredibly strong.

And they're like, yeah, but he also has a big gun that he shoots someone with.

There are other Hulks that had guns.

I guess.

I guess in the 90s.

Mr.

Fixit would carry on a Tommy gun.

During the 90s, it got cool for Hulk to have.

When I saw the trailer, I was much more i i've been i've as we are going to discuss i have lived with the

uh harrison ford's energy as an actor my whole life which has varied from the most excitable

most movie star movie star yeah to his middle ages which were

yeah and that went on for a very long time yes and then we've entered the um this era, which which started around Force Awakens, where he's just enjoying being Harrison Ford.

All right.

And

I never saw this coming.

I thought we were going to be stuck with cranky Harrison Ford for the rest of our lives.

Yeah, when does, that's actually a great point.

When does Cranky Ford begin where it becomes like, do you even want to be here?

Like Harrison?

I would say it starts with Hollywood homicide.

I think Hollywood Homicide is a reflection of what was going on at the time.

Yes, but I think that's sort of the fulcrum point.

Well, I'm going to argue that

In the 90s, you know when he's Jack Ryan and Richard Kimball he's gruff, but he's not totally grumpy all the way up to Air Force One right that's honed movie star persona gruff not grumpy and then post-Air Force One you have six days seven nights random hearts K-19 what lies beneath Hollywood homicide.

We're getting quite grumpy there Yeah, but here's okay.

I mean look this is what we're here to do on this episode.

Thematically

he's he makes sense as a grump in what

I want to get into this very deeply.

This is a very interesting conversation.

Go ahead.

In an episode about one of.

A very famous movie.

But also, like, one of the most definitive movie star performances of all time.

No, no question.

Right?

Like, this is obviously, inarguably, one of the totemic creations of the American cinema.

Indiana Jones will always be on like the Mount Rushmore to a certain extent, the tapestry of like, what is this popular commercial art?

But this one in particular, for a guy who had already created an insanely iconic character in a Wild Blockbuster franchise.

And had been in two of them already.

I feel like this is one of those performances, kind of like Bruce Willis and Die Hard, like John Wayne and Stagecoach, right?

Where people just study it and go, what did they fucking synthesize here?

Total natural ease,

humor, sexiness,

you know,

doesn't gives a shit, but doesn't seem like he's trying hard.

You know, like,

you can't, you can't fake it.

You can't fake what he's doing.

Yes.

There are pictures of him.

Just like we can't fake the fact that this is blank check with Griffin and David.

I'm Griffin.

I suppose we could fake it.

I'm David.

I know.

You can AI me.

Refused.

Just like some AI that goes, what do you want from me?

Every two minutes.

Cranky David face.

David's entering his early 2000s.

What if I become the red David in 2025?

We might need that.

You think so?

You think I need to red Hulk to roll out?

Maybe that's a year 15 arc.

Have they done any other color Hulks since Red?

Well, there's composite Hulk, right?

All of them.

Have they really?

They've done a lot of Hulk.

Okay.

Is there like a purple Hulk?

And the Red Hulk famously debuted on the TV show.

Like that was, that was, they even referenced it in Walk Hard.

My daughter recently was watching an episode of Spidey and His Friends or whatever the cartoon is where there's small Spideys that Hulk was in.

And Hulk's just walking through the carnival with Spider-Man, by the way.

And I was kind of like, this is not what Hulk's supposed to be like.

He's just a green man, but apart from that, the same as anything, right?

And she just looked at him.

She was like, he doesn't have any clothes on.

And I was like, you're not wrong.

That's the, and that's the only takeaway she could have from this child, Hulk, because he didn't seem angry.

Right.

So he was just a man with no clothes on.

He was angry.

The other girl.

Yeah, he's like.

But he's not like huge.

He's like a big kid.

He's taller.

He's large.

He's muscle-bound.

I don't know.

The whole thing's weird.

Some of these guys don't translate well as kid form.

Like Spider-Man does.

Does she like Miles Morales?

Yeah, she likes all three of them.

Yeah, he's right there in the front.

I'm just saying.

Is that the creator of

the please introduce our guests?

Blank check with Griffin and David.

I'm Griffin.

I'm David.

It's a podcast about filmographies.

Directors who have massive success early on in their career, such as making Jaws.

Sure.

And are given a series of blank checks to make whatever crazy passion projects they want.

And sometimes those checks clear.

Like Rares of the Lost Ark in the wake of a bounce, like 19

41.

That's absolutely.

This is another thing to talk about here.

This is like one of the greatest comeback movies in hollywood history

comeback and probably

one that doesn't it's not like he was like ah 1941 doesn't work i guess i'll do my sort of throwback alan quarterman thing

you know like and everyone was like oh sure retreat to safe ground with that steve like it's risky it's risky and this is also a movie that is imbued with the energy of I need to not fuck up.

Yeah.

Like you feel a certain, in a weird way, it doesn't, it's only positive but spielberg being in his head about like i need to get over the hump of being a wonder kin and not be a flash in the pan yeah this post david's pulling up a really weird poster can you turn this around

a british poster i mean ford just looks like 85 in this post look at him i don't know anyway our guest today yes as david was saying right before we recorded Arguably the most important impactful comic book writer of our generation, of our lifetime.

You were very much the guy that I feel like we grew up on and grew up with and activated through.

Brian Michael Bandis, unbelievably is on the show.

Well, that's awfully nice.

Thank you for having me.

I am thrilled to be here.

I am a huge fan of this podcast

as I will reveal over time, including knowing that I could jump in early.

and without being introduced.

It's a pro move.

Yeah.

My obligation.

But I am thrilled to be here.

And I will say

for the few people, I know you like to keep it on the download what you're doing.

But when I said I was doing the show

and they go, hey, what movie?

And I said, Raiders,

the reverence in which I was shown, like, oh, they gave you Raiders.

It was like literally an honor, an honor

amongst us blankies.

I'm on the Patreon.

I am a huge, huge fan.

So you've listened to us blather on about Marvel movies?

Yeah, but also think about this.

It's the funniest thing because, like, yeah, I've listened to you blab around about the mummy.

I've listened to you blab around about Austin Powers.

I've listened to you.

It is a very, very excellent space for my head to be in when I'm doing laundry and other things, like driving my kids around like an Uber.

But I will say it is very funny that part of the magic of this.

podcast is that often you will venture into other subjects with no warning.

And when I'm listening to a Marvel podcast, I'm like, hey,

you might bring up some secret invasion stuff.

Sure.

It might come up.

But it's always amazing when you're talking about Austin Powers, Man and Mystery, and all of a sudden you get to a Dark Avengers ranch.

And I'm like, oh, that's hilarious.

I would never have guessed that.

A tremendous amount of your work looms very large in both of our minds.

Absolutely.

I feel like to some degree, like one of the connection points we found early on when we became friends.

Was Bendis Comics?

Yeah, I think like, you know, you know,

sort of like courtship, but then also, like, finding like we have the same, like, oh, these arcs were as big for you as they were for me.

I just had to move my bookshelf from one side of the room to the other.

I had to take all the comic trade paperbacks off, put them all back on.

I put faithfully

my Bendis shelf, all the Daredevils, all the Avengers, all the pow, you know, all the Jessica Jones.

Anyway,

Ultimate Spider-Man, I have all of your Ultimate Spider-Mans.

Thank you, man.

It's really cool.

No.

Who wants

Okay, fine.

Well, you should hear it then.

I have them all.

I have like 16 of those things.

They're heavy.

See, I believe I have every single issue of the original run, but that was transferred

to

a basement that my father oversees that I am very concerned about the status of.

Yeah, sure, sure, sure.

Yeah.

That's tough.

Right.

So I've almost been too scared to check.

But at one point for a very long time, I had all of them as single issues,

buying in real time.

What if I came, like, just brought you on to drag you about killing some character?

I know I'm trying to think of what character I'd be mad about.

I would be very happy to have that conversation with you.

But I will say,

to pivot into our subject of the day, is that

I don't think there's any movie that I could refer to as more important to the DNA of how old I was when it came out and what the world was like, and what the culture was like, and how like everything about my life at this stage that wasn't Marvel was Lucas and Spielberg.

And

I was giving a great amount of thought in some of the links I sent you, Griffin, about like,

why do I know all of this?

Like, why do I know all of this by heart?

I knew every single magic trick that Lucas and Spielberg did from Star Wars through Temple of Doom.

And it really was this amazing time where these two Wonderkins were like doing magic tricks and then couldn't wait wait to show us how they did the magic trick.

Like, here's how the land speeder works.

Yeah.

And I'm 10 to 15 years old and I'm being showed the magic trick and then being showed how it's done

and

mind blown constantly.

Like there's no other space I'm in with Star Wars and Indiana Jones and it just keeps building, building.

Star Wars comes out in 1977.

I'm 10 years old.

I see it in the theater.

One of my favorite things you guys talk about is how old you are when you see certain things and the experience of what that was.

And here I am right at this.

Like I see Star Wars in theaters and also Star Wars stays in theaters for two and a half years.

Right.

So you see it multiple times.

It's just the thing, a thing you can do constantly the entire time, my entire childhood and see Star Wars up until Empire Strikes Back comes out.

One of my favorite moments as a movie theater going child was my mom took me to see Empire Strikes Back.

This is Giant cliffhanger.

I never experienced a cliffhanger outside of a comic book.

With a comic book, it's always coming next month.

Spider-Man's going to die.

We'll figure out how in a month from now, you'll find out he's not dead.

This one, I literally, I just sat there in stunned silence, and my mom just let me watch it again.

We just never left the theater.

We just like.

Oh, she's like, there go, they'll roll it again.

Well, if nothing else,

yeah, 40 minutes later, they're going to show you.

You're not going to get the resolution you want, but at least you can just watch the same movie a second time immediately.

That's so that's like methadone.

That's an experience I didn't have, right?

I didn't get to watch in Empire Strikes Back and then have to wait three years for Return of the Jedi.

Do you remember being happy with Empire Strikes Back, like forgetting the cliffhanger?

Just generally, were you satisfied?

Or were you like, I don't know what to make of that?

Yes.

Also, you're very aware.

Oh, they're not repeating it.

They're continuing it.

It's, oh, it's a snow planet.

Everything, everything that we celebrate about it, the initial feeling was complete celebration.

Like it's everything better.

It's everything elevated and doing it.

It's broadening out.

Yeah.

The only thing we didn't have is like,

and I have a lot of kids, so I get to funnel my pop culture memories through how they're processing their pop culture memories right now.

Like my son knows when the next four Marvel movies are coming out.

We have no idea when and if another Star Wars is coming out, unless maybe you had a subscription to Star Log.

Maybe you caught something on some weird entertainment tonight thing.

But other than that, unless you caught it live, unless you caught it in the moment, you really didn't know what's going to happen.

Right.

Yeah.

I mean,

I talk about my little cousin, George, a lot, who's now someone I'm like giving your trades to as he's like digging deeper and deeper into Marvel.

But he is very much a kid who's like aware of what the upcoming Marvel slate is.

Right.

It's weird.

You know, and he's like talking about the moves of like, so what does it mean that Downey Jr.

is coming back, but he's a different character?

Like, he's like fully in on that.

I mean, I've said this.

It's just the quote that is the most fascinating to me was

he was like, what Marvel movies are still coming out?

This was whatever, a year or two ago.

You know, he always asks me, like, so what are the next three Marvel movies?

And he was like, what's coming out?

And I was like, well, the Marvels comes out in three months.

And he goes, I hear the buzz isn't good in that.

And I'm like, you're eight.

Who's giving you the buzz?

You don't have a cell phone.

You're not on social media.

What is this?

But like, he's very tapped into all this stuff in a way that's just like this is the monoculture like the monoculture is in a weird way the discussion of the industry and all of that whereas i think you know david and i always felt like weird kids were we were paying attention to this at a time when like people were not yeah were most adults no you would have one friend i had one friend who i shared like the comics thing with or maybe two you know like where we that was it And then maybe, right, maybe you like read Wizard Magazine.

So then you know a little bit about like what's in the future.

But yeah, you do not watch

entire like presentations of slates on YouTube at press conferences and things like that.

There's the entire cottage industry of trying to guess what will happen next.

Like you talking about that experience of like Spielberg and Lucas being so pioneering in kind of serializing legitimate A-level filmmaking, right?

That they were sort of like bridging this gap between like like the old serials that they grew up with and the comics that they grew up with and the TV shows and the radio plays and all of that that were always seen as low art, you know, or children's art or like pop trash or whatever it was.

And then elevating this to like A-level craft, but getting people roped into the story in that way.

Listen,

I'm forgetting what the original connection point was, but if it was you messaging me or someone telling me,

do you know that Brian Michael Bendis Bendis is a listener?

At some point, it got relayed to me.

And then we started messaging.

And then you did the George Lucas Talk Show,

I guess, about a year ago, maybe.

Yeah, eight months.

I loved it.

I absolutely adored that experience.

You were wonderful on the show, but you, we had already been messaging back and forth a little bit at that point of like, we got to find something for you to be on for.

And we will keep potential guests in the hopper for a long time sometimes to wait to find the right fit.

And there were a couple of things we were throwing out and going back and forth on.

Then you come to George lucas talk show and you came with like 10 indiana jones prop replicas i don't think i've told you this no but brian comes with like a hat but he comes with like a grail diary replica he comes with like maps like he comes with like all the paperwork and like you really look right there hey there you go a little Jewish boy with the cup of christ there a little a little uh chalice there is this thing that's very nice about doing the show is that sometimes we will have people like yourself where George Lucas was so important to them in their development as an artist or whatever.

And they basically use Connor as like a surrogate to say those things.

Right.

You were very earnestly talking through the value of what this stuff means to you to Connor, who is very good at receiving that stuff.

Because he can go kind of like, yeah.

Yeah.

Well, of course it's a perfect movie or whatever.

Right.

And I like that lodged in my brain.

And then a couple months after that, we were like, let's do it.

Let's fucking do Early Spielberg.

Let's do Spielberg.

And I feel like you were the first message I sent of just like Raiders.

That's awesome.

Well, actually, you said, hey, we're doing Early Spielberg, which I could have done any of them.

And

I think I said to you, Temple of Doom, because

as I will describe to you, I'm now in high school learning story, and Temple of Doom is playing at my local theater across the street from my house the entire summer.

Like, like, I saw it every day.

Like, I went to it every day.

So it was like, even though Raiders is obviously the better film,

the Temple of Doom, I was, things were unlocking.

It was, it was, it, it met you at a pivotal moment in your life.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

And

even the, oh, this is darker.

This is different.

Why?

Why am I feeling differently about this?

Like every choice that's being made was interesting to me.

So, and then you, and you, you literally said no Raiders.

And I was like, oh, of course, I will, I will accept Raiders, but I.

But I was like, it would be a mitzvah to us if you came on on and did this one.

And that gives you an opportunity to talk about Indiana Jones as a whole and Lucas and Spielberg and all of this.

It feels like you saying that like, you know,

it's, it's a big deal that we let you do this one.

I was like, that will make our lives easier.

If we have Brian talk about Raiders and like kick off this Indiana Jones run.

I think it's one of the things that David and I talk about a lot with your work.

and how important it was for us at a sort of developmental age like what you're talking about of like learning how story works through the stuff you're absorbing and seeing what works and what doesn't, is that like, I feel like we will often cite you as someone who is incredibly good at understanding the format in which you are doing the storytelling in the sense that you are telling long form serialized stories.

But there was a thing, I think a trend that started to bum me out.

And I feel like we've complained about David.

that started in the 2000s that has only gotten more and more extreme over time, where I would be reading single issues and feel like this is just a graphic novel that is being split up into six parts, that I'm just now having to wait a month to read chapters.

You know, very similar to a lot of our complaints about streaming television now, where people are like, well, this is really just a 12-hour movie.

And that balance of like doing something that has integrity as the one piece you're engaging with at that moment, but can also amount to something larger.

You write great arcs, but I also think you understand the value of like, this issue needs to be satisfying.

There's like a big picture and a small picture of what's going on there.

And like Indiana Jones is this basically, it feels like storytelling experiment for Lucas and Spielberg to be like, can we make a movie that is just that?

Right.

There are all these famous lines of what if it was just the good parts and none of the boring parts?

What if it was a Republic serial that never ended?

At every 10 minutes, there's like another huge moment and another big cliffhanger and where does it go from here?

And then, yeah, I guess leaving you probably with the same feeling as Star Wars of like, so what happens to Indiana Jones now?

So, a few things are going on here.

Number one, both Lucas and Spielberg are

eager to let us in on the magic trick and to take us in.

And as a youngin', I'm all in.

And so, when I sent you that network special on Raiders Lost Ark that aired on like CBS

as a document, right?

But if you've only can only see the movie in theaters, there's no other way to experience it.

And all of a sudden they're showing you

an hour-long behind-the-scenes with genuine, interesting,

you know, and also honest storytelling.

There's one bit in that in that special I sent you where

Spielberg literally is exhausted in Morocco, going, I'm in the middle of desert with all my friends.

I'm completely embarrassing myself.

This is not working.

Like he's having complete imposter syndrome.

And I was thinking, wow, I wonder if this would air today.

Like, I wonder if

the director of Wicked was staring at

having just the moment like we all have going, you know,

so this honesty that they're sharing with us

and on top of, all right, so Lucas to Star Wars.

Spielberg did the same thing with Close Encounters and Draws.

All right.

So now we're also, we have the, and the John Williams documentary, which is out right now in Disney Plus, which really does a good job illustrating this, is that in lieu of DVD and VHS, we have a soundtrack to just sit in our room, stare at the ceiling, and relive the movie in our mind's eye with whatever top, you know, trading cards we have.

Like we're, we're absorbing it and remembering it and recontextualizing it in ways that are just different than what happens today.

No, no better or worse.

You had like novelizations, I guess, or some other book adaptations, right?

Like, that's about as close as it got, I guess.

But that was a big one, too, because even the Close Encounters of Novelization, written by Steven Spielberg, whether it is or isn't, but it says written by Steven Spielberg,

it internalizes the story for a young person who's only seeing, externalizing it.

And now you're, now I'm, I feel like I know what Roy Neary.

Like, I'm like, I, I know you're hearing his internal monologue, yes.

Yeah, so that's for a young creator, all this is new.

So, all this is happening, including whatever 1941, what, like, like, like,

but all of it is very also connected loudly to the comic book space.

Star Wars and Indiana Jones are also comic books.

And the Star Wars series

is, you know, drawn by Howard Chaikin to start with, which is one of the greats of all time.

You had

Walt Simonson doing the Close Encounters adaptation, and it is is wonderful.

It is not just.

Well, they're very much like, you know,

the short version of a story, like the Cliff Notes version of it,

but visually spectacular.

And there's a great, like, how they made it of the Close Encounters comic book that showed the differences of how things, something is directed versus how something is shown on the page.

First time I'd ever seen that talked about anywhere.

So this is a huge moment for a young comic book creator, right?

So, all I have is How to Make Comics the Marvel Way by Stan Lee and everything George Lucas and Steven Spielberg are telling us.

Like every,

so, and

Spielberg is loud on graphic novels for

Close Encounters, makes a huge, like, national lampoons heavy metal version of 1941 that is loud and naughty and completely inappropriate by today's standards.

And

then, the

Raiders Lost Arc is a two-issue mini-series, Cliff Notes by the Maze and Claus Jansen.

So these are all like world-class comic creators that are stopping what they're doing to adapt or to take what might have been a weekend gig for them adapting

these movies.

But I remember the Raiders Lost Ark two-issue Cliff Notes came out and I was livid.

I was, this is.

not

enough of an adaptation.

I mean, they skipped the well of the souls.

I mean, there's just just like major pieces missing because they just don't have the thing.

I'm looking at it, though.

It's Harold Chagan.

Yeah, like you said, he's the coolest.

Damn.

Yeah, no, he looks pretty good.

Yeah, I'm

also look at fucking cool.

Look at Blade Runner comic abductation by Al Williamson.

You're about to be leveled.

Like these things come.

Right, because I was too, you know, I was too old for this stuff, right?

Yeah.

Like by the time I was watching these movies, like you could, you know, rent them or whatever, like I could just watch the movie.

I mean,

the moment you're talking

in the John Williams doc hit me really hard and kind of unlocked a thing that I don't think I'd ever like verbalized in such a specific way.

And some of the talking heads say, to your point of like the movie's out of theaters at some point, you have the soundtrack.

You look at the liner notes.

You play it in your head.

And I feel like so much of my childhood, I would listen to CDs of film scores and try to reconstruct the sequences in my mind.

I mean, literally listen to the beats and go, oh, that's where that's when that happens.

That's when that moment happens.

This little swell here is that.

If you have the same kind of demented brain that the three of us clearly have, you're trying to like deconstruct these things to understand how they were made.

You're also trying to remember the

sort of pure emotion you felt the first time that relive some form of it.

Yeah.

But the uh this notion I

don't think I've really thought about before of like Lucas and and Spielberg kind of being the first major open source filmmakers that like I was re-watching recently, a thing I watch multiple times a year, but that like Peter Bogdanovich attempting to interview John Ford

and John Ford just giving him like the steeliest non-answers of all time to everything.

Okay.

And that whole generation of movie star movie directors, movie makers.

Like, I don't know.

Right.

Who either were just like very sort of like aloof and tony in their sort of attitude about everything, or would try to just be like, oh no, I just shoot movies.

They're trash, whatever.

Like, try to sort of hide their emotions.

Lucas and Spielberg were kind of the first enthusiasts who reached that level of success and wanted to, like, as you're saying, kind of tell everyone what they did,

share the process.

I think a lot of it was based off of giddiness of like, can you believe we get to do this?

More than them consciously trying to educate another generation.

But it is why those two guys and their movies across these like 15 years primarily are so influential, were so activating for so many artists in different mediums because you were getting the pieces in that kind of way.

And you were getting the supplemental material, all the merchandising and all the stuff, the adaptations, all that helps keep the movie alive in your mind.

But they're also doing interviews.

Fan culture is rising.

There are places like, you know, Starlog and whatever that they can like talk to where these things can be distributed and then lodge into heads forever.

So, and the same thing was going on in comics where there's a lot of our, our, a lot of our masters were

not giving, like Jack Kirby often refers to when there's a job, I have to make sales.

Jack Kirby was the John Ford of comics.

Yeah.

And, and not in a, but he's never, never cranky like John Ford, but, but certainly would not give up, I am an artist, until his much later years when, when enough people were yelling at him, you're an artist that he finally said, Okay, okay, I'm an artist.

But

so there was like

getting any kind of information about how to do any of this was really,

if you've you felt like an archaeologist, you felt like you had to like really sift through

issues of comics buyer's guide and comic scene magazine and star log, looking for just any kind of information about how to tell a story or what, you know.

So anytime someone like Lucas and Spielberg particularly really couldn't wait to tell you how the magic trick worked.

It was deeply exciting.

I am also interested in

that they kind of stopped doing that after a while.

Like there was a window

well into the, but by the time they get to the third Indiana Jones, they have stopped sharing.

He doesn't do director's commentaries.

And if you think of anyone's doing director's commentaries, it's him.

It's Spielberg because like it feels like all directors commentaries beholden to him

and he didn't do them.

And it was strange and appealing at the same time that he stopped sharing.

I found that deeply fascinating.

David, yes.

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Bye.

David.

Okay, okay.

I'll be very quiet.

Oh, I'm used to it.

Producer Ben is sleeping.

Oh,

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getting some exact

getting some multiple dashes what's he sleeping on he's sleeping on one of the new beds we got from wayfair for the studio for our podcast naps but this is a big opportunity for us we get to do the first ad read for wayfair on this podcast no no griffin you're clearly not listening to past recordings ben did a wayfair ad for us recently you listen to past recordings yeah sometimes that's psycho behavior it is look he did that when we were sleeping look apparently we need to talk about how when you hear the word game day,

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Okay, that's the end of the apprentice.

I want to swivel back to your childhood.

Like, so 1980, you see in Prior Strikes Back, you have this experience with the Cliffhanger.

1981, Raiders of the Lost Ark comes out.

So you're 14?

Is that right?

So I'm 13.

13.

I'm 13, 14 years old.

How aware are you of this coming down the pike?

Like, what's all in?

Right.

Yeah.

Okay.

Like,

that's the thing.

How it was sold to us.

And it was funny when I was talking to people about doing this.

A couple of people said, what could you possibly say about Raiders Lost Ark?

Sure.

That hasn't been said.

Did we get into sometimes

when we do the most totemic movies of all time?

Like, you're like, it is kind of impossible to overstate the impact of Raiders of the Lost Ark when you're like, oh, it was one of the most successful movies of all time.

It launched one of the most enduring franchises in history.

It is like key movie star text, key filmmaking text.

It is like a movie that everyone is still kind of ripping off or trying to like chase.

And then you're also like, it was fucking nominated for best picture.

Like it just kind of did everything.

Yeah.

Everything right.

Everything that could be.

So here's what I came up.

They go, what is there left to discuss with Raiders that hasn't been discussed?

And I go, I honestly don't think i've heard a serious conversation about this movie post-fablemans which to me completely changed my perspective on some of the elements of this movie and what he was doing and why he was doing it including the fact that he lived with the monkey he lived with the monkey i never in the 57 years i've been alive on this planet knew that young steven spielberg lived with this little monkey.

My kids are growing up with a little chihuahua.

My wife has a chihuahua, our pandemic dog.

And I, I, and I, and I, I wonder which one of my kids will make art out of the, uh, out of the chihuahua, like, like Spielberg had to with the monkey.

So it's just like, um, so there's that.

And also, like, I have a very deep memory of how we were sold Steven Spielberg

of the time.

And it was all, you know, keeping it light and keeping it, you know, based, you know, compared to Fabelman's.

But like, I remember my mom going, you know, Steven Spielberg gave his mother

a Bloomingdales card with no limit.

Like she, she can go into Bloomingdale's buy whatever she wants, whenever she wants.

Right.

If you, Brian, if you like telling stories, this is what you need to aspire to be and then how you need to handle that level of success.

So that was always like, and I'm saying, well, I'm going to be a comic creator.

So that will be no problem at all for me to.

for me to accomplish that goal.

But so so, but it was so interesting that it was such a,

it was my mom really trying to share with me like some kind of information about this thing that I won't shut up about, right?

So she, she heard something, she shared it with me, but it did still with me.

Oh, like the mother relationship, and then you see it for real laid out later in his later work and in Fable Mension.

Like, oh, took him a long time to get there.

Yes.

Well, and it's, it took us a long time in our history to get around to the balance due of Early Spielberg.

I'm so fucking happy we waited to do it until post-Fablemans.

Yeah.

Because it does really make all of these movies make a little bit more sense or whatever.

I mean, we're just interesting from different

interesting.

Now, when I watch a movie like this, which I've seen a number of times, you know,

I'll just, I feel like I talked about this a little bit when we did our Crystal Skull episode

eight million years ago, an episode that wasn't controversial at all.

Good movie.

But like, Indiana Jones was a weird blind spot for me.

I was.

Yeah, I do remember you talking about this.

It's not your franchise in the way that, say, Star Wars.

Well, it just wasn't.

And like, I had the baby version of what you're describing with Star Wars, which is I didn't see them until the special editions came out.

So I had that thing of the movies being released one month apart and feeling like, oh, there's a kid at school who says he has a VHS of Empire Strikes Back, but that's cheating.

I need to wait three weeks until Empire comes out in February, you know?

And like people at school being like, you know, Darth Vader is their dad, right?

And I'm like, that's impossible.

What the fuck are you talking about?

But having this mini three-month arc of needing to wait to see the next one.

I just never seen Indiana Jones.

And I feel like it was a movie that most kids I know were like shown when they were five.

I don't know if I was.

It was the thing that like parents just passed down to people very early.

I feel like it was a thing I knew through osmosis.

I saw 8,000 parodies of the boulder rolling.

I knew what the theme song was.

I could make jokes about Indiana Jones.

But like, I just never got around to watching them.

And then when Crystal Skull was coming out, my roommate at the time, Spike, was like, how have you never seen these?

Gave me his DVD box set.

I watched all three of them, I think, in the week leading up to Crystal Skull.

So a lot of my opinion of Crystal Skull is also like shifted by, I didn't have decades of living with this thing in expectation before I saw the one that everyone got angry about.

You know, like those four movies all were seen for the first time in the same week for me.

I can't even imagine what that feels like.

Exactly.

Crazy.

Yeah.

And I have, in whatever it's been, the

15 years since then,

more, 18, gone back to watch Raiders a lot.

And every time I do, I try to sort of like remove layers of my awareness and try to get myself into the headspace of just watching this as a pure object.

Right.

You're just sitting in the theater, you know, Harrison Ford's in it, but that's all you know.

And you just watch this extremely fun rip roaring adventure.

Right.

The thing I cannot even imagine is

for you being your age, your generation, already invested in this shit, the the mere news of, hey, Spielberg and Lucas are going to make a movie together must have been fucking mind-blowing.

That these two guys are like, you know, neck and neck chasing each other.

You know that they're friends.

That's part of the mythology, that these guys are buddies.

They kind of come out of the same soup.

They're two sides of like the same coin.

You know, here's like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones inspiring each other.

And then it's like they're, they're doing, they're unifying their powers.

Here's like the mega project.

And I remember, and that was like how interesting is.

Yes, he's the director of the films.

And so, but I remember it growing up as it's,

it's a Steven Spielberg joint that Lucas is part of, right?

But when you read the transcripts, which is part of what I was excited to bring to the George Lucas Talk Show, that you read the transcripts, and it is.

shocking how much Lucas had this lockdown.

Like he really had this figured out from the get-go in a way that's even stronger than the way he had Star Wars locked down.

Star Wars was always, you know,

building and building and building until it became what it was, right?

Including the scroll.

Like everything was like stuck onto it as it went.

But he really sat down with those guys and goes, here's what we're doing, and had like major parts of it locked down.

I love this

transcript.

For those who don't know, online, you can find

literally the transcript and the recording of Spielberg, Lucas, and Kasden

just working it out, just

doing a little mini writer's room and figuring it out.

And it is glorious for someone like me who always sat there and going, why is it so hard for me to figure out how to create things?

Right.

And then when you see the three masters in a room, also not figuring it out right away.

I mean,

my favorite moment in the transcript is when someone says, maybe Marion's the villain.

And I'm like, oh my God.

But, you know, like, like, because you're sitting there going, that's not a bad story.

Like, that's not a bad way to go with this.

But, oh, my God, I'm so glad they didn't.

And oh, my God, I'm so glad they shared this with like just the idea of the multiverse of madness that could have come out of that room

is so brilliant to me.

And I, I, but I, I, I just, I just was so impressed with George Lucas in those transcripts.

So you really get to see the magic that is him at full blast.

Well, it's

right.

It's the whole thing about him that is so fascinating and maddening at the same time, where you're like, this guy who just like had this incredible flow state period and a weird lack of self-awareness, where he was either like so right or so wrong.

And there is like a pretty dramatic moment where the pendulum kind of swings.

And it's so easy now, I feel like in a modern context, people sort of write him off and go like, oh, he's like a broken clock that was right twice a day, you know, but everyone else around him made really good decisions and people saved him from his worst instincts.

And Raiders is like, as you said, this thing he basically brings to Spielberg and is like, I'm hiring you to direct this.

Like, this is a four-hire job for you to execute my vision.

of this thing I've mapped out.

And this is a movie that has like four primary authors in Spielberg, Lucas, Kasden, and Ford, where the movie doesn't work if you're missing any one of those four guys.

But I do think they all, in a lot of ways, contribute equally to the soup of the thing, even if Lucas is primarily the first 25%.

It's also, I mean, good moment to crack open the dossier.

But talk about this as a comeback movie.

This is a movie that like largely stems out of two failures, which are like the miss of 1941 and Spielberg being like, have I fucked up?

Combined with

all his movies up until then had gone over budget, over schedule, were lauded, were successful.

You know, he had the Jaws close encounters thing like as feathers in his cap.

But the second 1941 bombs, it's like, well, now we can acknowledge that this guy is not infallible.

And maybe it's not worth putting up with his shit if sometimes he's going to make something like that.

That costs us a lot of money along with everything else.

and then the other big thing is spielberg desperately wanting to be the first american to direct a james bond movie a thing that he keeps getting rejected from doing he's made two of the biggest movies of all time and they will not let him through the door i like that rejection at this level hits him so hard that even decades later he still brings it up like he's still kind of mad he gets directed to james bond right that he was like i'm i made fucking jaws like what more do you want out of somebody so the dossier i am opening it.

Raiders of the Lost Tark, Steven Spielberg.

They are admirers before they're friends, we should say, right?

Like, George is a little older than Spielberg.

Is that right?

Or at least he's a little more, he's creatively further along than Spielberg, right?

Like, George Lucas is already established by the time that Spielberg is emerging as a filmmaker.

Spielberg.

Well, Lucas is also part of Coppola's situation for a lot of people.

Like, there's all these stories of, yeah,

Lucas is three years older than him.

Okay.

But the other interesting thing is that like Lucas goes to film school, right?

Like links up with all these people, comes out with a better reputation faster in a certain way than Spielberg, who is the Wonderkind who skips straight to a studio contract.

Yes.

But is not getting that sort of prestige around him.

Whereas Lucas, it's like you have Coppola and everyone saying like, this guy's a genius.

But yeah, so Coppola and Lucas at all all known as Spielberg when Duel comes out on TV.

And after American Graffiti comes out, George Lucas starts a daydream of like, let's make a sort of B picture at an A picture scale, right?

Like an old Republic film serial from the 30s and 40s, your Flash Gordons and all that.

But how he has this idea of like a 1930s style supernatural grave robber archaeologist type thing, right?

Which is, that's the Indiana Smith is the character he comes up with.

No notes.

Perfect name.

And he does.

I mean, his original, this is George Lucas's original conception, does sound about right, which is like college professor, goes off on adventures, also can be found at a nightclub with like 30s ladies on his arms, right?

He brings in Philip Kaufman, who is,

well, where's Philip Kaufman at this point?

He was pretty, again,

already an established filmmaker to sort of flesh it out.

Kaufman is like, eh, drop the nightclub and the ladies for now.

Like, you don't really need that.

You more want this to be like

this kind of like intellectual/slash adventurer thing.

Like, he's a professor, but he's also fighting the Nazis.

He's, you know, smart, but he also is finding like magic shit.

Right.

Because that's the thing about Nini Jones.

You're like, oh, he's like this smart professor.

And he's like, yeah, that's that magic box from God.

And you're like, what?

And he's like, you know, who knows?

Or maybe it's just a box.

I don't know.

It might be like, have like Jewish magic inside of it.

Don't open it.

That all these movies are like about the

meeting place between like hard facts and science and history and like

inexplicable religious phenomena.

So as Lucas is developing this, his other passion project, Star Wars, takes off.

So

how did that turn out?

I don't know.

I can't check right now.

I think it did okay.

Okay.

But in the theme of your podcast, it does seem that Raiders Lost Ark is his blank check.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yes.

A little bit.

Right.

Because, I mean, obviously, Empire and Jedi, it's like, well, he now owns the rights.

He gets to like turn this into like an industry and map out where Star Wars goes.

But there's a certain extent of like,

they're not an obligation, but it's like, well, of course I have to keep doing Star Wars.

This feels like the second.

major new thing he is creating.

Well, the other thing that happens right after Star Wars comes out and begins to conquer the world is that Steven Spielberg goes on vacation with George Lucas.

Yes.

They go to Hawaii.

Spielberg is wrapping up on Close Encounters, which also comes out in 1977, of course.

And Spielberg mentions offhandedly, like, a dream of mine is to make like a James Bond movie.

And George Lucas is like, I have that beat.

I have something better.

Right.

I have the, I have the same basic idea, but better.

And it's this Raiders of the Lost Ark idea.

And as Spielberg says on hearing it, he said, I felt like I was eating a barrel of popcorn at a noon matinee.

Like, because it's basically just like, you can do a James Bond movie, but with a more fun aesthetic a more you aesthetic in a way right not this british spy aesthetic right what is the american james bond right and it can be a globetrotting adventure that's fun like you know and all that and spielberg had been says he had called cubby broccoli after jaws came out being like hello do you want to hire me like like begging him for bond and that's not how Broccoli did business, right?

Like he, you know, he had his like three British guys who did the, you know, John Glenn and Guy Hamilton, those guys.

Like, yeah.

He's not going to hire this American vunderkind

so he's not gonna make james box i feel like it's part of the fascinating mythology of this movie that like even and i imagine this was uh the case with you brian like the george lucas steven spielberg like hawaii beach conversations have taken on this mythical quality over time where there were all these kind of regular powwows they would do at these sort of like check-ins at like the parallel moments in their career.

There's the infamous story of

before Close Encounters and Star Wars come out, and they're both absolutely terrified about how their movies are going to do, and they consider making a deal to swap profit participation.

Like each one thinks the other guy's movie is going to work.

They're both like, ah, God.

Yeah.

Right.

And the fascinating thing of like, you're just like, it boggles the mind that there was space for both Star Wars and Close Encounters to exist at that level in the same year.

It feels like a case where the audience would vote on which version of a sci-fi movie they wanted, and both of them working to that extent is insane.

I believe Aaron Sorkin will one day write a movie about three vacations of Lucas and Spielberg.

Oh, that actually different ages.

That would be fun.

So Philip Kaufman nominally is the first choice to direct the movie because he had worked with Lucas on it at a certain point, but Philip Kaufman loses interest.

So Lucas brings it back to Spielberg more officially.

Are you interested?

Yes, I am.

And so then they look for a screenplay, a writer to actually write a full screenplay.

They really just have like a story sketched out and they read this script called Continental Divide that had been written by Larry Kasden, who had only written another script called The Bodyguard.

Yes.

Tapes.

And Continental Divide is the one that ends up being the Belushi movie.

Yes.

But they like these scripts.

So they like, they think he has a Howard Hawksian sensibility, very fun.

And so they're just basically like, you know, will you turn this into a proper screenplay for us?

It's wild that they kind of take a flyer on him.

It's wild that he was so firmly the right choice when neither of those scripts seem to be obvious indicators.

Right.

Speak to a Raiders thing.

Right.

And then he obviously has his like time in the Lucas film trenches, but then you look at what his career becomes once he goes off as his own director.

And it does feel weird to be like,

wait, right, Raiders was written by the guy who did Mumford?

Sure.

Or even Body Heat.

Like, you're like, did you, Pit Spielberg, Body Heat?

Like, did that be?

Yeah, does that ever come up?

Right.

Yeah.

Which was at the time for people to know, the sexiest thing that had ever been.

It's a whole movie.

It's one of Connor's favorite things to bring up.

Which one already?

Jerry Kasden wrote Body Heat.

No, well, no, that Lucas produced Body Heat, but had his name removed from it because he thought that people would be turned off of the movie being sexy with his name attached.

It's like the Mel Brooks Elephant Man thing, where it's like, they'll think it's a comedy.

He's like, if my name is on it, it will not be taken seriously as an erotic word.

It's fair.

Wow.

I did not know that one.

That's a great one.

That's fantastic.

So Lucas and Spielberg, they do fight a little bit.

As Spielberg puts it, like George loves logic and sometimes you'll get sort of swallowed up by the logic, right?

Like trying to make a fun story.

But George will back off when you are like, no, I want to do this and I'm going to go shoot my movie.

He says, George is a bit like Disney.

He does put a vision out there that's so attractive.

You'd be a fool or a slave to your own ego if you denied it just because it didn't come from you.

Interesting.

Their biggest dispute was Tote, you know, the evil German guy, Ronald Lacey's character.

Spielberg wanted to have a prosthetic hand that was like a machine gun and a flamethrower.

And they have like concept art that they had built up with this.

And George Drucas was like, that's the wrong genre.

Like, that's sci-fi.

Right.

Like, I don't care care how cool that sounds.

Right.

Like, that's fucking James Bond shit.

Yeah, that's too much.

Like, we're not having a robot-armed Nazi.

Right.

Right.

You know, and in my opinion, George Lucas, as

metal as that sounds, like, George Lucas is completely correct.

Like, these guys are all the scarier because they're just three fucking guys in hats.

who are like, maybe Hitler would like this coffin.

But it is fascinating when the James Bond franchise is so based on technology, right?

That the cornerstone of the image is that Q is showing you the 10 new objects and what the car can do and all of that.

That they are making this movie where they're like, technology is not the thing, but also magic exists.

No, like, right.

Star Wars

changed James Bond.

They went to outer space.

Right.

James Bond

went to the moon because of Star Wars.

So he raped that moon.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yes, he did.

So

Indiana Smith, there's a Stephen Queen movie called Nevada Smith.

So Spielberg's like, what do we do about that?

And they're like, Indiana Jones.

So there you go.

That's how that happened.

And yes, there is the famous transcript that Brian was referencing that does have the infamous moment where they reference like how young should Marion have been when they had this Trist.

Yes.

That when you read it now, you're like a little skeeved out by.

But they are

sort of playing with how like shocking or transgressive can they make it.

The movie is very vague about it.

It has the kind of like, I was old, I was old enough, you know, like, but like, it does not throw down any numbers.

No, I mean, I think an incredibly wise decision.

I think it's like a perfect kind of

Spielberg.

At this point in time, his judgment, 1941 aside, is sort of so impeccable about like what is the information you need to give the audience and what do they not need to be concerned with.

Like he just knows how to portion out the exact right amount of visual information, narrative information, backstory and whatever.

If numbers are left out only because he thought it was like excess fat, it is a decision that has greatly helped the legacy of the movie

long term.

So Kasden, you know, he writes the script, takes six months.

He said he basically never checked in with them, just went off and did it himself.

Stephen's working on 1941.

George is working on Empire Strikes Back.

They give him a researcher named W.

Fine who brings him all this research about like Hitler and the occult and Egypt at the time and all that stuff.

He delivers the script and George is like, let's take lunch.

And they sit down and George is like, do you want to write Empire Strikes Back?

I'm like working on this sequel.

And Larry Cousin's like, do you want to read this script first?

And he is like,

I'll read it, but you have the job.

I'll call you tomorrow if I hate this script.

And, you know, he didn't have to rename that offer.

But like, Lucas had basically become his own studio at this point.

Like, this is the weird thing of he's insulating these guys from like studio notes.

And perhaps there are early signs of things that will plague later Lucas productions in this attitude where it's like, guess what?

Like, Larry Kasden was the right horse to bet on.

Yes.

And he had a feeling about him and he was right.

It might be a little insane to just be like, I'm not reading this draft.

I'm not hiring you to write another thing.

Yeah.

To write The Empire Strikes Back.

Like, once again, like a thing where it's like, you weren't even in with the the last star wars movie but i don't care i want you to write this some stuff that got cut though there was a a somewhat of a love attract a love triangle between marion and bellic and

ind

they got rid of that just a lot of the stuff they cut was just like this thing needs to move like you know just just pare it down parent down they go to uh now so now they have this package Lucas producing, Spielberg's directing, Kasden wrote it, Frank Marshall is also producing it, right?

And

they take it to Hollywood essentially.

And they're like, let's make the greatest deal in the history of Hollywood.

Like, I think they truly were like, I guess 1941 hadn't come out yet, too.

So they are like big swinging dicks.

Right.

But that's the big difference.

Yeah.

1941's got like a like a tale to it.

But at the time, even though it was a big, loud thing

that wasn't close encounters.

but it didn't fail.

It was like on cable.

You're right.

It wasn't.

Yes.

Like it just sat on showtime there were certain movies that were just lived on showtime and became like part of our consciousness not all good ones like no of course not right it's a it's a somewhat of a long tail cult thing i mean yes it failed at the lofty expectations of a steven sielberg follow-up there's this infamous story about

in i guess the early 2000s when

Eisner was overseeing Michael Eisner, who's also involved in this film, but Eisner was

overseeing the Pixar rollout of the five-film deal that he had made around Toy Story, right?

And the movies were getting bigger and bigger and more and more lauded.

And other Disney execs were like, we need to come up with a plan for how we continue our relationship with Pixar because our contract with them is going to run out and their value is going up so much, they're going to have all the negotiating leverage.

And Eisner said to them, they're going to have a flop.

And when they have a flop, they'll come back to us.

We hold the cards and we pounce.

And then the next movie that came out was Finding Nemo.

Right.

It was the highest-grossing animated film of all time.

And they were like, you fucked up.

Right.

You could have had this.

Yeah.

They bet on the wrong way.

You could have had it.

And it's one of the things that leads to Eisner's downfall, right?

I think within the industry, there was a similar thing going on with Spielberg, where like Eisner was scared at that moment with Pixar,

they are never going to be able to receive any oversights because they've done so well without our interference up till this point that they're not scared of us.

And I think Spielberg's success was so meteoric just on like JAWS and close encounters back to back

that I think the industry probably was excited for 1941 to not work because it's like, maybe this guy's come down to earth.

Maybe he can be controlled now.

But the fact that he has already set up this deal with Lucas, that Lucas is the one who basically is putting himself in the position to have oversight over him.

And that on top of that, he himself now has this chip on his shoulder of like, I want to prove them wrong

and become responsible.

The deal they're offering to these studios, to be clear, is like, we own the movie, George Onto the Negative.

You get action for distributing it.

Like, you get some money.

Universal says no.

Fox and Disney and Warner Brothers say no.

Paramount is like, okay.

Even though this is going to make like, need to make like $60 million domestic before we even, you know, see any money, we'll take the risk.

Obviously, it was a good gamble by them.

But this is right.

This is before the days of like, well, no, we need to own the intellectual property because the whole point is we can then create whole universes around the television, video games, action figures, and all that.

But it's the legendary Lucas deal where he gives up his salary and his points as a director on Star Wars to retain the control and the merch and like the deal that, you know, people say, like, the last time that will ever fucking happen.

The studios made that mistake one time, but they gave Lucas the power to be able to just demand that as his terms from here on out.

So,

yeah, Eisner is the guy at Paramount who makes it happen, just FYI.

And

they get 60-40 grosses until the grosses reach $35 million and then it goes to 50-50.

All merchandising and franchise rights remain with George lucas uh sequels are planned by the planned from the jump but you know they have approval and all that uh harrison ford is not the first choice to play indiana jones as i feel like tom sellick is often listed as the famous first choice that like passed on it and i think it's like that is kind of true he was committed to a tv to magnum pi

and they definitely like screen tested him and they liked that he looked like jim sturanko uh the famous comic book uh illustrator, had done some concept art that kind of looked like he's

certainly looks like a classic square-jawed Paul Piero.

Right.

Even a little more than Harrison Ford, who's obviously maybe the hottest man who ever lived.

Harrison Ford's so handsome.

Yes.

But have you seen these, this concept art?

Has he seen that?

I'm just making sure.

Can I just show you the cup for Christ?

Anyway, so.

Yes, but here.

So Jim Sternko, for those who don't know, is kind of like one of our Orson Welles in comics.

Like

he was at the time miles ahead of what everything that was going on in mainstream comics and most famous for like kind of like creating the Nick Fury that people would refer to as Nick Fury up until Samuel L.

Jackson, like that, that the cigar chop.

But when you see his Nick Fury stuff, like his, like it feels like it's from...

80 years in the future, right?

You're like, I can't believe this is from the 60s or whenever it was, you know, like it feels so modern.

But like Nick Fury, his Nick Fury looks like Tom Selick, right?

Like Tom Sellek looks like the sort of like archetypical, handsome action star of comics of the 60s and 70s and 80s in just kind of the like impossible jawline, cheekbones, chin.

Yeah, and so the look, what you refer to as Indiana Jones is

right there, right up front in the in these storyboards and concept art pieces, as Sharenko did.

Sometimes he is very, very credited with this, sometimes not in a weird way.

Like I'm always interested in, because one of my favorite things about Steven Spielberg that will repeat for sure during this whole run that you're doing now is how generous he is about giving people credit.

for really big things in Steven Spielberg's career.

Like, oh, the boulder was this person's idea.

Like

he'll never take credit for something that was someone else's idea, which, as we know in Hollywood, is

unicorn behavior.

And

certainly something that I even,

like,

I will aspire to that.

Like, I looked at that as, that's someone I want to grow up to be, like someone who always can give credit where credit is due.

Beyond that, I feel like he often will frame it as, here was my bad first idea.

And thank God this other person came in with the intervention.

Like, he's in talking about this sort of like open source way of understanding how these things are made through the way he tells you about their making.

He's explaining to you what the bad draft was and then crediting the person who had the spark of inspiration.

Um, which this is a this is a deeply collaborative movie, right?

It is the Selic thing, you know, there's the infamous kind of like American Graffiti, Carrie shared

casting sessions.

Or no, is Carrie and

Star Wars?

Carrie, yeah, sure.

I think.

Yeah.

But then American Graffiti has its own casting session.

This sort of like generation.

Am I wrong about this, Brian?

I thought it was Carrie and American Graffiti begat

Star Wars.

You're right.

Like that was a okay.

Yes.

There's a, there's all that like pooled casting pot, though, of all the kind of young actors in the 70s who like read for all of these movies, kept on going in.

Lucas had this like very specific kind of bugbear of like, I don't want to reuse actors.

He, that's part.

Yeah.

He's the one who's like, eh, Harrison and another thing.

Like, let's not like, you know, they also, Peter Coyote and Tim Matheson are two names.

They watch.

Yes.

Well, when you, when you watch the, um, the screen test, you get, you get, you got your, um, you got your Magnum PI.

And, and I, I, it feels like they did give it to him.

But when you watch the screen test, even you're like,

yeah,

yeah, no, it's, it's Harrison Ford.

But, but the one that's closest in the screen test is Tim Matheson.

Looks like, well, if, if I was seriously looking at that footage and I had to make a choice,

Tim Matheson is interesting, but not Harrison Ford.

It's just not there.

And also

the Sean Young of it all.

Well, yes.

But the kind of like American Graffiti, Animal House, all these movies that are kind of these incubators of like, here's the next wave of people, who's going to pop and who's going to be a movie star.

Harrison Ford infamously had to fight really hard to get Lucas to consider him from Star

because he had found all these young actors for American Graffiti and then was like, I don't want to repeat the same cast.

I need new faces.

That's why he's doing this like pulled casting session and trying to find new people.

And Harrison Ford's the reader.

And finally, he's like, I guess I can't deny this fucking guy.

But I think going into Raiders, he feels even more so.

Like, I can't do this a third time.

Well,

he had famously, Ford refused to sign a three-picture deal for to play Hanzola, which is why he kind of has them over a barrel when they're doing the other movies where he's like, please kill me off.

And they're like, no, no, no, you know.

So George is like, he's going to do that again.

Harrison Ford reads the script to Razor the Lost Ark and immediately signs a three-picture deal.

So he's like very, very on board in a way that I guess he, he's more enthusiastic.

And he,

you know, Spielberg is like the initial concept of this character was like two-fisted lover cad Hellion, right?

You know, like,

Harrison takes him out of that mold a little bit, like, makes him feel a little like more like one foot in each world, right?

Like, you know, a little, a little more academic, but also a little more like gritty and grounded.

I mean, how to describe what Harrison Ford is doing?

Especially when, like, Han Solo is like kind of the ultimate finesse character, and you obviously have your big moments where like his guard comes down.

Well, you know, the whole magic of Han Solo is that he's full of shit

in Star Wars.

Right.

I do have a hot take here.

If If you will join me on this.

And if not, that's okay.

But

having grown up with this, part of my perspective of Harrison Ford

is

altered a little bit by the

existence of a movie called The Frisco Kid.

Uh-huh.

Yes?

So in Cleveland, where I grew up, which he makes in between, it comes out in between Star Wars and the Empire, right?

Or maybe, yeah, it's like 79.

It's one of his first follow-up, what do i do now that i'm a movie star movies right yeah yes it's a it's a western comedy starring uh a very very intuit Gene Wilder playing a very loud rabbi um and um and Harrison Ford playing a gunslinger of of of Harrison Ford energy and um and these it's it's basically a road picture where this um where Ansolo is taking a rabbi across the across the thing and eventually they get to

meet each other's cultures and kind of like figure out stuff.

This was the most Jewish movie I had ever seen in my life at this age.

And in Cleveland, it played in a theater in the Jewish neighborhood, in the Center Mayfield Theater in Cleveland, Ohio, every Saturday for years.

Oh, wow.

And it played like fucking Rocky horror picture show.

I mean, I'd play, like,

after Chavez, the Jewish would come and watch Han Solow give us representation.

And then, of course, people would whisper, you know, he's Jewish.

Like, this is now made famous by Harrison Ford, a quarter Jewish, not too shabby.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Made famous by Adam Sandler's Hanukkah song.

Yeah.

But like, but as Jews, we would, we, we had, we'd call them.

We'd, at least, at least the Jews I knew had.

Don't forget, don't you forget, he is Jewish.

He's Jewish.

So watching, watching Raiders in particular, and it codes very jewish like indiana jones codes

hans solo doesn't code jewish but indiana jones absolutely does code as a jewish action hero um and marion also codes jewish and for me at the time i i i i could feel it like like oh well like they're they're spielberg's bringing it to the bringing it right to the table and that was part of also how we got to know him as a as a little jewish boy done right right like done good yeah but the whole aspect of this movie being this like Nazi revenge movie, right?

It goes beyond just being,

you know, an adventure film in which the Nazis are easy villains because we all know who to root for in that situation, or at least hope that one would know who to root for in that situation.

Uh,

is heightened by it being all about like basically the intervention of God

and this sort of like course correction that possibly arguably creates an alternate timeline.

You know, I have a very strong memory of like when the movie where we're seeing the movie and then the ark is in the,

you know, in the basement of the submarine not being attended to.

And then God kind of like blocks out the Nazi symbol with kind of an amorphous shape that kind of looks like a mug and dubbed.

It's got like six stars to like almost.

And my mom like elbowed me and went mugg and dubbed.

And I'm like, it's not like, oh my God.

Like, it's like, it was like, oh, my God.

Is, is God just God's mask?

Like, it's everything about it was like, are we going to, like, it's a 10 commandments sequel?

Like, it was just everything about it was strange.

And I didn't know what was happening.

Like, my.

But that's what's so fascinating about this coming fairly formed from Lucas first is that he's like a hyper wasp.

And then he like assigns Larry Kasden and Spielberg to be the ones who actually realized this thing.

And through some combination of like conscious effort and just their own mentality and their history and their background all this stuff gets coded into it but like lucas is the one who's designing this around

the the ark of the covenant and the tablets and all of that right yeah well let me let me ask you having watched all four of them in a weekend yeah did any of this click with you no absolutely not i like when i was watching them for the first time i i remember here's like a very distinctive memory i have watching the first one

uh this was in the worst apartment I ever lived in, where my bedroom was the living room where the TV was.

And I slept on two mattresses behind a couch.

And I watched the movie and I came out and I knocked on Spike's bedroom.

And he said, so what do you think?

And I went, yeah, it's a lot of fun.

And he was like, a lot of fun.

What are you talking about?

It's the best movie ever made.

And I was like, no, it's like a fun movie.

And then I don't like Temple of Doom very much.

I'm excited to rewatch it.

Yeah, but it's a, it's a fun movie.

I have always struggled with it.

Yeah.

And like Last Crusade has always been the one that is my favorite.

Yeah, it's a very griffy movie.

It's a very griffy movie.

And I feel like as a very Buster Keeney movie in particular, there was something that clicked for me in watching that one of like, oh, that's a huge part of the DNA of these movies is silent comedy and not just the adventure serials.

That one makes brings it to the forefront.

So that's when I sort of really locked in.

And I saw Crystal Skull and was like, half of that works for me, half of it doesn't.

It doesn't feel sacrilegious because I haven't lived with this my whole life.

I mean, right.

I mean, for me,

I always had locked into the the three movies before crystal skull existed you know they're all religious in a different way like this is about jewish mysticism temple doom is about hindu mysticism last crusade is about christian you know sort of folk right mysticism and it's sort of annoying that uh crystal skull doesn't have any of that crystal skulls doing the thing where it's like well now it's the 50s so we're what was the genre of the 50s is uh you know is more like sci-fi we're going to do aliens and i just wish it had picked a lane but we can talk about that.

We devoted a whole episode to it.

Yeah.

I think that movie is.

Yes, the Jewish,

funny thing.

The weird Jewish mystic undertones of Raiders of the Lost Ark are fun to me because I think this movie is dark and scary and weird in a way that I love.

Temple of Doom, you know, presses on that pedal a little too hard.

And I kind of enjoy how nasty it is, but it's a mean-spirited movie in a way this isn't.

But this movie is

sort of haunted, like and scary.

And it's fun, but it's also like yeah it's kind of terrifying to consider what's going on there was also a lightning in a bottle thing with this movie i mean let's dig into actually like talking about the movie itself as it plays out

david what this episode of blank check with griffin david podcast about philographies is brought to you by booking.com booking.y.

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

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Ben.

What's up, Griff?

This is an ad break.

Yeah.

And I'm just, this isn't a humble brag, it's just a fact of the matter.

Despite you being on Mike, oftentimes when sponsors buy ads based on this podcast, the big thing they want is personal host endorsement.

Right.

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

But something very different is happening right now.

That's true.

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

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Bacon is in the pocket too, man.

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David?

Sizzling.

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

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Tell us some things you liked about the movie.

Okay, well, I'm a Jersey guy.

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

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Yes, yes, that's right.

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I grew up watching toxic and trauma movies on porches yes with my sleazy and sticky friends it informed so much of my sensibility your friends like junkyard dog and headbanger yeah exactly making toxic crusader jokes and so when i heard that they were doing this new installment i was really emotionally invested

It was in limbo for a while before our friends at Cineverse rescued it and are now releasing it uncut.

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

They're playing with fire here.

yeah it's just it's something that means a lot to me and they knocked it out of the park okay it somehow really captured that sensibility that sense of humor even just that like lo-fi scrappy kind of nature that's inherent in all of the trauma movies and the original toxy movies and they have like updated in 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

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Cineverse last year released Terrifier 3 Unrated.

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Big risk for them there.

I feel like it's a very, very intense movie.

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And Ben, it just says here in the copy, wants to call out that Elijah Wood plays a weird little guy who says Summon the Nuts.

Can you tell us anything about that moment without spoiling it?

Summon the Nuts is in reference to a

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You know, you start with one of the most infamous opening sequences of all time.

That is, you're just dropped right into the action of the most like thrilling series of incidents imaginable as you watch this guy basically do his like

side gig.

which is being the coolest movie hero in history, you know, and avoiding slings and arrows.

and as someone who is there i can tell you that the thrill ride that is the first 10 15 minutes of the movie is overwhelming as as

experiencing it for the first time it is incredible these are spuber pulling out tricks we have not seen him do before stuff he would master and everything but all of this is just working working working and by the time

He goes, I hate snakes, you are just, your breath is just gone

in a way that so so few movies can achieve.

It's, it's an incredible experience.

I want to unpack it more fully, but like the back-to-back of that and then him in the university, right?

And to this point of my experience watching them for the first time, this is a movie that I've now like re-watched maybe every two years because I'm really like, I should study this more as a thing.

Not that I need to deepen my appreciation, but I'm like, there's a, there's a, an element of catch up to a certain extent.

Ketchup Entertainment, of course, our finest distributor.

But even though I like prefer Last Crusade, I almost never re-watch it because I'm like, I know I think that movie's fun, but there's something in the codex of this movie that is so like distributed.

I don't prefer Last Crusade.

It's just my sensibility, I think.

I mean, but we'll see how the rewatch goes.

No, it's deeply fast.

It's fast.

I make no judgment.

I've just.

Yeah.

I wouldn't say it was better

by any argument.

Yeah.

But I think a lot of it's the comedy of it.

But the immediate like thrill ride, you're saying, followed by the university and just the feeling of, oh, this is just this guy's life.

What we just saw wasn't the craziest thing that's ever happened to him.

That's another adventure.

And then he just flies back and teaches a class, right?

There's a lighting in a bottle thing in this movie that the other movies can't totally recapture in the same way.

And I think Temple of Doom.

being a prequel makes this even more of an issue to your point which is all the weird spooky mysticism of it is really fascinating when you're like, this is the first time this guy is challenged in this way, which isn't to say it's the greatest challenge of his life, but it's like the greatest ideological challenge of his life, which is I don't believe in this shit.

No, yeah, yeah, right, right, right.

He is kind of a Mulder and Scully together.

Like he's like, look, I believe that this

object may be the quote unquote lost arc or whatever, but I'm not sure I believe that that means it's going to have magic inside of it.

I just sort of, you know, I do scary shit for a living.

Yeah.

I'm constantly encountering weird shit.

It is all explainable.

Yeah.

There's a certain like power this movie has to being the one film that is him having to realize that there's a lot about the world he doesn't understand and a tremendous amount of skill and how much that is not a wildly overstated sort of plot to the movie.

It is kind of just like a minor thread running the whole time.

Yes, to everything you're saying.

And also

it's the game of expectation.

Like you see the poster, you know who Han Solo is, you know who Harrison Ford is, you know, the credits.

You're obsessing over that.

You're looking at the top trading cards ahead of the movie's release, trying to figure out what you think the movie is.

And I can't express you enough having these collector cards is really all you have.

And Star Wars has made them like statements of fact and looks inside that you're only going to get from these top trading cards.

So once the Raiders ones hit,

they're like the encyclopedia of everything you're going to know.

And then the movie comes, and you're 10 minutes in, and expectations met, exceeded, and now completely surprising you.

Oh, not who you thought he was.

He is a nerdy professor.

And

also, I think that the reason that none of us tripped on the Marion's age thing when we saw it in the theater was because that scene when the

student blinks and has written Love You on his eyes, and he reacts maturely, like

no skeevy reaction to it.

So he's not a skeevy piece of shit.

Like he's not, like, there was an excuse there for him to wink or do something gross, and he did not.

Like, that is not who he is.

So when Mirion says, I was a child, you just, I did not think she was an actual child.

I thought this is

she's saying you, you know, I was too young and he's, you know, you're older than me, which he is.

But like, yeah, no, but I, I remember when Twitter hit that a few years ago with, wait, what?

And I was like, oh, yeah, that does ring badly, but, but I, I never thought it the whole time.

It's this fascinating thing of like that line is a vestige of clearly the development of being like, what if she was literally a child?

And it plays in the context of the Finnish movie more like I was young.

You know, like the way we talk about like, I was like, my brain wasn't fully formed yet, you know?

These things where there like was a power dynamic, but they're also close enough in age, the two actors in a way where you're just like, okay, so they were like on opposite sides of a narrow developmental line, maybe.

But you're right.

Like all, every one of those characterization choices is so impactful.

It's the other, we've talked about before how much.

Harrison Ford loves Indiana Jones, right?

He's always felt more enthusiastic about the sort of legacy and and importance of the character versus Han Solo, where he's kind of been in and out on loving Han Solo.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it makes sense because Harrison, how would I put this?

He talks so much about like how he approaches acting like a craftsman

that he's not very like precious about it, even though I think he has a tremendous amount of technique.

And people who work with him are like, he cares a lot more about it than he wants to let on.

He tries to play like Gruff.

I don't give a shit.

Harrison does.

But he's like a very thoughtful, intentional person.

Sort of red hulky.

Right.

And, you know, he has talked about how he had his period of brief frustration, I think, post-Star Wars and Indian Jones, where he's like, great, now I can do anything.

I can do Mosquito Coast and I can do whatever.

And very quickly, it was like, audiences want to see you be Harrison Ford.

Yes.

You better not stray too much from the now very established star persona you have.

Right.

There's his Inside the Actor Studio is incredible.

And James Lipton kind of like pokes him on that.

And he says like to the effect of like, what am I going to do?

Like cry about the fact that I'm Harrison Ford?

I like tried doing other stuff.

I very quickly realized like audiences don't love seeing me in that kind of movie or that kind of movie starring me.

It doesn't appeal to either audience.

I like have peace with where I am.

He'll make these jokes about like I get paid money to fall down.

Well, I get it, right?

There's that part of it that's kind of blight.

But when he talks about the craftsman aspect of it, he's like, my job is to like fulfill the needs, is to like look at the story and go like, what needs to be accomplished in this shot, in this moment, in this line.

He thinks about it not in a technical way, but really tied to narrative.

You know, it's not about like.

what is in my heart that I need to get out of my system or what like, you know, sort of prism of the human psychology am I trying to like capture here.

As much as he gets down to the brass tacks of like, this is storytelling.

It's visual storytelling.

What is conveyed by me like tilting my head three degrees, you know, or raising my eyebrows here.

It is this, in that sense, this franchise is so perfectly built for him because it is this like episodic, serialized, trying to game out how this guy is making decisions in real time and narrowly just surviving.

It is like a structure for a movie and a series that is perfectly suited to the way he thinks as an actor,

which is what do I need to do to get the audience to lock into this moment?

And what are we trying to convey here?

And in that sense, Spielberg is such a good match for him.

And it remains so weird that they never

work together outside of these movies.

Well, Harrison Ford made a lot of weird choices.

I mean, like, I feel like the choices he makes that are like

making a good movie within his star persona are like Witness, Working Girl, and then the Jack Ryan movies, things like that, where it's like, it's doing a slightly different thing.

And the fugitive, slightly different thing.

He's still Harrison Ford.

He's the Harrison Ford we know and love.

These movies are giant hits.

And then there's stuff like Mosquito Coast or Presumed Innocent or Frantic or whatever, where it's like, what if I showed you a darker side?

And the audience is usually like,

we don't really want to see that.

Like, and you watch those movies later and you're like, there's a lot, a lot that's interesting about this.

And he's really good at darker side stuff, in my opinion.

Well, and to close the loop on a thing we set up fucking 90 minutes ago but like what lies beneath is the first time he weaponizes people don't expect me to be that dark right yeah and that movie's a big hit and feels like it gets a lot of juice from like holy shit you've never seen harrison ford like this and then right after that movie is when you start the era of him feeling like a grump yeah is he tired is he bored is he too grumpy are the movies written around his grumpiness is his persona now that he's like at odds with everything

And I think you're right, Brian, that's not until Force Awakens where he kind of owns being Elder Stairs.

There's that glint in his eye with Force Awakens that there just isn't with so many

movies.

And I think like we were living through that era every time there was a new big Harrison Ford movie being like, is the magic going to be back this time?

Because there's just shit like the opening of this movie where you have this like beautifully deliberately designed series of shots, the build of the sort of mystery of what's what's going on, even just down to the fucking

Paramount logo transition, right?

Like this movie just like sets you on its course so beautifully.

And this sense of like, we're not hiding this guy in shadows, but why are you not showing me his face when he's Harrison Ford?

And it's not because there's some twist coming, it's because Spielberg knows he has one chance to make a first impression.

And like Harrison Ford knows how to step exactly correctly into the right at the right timing, at the right angle and look like $20 million.

And suddenly.

Having experienced that walk into the light, it was, yes, we know it's Harrison Ford, but like

by the time he walked into light, it's Indiana Jones.

It really is a perfectly crafted sequence where you're kind of like shedding Han Solo, which is an enormous

thing over this character is that he's literally played the most iconic character of our lifetime already.

And the reason you're hiding his face is because you need to be introduced to this character through action before you're thinking of him primarily as Harrison Ford.

Everyone knows what they bought into him.

Right.

Yeah.

His name is on the poster.

His face is on the poster.

I'm seeing the Harrison Ford movie, but he's like forcing you to engage with Indiana Jones as an abstract idea before he then has Harrison Ford step into the light.

And it's like, and this is who he is now.

And you're thinking about this character and not Han Solo.

And then you just have this like perfect fucking Rube Goldberg machine sequence of just like the most classical Spielberg like introduction of information in ways that feel charming and effortless, but stick in your brain so that he's setting up the perfect payoffs to come later.

The way you build the entrance into the temple versus like what the escape's going to be of repeating the things like the golf and needing to swing over and the arrows and all that shit.

It's like just incredible set of payoff shit.

And because it's so, yeah, Melina, and because it's so

thrillingly dark and scary, and spiders and shadows and, you know, literally, you know, wet skulls.

We are not like at this age that I'm, that I'm at, like, this is like, I, I'm, I'm feeling very like challenged and seen.

Like, oh, you're not talking down to me.

And then I would learn as I got older, that was kind of Stan Lee's magic, too.

It's like, I'm not going to talk down to you.

Come, you come here.

And that was just, you feel respected almost as an audience member.

Like, oh, and so all the way through Temple of Doom, like they keep pushing it and pushing it and pushing it in

the frame they're at.

So when people were complaining about Temple of Doom being too dark, I was like, what?

That's what this is.

Yeah.

This is what this is.

Yeah.

I like the opening sequence to this film.

I think it's a bold take.

Yeah.

I think it's really, really

thrilling.

Yes, Melino.

It's so fucking good.

This is his first performance ever.

But there's like it's

he's already got the character actor eyes.

Yeah.

Character actor eyes.

Yeah, but if you watch the behind the scenes, you can't believe he made another movie because they literally put him in the set and dumped a bunch of spiders

in him.

And then famously, the spiders wouldn't move.

They were just sitting on it.

So they go, what you got to do?

You just got to put a female spider on there.

And all the spiders would start.

Getting all excited.

And that's what you see when you see the spider.

You got to create a spider meat market.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, and you're saying, man, he's never made a movie before.

Like, I don't know.

It just feels like the worst Hollywood experience.

Right energy and such skillful control of the dial of like when he's playing scared, when he's playing cocky.

You just are like, ah, maybe he's actually not going to screw Indy over.

And then maybe does.

He's like, yeah, I could see him screw you.

But also, you're like, is this guy confident enough that Indy's in trouble, that he's going to get away with it?

Is he overstepping?

It's a lot of

right, what you're saying.

Like, you know, like a lot of stuff being communicated through basically nothing, and you get it all.

Like,

who are these people and what are they doing?

You just understand everything without really anyone having to say much.

And,

you know, Harrison Forty is a very confident on-screen presence.

Again, it's a struggle to talk about movies like this.

My passion for this movie and my frustration with the comic book adaptation

was so high that I spent

the year of 1983

at my Passover vacation.

I'd got a VHS copy of the movie and I sat on my couch with a big thing of like chocolate pudding, the cheapest junk food I could find at the time.

And I sat there and I drew every single edited shot.

of the movie because I was going to do the real adaptation of Rado's Lost Ark.

I was going to send it to Marvel and then they were going to stop publishing what they were publishing.

And they were going to stop the presses and publish mine.

All right.

Now, I can't express to you enough how much I am not good and a little child.

And

I literally, every time there's an edit, I pause the movie and draw what's on screen.

I drew 45 pages of comic book art.

I never got out of the jungle.

I don't think I even got into the cave because it's just like, yeah, it's just Indiana Jones walking through the jungle.

Right.

So, if you, yeah.

But that's how formative it was to me.

Like, you have this art somewhere?

Yes, I absolutely do.

It belongs in a museum.

It absolutely doesn't.

You, you saying, you're talking about the things like the trading cards and the comics adaptation, like them taking this movie and splitting it only into two issues.

You're like, this opening sequence is an entire issue.

Things like the trading cards, you're like, it would take 100 sequential trading cards to get through the beats of just the opening.

It is like an entire movie.

It's a mini-movie in and of itself.

It has, I mean, like, how many shots are in the first 10 fucking minutes that are just like indelible history of cinema shots?

But I'm saying the pure number of shots.

No, no, no, you're right.

You're right.

It's both.

It's that every shot is like a deliberate, like diamond-cut, perfect, evocative, communicative, exciting, thrilling, thrilling, kind of meaningful image with like these perfectly timed edits.

You know, you watch a big action sequence in a movie today.

You might have as many shots and as many cuts, but it's just 20 meaningless kind of setups of like multiple cameras filming the action from multiple angles and then it's sort of edited in whatever mishmash way.

And you're like, no, these are like 60 deliberate different setups that all are like telling you something very specific from where the camera is relative to the action and where the action is and the screen direction and all of this fucking shit.

It is like a sequence.

The whole movie is like this, but this sequence in particular is like every single shot is moving the story forward in like a very deliberate way and in a way you could not have done in the previous shot.

Even sometimes when it feels like the shift of angle is marginal.

When the action plays out, you're like, that's why the camera had to be here rather than there.

He's good at that stuff.

He's

pretty fucking good at it.

He has the best innate brain for that, maybe of anyone who's ever lived.

Yes, he does.

The one influence I was not aware of at the time, but I came aware of like more recently was how important Chuck Jones was to Steven Spielberg at the time.

And it's clearly like all over 1941 in a real, that is a Chuck Jones cartoon trying to come to life.

Whereas this one has the influence of Chuck Jones's mousetrap-like storytelling being produced

towards a narrative that deserves it.

It's quite an interesting kind of magic drake on its own that that would be amongst all the John Ford and other influences.

There's like a Chuck Jones bit of business every time he's kind of setting up his shots or laying out how he's going to make his action.

Who's Chuck Jones?

Chuck Jones.

Yeah.

Sorry.

I'm just.

Oh, of course.

I'm just asking, though, again,

on behalf of the audience who may not.

Yes.

He's kind of.

Oh, I appreciate that, Ben.

And also, if there's a book that came out recently called spielberg the first 10 years and in it they they dive a little uh harder than i'd ever seen about what like how spielberg and chuck jones were just hanging out together like they were having lunch

together and right

uh

spielberg was one of the people who was really working hard to elevate chuck jones in the public's eye to like this is living legend like master of the form for the last couple decades of his life.

Yeah, the thing, and speaking to what you were saying, Griffin, is like he's Spielberg proudly says they shot this film in 73 days, which is, you know, very, very short shooting schedule for a movie this epic.

They would shoot just three or four takes, like not like 40 takes, because he storyboarded,

you know, very precisely, which is a Spielberg trademark.

But really, he's like, really for this one, I would, I, you know, they were the fallbacks.

in my previous movies, but for this movie, it was like, really, to stay on schedule and to like, you know, stay to exactly what I it was an exercise in self-discipline for him.

Like he needed to prove to himself that he could do it.

So it's kind of a live-action animated vibe, right?

Like it's like, we've already drawn what's supposed to happen.

Now, there are things, of course, that change, such as the famous fight with the swordsman, which just turns into Indy shooting him, versus like the whip versus sword duel.

Because everyone had diarrhea.

Because everyone had, you know, these are the stories where it's like they became, you know, IMDb lord and everybody.

It's a combination of things being so perfectly worked out in advance and then inspiration hitting and things changing and evolving on the fly i mean chuck jones ben i feel like is kind of credited as being like the real father of bugs bunny uh but also was like uh the main architect of the roadrunner uh wily coyote shorts which i feel like have a lot of influence on this And the philosophy that's talked about a lot about with animation, but in particular all the like Termite Terrace, Looney Tunes Tunes animators was like the importance of anticipation and how to visually

sort of indicate to the audience what the character thinks is going to happen, what they're thinking, what they're trying to do, so that you can subvert the expectation and have the comedy of what goes wrong.

You know, Wile Coyote running off the cliff.

staying suspended in the air, looking down, recognizing he's standing in the air, and then he like falls, you know, things like that, where it's like that's being conveyed wordlessly that's why the like wiley coyote thing i feel like is very has a big influence on this where so often despite the fact that nidana jones has like 40 of the most quotable lines in film history in this one movie many of his biggest sequences he's kind of moving

wordlessly yeah absolutely it needs to play out in his face it needs to play out in his action it's the beauty of even just like the power of the sandbag thing, right?

Of just this moment of him like relishing the idol, walking towards it, the golden glow on his face, taking out the sandbag, holding the two in his hand, weighing it, pouring a little bit out.

And you're like, that's a kind of complicated idea that is being conveyed to us in like 15 seconds.

Okay, this is like a pressure trap.

It's a weight trap.

He needs to substitute it with something of equal weight.

He does it.

He thinks he gets away.

It's wrong.

The thing starts to slide down.

The ground shakes.

It's all such beautiful nonsense.

Yes, but that's like,

this is where I'm very jealous of you, Brian, is I'm just like, I probably knew Indiana Jones as the guy who runs away from the boulder.

That was how it was introduced to me.

I cannot imagine sitting in the fucking theater and being like, already this movie's done so much.

The

temple idol pedestal starts to go down.

You're like, what's going to go wrong now?

No one could have fucking anticipated it was the biggest boulder you've ever seen.

Perfectly round boulder.

A thing that must have felt like impossible that this could even be depicted on camera and like and these things are so cliche now and so part of film history but like even like uh snakes i hate them like screaming laughter in the theater like the first time that joke is told the first time you see him lose his shit like like losing he loses his cool because he's kept his shit together through all this insane shit for like 10 minutes and then the snow caused him to have a panic attack right right snake yeah it's the the the the delight is through the roof it's just it's incredible to even you know you're we're feeling it 50 years later.

You can still

feel the

embers of the joke.

Hey, hey, Ben,

I'm a big fan of Ben and his tastes.

Ben, what was your relation?

Have you seen this before?

That's a true good guest, bringing Ben in.

Oh, yeah.

Specifically.

No, no, I was really curious what your relationship to all of this is.

I am a big fan of Indiana Jones.

Have you always been since childhood?

Yep.

Yeah, for sure.

I mean, it was, you know, it was something

I feel like I'd catch the middle of the day on the weekend playing on cable TV.

I had to watch it, you know?

Also, I played

the video games?

The computer games.

Yes.

Yeah.

The Atlantic one in particular.

I love that game.

Also, he's dusty.

He dresses well.

He goes into pools.

He's finding bones.

He's getting, stealing treasure.

He's just like, he's such an amalgamation of all of these characteristics in this incredible way.

Yeah.

He's He's like kind of a bad boy, but he's smart.

He gets

an egghead.

Right.

Like that's the weird.

I just can't get over it.

Every time I rewatch this.

You love the cut to the universe.

Yeah.

You're just like, this is when the movie should fall apart.

You almost feel like the legacy of this movie should be greatest opening sequence of all time.

And then they fuck it up.

It's literally the greatest exposition scene in the history of

exposition scenes.

It's an incredible scene.

But it's such an insane

change of pitch that it's wild that it keeps the momentum.

But I would say for me, origin-wise, this is like major bone core.

Oh, sure.

Yes.

There's just bones all over this franchise.

You're right.

It's a bone-heavy world.

And he uses it as a torch.

It's a comedic device when, you know, a bunch of brattlin bones come out of nowhere.

I just, I love that.

That's such a fun element.

It's just so fun to consider this like academic being like, well, I'm going to go find this Peruvian idol.

Where is it?

It's in this video game level

cave, you know, where it's like, you have to do eight traps and dodge the spikes and like, you know, solve the puzzle and all that.

And as a kid watching this movie, I'm just like, yeah, the people who built this, of course, this is part of ancient lore.

But also like we were

playing Super Mario my whole life.

Yes.

You know, like.

But also we were born into a post-Indiana Jones world where you're like, oh, I get it.

He's like an Indiana Jones type.

You know, true.

True.

Versus like this movie creating a thing that is like when you break it down into the elements of even how Lucas pitched it to him, it's wild that it was so fully formed because it is an odd idea.

And it's odd that it's not like

there's, there's such an obvious

instinct, I would imagine, to make it into a Clark Kent Superman thing that you're like, oh, Professor Jones is the cover, is his boring sort of like front for his real like adventuring.

Right.

Or

he's a nervous professor who gets thrown into these situations and he's in over his head and he doesn't like exploring.

No, instead it's like,

you know,

U.S.

intelligence comes to him and is like, look.

Hitler wants the Ark of the Covenant.

We figure you're the guy to figure that one out.

Like, you know, like there,

he's a known adventurer.

But to to your point about being the greatest exposition in in cinematic history right the fact that you watch him spin that blackboard and start to break down and chalk the history giving them the backstory right like just dropping his bona fides and his theories and he gets his rocks off as much doing that as he does successfully outrunning a boulder they are both equally exciting to him he plays them differently but then so he goes all right to move the story along then he goes to nepal in search of.

You're really moving along.

No, I am not.

We should mention what?

Belloc!

No, he's not.

We haven't met him yet.

Excuse me.

He's the one

fraternity.

Oh, Belloc.

Sorry.

Sorry.

Not Belloc.

I thought you meant Salak.

No, we'll get back to Salak.

Belloc's there.

Yeah.

We'll get back to Belloc.

Brian's laughing.

I mean, if you want to.

He's happy that he got to see if you wanted

to tell you who they wanted for the part of Belloc.

Sure.

Spielberg wanted Jacques Dutronck,

who's a French actor.

He really wanted this character.

That guy's French.

Well, let me tell you, do you think this guy looks French to you?

Jacques du Tronc?

Don't.

I'm seeing here.

His second choice for the role was Croc, Monsieur.

Croissant du Tronchee.

A French.

These are real names.

These were beloved actors at the time.

But I guess he had played Van Kopp.

Pepe Le P.

Anyway, he's busy.

He was busy smoking a cigarette.

Right, Spielberg really wanted a big character to be played by a Frenchman.

Yes.

Paul Freeman

enters late.

They've already thought about Giancarlo Giannini, which is a fun idea.

Yeah.

And

Spielberg just liked his eyes.

Said he has the champagne villain from a film noir vibe.

Yeah.

Right.

Like, it's like, this isn't a tough guy exactly.

He's like a smart, mean guy and like, whatever.

Good, good.

I also like the villain that's handsome in his own way.

Like, he's equally handsome.

Different kind of handsome.

If that's your type.

Yeah.

He could be a leading man in a different movie.

I also, it's funny.

I always go like, it's wild that he's still alive because he plays so much older in my mind watching this movie than he actually was at the time where I think Ford is two years older than him.

They're roughly the same age.

Right.

And it feels like Bellock is like 15 years older than Indy.

He does feel a little bit patronizing.

I think that's why.

Which is something he's successfully selling as an actor.

I think it's also the fact that Bellock's a little more hands-off, right?

Yeah.

And Bellock is a perfect villain because he's like, yeah, he's smart like Indy's smart, but he sells to the highest bidder.

Right.

Clearly, he has no scruples.

He's unscrupulous.

Yes.

That's very true.

And he,

like you say, like, doesn't get his hands dirty like Indy does.

Indy's, Indy's got, you know, dirt under his fingers.

But is that's what's so frustrating is Indiana Jones can go through this whole fucking adventure, roll out by the skin of his teeth, hat intact, right?

Right.

And be like, oh my God, what a thrilling set piece.

And Belloc is just standing there and he's like, I'll take it.

Thank you.

Right.

That Belloc just is able to stay one step ahead ahead of him while avoiding the trials and tribulations that Indy had to go through.

He's also wearing the uniform of an explorer, Belloc,

but he's not dirty at all.

Dirty, right?

Right.

Like, it's like clearly, he's

an immaculate

white suit.

Yes.

His cream.

It's like he's trying too hard to fit the part, whereas Indy is just, fashion-wise, I mean, one of the best looks of all time.

It's really interesting how the villains.

It's so simple, too.

Like, I feel like the villains of every Indy movie are not really famous actors until, I guess, you get to, like, Kate Blanchett.

By the time we're doing the new ones where it's like, well, everyone wants to be.

When they announced that Kate Blanchett was playing, was, was going to be in Crystal Skull, I was like, well, she must be playing the new love interest.

Right.

Because it feels weird for a franchise that never has out-and-out movie stars as even Mad Michelson feels

too.

well known in that type.

Well, God, I love Mad Michelson.

I do.

He's just lazy casting as a a villain these days.

But right, like Amrish Puri and then like Last Crusade, who would you, you know, who's the biggest

like Alice and Duty?

No, but it's, why am I forgetting his name now?

Your favorite for Employer.

I do love him, Julian Glover.

Julian Glover is the man.

But again, like, these are character actor guys.

Julian is a guy who Lucas liked was like, you're a good stuff shirt.

Like, right.

Right.

And that's what Paul Freeman is, and he's, he's excellent.

Like, you're.

But it's also part of the Indiana Jones structure where it's like you have these secondary, like, third villains.

You have like, you know, boss-level villains.

There's an overarching guy who you're fighting against in sort of like almost a conceptual battle.

But the actual action sequences don't happen with that person, which is, I feel, like, another mistake modern movies tend to make is like they want the Belloc to also be the best fighter in the world.

And you're like, no, that's two separate guys.

Belloc sends someone else out to punch Indy.

And we, and in this time frame of James Bond, Jaws is Richard Keele, right?

That's his, that's his doctor's name, is Jaws.

And that is an iconic villain that goes, like, that is referenced in every

variety show of the time.

That's also part of the Lucas and Spielberg is that there's always these.

weird like you know variety hours that would do sketches about star wars or indiana jones and James Bond and Sir Richard Kill would show up as Jaws.

So when you're watching Raiders and the big, the burly Nazis are they're boxing outside the right outside the plane,

that's a Jaws theme.

Like that's that's a flat out James Bond Jaws scene.

Right.

But it's like, I mean, it's always the example I throw out, but like that's a clear thing they lifted from James Bond very wisely, right?

Yes.

Of like, there's a guy who they're trying to track down who is the man in the lair lair who is going to monitor.

The guy who'll talk to them and wear a suit and pour, you know, serve them dinner.

And that guy will give like an A-class performance.

And then you're going to have some weird-looking guys with gimmicks who create like different sort of like battle puzzles for Indiana Jones to get through.

Versus I always think of Quantum of Solace, where at the end, James Bond has to fight Mathieu Omariek.

And I'm like, well, this fight is over.

Well, there is a big general guy that he fights.

Well, no, it's no good.

Kira Lanko fights him.

Look, we'll do Quantum of Solace one day.

Very interesting movie.

I defeated it.

I will.

I will, Brian.

Thank you.

Do you like Quantum of Solace or are you anti-Quantum of Solace?

I am

such a big

Casino Royale fan that it's hard to wrap my head fully around quantum, but it is a part of Casino Royale.

So it's hard to let it go as well.

Yes, it's one of those.

Right.

Nasty little lights.

I don't hate it, but

you know, much like nothing's Force Awakens except for Force Awakens, same thing with Casino Royale.

I think of it as the Temple of Doom to Casino Royale's Raiders of the Lost Ark in

sort of complimentary answers.

I bump on them in similar ways for similar reasons.

But okay, so then they go to meet Marion.

We have to talk about Marion Ravenwood played by Karen Allen.

Yes.

Obviously, they're looking for Arthur Ravenwood or whatever the fuck his name is.

What's the dad's name?

Abner Ravenwood.

Abner Ravenwood.

Right.

But he's dead.

And his daughter is running the bar in his stead in Nepal, and she's got this medallion.

And, you know, off we go.

But what do we think of Karen Allen?

This is an incredible performance of the highest order.

It doesn't get enough credit to this day.

It just,

even though the franchise eventually acknowledged, like, yeah, she was always the one with these later movies.

Right.

Yes.

We were kind of still

for trying to do anything else.

Right.

Right.

Yeah.

And

I get the, that's, that's the James Bond lesson they they did wrong, I think, which is he gets a new, he gets a new lady friend every

thing.

And also, uh, a lot of people feel like you know, Marion Ravenwood is one of the great characters of cinema and then followed by Willie Scott, who isn't.

Like, I would have been screaming and yelling, just screaming at the top of her lungs the whole movie, which is not anywhere near as interesting as what Marion brings to the table.

Well, it's like they wanted to make the anti-Marion to have fun with the flip side of it, but the anti-Marion means you're doing the opposite of what works.

Marion's a good character.

So the anti-bad switch, and they made one bad choice.

Yeah.

So watching the making of that I sent you that aired on television, there was two takeaways that were amazing.

Number one, that

she basically says, like, I think she's one of the first people to say, she says as nicely as you could possibly say, but she's basically saying, I'm doing everything he's doing, but in heels and backwards.

Right.

And she absolutely is.

And

also that she would come to Spielberg with bigger ideas that he would take very seriously, including, I don't think I knew until recently that the scene between her and Bellock, you know, drinking each other under the table was improv.

They went off to the side, improv the scene, put it together and

gave it to Spielberg.

Like, here's what we worked out because I want to wear this dress and like, I want to do this for the rest of the movie.

And they, they went off and improved and came back and he accepted it and changed the course of the movie in a positive way.

So she has authored her character in a way that few actors, particularly in a movie like this, get to do.

And that's amazing.

It's a thing with Spielberg I find so fascinating is most filmmakers who are this precise in their craft.

have a tendency to go towards the sort of like hitchcock, like you are a model.

I am telling you what to do.

You have to hit, especially because it's just like with Spielberg, it's like, if you step an inch off, the shot's not going to work, right?

The timing needs to be like hair precise.

And yet, it feels like he's very collaborative.

It never feels like he is boxing his actors in.

There's this weird dance between the visual language feeling

so

rigid in a certain sense, and yet the performance is feeling very fluid and organic in between.

And even like Marion's introduction, this long wonner of the drinking contest in the bar in Nepal, where the camera is just kind of slowly moving back and forth between the two of them.

It's really unshowy.

The unconscious effect of it is knowing that you're watching this in real time without cuts, that you're seeing these shots being taken, even though it's probably fucking water or whatever, right?

But it's like such a perfect, wordless, like drinking this guy under the table, walking off, kicking everyone out of the bar, and immediately being like, She's not even like tipsy, right?

And she's also, I mean, she's a tiny little firecracker.

So, this is the other part of this character is that it feels like her first fight with Indiana Jones is also like, how dare you did this to me?

And then you fucking walk out of my life and then you come back like nothing happened and you want my fucking help on one of your stupid fucking adventures, you and my dad, right?

There is this whole feeling of this woman who is like, yeah, look, I'm this like cool badass lady who like beats tough guys in drinking contests and runs a bar and doesn't take any guff.

It's like not by choice.

It's on affectation.

I was basically deprived of having a normal child.

I was raised this way.

I mean, I was raised this way.

My like first romance was a guy who was my father's protege.

who was trying to be my dad and pulled me even deeper into this shit.

To give you some Karen Allen news.

Please.

News?

No, you got dossier stuff.

You know, background.

Spielberg had noticed her in Animal House where she's Peter Wright.

We all did.

She really stood out in a great way as you're better than all of this.

Like he was like, she's like a Carol Lombard.

She's like an Irene Dunn, like one of these sort of like 30s, like heroines with a big chip on her shoulders, right?

Natural fit.

Karen Allen says some of the people who tested that she heard about Deborah Winger, Sean Young, as previously mentioned, Barbara Hershey.

Karen Allen auditioned with John Shea, Lex Luther himself from the 90s, Ellison Clark.

And he was in Mutin X.

Remember John Shea?

Remember?

Remember John Shea?

Yeah.

And then she did a screen test with Tim Matheson.

And it was always the bar.

It was always the bar.

Like that was the, that's what she's doing.

And she said she just loved the character, reminded her again of all those firecracker, you know, broads from the 30s and 40s, right?

And a character that she felt had kind of vanished from movies, right?

Like, that's an old kind of female lead.

Like in the 50s and 60s that kind of character had gone away guess you have like catherine hepburn yeah

the very catherine hepburn yeah she plays the sadness of the character like it's the thing i think that

causes people to like get up in arms and like uh uh cancel indie

I was gonna say, when people complain about fucking like Mary Sue characters, right?

When they push back on this idea of like, oh, so now I'm supposed to believe that this woman who's smaller than everyone is tougher and a a better fighter and smarter and funnier and prettier and all this sort of stuff.

I think a lot of it is like people trying to recapture this character.

And

Karen Allen correctly, I think, figures out how to dramatize all of her behavior being a bit of a defensive posture and like learned survival instincts.

rather than it feeling like,

I don't know, just a show, you know?

She says she went to Spielberg and said, I have a whole history for this character.

I think I was in this romance with Indy when she was 16 years old.

Like, she also is doing this stuff.

And Spielberg apparently looked at her and was like, That's an entirely different movie.

We're not doing that.

Like, like, clearly, like, Lucas and her are both kind of like, what if there's this twisted backstory?

Spielberg's like, I'm making an adventure movie.

It doesn't matter.

Like, stop it.

It's under the hood.

It's a little bit under the hood.

There's a perfect amount of spice, though.

Karen Allen's exactly what he needs.

Right.

Her ultimate take is like, I think she had a crush on him.

Like, you know, maybe there was a flirtation or whatever when she was like essentially a late teenager.

I don't think this was some major romance.

Like, that's, she thinks that's like the movie sort of take on Marion and

Indy,

not something like more darker.

But there's like this version of, it's obviously far less tragic, right?

But like, I think about the end of True Grit,

where like the poignancy of that story is like, oh, this girl kind of never never gets over this, right?

Like, she's this tough, flinty little girl, and everyone thinks it's kind of cute and funny.

She goes on this wild adventure.

Right.

It's clear that she's very tough to interact with because she's such a tough, flinty woman.

Right.

One arm.

And Marion's got like a version of that where you're like, how many fucking adventures was she dragged along to between these two men in her life who were such like important figures in her development?

But uh, that's if you want to see Spielberg direct the scene in the bar, it's in the, in the, in the dock I put on my social media because it's an incredible bit of watching him direct.

Just the wonder of her putting the shot glasses down and

him getting the crowd to do what they need to do and

react accordingly.

That was another wonderful direction.

I was looking at drew number two, a film that we both love.

Have you seen Brian?

I have not seen it, but I will.

It's very good.

Clint Eastwood, famous for doing...

Maybe half a take on it.

One and a half takes, right, is him having a long day.

Right.

A thing I noticed watching this movie that I want to be be clear i like a tremendous amount

uh but now clint eastwood filming digitally it's a little brighter you can see everything i kept in multiple sequences noticing how bad the background actors were and it is a thing that i'm not putting on the background actors no but it's the problem of these clint movies yeah these late clint movies where it's like people really had to come have to come correct because it doesn't take very long and i think the principal cast of this entire movie of juror is doing that but like background actors are a thing that are hard to dial in because it's like a complicated machinery.

They haven't read the fucking script.

They're showing up.

A first AD is like, so basically what's going on in this scene?

They're wearing costumes that they got five minutes ago.

It's hard to get everyone synchronized on the same page.

That fucking drinking contest where there's like 10 people over each of their shoulders.

And you can tell it's a combination of like stunt guys.

character actors and people who seem like non-professional actors.

And all of them are immaculate.

And there's no editing editing wiggle room.

This whole thing has to play out in one shot.

When the camera pans over from one to the other, the people in the background need to be doing the right thing.

And I like rewound it five times.

And I was like, no one's doing too much and no one's doing too little.

There isn't anyone who looks checked out or distracted.

But there's also the opposite of people being like, yeah, Marion, go Marian, and making like huge faces.

And this whole movie is like that.

And that's the shit that's like astonishing for me is he's just able to get everything in the frame correct you know and then even down to like

the um the indiana jones silhouette you know appearing on the wall after marion kicks everyone out of the bar i feel like the story with that is that because the shadow would actually be going in the opposite direction

logically sure but it doesn't okay like they're messing with fit that he's like walking backwards he's starting closer to her backlit and then moving further away.

Sure.

Because if you get closer and closer to a shadow, your shadow gets smaller.

Shrinks.

Yes, right.

Right.

Or the opposite way.

Well, it depends on where the lights.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Whatever.

But it's like that's a moment where Spielberg has this idea of this clear, like impactful, iconic shot.

A lot of filmmakers would get so caught up with trying to capture that image that the Karen Allen performance part of it would be secondary, but that's the most important part is how beautifully she plays that moment of dropping the glasses and immediately being kind of like astonished, emotionally overwhelmed, furious,

and then going up to him and slapping him in the face.

And it's like, here's the whole dynamic all the way.

It's true.

It's all you need.

You're going to go over there right away.

And he never really gets it with any other character in the sequels.

Yeah, the romantic.

Well, I think Willie Scott doesn't work, and Allison Duty is kind of like a misdirect.

Yeah.

Allison Duty's, no, I think she's good, but I think that character is like a kind of

wrong footing.

And I think the thing that Last Crusade gets right is that, like, Indiana Jones needs a sparring partner.

They just make it his dad instead of a love interest because I think they know they're not going to beat Marion on the third one.

It's not worth trying a third woman.

And a winning thing for Crystal Skull for me is when she comes back into it, she comes in as

clearly this woman has never had a break and is now as a glorious agent of chaos.

She is, she is, we,

and to get to the Jewish coding again, I feel with Marion as well, but there is in Crystal Skull, she definitely has that Jewish mother energy of get in the car, we're leaving.

Like, like, this is

like, and I just adore it tremendously.

And there's a joy of her performance in Crystal Skull.

Like, she is.

deeply happy to be back and deeply happy to revisit this character at this age.

And it just, she's shining with it.

It's just, it just makes the movie a lot of fun to watch.

I feel like we adore her.

Animal House was a movie I was shown way too young for how overprotected my parents were.

My dad, basically, like at like maybe six, showed it to me as if it was Talmudic.

Was like, you must understand this.

So she like loomed very large in my childhood.

I feel like one of my first on-screen crushes.

And as you said, I think generationally, especially for people who were alive at that time, that character, like, even though she's not in that much of the movie, she is just like kind of so captivating.

And there is just some sort of like inner life and sort of like, there's a sense of self she has that is very fixed.

And her like weird balance of like

how much bullshit she will tolerate versus when she puts her foot down, which is the stuff that they're like really weaponizing very well in this film.

You know, the Willie Scott problem is like Indiana Jones can't have a sidekick who doesn't want to be in the movie.

And they tried this with Mutton Wombat as as well, which is like, he needs someone who is his equal, but has a different thought process on how they should be handling things.

They both need to be trying to drive the story, but with different approaches.

And Marion's just the perfect example of that.

Where like, and it's just structurally, very beautifully built about when she falls out of the movie and when she comes back, when he thinks she's dead, when he finds her in Belloc's tent, but leaves her there, the sort of like, anytime she's not on screen, you're going, where's Marion?

When's Marion coming back?

By the way, opening weekends, 13 years old, Marion dies.

Totally believed it.

Oh, my God, they killed her.

I feel like I will.

Oh my God, they killed her.

Yeah.

Totally fell for it.

Also, when you watch the documentaries, which I re-watched everything in preparation for this,

Bielberg is so head over heels in love with Kate Capshaw, as he should be in the making of that.

It is distracting them.

It is 100%.

He literally, the end of that documentary, he goes, Indiana Jones didn't get the girl.

I did.

He literally looks in the camera and says those words.

So that's where his head is at when this movie is being made.

So Marion and Indy go to Cairo.

They meet Salah.

It's something you probably know about.

Give your introduction of Toad, who I will say.

Oh, in the mirror, yeah, who rocks.

Is my favorite character.

Of course it is.

He feels.

Ideologically, I like his.

Ronald Lacey in this movie, especially, just looks like a puppet to me.

It looks like they made him.

Now, obviously, maybe that's partly because his face melts at the end in this way that

like you're like he was always a puppet they missed it created by ardmin he is a plasticine man it just there's and he's so good in every scene right he always you're just kind of like this is like a fake person there's something on camera there's an alien in his head working like lever i find it very captivating uh spielberg infamously wanted klaus kinski and couldn't get him to agree that would completely have unbalanced his body might be fun

i mean beyond like this sounds like a production that didn't have the room for error to allow a Klaus Kinske into the ecosystem, the damage he would have wrought behind.

Everyone's pooping their guts out already.

But I'm also like, his performance would have been very overcranked, I imagine.

That would have been fun in its own way.

But there's something about Ronald Lacey kind of like never tipping over.

But instead of the documentary airing on CBS and primetime, it would have aired a con.

Yes.

Yes.

Spielberg said, you know, I thought he had Pierre Laurie vibes, which I think is right.

And just that kind of perfect weird look.

And, you know, the three guys who get melted at the end, right?

It is this perfect triumvirate of villainy of like, you know, Belloc, this sort of cool, erudite.

It's not even ideology for him.

He's really just in it for the money, right?

Then the big lack of ideology.

The big statuesque Nazi guy.

You're just like, can't wait to watch this guy.

And then the weird little creep Nazi guy who's like,

I'm reading naps.

I want Hitler to have arc power.

And seems to maybe have some weird psychosexual thing going on.

But much, much like a lot of other areas of the movie, it's done just the right amount, not really like delved into.

Yes.

Yeah.

So,

yeah, totally, we mean him.

But yeah, okay, we can go to Cairo Sala.

You know, you know who was supposed to play Sala, right?

Danny DeVito.

Danny DeVito.

He was supposed to basically be like a cantina creature from Star Wars, right?

Like a...

this fun little guy.

And DeVito drops out late.

I'm not sure why.

And because we kind of get to see him play the character in Romancing the Stone, it's weird to like

see it.

I still can't see it.

Like, I'm a huge Danny DeVito fan, a huge fan, and grew up with him my whole life.

And I cannot see that.

It's another thing that feels like it would unbalance the movie.

I think so.

Where it would work.

I don't think the movie benefits from Sala being funnier.

I'm sure if Danny Vito were in this movie, every single second on screen would be funny.

But does that help the film holistically?

Which is the sort of balanced thing that Spielberg has such good instincts for at this point in time?

I think especially after 1941, where he's like, maybe I don't have the handle on comedy I thought I did.

Maybe I really need to like be deliberate about this.

It's just so funny that like, in the same way that it's weird that Paul Freeman plays Belloc, whose thing is like hoity-toity Frenchman.

You cast John Rhys-Davies as Sala.

Well, this is the thing.

They send him the script and John Rhys Davis is like, I am not a 5-2 5-2 Egyptian guy.

What are you thinking here?

And Spielberg is basically like, I loved you in Shogun.

He plays, you know, the drunk Portuguese guy and Spanish guy in Shogun.

The Nestor Carvinel played him in the new version beautifully.

I want you to do something like that mixed with like false staff or whatever.

And John Rhys Stavis is like, well, of course I can do that.

Which I think it's just like, even if that...

It doesn't make sense as casting on paper, Spielberg understands what that character needs to accomplish, which is exposition sounds pretty fucking good coming out of his mouth, right?

Like just the actual register of his voice, this sort of like classically trained, he can make anything sound like, like poetry.

Yeah, absolutely.

And he needs to be this sort of like high impact support with this sense of joy and this sort of like

devilish, you know, sort of like mischievous.

quality but also it's like he needs to be able to relay the three lines that explain what's going to to happen for the next 10 minutes of the movie and keep you interested.

Right.

Yeah.

And

from the time he's there helping, every joke lands.

Every line read is perfect.

In fact, when I was trying to imagine how you were going to open this episode, I thought you were, I literally thought it was podcast, very dangerous.

You go first, is where I thought you were going.

I probably would have done an even worse job with that impression.

His voice is just astonishing.

It's incredible.

It's incredible in Dial of Dial

of Destiny as well.

It hasn't lost the beat.

It's another thing that Temple of Doom is missing is Sala.

But yeah, we meet Salazar.

We brushed over Brody entirely.

We brushed over Brody.

Yeah.

You're right because Brody's there from the beginning and he's so good.

Yeah.

And

Denham Elliott was nominated for best supporting actor

at the BAFTAs.

He's probably partly a, you know,

the Brits love this guy.

Hold this up.

I was just looking at this.

Denil Elliott won three consecutive supporting actor BAFTAs.

Right.

So there you go.

After this.

Okay.

I think he maybe had one nomination before this.

He wins for trading places.

Wow.

Yeah.

And then he wins for two other movies, British movies I didn't even know of.

Okay, let me see.

Den Holm Elliott BAFTA.

Well, just while you're looking it up,

if I can be professorial for a second, there's some things in this screenplay that are just undeniably perfect.

And one of them is the fact that Denholm Elliott, like the only time we're ever in Indiana Jones's house for 25 years is the scene where he comes over and goes, hey, don't do this.

Just this is, this is, this is everything wrong, everything bad.

I, I, I'm getting the creeps.

And, and, and then you get to see Indiana Jones just blow him off.

And it's one of a series of scenes where people keep pulling him aside.

And we, the audience, are the only person that also knows that everyone has warned him, don't do this.

Yes.

The good guys, the bad guys, everyone's saying, don't go down this road.

And he can't help himself, which I found it's an incredible bit of business.

So that's following that great exposition scene where not only are we getting all the information we need from the, for the movie, but we're getting Indiana Jones's perception of it and his take on it and his relationship to it.

And that's what's often missing.

from exposition scenes in any kind of storytelling is, okay, we need this information, of course, please.

But what's your hot take on it?

Why you?

Why why am i hearing this from you and what and what what are you not telling me or what are you what are you blowing off and all of that is just exceptional writing characterization getting lost in exposition which is what leads to scenes that feel like homework where you're like okay and when does the movie start versus having the perspective in the exposition of the character reacting to what they're finding out and it's telling you things about them that are going to come in helpful later in your processing of the movie.

Because I mean, Brody, it's like, okay, here's this weird like guy who finances his expeditions, clearly has this kind of like boyish glee at the idea that not only are they acquiring these objects and like protecting them in the right context where they should belong, putting them in a museum, whatever, right?

But also that he kind of loves hearing Indiana Jones report back and tell him the crazy shit he got up to.

He never wants to do that.

He loves that that's part of the equation.

She's not about to fly to Peru and whatever.

But you have like this really beautiful, very quick quick sort of like three-scene arc of Brody being excited to hear what his expedition was like.

Oh, no, Bellic took it from you at the last second.

That's a bummer.

Right.

The only friend Indiana Jones has that could really appreciate all that went into this is his, is his benefit, his friend Brody.

Who he can really share this with.

Then you have like Porkins and his partner show up, right?

Here's a new potential assignment.

You're watching Brody process the information as well at the same time.

And then as you said, followed by him visiting Indiana Jones at home and being like, okay, but seriously, don't do this.

Jack Porkins.

Also, you can pack a gun.

Back in those days, you couldn't pack a gun in your shirt.

Yeah, you could get it through TSA.

Now you can't even pack toothpaste.

But also Porkins,

his relationship to it, they literally come to Indiana Jones and go, hey, what do you know?

And he goes, well, I know this exact information.

And the guy goes, whoa, Jesus Christ.

And like, that I'd never seen that in the movie before.

Like, well, why are you asking him if you're not going to believe him?

Yeah.

It's everything about this scene is is wonderful he lost the bafta to ian holm for chariots of fire which of course is the best picture winner that okay makes sense uh and then the he gets bafta

uh wins uh after this for trading places which he's amazing incredibly funny in obviously and then yes a private function

uh which is like an alan bennett uh famous british dramatist uh like

dramedy with michael palin and defense of the realm which is this kind of like dark british political thriller with gabriel byrne don't know what I should watch them.

Yeah.

Bet you he rocks in them, but it is crazy that he won three.

Yeah, that's a bar looks a good movie.

He won three, three consecutive.

It's 84, 85, 86.

He is nominated for Rumor of the View in 87, which is his one Oscar nomination, which is also amazing.

This is a thing, you look through old BAFTA years, and now the BAFTAs like a mirror the Oscars too closely where it's kind of boring.

They used to just have such pride in their guys.

And it was, it was a more British, there was not a lot of American movies making it in.

And if there is, it's like Holmilli and Raiders, where they're like, well, we like the British guy.

Right.

We like that British guy in that movie.

But then they also like Jamie Lee Crudis wins for trading places that is.

He loves trading places.

It's kind of farcy in the way they probably do it.

They just had interesting zags.

But yes, to your point, like the fact that we're seeing the introduction of the Ark as an idea.

through Brody as well as through Indy means that when Brody says you shouldn't do this, that hits differently for the audience where you're like, this is the guy who likes Indiana Jones doing Indiana Jones shit.

He's bankrolling it.

He thinks it's fun.

He likes hearing the stories.

He's in favor.

And he's saying this is one step too far, which is basically the introduction of like, there are forces at play that are maybe beyond your comprehension.

This is like touching on mystical shit that's a little scary.

Maybe.

Maybe, which Indy is just like, what the fuck are you talking about?

Yeah.

But he literally goes, the wrath of God or some shit, right?

So you're, and by, you know, by Billy Wilder rules, you are promising that we're going to see some wrath of God at the end of this movie.

Or, or they put it there, you don't really think about it again.

And then when the wrath of God starts coming, you're like, oh, shit, we're going, oh, we're there.

We're going to the God's coming.

This is

super exciting because once you hit it, you're like, what am I looking at?

And you remember, oh, they told us wrath of God.

Oh, shit.

So it's deeply exciting.

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I mean, obviously, right, but the weird thing about Indiana Jones that a zillion people have remarked on is, right, he probably didn't need to do anything, right?

Yes.

They were always going to open the arc and all get murdered by it.

Do you have thoughts on this?

And like, this became, right, the sort of galaxy brain nerd take of like, Indy doesn't really even do much.

Well, it's like, we watched this movie of Indiana Jones doing a bunch of shit, but the big question is, if you remove him from the narrative, does the outcome change at all?

Well, our perspective of the narrative changes

in itself changes the narrative.

I would say is kind of like the defining element of what makes an interesting lead character.

This is what people get wrong: they're like, oh, an interesting lead character is a character who does a lot of shit.

They're impactful because they're high-functioning and capable.

He makes the right kind of moral choice at the end of each of his movies, like, you know, right?

Like Indy does.

But I think it's beyond that where it's like, the lesson is

you want to watch the movie that Indiana Jones is in.

The movie where he's not in it wouldn't be fun.

You could watch these same events play out, even if they were unaffected without this guy doing his.

Treasure hunters?

Yeah, no, it probably wouldn't be very fun.

But you see so many blockbuster movies that can't answer why the main character is the main character, right?

Where you're like, they're the main character because they decided that's the main character at the center of the story.

It's not interesting to be telling that story from that character's perspective.

Isn't there also the argument that it's like

when they open the ark, some kind of ancient magic creatures, whatever comes out and they look upon these Nazis and turn into demons and destroy them.

And they do not destroy Indiana or Marion.

Is this, it's not just because Indiana's closed his eyes.

Isn't it also just like they know these spirits have rendered judgment and they know that Indy and Marion are not, you know, evil of heart as everyone else gathered is.

Well, that's the low-level sort of like Inglorious Bastards version of like, this is me creating an alternate history where there is like some modicum of like a microcosm microcosm representation of a course correction of like there being a cosmic balance.

That's imperfect reference is that like we're taking history and we're just little little tweaks so we can have some fun with it.

If you,

I'll answer a question with a question.

If you were tied to a poll with David

and there was the wrath of God was swirling around you and David said, Griffin, keep your eyes shut.

Would you be able to?

It's It's actually a good question.

This is what's tough, okay?

I think I'm capable of keeping my eyes shut.

If David's waving and yelling, and but I'm now I'm commanding it.

If David's the one telling me to do it, the tone of voice is really going to make a difference.

Kriven,

close your eyes.

There's a version of it in which I keep my eyes open just to rile him out.

I'm going to look.

There is, there was an essay by a guy, uh, Matt Pomroy for Esquire, that was sort of like expanding on on this whole, how is the movie's outcome affected?

Does any, what changes if you remove Indiana Jones from Raiders?

And I'm just going to read the quick sort of summary of this.

But he says, like, the argument is, if the major things that change if Indiana Jones is not in the movie is that Tote kills Marion probably right away.

Yes, right, right.

She won't survive.

Right.

Just at the bar.

At the bar.

The Ark would have been flown to germany on the plane because indiana jones wouldn't have stopped the german mechanic

and that means that the ark goes straight to hitler opens up and burns his face so maybe we lose some good pieces you know we lose some heroes this is the interesting thing

you're like the main thing that indiana jones stops is the ark from getting straight to hitler who probably wanted first ride refusal and cracking that bad boy open right right right right right right right it's a it's a it's an interesting perspective, but, and, and, and also, there's a lot of, you know, uh, uh, talk about like, you know, the, the, when we hear the line in Last Crusade of it belongs in the museum, the the ongoing joke, it was a great line of dialogue.

Uh, that, uh, but, and then years later, you go, wait, no, it doesn't.

It does not belong in the museum, it belongs exactly where you're stealing it from.

Uh, but in most of these movies, he is keeping it from bad guys who are taking it.

Like, they are going to to take it.

So

that's that's it.

That he's he's like better a museum or in a warehouse than

in Hitler's.

That's the better part of the argument is that the thing he stops from happening is it getting to Germany.

Right?

It's that like it never ends up in complete Nazi control.

Right.

And Lord knows whatever.

Maybe they could have done something bad with it.

And Lucas had this thing about that the MacGuffin always has to go back where it was or disappear.

He has like that, that he has said this out loud.

And I always wrestled with that back and forth.

It's just from a storytelling point of view.

And I'm like, okay, the perfect ending for Raiders.

And I do believe a perfect ending for Temple of Doom because he returns them to the village.

He does not bring them to the museum.

And you got to get a sense that young Indiana Jones has learned a lesson.

right on some level.

And then by the third one, it's the grail and the grail is just going to go and, you know, fall into the pit.

So even though the joke of it belongs in museum, and uh, there's a comic book out right now called The Horizon Experiment by the guys that did the Good Asian, where it's uh, like a

flip side of Indiana Jones, whereas she's literally taking things out of museums and bringing them back to great adventure.

It's a great idea, I wish I thought it was a good idea.

So, but yeah, what, but Streets of Cairo, right, right, to fill in the several action sequences in between the Denouement and the bar.

Uh, which one is which?

There's the car chase,

which rocks.

There's that.

In the documentary, my favorite stuff about Cairo is these beautiful wide shots that look like either timeless shots.

And then you cut to Robert Watts, the famous producer, who went, and I had to go down and yank every one of those TV antennas off of every rooftop.

And I'm like, oh, those poor people.

It's just, I didn't, I just thought they didn't have antennas.

Television, right?

But it's so much part of the lore of this movie, too, that it's like 120 degrees and they all get like dysentery there's someone who didn't i can't i think it might be spielberg who like wasn't drinking the waters there's some anyway yes yes um but like a movie that is already him trying to keep himself on rails be controlled be precise starts getting like more and more he's basically like throwing dead weight off of a plane with a dying engine going like how do we save like 10 minutes here right and obviously that's how you get the sword versus gun fight fight.

You know the story, right, Ben?

You know, when Indy shoots the guy, right?

The guy's like got the sword and he's swinging around and he just shoots him.

It's like the most badass moment in the, but that was supposed to be a big fight.

Oh, and there was a fully choreographed, like, extended set piece, Indy fighting this guy with a whip versus his sword.

And they get there on the day and everyone is like shitting their pants.

And Harrison Ford's like, what if I just shot him?

What if he does

a big like show and then I just shoot him him there?

Because of course he's got a gun.

Why would he use the whip if he doesn't have to?

That's incredible.

Yeah.

And it's like, it's incredible.

It is this iconic moment that I feel like people try to replicate a lot.

And a lot of times when other movies do something like this, it feels like it is an unsatisfying subversion that you are avoiding us, avoiding showing us the thing we want to see.

I think there's something weirdly just in the like DNA of it

being created in an organic way versus it being something that is reverse engineered.

This is the problem with a lot of movies that try to be Indiana Jones, is they're looking at the end results and going, we need something like this.

You need the swordsman moment.

You need a character like Marion.

And you're starting from like the final result surface level elements.

Indiana Jones also just has so much action that like you don't miss whatever you're missing there because it's on to the next thing and we're running and we're running.

You know, it's like Indiana Jones is 70% set pieces anyway.

So it's fine.

If you want to accuse Indiana Jones of doing anything wrong in the movie, is he has caused chaos throughout this village.

I mean,

he's just like, he has tipped over everyone's business.

These are small businesses and he is just causing chaos.

He is an unhelpful presence.

That's true.

And it's also that he can find treasure.

Like, as much as I love Indiana Jones, he is looking for treasure.

But like talking about Chuck Jones influence, like Marion hiding in the barrels and it like having this like sequence of it almost becoming like three card Monty of like, where is she feels like a thing that Bugs Bunny does to like avoid Elmer Fudd.

You know, like I feel like there are 10 shorts where he does a similar thing where he's like hiding in different jars and peeking his head out.

And the monkey giving her away, giving her up.

Yes.

Very funny.

The monkey Steven Spielberg grew up with in his house.

Right.

And then you're just like, the relationship Marianne has with the monkey in that brief amount of screen screen time feels so mirrored to his mother's relationship with the monkey, which also kind of makes sense in terms of like

what you're saying about part of the Willie Scott problem being that Spielberg was so taken with Kate Capshaw that to a certain degree, maybe his judgment is out the window, right?

I'm not saying that he wasn't noting her more because he was in love with her, but there are other considerations going on in his mind.

He is so sort of like entranced by this woman's existence versus I think what helps Marion avoid ever feeling like some weird kind of like idealized little boy's fantasy of a tough girl who's also pretty and is cool and is funny is that it does feel like to some degree she's like his mom

right that like everything we now know about Spielberg's real mother and from the failed months, but also the way he's talked about her, written about her, and being the sort of person who like refused to be boxed in in life flowy poetic spirit who was being boxed in but was resisting and was like constantly pushing against it and acting out and causing trouble and all of that it feels like he's pulling from a very personal experience of a woman he had a non-sexual relationship with who you know who she had a sexual relationship with is Seth Rogan she did in real life um yeah

the Salah of his family

But but also, like, I know they, it's just like little clips and stuff.

It's almost not fair to even judge the whole relationships on the four seconds they show us in the documentary.

But you can see in the, in the Raiders doc, the, the ones made, like the series docs made about this, is that you can see them,

Karen Allen and Spielberg really working, like really, like,

like challenging each other in the best way possible.

Whereas every clip of him and

Kate Capshaw is very flirty and very, they're having a blast and there's nothing creepy or weird going on, but they are absolutely falling in love with each other and it's just a different vibe it just is yeah

and the the the best part in the in the the stuff with kate capsha is that she won't do the snake right that she's so scared of everything yeah but you'll do the bugs right okay i'll do the bugs and it cuts to the bug scene it goes you promised me bugs like they're this they're very much in that space as a couple right

do the bugs i would do the snake I was surprised by her choice as well.

I think she was just trying to get out of the day.

The Well of Souls, as you mentioned, is cut out of what the comic book or the novelization?

The comic book did not have the well, I believe, yeah, there's like that kind of chunk is cut out of it, but you, I, I, I guess it's the slowest chunk of the movie, it's the least uh, you know, kinetic part, but it's fun, it's fun puzzle stuff.

I like puzzle stuff.

You like,

uh, yes, yes, and this is where it helps to have Salah in this part of the movie, too.

That you have this like bon vivant guy who, when indie is getting more academic,

you could have Salah be big.

Right, right, right.

But even like Salah, like trying to pull the,

like, like, when they're really trying to lift the, the, the lid off the well of souls, like, they're both, there's some tremendous shots there, one of which I've never seen someone strain that hard on camera before.

Like, I just like, Salah's like, really looks like he's going to pop something.

And then there is a shot of Harrison Ford in an almost wild-eyed like mania, like he hasn't slept, it's going to happen.

And it's, it's a, it's a very rare shot of him just

almost like spiritually out of control.

Like, I, I, I must, like, and it's what, not to rewind on you, but you know, Bellock hits him with that, hey, you and I are the same guy, which is, by the way, for writers out there, never write that scene.

It's been written, you don't have to write it.

Please don't write it.

Please, please, please.

Even if you really feel like your villain and hero are two sides of the same coin.

You don't need someone to say it.

Don't have anyone anyone look at the camera and say it.

But in this time, he does.

He goes, Yeah, you and I are the same guy.

I don't even know why we're fighting.

We're both looking for the same shit.

We both feel the same way about this stuff.

And then in that moment where Harrison Ford is wild-eyed to open the Well of Souls, you see that the villain is right.

The villain, that he is right, that Harrison Ford is built of the same stuff as this guy here.

And when the moment's happening, he cannot stop himself.

And that's great character stuff, particularly for an action movie.

There are movies like

Sorcerer and the Abyss and The Thing, two of which we've covered.

Sorcerer will probably do one day.

Definitely cover, yeah.

Where you're like, part of the magic of this movie is you telling how fucking difficult it was to shoot.

Sure.

That those are movies that like

training.

You can feel it.

Right.

And they successfully represent the extreme environmental conditions that the characters are in, which you also know the

cast and crew were put through as well.

And that it's not faked, and that, like, the tone of Kurt Russell's skin is a legitimate reaction to him actually being like in a fucking Arctic environment for that long.

It is wild to me that Raiders in particular does not have that kind of weight to it.

Where I like, if I, when I watch this movie,

it feels light and breezy.

And then every 10 minutes, I think, like, Jesus fucking Christ,

they, this would just must have been the most exhausting gauntlet in the world.

It is nonstop action in like very

inhospitable climates and terrains and just all the things you know about like how rushed they were and everything.

I think that's the magic of Michael Kahn, the editor.

That's true.

One of the magic of this collaboration is this.

lifelong

relationship between him and his editor and him.

And he does it.

He makes things look effortless.

And sometimes that doesn't work towards like, like a hook, it doesn't.

It has that same effortless.

It should look like a little harder.

And with this, I don't know.

There's just like, there's so much grit and dust on screen.

Yeah, Ben, it's a very dusty movie, Ben.

So dusty.

So dusty.

And

Hook is exactly the movie to bring up, though.

Yeah, you're right.

Yeah.

But there's a difficult balance of like, you also don't want this movie being too weighed down by it feeling like too much of a struggle.

There is like a

point.

Right.

Hook, there's like no tension.

Hook is right.

I mean, I know people love Hook, and we're going to talk about Hook, and there's fans of that movie, you know, a whole generation.

We will have a defender on the episode.

It's a clunky movie.

We'll tell you off Mike.

Don't tell you off Mike.

But like, it's a very, it's a movie that sometimes really feels like it's plotting.

And it's, even though these sets are large and these actors are here to have fun or whatever.

But that's what I'm saying.

You're like, you're training.

You're like, oh, this movie was like filmed on air-conditioned sets.

Everyone's trailers were close by.

The catering must have been great, you know?

Like you feel that lack of like Glenn Close stopped by the POF.

Like, I'm sure that that movie had its own struggles in its making, but like Raiders, they were like, this is like a fucking like complicated, like, military operation.

Yeah.

I mean, I think that they're like wheeling into existence.

Spielberg has said with Hook, and again, we'll talk about it, like, where he's like, I didn't have a lot of faith in the meat of the movie, and I cover for it by being like, make the sets bigger more colors more more more you know like yeah and that's how that movie feels to me it's like it's just kind of like trying to distract you from not much I think you're right about Michael Kahn deserving a lot of credit I also think like John Williams' score is so much lighter than you would think.

Yeah.

It is so much jauntier than you would think.

There are obviously like so many different le motifs in Indiana Jones that are iconic beyond just the obvious bump bum bum bump where you're like, it's wild that Indiana Jones has 10 perfect themes that alternate and most of them feel like they're more like they would be more place in like a screwball comedy or like a classic hollywood romance you know who it lost to in 1981

it lost to reds chariots of fire oh well of course chariots of fire there you go and obviously john williams had various he had like three oscars at that point But uh you're like, how did it lose?

Oh, chariots of fire.

Well, it's pretty famous.

I'm sure it will be brought up numerous times throughout this wave of your podcast.

But the John Williams doc on Disney Plus does a really excellent job giving you an overview of what was something I grew up in going back to the world I grew up in.

Is

John Williams delivering a bang, like it's a world-class career-defining banger of a soundtrack about every four months?

Yes.

Just it is

on one.

Jaws, close encounters, all the Star Wars, and then Superman, and

things in between.

It's incredible.

And then, as

expressed in the documentary, he may be one of the greatest, biggest pop stars of all time, and certainly of that era.

Like, there was, who was, who was a bigger musician?

Who did you?

I knew who he was at 11 years old.

I knew his name, and I knew that, that, that, that if his name was attached to the movie, I was in good hands.

But also, like, Marion's theme is like the fifth most important theme in this film musically.

Like that's the quality of like his number five.

You know, it's not just like, oh, he came up with a perfect theme for Indiana Jones, the character, and then the rest of the score is just riffing in variations on that one thing.

It's just incredible.

And to the point where John Williams would then take me to other filmmakers.

Like, I literally feel like how I met Brian DePalma and other people was through.

um oh oh

john williams works with him then he must be equal to spielberg i will then go there.

Well, it's almost like it's like the

famous Roger Ebert, like M.M.

at Walsh, Harry Dean Stanton role, where you're like, no movie with those guys in it can be entirely bad because those guys are always going to do something interesting.

You're like, there is no entirely bad movie with a John Williams score.

It's an interesting question.

There are certainly scores.

There are movies I don't like that he did the score for.

Yeah, but no, you're arguing like, does his score make even the most bland scores?

Have some value.

I mean, mean i can argue 1941 is among his very very best like right here right um john i've written whole graphic novels just to the 1941 soundtrack it's just an incredible soundtrack you did the score to heartbeat fun yeah i remember the heartbeat score being good there you go yeah which is what andy kauffman yeah andy kauffman heartbeat yeah i never heard of that andy kaufman heartbeats i feel like i brought up a lot on this podcast but as like an andy kauffman weirdo comedy obsessed kid i would see photos of that movie in magazines and shit as like, this was one of the first best makeup nominees.

And I'm like, there's a Bernadette Peters Andy Kaufman robot love story movie.

How is this not my favorite movie of all time?

It felt very hard to see for a very long time.

They finally put it out on DVD at some point in the mid-2000s.

And I was like, I get to see Heartbeat, which is about to become my number one favorite movie in history.

And it just so definitively doesn't work in a way that is

astounding.

That was another one of those movies that played for a window on Showtime all the time in the earliest days of cable when there was only like six movies and they just played constantly.

Like the movie Scavenger Hunt would play like constantly, right?

So yeah, so I did see that.

And as a fellow comedy nerd of an age, I was, oh, please, of course, it just, you guys don't understand it.

It's, it's brilliant and you people don't understand it.

And you watch it for four minutes, you go, oh, no, okay, that's all right.

That's right.

Cat skills is the least funny character in the history of movies, the cigar-smoking robot.

I hate to cut you off, but we must finish our discussion.

You don't want to hear me rant about Catskills for the fifth time in the arc of our podcast?

Exactly right.

I do not.

Simply because we have.

As much as he doesn't, I do, but I appreciate it.

There's other episodes for that.

Are there action sequences we have not

gotten into enough

of the many, many action sequences in this movie?

I do think the car chase is the best constructed, you know, the whole thing.

The truck chase.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And also opening weekend and opening experiences.

By the time we're at the car chase, it is, you are truly a breathless audience member.

You are, you just cannot believe how much movie you're getting.

Uses every part of the truck, go on top, go in the hood, go, you know, right?

Like, you know, I like anything that, you know, maximizes a smaller, like, just this is more movie than you thought was previously possible.

Right.

Right.

Like Dave and I talk about when we did the Raimi series and watched those Spider-Man movies, which were so pivotal for us because they come at a

time

parallel with your work and all of that.

But you watch those and there was an expectation of superhero movies where for so long it was like, you can't make these.

They're too expensive.

The effects aren't there.

And then it finally got to the threshold point.

Computers can make Spider-Man swing through the air.

But you'd watch these movies and be like, he's going to have like two fight scenes.

Right.

It is just not cost effective.

Right.

He will have like one fight scene in the middle.

I mean, God bless.

That's what the first X-Men movie is.

Totally.

Where you're like, oh, they're out of action money.

Right.

Like, you know, like, there's two really, two to three really fun.

And I love

a very soft spot for that movie.

Yeah, but I do as well.

But like,

the final battle between the Green Goblin and Spider-Man at the end of the first Raimi movie is like four minutes.

Right.

You know, it's like...

I'm physically incapable of not saying out loud that I saw that movie for the first time.

sitting on a couch next to Stanley and Sam Raimi's office on an AV cart.

That fucking movie.

They rolled in an A-V cart.

And I was not told what I was doing there.

And then that's what I found out I was doing there.

And I'm now supposed to watch the movie when Stan, who I don't know, is sitting right next to me.

You must be having a lifetime of emotions about

the special effects catching up to that which he's been trying to make this movie since he thought of it.

Because he must have only been in the Marvel fold for like a couple of years at that point, right?

Yeah, no, I was early goings.

I did not know I was there.

Sam Raimi

smartly figured out that he and i had the same job to right to re-introduce spider-man right yeah and it was and were as interested in the things that we did that were similar and the things that we did that were different and had had us come in as like the first test audience and it was it was an genuinely an incredible moment in my life because i'm literally just a sam raimi fan just the evil dead guys here and then all of a sudden stam walks in hey too believe us sits down and and we're watching the movie it was it was good raimi impression by the way thank you did he like it he was, I literally, he got emotional at the end.

There was like, he wasn't, well, he wasn't bawling, but he was, he was, you know,

he was misty-eyed and took us down memory lane for a while.

It was quite wonderful.

And then, and then they asked us, you'll, you'll like this.

They, um, they asked us if we wanted to stay and help like rewrite, work some of the dialogue situations out.

And Dan grabbed his Windbreaker and he goes, oh, well, I wrote 126 issues of Spider-Man.

They're all yours.

Goodbye.

And he was gone.

And I, as a younger creator, just stayed and immediately realized that he was smart and I should have ran out.

Right.

And you're not just talking to

execs all night.

Yeah, but whatever.

But

it's cool.

It was an incredible day.

I'm sorry to start.

No, it's a pretty good anecdote.

You're a liar.

The reason I brought all this up is that I have, I think, I imagine this is what it would have felt like to watch Raiders in the theater at the time.

But seeing Spider-Man 2 opening night when the Subway Chase sequence goes on for like 15 minutes.

It keeps happening.

And I kept feeling like, this is impossible.

How is this still going?

The projector should be breaking down.

I don't think the infrastructure exists to let Spider-Man exist doing Spider-Man shit for this long.

And that's not even the final sequence of the movie, where it's like, by the time you get to the truck chase and you're like, this is like the fifth.

like absolute like balls to the wall like jam extended set piece that he has constructed now in this movie.

And also set it up with one of the greatest lines in history, which is, I don't know, I'm making up as I go, which is

such a ballsy line of dialogue for any action movie, let alone this.

I don't know.

It's just like, you're like, oh, oh, I don't know what's happening.

But it's a fucking mission statement.

I don't know what's happening.

Right.

It's a mission statement.

It's the thing that so many of the impostors get wrong.

And it's the same thing that works about John McClain in the first diehard, is it's fun to watch a hero who is is capable but doesn't totally have it figured out that we need to watch them work it out if someone is too in control of a situation it gets pretty

boring

and you want to see the struggle the pain them doing the math in their head

Yeah, he's smart.

He's passionate.

He can do it.

He's not going to stop.

How far will he go?

This is where we are in the movie in our headset.

Like, how far is this going to go?

And then also, then you find out from making of that it's mostly second unit, that he, that Spielberg gave over that sequence, a very storyboarded sequence to the second unit.

And they talk about it in great length in the documentary.

And so you're like watching a stunt team being given free reign.

It's almost a Valentine to them.

Like, like, here's everything we know how to do.

And we're going to have the blast doing it.

And no one's telling us no because the director's not here.

And you're getting all their best stuff.

George Lucas also did a lot of the second unit.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He basically had to do that.

Like that was how to get the movie finished.

But it's also, I think it's a self-imposed Spielberg's like, I'm not doing 1941 again.

I will not go over schedule.

I will not get this reputation.

Right.

The way to keep this movie on rails is to understand what needs to be delegated to other people.

Right.

Right.

So, uh, should we shout out at least the shirtless chungus Nazi?

I love that guy.

He's so huge.

Again, you love his ideology.

No.

No.

Can I do that?

like david

no

this is not quite a merchandise spotlight but here's the thing i want to say kenner gets the star wars license in 1977 right and starts making all the figures and some of them they come up with these names like the walrus man you know an elephant head and whatever uh that later then lucas is like no no no we need to give him canonical names this is moman nidon this is whoever this panda baba right

But the whole like Lucas-y thing of like, we're going to come up with a backstory and a name and a species and a planet for every fucking background character, any object you see in any shot, even if it's never explained, there's an answer for it.

I love that across now four plus decades, the history of Indiana Jones merchandise, none of these characters are ever named.

He's named German mechanic.

Correct.

When those toys are sold in 1981, they are German mechanic.

Monkey Man, you know, like those are their names.

Cairo Swordsman.

Right, exactly.

Wow.

And then like Lucasfilm loves to fucking backfill and be like, never mind, mind, we finally landed on a name for that Star Wars character.

Never does that with Indiana Jones.

None of them are ever fucking named.

Like, any character who isn't given a name on screen has no canon name.

Yeah.

It is a loosered world, which is fine.

It's good.

Right.

But also, you're like, who's that character?

He's a German mechanic.

Big guy.

Big man.

He's got a fucking Raleigh fingers mustache.

He does.

How do you know about Raleigh Fingers?

How do we know about Raleigh Fingers?

Just at my age, like when that guy punches Harrison Ford right in the fucking face, you're like, oh, he falls down.

Like, like, he's literally his, his, his, his, his, his knees go to jelly.

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

I'm sure Burt Reynolds did it and stuff in the, in the Smoky the Bandit movies and stuff like that.

But I, I, I just, I had not seen it.

And I was, oh my God, he might die.

Comparing, not comparing everything to modern day, but like the infamous fucking like Dwayne Johnson, Vin Diesel, contractual, how many punches they can take and how they can never lose a fight and whatever.

You got two movie stars who both look like the German mechanic and refuse to ever look uncool or weak for half a second.

And Harrison Ford's like, no, this guy should fucking

have no ego about this.

I beat him in the end.

Everything should be hard for me.

Great.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Things are hard.

And in the movie, the great scene where we, the quiet moment on the submarine, where you get to see how beat the fuck up he is.

Like, oh, everything hurts.

I mean, like, that's still to this day, not something you see in movies.

Really, from then to the end, he doesn't do much.

Like, he's really out of commission and he's tied to a pole.

Like, it's like, that's right.

Once they're on the U-boat and stuff, it's really just a matter of Jones being like, I think Bellic wants to test the arc, you know, and that's sort of going to be the weakness here, right?

Yeah.

Rather than this going right.

But you're right.

From that moment on, you have like the moment of intimacy that comes only when he's acknowledging his own wounds and scars, the years, not the mileage, right?

This moment that incredible scene.

Right.

And the fucking just when you think it's going to lead to like an ecstatic love scene, it leads to like he's getting knocked out, you know?

Like he just is barely keeping his shit together.

I mean, and to be the end of Indiana Jones, where Jewish ghosts melt Nazis, is awesome.

Yeah.

But it's a passive ending for Indy in a way.

And so it's a bold choice.

Post the boat.

Basically, everything he tries is kind of a non-starter.

Yeah.

You're like, oh, he's going to put on like a German soldier outfit.

He's going to infiltrate them.

This will be an exciting last 30 minutes where he's amongst them.

Almost immediately they catch them.

They're like, we busted you.

You're right up there with a fucking bazooka.

What do you think you're doing?

You look like Harrison Ford.

It's just surprising in a way that they, whatever.

Like, it just feels like a Hollywood studio now, I guess, would be like, well, come on.

No, Indy has to, you know,

use the ghosts against them or whatever.

You know, like, they're Indy has to be more involved in this.

But it's their thing and they get to do what they want.

And who is the Hollywood studio in this case?

That's not, no, but that's George Lucas.

That's what I'm saying.

Right.

Like, you know, they don't have.

It's like A notes, I think, were less bad then than than they are now.

But on top of that, you basically have this movie bankrolled by another artist.

Yeah.

And so they get to that.

And also, like, there's some shots in the dock about like Spielberg looking at like the models for the ghost, you know, the angel of death that's coming at the end.

And they look very space alien.

um the very close encounters-ish like and to the and he's delighted he's like oh this is perfect i'm like oh i would not be able to see like what he sees like it's kind of amazing that he does see what it actually is going to look like on screen because you cannot tell with even perspective that that's what it, what it's going to look like.

The other thing I want you to say, I think, about the action heroes of the time.

So, when I was growing up, when Harrison Ford got into shape for Temple of Doom, it was international headlines about how bust out Harrison Ford is.

He is jacked to the gills.

He got in shape.

And then you see it today.

He is just in very good

physical shape.

Justin Long in comedies is as buff as Harrison Ford is in Temple of Doom.

So this summer, I had a good summer with the kids, like showing them stuff they wanted to see they hadn't seen before, like Terminator 2 and The Martian, just like stuff that they were too young for when they came out.

Yes, the Martian.

And

looking at Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2, which is not him at his biggest, but him at his most iconic.

And he is the exact same shape as Paul Rudd and An-Man.

Yeah.

Yeah, basically.

I mean, look at that.

What the biggest man in the world at that time, the biggest man in the world, and that is, that is mid-Marvel by today's standards.

Yes.

I'm not throwing out the Justin Lung thing wantonly.

No, I remember.

I knew exactly what you're talking about.

I know exactly.

I had a very specific moment.

I think probably around that time that He's Just Not That Into You came out.

when I was like trying to kickstart my acting career in whatever way.

And I was waiting at a stoplight to cross the street in New York.

And I looked over and he was standing next to me.

And the first thing I clocked was, wow, he's got like guns.

And I was like, this isn't Justin Long trying to campaign for some superhero role.

Like our whole body image of people in movies has become so distorted that the guy who plays the skinny, gawky guy in comedies is actually cut in real life.

Yeah, like cheating in the good place.

But

I, yeah, I remember like Harrison Ford working out made me go work out.

Like I was like, you can do it.

Like, I, yeah, I, this little, I should get some definition.

Like, but I, I do, I, I, I guess I also saw it as obtainable.

Like, like, here, like, like, he had worked out and he'll feel good, you know.

Yeah.

Also, we haven't mentioned Harrison Ford gets hurt a lot in movies in real life.

Like, watching all the documentaries in a row, he gets hurt on every single one.

Almost every movie gets shut down.

He's always breaking limbs and crashing.

Yeah, like,

up until including Force Awakens, like, like, like, he's.

He, like, broke his arm or leg in the hydraulics.

Okay, so the I'm just making it up as a go-along thing, I think works because in some ways that is an admission of Spielberg talking about his own creative process, right?

Yeah, that is the side of Indiana Jones that is Spielberg himself who's looking around at the elements and gaming out what is the most fun way to construct this.

How do I get out of this, right?

It's not even the most fun way to construct it.

It's what people talk about where he gets to set and goes like, what is the fewest number of shots I can get this this in?

If this person walks from here to here on this line, then suddenly that's a wonner and we can cover half a page in like five minutes or whatever it is.

He's the most famous for it, and it gets talked about endlessly by film nerds, but you, you guys will reference it often.

It is to watch him construct this, like when he, when the dock cameras are on him, watching him in real time construct a scene either from this or from Lincoln with the same amount of just he's so good at it.

It's just an threat.

He really may be the best at that that ever lived.

I think he is.

And it's like you watch that footage and it's almost like he's like speaking in tongues where it's like he's channeling something from like another dimension where he's just like, oh, wait a second, da, da, da, da, da.

And he just like calls out five chess moves and he's not doing it in a bossy or demanding way.

It feels like it's just coming to him suddenly.

And then the thing comes together so quickly.

And he just like knows exactly how to get it really fast.

The other part of it is the Indiana Jones thing: talk about the falleability of him as a hero, right?

That he isn't worried about looking weak or failing or whatever it is.

There's something unified there in the fact that Harrison Ford himself hurts himself a lot.

And it's not just like, oh, he gets injured on set because he's not good at doing stunts.

He gets in a fucking planes and crashes them.

And then people go, Hey, Harrison, maybe time to stop flying planes.

And he's like, fuck off.

And it gets in another plane.

Like, there is something he's playing that speaks to something very real in him, which is this guy who just just keeps fucking doing the shit.

Even when he gets like knocked out, he just gets back up and walks off like the fucking crash site.

Yeah, but pre-Indian Jones, you remember a scene where there was just a moment where the hero looked his wounds on camera?

I can't

think of it.

No, and like thinking about like comparable like 70s stars.

You know, I know this is an 80s movie, but like, you know, who are the

towering figures of like 70s action cinema, right?

A, they're largely a lot older.

Like, you still have like, you know, Lee Marvin movies and like Charles Bronson movies and those things where those guys are a lot steelier and a lot more humorless.

Burt Reynolds is way more humor.

He does not want to show that he cares.

He's never going to get his hands that messy, right?

Like he's more the Han Solo type of wanting to be a little bit above it.

And then you have like Dirty Harry, who is similarly just like, Dirty Harry's never going to show fucking vulnerability.

Yeah, I was like, like, wonder, like, when I was thinking back on this, like,

how did I, as a kid, know that Burt Reynolds didn't give a shit?

Like,

what was it for me, like, going on the tonight show?

I mean, I, yeah,

it was messaged to me.

Just like he doesn't, he's not giving other things.

But it's like, that was the product.

Like, that's what he was selling.

It was like, he was like the pet rock, and people were like, so what do I do?

And they're like, you just put the rock on your desk and you pretend it's a pet.

And you're like, I got to do the work.

He's just going to sit there and flub his fucking lungs

um also um you were talking about the costuming it's also how he's wearing the costume that the costumer talks in the documentary about how how harrison wears clothes and uh he's not just wearing the jacket he's kind of wearing the jacket like almost off his shoulders half the time like it's barely on him it's very unique like he it's and when he like like buttons up his tie and like puts the jacket like there's there's a there's a a more like a more respectful Indiana Jones in the in the costume but most of the time it's it's the jackets almost not on his shoulder but that's like the craftsman side of it which is like he's doing things that are unnatural but he understands that he is in the business of making iconography and the tough thing to do is to do that and not have it play as self-conscious that he is able to give this very like natural behavioral performance with that kind of self-awareness.

Yeah.

And again, you said before, the other thing with Spielberg is every single one of these supporting performers and/or stunt people and/or just presence on the screen just really feels right and exciting and surprising.

Like it's just everywhere you turn, there's something really interesting to look at.

There's someone who's bringing their whole story to this one line of dialogue that they're reading, even the Nazis.

You know,

also, I

because I know we're heading towards the end here with the Nazis, but it was very interesting to me when they were talking about making a crystal skull.

And he said, no, Nazis.

I'm not like he literally, the only rule Spielberg put out is I'm not going back to doing cartoon Nazis post Schindler's list.

Yes, he refused.

Yeah.

Like, and that

arc of just maturity as a storyteller, like I, I, I have made a statement so powerful, I can't go back to the Bugs Bunny Nazi.

I can't do that.

And I, him knowing he can't do that.

I find that very fascinating, but it also feels like an admission that he shouldn't have made another Indiana Jones movie.

That's the problem.

It is what is so interesting about him that like, you know, I feel like it's been said that part of the calculation of making Temple of Doom a prequel was that he didn't want to just do the Nazis again.

And if you were setting it right after,

World War II isn't resolved.

You don't want to go too far in the future.

It felt like you could put it earlier and put it in a different timeline.

And then Last Crusade, he's like, why am I trying to like fucking perfect something?

He's never going to be better than Indiana Jones fighting the Nazis.

But if you get to a point where you don't want to make Indiana Jones fight the Nazis anymore, then maybe it's like not the time to make an Indiana Jones movie.

But also you get that.

that great line in Last Crusade, the famous Nazis, I hate these guys.

Like he's the only one that hates them.

Like

this is something about me you should know.

I don't like Nazis.

It's very, it's a great.

Yes.

It's a great line.

One of of his defining characteristics.

And you had to wait a decade for it, too, which is great.

All three face meltings.

So good.

So different.

I mean, obviously, Toad is the best one.

Yes.

But they're all fun.

But it's like

three of the best practical visual effects of all time, all happening right next to each other.

And as you said, what's great about it is that they're three different bites at the apple, that they're different

philosophical approaches.

The practical effects were good.

I think also the individual freaks are, you know, like Paul Freeman is the best.

I mean, not Paul Freeman, sorry.

Toad is the best.

Ronald Lacey, the way he just goes like,

like, you know, he, he hits the scream the best, but yeah, just

one is sort of shrinking, right?

Like a sort of drying fruit.

Tote, the Nazi guy, tote melts.

Yeah.

And Bellock blows up.

Yeah.

Boom.

The behind the scenes of the tote head, where like it was this incredibly like complicated, immaculately built layer by layer, basically like candlehead.

It makes sense because that's exactly what it looks like.

It looks like this thing is truly like being melted layer by layer.

Right.

And they had like 40 fucking hair dryers on it, and then we're speeding it up even further.

But you're like, it's a thing they could only do one time successfully.

Right.

And a lot of it is like theoretical, where they're like, we think this will work.

It worked.

It's cool.

And it still works.

I'm here in Portland where Raiders and Jaws play on theaters at least once a summer.

So I got to take the kids to like my son saw Jaws for the first time.

Completely works, even by modern, through modern eyes.

And Raiders also works.

And the head melting completely.

Like, I always wonder, like, does this read at all?

Or is this just something I grew up with?

So I love it, right?

It's decades old.

Does this just look like an old like Three Stooges cartoon to my kids?

You know what I mean?

And they come, it nope, does it work completely rattled them?

And to the point like even watching it now, I remember thinking, Do they find an actor that looks like this model they built?

Because they like this, it's so perfectly right.

That's part of what helps sell the illusion.

You're right, is that he himself looks like a model, right?

Right.

That's why he looks like a little robot, like I said, like a little alien.

So

it's also just very satisfying in that sort of careful what you wish for way.

It's Nazis getting what they deserve, but it's also just right.

You're like, you're like, yeah, I

know.

Now, maybe in

the moment, I would not know this, but the viewer has the kind of confidence of like, I wouldn't open that fucking box.

Ben?

You don't open the box.

If I open the box, I think God's hand would come out and pound me.

Be like,

what's up, brother?

Like, keep it up, Benny.

Right.

And then just turn into a bunch of coins.

Yeah, buddy.

He wouldn't beat your ass.

He'd dap you.

Oh, yeah.

Absolutely.

Good job.

But it does feel exactly like In Glorious Bastards where, like, oh, this is much farther along than I thought we were going with this storyline.

Like, we are well past what I thought was the line.

So, that's very, and also, I don't know where this is going to end.

Is God going to show up with the voice of Gene Hackman and give us the business?

I don't know what's going to happen.

God,

Gene Hackman never played God, did he?

Yes, he did.

I just tipped my hat.

It's a movie with

the movie that isn't Greece starring.

Two of a kind.

He is the voice of God in the John Travolta Olivia Newton.

Wild.

Yes.

Oliver Reed plays the devil.

Is that movie good?

Probably not.

That was a notorious.

Another one I saw in theaters.

So just from my experience requesting Greece, of course, this must be, even if it's half Greece.

Yeah.

You know, it is a truly terrible movie.

It's a hard movie.

Speaking to, by the way,

I re-watched the Siskel Ebert of

this movie

because also I'm of an age where everything Siskel Ebert did affected me greatly.

They were my film school for all of my childhood.

And everyone they championed,

I immediately took notice of.

And

so you watch this clip and they are just giddy with excitement over this movie.

They just can't believe they experienced this movie in a way that they rarely show on camera.

That's awesome.

And it really is.

And Siskel says to Ebert, you know, I was thinking,

is this year a movie such shit that I'm just loving every second of this?

Like, we haven't seen, he goes, honestly, Rogers, we haven't seen a good movie in like six months, like a really good movie.

He goes, is it that or is this just a really good movie?

And they agreed that it's just a, it's a really good movie.

And this was a terrible movie the year for the cinema.

Like, it's kind of surprising that it got nominated not just for best picture, but best director when they had snubbed Spielberg for Jaws.

Yeah.

But it did just like, this movie, I think, was just fucking undeniable.

Yeah.

And it was obviously the biggest hit of the year.

And the, you know, but you're right, of course, the Jaws had been as well.

Now, but it's treated like the Spielberg movies Pre-Sheen Laz is treated, where it gets the noms, wins a bunch of tech awards,

and does not touch, like, there's no acting attention and, and it loses to Chariots of Fire and Reds, respectively, for picture and director, which are Reds is this, you know, big egotistical passion project.

I love that movie.

I love that movie dearly.

It is, it is one of my favorite movies.

It's amazing.

I covered it in great length on Scott Ackerman and Scott Henry Seen.

Oh, yes.

Oh, that's right.

Great episode of Scott Hasn't Seen.

Oh, thank you.

And then Chariots of Fire is the little movie that could that year.

That's the movie everyone, it's the

coda of its year.

Everyone's.

But you know, I really love that movie.

Those are serious movies about serious things coming out of a 70s where New Hollywood was like, we got to fucking engage with shit politically.

And like Spielberg is making these like fun, like gumball rally movies yeah it's just not right the oscars have not caught up to what he's doing yeah uh and they and yet they couldn't ignore him

there's a weird balance of them being like come here but not too close right yeah to be clear i love reds i love reds it's a weird public narrative that goes on for the 80s like when's spielberg getting his due Like this is this is the narrative through every movie, including Color Purple and all the way, all the way up to Schindler's list.

Let's play the box office game.

Okay.

Any final things you want to to say?

I mean, the final moment, you sort of teed this up, but it's like, it is the one most satisfying resolution to what do they do with the relics that the movie, the sequels can't ever replicate of just putting it in a crate and it's just like stacked up.

And then this incredible shot of this warehouse and being like.

Every single fucking crate in this place is an Ark of the Covenant.

Some fucking thing in there that caused some crazy adventure, presumably.

Yeah, anyone with a little story brain just explodes.

Like every one of these is an adventure.

Every one of these is a comic book I have to read.

It's also kind of like, it's this weirdly like bittersweet note of like, and all that for what?

It like gets stacked up.

And then you get the shot of Karen Allen in full wardrobe and makeup, like a woman about town, like, like, which we had not seen because we've only met her.

We met her at her lowest and watched her through an adventure.

So here she is in full makeup, and you're like, holy shit!

I don't know.

It just, it was like at the end of the movie, the last thing you think of, oh my God, is

a fun thing to think of.

And also

thinking of it, like, if it was today, I wonder if Karen Allen would have more of like a Jennifer Lawrence career.

You know what I mean?

More of, like, I know she had shots where she got

it on the Star Man.

Right.

I mean, I think we both said that we think she should have won the Oscar that year, and she wasn't even nominated.

And it does feel bizarre for like

either either or if it was just Animal House or Indiana Jones, you'd be like, either one of those should have set her up to have a dominant career for 15 years.

The fact that she did both, it's just kind of bizarre that she didn't have a bad career, but it's like she should have been like one of the top five female stars in America for all of these.

Yeah.

And yes, she was clearly capable of doing anything and everything and still is.

Yeah.

Film was the biggest film of the year.

It was successful.

Very successful.

Made $220 million domestic, $20 million budget.

Comes out June 12th, 1981.

Brian was there.

I was there.

Opens number one at the box office.

We're in this stage where we, you know, wide release.

We're beginning to have opening weekends.

Number two is another.

What did it open to?

Did you say?

$4 million.

Robust.

Yeah.

But also, interesting, I was reading this morning, was not tracking well prior to release.

They were worried about it.

There was Superman 2 without tracking it by a mile.

Interesting.

So that is, yeah, I know.

Superman 2 is one of the big hits of the year, but not as big.

But as a child,

it was all in on Raiders.

Like,

we couldn't wait.

So that's weird to hear that.

It is opening against another new movie that is a big adventure movie, epic fantasy movie.

that is

not as well remembered.

In 1981, it's a big epic.

Yes, it's not Excalibur, is it?

No, no.

Even more ancient than that.

In terms of when it's set?

Yes.

Is it biblical?

No.

A little forward, maybe.

I don't know.

No, it's no.

Ancient myth.

Ancient myth.

Yes.

Last of the Titans?

There you go.

Oh, with Harry Hamlin and Lawrence Olivier and, you know, release the Kraken Mode.

Obviously later remade with Sam Worthington.

Yes.

The last work of Ray Harry.

He is kind of our generation's Harry Hamelin.

Yes, no.

I mean, that's the big thing is it was the end of the Harry Hausen.

Right.

And look, it's a throwback.

We're letting Harry Hausen do one last.

Yeah.

Here's another new movie that week.

Okay.

A comedy.

One that we will.

Also, epic.

One that we will, I'm sure, cover on this show one day.

We will cover this someday.

We will cover this directly.

One.

Epic comedy.

Is it a genre mashup?

It's a comedy

epic?

Hmm.

He's struggling to think how he would describe it.

Epic movie.

Is it History of the World Part one?

Holy Moses?

Oh, it's like a History of the World Part 1 from Mel Brooks.

I was going to pull out a Holy Moses, which is pretty.

That would have been good.

Yeah.

But not a film I've maybe only seen once.

Not a Mel Brooks, I really know very well.

It's not one of my favorites, but

it is.

It's got good stuff.

It's consistently funny.

It's got great stuff in it.

Yeah.

But so all three of those movies are opening against each other.

That's wild.

Very weird that Raiders and Clash of the Titans, like those feel like way too much overlap there, but they were.

Now, number four at the box office, Ben, you might be interested by this movie.

It is.

It's called Bone Dirt River.

It is the third of, I mean, I don't know, six or seven films that this comedy duo made that you might be interested by.

Is it a Pryor and Wilder?

I know you were pitching this to Ben.

Okay.

Oh, I think I know who it is.

I don't want to guess.

These guys like to, you know take it easy oh you're talking about cheech and chong that's right my boys what is the third cheech and chong movie big proponents of the jazz cigarettes those two yeah uh is it the weird one where they're it's like the brothers horseskin brothers i think is the last that is their

thing okay yeah way off okay the second one is cheech and chong's next movie is that correct

That is the second one.

The first one is up in smoke, obviously.

The first one's up in smoke.

Is this Sweet Dreams?

It's called Nice Dreams.

Okay.

In which they sell drugs out of an ice cream truck.

And Stacey Keach is a DEA guy who's trying to catch him.

Should we do the Chee Chun Chong movie?

We've mentioned it.

We've had him on Patreon Brackett.

I got to say this.

I've seen, I don't know if I've seen all six, but I definitely have seen a lot of them.

And I don't remember anything about them.

That's weird because he must have been dead sober while watching.

Would you include Yellowbeard and After Hours?

No, no i feel like

because we'd want to we'd want to save that for martins corsesi and mel damski series any credit for pulling mel damski director of yellowbeard no i think it's no lookup it's up and smoke next movie nice dreams things are tough all over still smoking and corsican brothers is sort of their last live action film together in how many years uh they did them very close together like like up and smoke is 78 and corsican brothers is 84.

Like, they did them all back-to-back to back-to-back-to-back, and then they stopped.

Was there a later, more recent movie where they teamed up again, animated?

Am I for it?

Yeah, it was straight to DVD.

It was straight to DVD.

Oh, no, it wasn't actually.

It did have a limited theatrical release, the Cheech and Chong's animated movie.

Exclamation points.

But I was also thinking, because I know they've both done animated roles.

I was like, was there a thing where they cast them like Brother Bear style to play animals?

Well, Chong is in Zootop.

That's what I'm saying.

And Cheech is in Lion King.

Right.

They're all in, you know, they're reliable.

He's, of course, Ramon and Cars.

Right.

Of course.

I'm sure there's a Nash Bridget special episode.

Yeah.

Number five is a romantic comedy directed by and starring its star, written, directed by, and starring this man.

Is it an Alan Aldo?

It's an Alan Aldo.

I got that right.

You did.

Okay.

Is it the one with Carol Burnett?

It's the one with Carol Burnett.

And Len Cariou, Rita Moreno, Sandy Dennis.

Do you know this title, Brian?

I know it's not Sweet Liberty.

Sweet Liberty is young Michelle Pfeiffer.

Sweet Liberty is his second film.

Okay.

And there's the

Joe Tinin one is a different one, right?

There's the one where he plays the politician.

Is that what it's called?

I don't fucking know.

Yeah, the seduction of Joe Tinan.

Thank you.

Okay, this one is called, this isn't the Four Seasons, is it?

It's the Four Seasons, his debut, which is now being remade

with Tina Faye and

John Hamm, maybe?

Really?

That's not a Neil Simon?

That feels like a Neon Sam?

It feels like a Neil Simon California suite type thing.

Ah, that's it.

And it has a four-part structure, you know, season by season, but it is

not.

It is Alan Alda, written and directed by him.

Never seen it.

I never have either.

I'm trying to find this thing.

There was an announced fucking Tina Faye four seasons.

Yeah, you're right.

There is some kind of Netflix show.

I think.

But I'm trying to remember who the other person is.

It can't be John Hammond.

He's in every TV show now.

Like, it can't.

It might have been Corell.

Steve Carell.

It's a date night reteam.

Yeah, I could see that.

Yeah.

Coleman Domingo.

Sure.

Also in the top 10, you've got,

and I wonder if you saw any of these movies.

Brian, you've got Bustin' Loose, the Richard Pryor film.

That was on cable constantly, all the time.

Never seen that one.

Cicely Tyson is in it.

I don't know.

It looks like he's busting loose, I guess.

You've got the Sean Connery movie Outland,

which is a Peter Himes film.

Right.

Joy Peter.

That's like him with a shotgun.

But it's like set on Jupiter.

Right.

It's like a Space Western.

I've never seen it, but it seems very cool.

And my guess is it's not as cool as I want it to be because it's not that famous, but you're saying it's pretty cool.

It is not that cool.

There is a comic.

believe it or not, there is a graphic novel adaptation

by Sarenko.

Wow.

Well, full circle on this puppy, but and it's one of his great

mid-career moments as a comic creator.

And the comic book is so well done and so innovative and Sarenko kind of thing that you go see the movie thinking you're seeing something similar and it's just not there.

It's very,

you know, like there's certain sci-fi movies of that era that just all vibe like Black Hole.

They're just depressing and dark and weird and not Star Wars.

It's that.

It's not alien.

It's not, it's not as bad as Black Hole, but

it's trying to be alien and it's not, it's just not connecting.

The tackling is on Jupiter's moon, he's the only law.

That sounds like the best movie of all time.

Exactly.

Put in the heartbeats.

It's set on Io, the volcanic moon.

Not a Deborah?

Oh, okay.

You've also got an action film called Kill and Kill Again.

Good title.

Yep.

Don't know much about that one.

You've got something called The Legend of the Lone Ranger.

Yep, that was a big movie.

That was one of those

very

marketed movies.

It was marketed with Star Wars energy and

with a young Michael Horse as Tanto, Michael Horse from Gwen Peaks.

And then you've got the Gary Coleman comedy on the right track.

I can kind of see what Siskel and Ebert were talking about of like,

do movies just suck right now or does this rock yeah because

history of the world part one is good i guess pretty much every other movie i described seems like mixed to bad yeah i also feel like history of the world was a hit but not on the level of his previous movies i think it was seen as a little bit of a like sometimes we did his mel repeating himself yeah we do these old box office games and there's sort of like seven masterpieces in the multiplex Instead, you've got on the right track, which was the, yeah.

And by the way, we'll get to that.

Like fucking E.T.

Summer is notorious for like wall-to-wall wall-to-wall bangers, you know?

Like a lot of the other Spielberg movies, these box office games are coming out in like peak blockbuster years.

81 feels a little thin.

Gary Coleman plays an orphan who lives in a locker at Union Station in Chicago.

And then he like wins the lottery or something.

Okay.

There's the Gary Coleman cartoon show.

It's like some shit was written like...

on some snot that a guy sneezed.

Like he didn't even have a tissue.

He was just like, do you remember the Gary Coleman cartoon show, Brian?

Where he was like an angel?

Yes.

Yeah.

and it was called the Gary Coleman show, which was confusing because I'm like, is it supposed to be Gary

again?

Kids, this is a time where there were things on TV, and either you watched them or there was nothing else to watch.

Are you scared of this?

This is your choice.

You have a choice.

Go read or watch this.

And there's no, there's no Disney on demand or every Star Wars or every Marvel movie available at every second of the day.

You got a stick in a hoop you could chase?

This is, this is, I will say,

David, a perfect example of what you refer to as not really movies.

Like the movies that don't really exist, except they do.

They were in theater.

Yeah.

On the right track.

Yeah, on the right track.

Well,

it was a financial success.

It made $13 million.

Wow.

I think, you know, back then it was like double the opening of Raiders.

Yeah, nice work if you can get it.

Yeah.

So, yeah, so it does, it does, looking at that box office, it is interesting.

It does feel like 1981 was a bit of an odd year after years of

Star Wars, Superman, you know, like, you know, right, these siding adventure, oh my God, where it's like the big hits of 1981 are like the Raiders, Superman 2, Arthur, Stripes.

Like, it's like movies that do have some legacy, but it's not blockbustery in the same way.

It's a bit of an odd moment before the 80s really ramp up and we start getting like a lot of sequels and big action movies and Arnie and Sly and all that stuff.

Some of these movies, their tale is fully on home video and television.

Like Stripes played constantly when I was a kid to the point where all of my friends knew it by heart.

Like every line.

Except no one's ever seen the second half of Stripes.

My favorite thing.

No one's ever seen it.

No one's ever seen it.

It's the most watched first half in history.

Too long.

That movie is actually too long, too.

That movie should be 82 minutes long.

It's like 110 minutes long.

Oh, you watched the shorter cut.

We got to be done, Griff.

We've been talking for so long.

I'm not complaining.

Yeah, well, I'm just looking.

I'm checking my notes here.

It's an episode on Raiders Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Yes, well, this is a problem we have on these Spielberg episodes.

Yes, they're all

to talk about.

Yeah, there's a lot to talk about.

You know what's interesting?

Harrison Ford got like $6 million for this.

I just saw this.

$5 million each for the two sequels, and then $65 million for Crystal Skull.

Well, if I'm not mistaken, I believe his deal for Crystal Skull was 20%

of of first dollar money growth,

not profit.

Like that was the deal elevated by Crystal Skull that Lucas, Spielberg, and Ford were like, it's 20% to each of us right off the top.

Probably partly why it took so long to make it.

Do you think this movie is Harrison Ford's best performance?

Oh, boy.

Oh, come on now.

I think it's his most important performance, and I think it's the greatest distillation of what he is uniquely great at as as a movie star, if that makes sense.

Han Sola will always be my favorite Harrison Ford character.

It's just the one and probably a lot of it was I saw it at the right age.

But single performance, maybe.

Yeah.

I mean, I think that might be

what was that reaction?

You're weighing Witness in your mind, I feel very specific

so much.

But I think it would be a little, you know, anorak of me to be like, you think it's Witness.

Yeah.

Morning Glory, obviously.

I contention.

I gotta an Oscar nomination for.

Furtado.

He's also very good in Presumed Innocent.

I love him in all of those sweaty late 80s, early 90s thrillers that he made, and I and witnessed sort of the start of that.

And I love him in Air Force One, and I love him in many, many things.

But I think, yeah, I think Indy is probably a good argument.

You're posing a good question because it is an interesting case of a lot of stars like him.

You'd be like, well, there's the most iconic performance, what will clearly be the first line in their obituary.

They're never going to surpass that.

And yet, actually, their best performance is X, Y, or Z, right?

You're like, well, that's their most famous performance, but their best actual work as an actor was this other thing.

This might be one of the rare cases where they're the same answer.

They're the same thing.

Yeah.

I think,

given the kind of stuff he is for,

the greatest thing he ever put on film was on Jimmy Kim Alive, the sketch where he confronts Chewbacca for sleeping with his wife.

Yes.

It is an incredible comic performance, which he does not break.

And every line he delivers is near perfection.

And if you think I'm joking, Google it later.

It is an incredible live performance where he just kills.

That sketch was written by Jove, Jeff Loveness, who later wrote a man in the Wasp Quantum Mania.

Oh, no shit.

I didn't even know that.

That's fantastic.

He had done like viral videos, get hired onto Kimmel.

That was the first thing he wrote.

We had him on the George Lucas talk show talking about this.

That was

him on Kimmel, I think the Monday or Tuesday after Cowboys and Aliens had came out.

And he, during the interview, cannot stop smarting from the fact that the Smurfs beat them at the box office.

Like it was the mistake of him not going on to promote the movie in advance.

They booked it as a victory lap, assuming the movie would be a blockbuster.

And then he's just like, Yeah, I guess we're not as good as the Smurfs.

But the show opens with that Chewbacca sketch, which is incredible and lives in my mind forever because he's yelling at Chewbacca and he goes, I don't need you anymore.

I'm in a movie with Daniel Craig now.

And he says, Craig.

And I think about it all the time.

Is it?

Yes.

Was he right?

He's right.

Americans say it wrong.

I'm in movies with Daniel Craig.

Craig, but it's not Craig.

It's Craig.

Craig.

We will will link to that clip in the episode description.

Chewbacca.

And I think we should also wrap up the episode.

It's time to be done.

Brian, anything you want to plug?

Oh, yeah.

Listen, head over to jinxworld.com where you can see you can sign up for my newsletter and all my books that are available at darkhorse.com, including Powers and the brand new release masterpiece.

And for fans of this podcast, I have a graphic novel coming out in January called Fortune Glory, the Musical, which tells the very true story about how I was the writer of the Spider-Man Broadway musical, Turn Off the Dark for a week and a half.

I think people will enjoy that true Hollywood disaster story.

Wow.

Oh, I cannot wait to read that.

Are you kidding me?

Brian, please come to New York sometime so I can pick your brain about all kinds of things.

I have so many nerdy questions for you about the early 2000s in Marvel, especially.

Yeah, the fucking Thunderbolt Ross mustache conversation.

That was a ticket iceberg.

That was nothing.

I have lots to ask you that's the coolest question david had

all right well ben i know you want to go but i just want to take a minute and say that i i really do love you guys and this podcast a great deal it is uh not to be weird i do think you guys are this spiritual successors of siskel and ebert in the best way possible i i just think it's it's elevated conversation that makes everyone i talk to about it

think better about their work and make smarter choices.

So I just really want to say thanks.

Ben is sitting behind the

victory lapping.

Well, no, because he, of course, wanted us to call the podcast Griffle and Simsburg.

And he's gesturing like, what was I telling you guys?

He was right.

I was right all along.

He was right all along.

And every time you give Ben a nickname, I consider it for myself as well.

Like dirt bike bend this sounds

something I could have pulled off in my younger days.

So I do appreciate you guys test marketing these Ben-related nicknames.

Hey, happy to do it uh thank you so much for being here uh it truly is an honor uh as as the show's gone on for years every once in a while we hear about someone who's a listener and it flips us out and we're like that fucking person listens to us make fart jokes uh but you are one that is uh uh truly humbling because of how large you loom in our development of how we understood stories for both of us personally and much the way you you talk about uh the lucas and uh spielberg stuff that you grew up with thank you uh And thank you all for listening.

Yes.

Join us next week for, should I double check?

I believe it's a movie called E.T.

the Extraterrestrial.

Just making sure that nothing...

Yep, yep, E.T.

the Extraterrestrial.

So I'm just going to check my notes here.

We'll do our breakfast the next week.

Banger.

Yeah, another good one.

Yeah.

E.T.

the Extraterrestrial.

Fairly large.

He made it one year later.

Yes.

Yeah, that's amazing.

And by the way, and after E.T., that's it.

He never goes back to, there's no doubt of Spielberg's.

No, I mean,

he makes three movies movies that don't go over as much, but it doesn't matter.

Yeah, he's he's unquestionably minted from the moment of Raiders on.

They're like, we can't, it's it's not a fluke.

How far does this Spielberg run with you?

Up to Schindler.

Oh, okay.

That's farther than I thought.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

It gets to him winning his Oscar.

And then we'll win our Oscar for best podcast, a category.

I assume they're including in the next year's ceremony, along with most cheerworthy moments.

Most dollars for CEOs collected.

Coming up in a few days over on the Patreon, we're doing a Spielberg bonus covering Something Evil and Savage.

Oh, yes, right.

His two major uh TV movies in between Duel and Sugarland Express.

Uh, and as always, uh, Bendis, you got me thinking, uh, drafting already in my head.

Ben's nickname for this has to be Bendiana Bones, right?

There you go.

There you go.

Yes.