Duel

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

The killer's weapon a 40-ton truck The victim's only defense a startling podcast

Trap?

I don't know if that's really

spoiler alert.

Yeah, he's kind of giving away his one move in like minute 82.

I was going to say, that's the last minute.

It's not like that makes it sound like the movie is him constructing an elaborate trap.

Right.

What if a truck guy tried to kill the most ingenious trapper?

Right, right, right.

It's like Weaver's behind the movie, and what he doesn't know is that I'm really good at setting traps for trucks.

Well, that's almost the eventual sequel, duel versus Craven the Hunter.

What if this truck were going after Craven the Hunter, the greatest trap artist?

Trapper John M.D.

to go after him?

Yeah, he's probably the second best trapper I know.

I think Young Thug is definitely one of our best trap artists.

Isn't it crazy, David, to think

you could just go after I was waiting for Ben to drop him with that?

Yes.

Like the

M9 Shaman film truck.

Okay, so here's the film we're pitching.

It's a Lega sequel to Duel.

Yes.

Going off of a poster that exists.

That's not that famous.

Somehow the 40-ton truck has returned.

The flammable truck itself.

Right, even though it blew up, it's back.

Spoiler.

Somehow.

Somehow.

And it has to fight a team of good guys represented by The Butcher, Mr.

Trap himself.

Yes.

Craven the Hunter.

Yes.

What was the joke you made of a trap artist?

Young thug.

Young thug.

Young thug, Trapper John M.

And Trapper John MT.

That's the one.

I think that's the four.

That's the Mount Rushmore of trapping.

Correct.

This is above all else a movie about trapping.

It's just not at all.

It's not at all.

This is a terrible tangent.

It's a terrible start of mini-series on it.

The quotes were not good either.

No, the quotes of this movie are like, what's the matter with this guy?

Exactly.

Beep.

Yeah, ready?

Let me try.

Let me try a quote.

Podcast.

That's pretty cool.

That's me saying the word podcast in lieu of a horn.

We could also

do

a pickup later where it's like your inner monologue.

Oh, sure.

Where you're thinking about

ready here is really

come on now.

Start the podcast.

There's a lot to talk about.

Go ahead.

In the film Duel.

Duel.

Duel.

Jewel.

Duel.

As the sort of Brits might say.

Richard Duel.

Richard Duel.

This is 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 careers and are given a series of blank checks to make whatever crazy passion projects they want.

Sometimes those checks clear and sometimes they bounce.

Baby,

it is

January 1st.

Or no, it's January 5th.

It's January 5th.

But it's the dawn of a new year.

And this year happens to be the 10th year of blank check.

This is the start of our 10th year.

What you're listening to is the beginning of our 10th year.

And thus, we felt what better way to kick it off than with six-year-old unfinished business.

Now you guys can't complain anymore.

Now you have

no grounds to complain.

There's nothing you can complain about anymore.

Certainly not in 2025.

No, nothing to complain about.

The year where everything works.

I'm calling it right.

I wish you wouldn't.

I think everything's going to work in 2025.

All my ingenious traps I set.

We're talking about.

I think it's eight years ago, Griffin,

that we covered.

We did in 2017.

Is that right?

It was in.

It was the first episode was indeed January 2017.

So you know what's crazy?

We were kicking off a certain presidency both times, yes.

Is that what you're going to say?

Yep.

Yep.

It's crazy.

That's wild.

I didn't realize it lined up that.

It's been eight years.

It's been eight long years.

Since we on this podcast covered the films of Steven Spielberg.

But last time, we threw a curveball.

We did.

And we started in the middle of his career.

We call it Spielberg the Dreamworks years.

We didn't know what we were doing back then.

No idea what we were doing.

And we covered all of Steven Spielberg's films, starting with The Lost World Jurassic Park, going all the way through to what seemed like the crowning apex, final film he would ever make, the BFG.

Since then, he's made like 18 more movies.

We've covered all of those.

Yes.

But we've never covered everything leading up to Jurassic Park.

Right.

Look, what better way to start off our 10th year than to say, I had always thought that Lost World, the Jurassic Park sequel, was his first film ever.

We found out.

I recently found out that, in fact, the first half of his career was basically a series of the greatest successes any director has had.

He's had a couple of hits in those 70s, 80s range, for sure.

And we're going to talk about them.

Blank Check Grim too.

I said this already.

Oh, no, no, mini-series titled Podrassic Cast.

Is that right?

I didn't remember.

Podrassic Cast.

Okay, good for us.

One more time?

Wow, we're being run off the road for that title.

Ben informed us that it took 40 minutes to properly load the truck sounds into his soundboard.

Well, I had to track down the right sounds.

You know, it's very important.

It's not just any kind of truck horn.

It's got to be the right one.

Well, you're an artist, producer, Ben.

Yes.

AKA.

Oh, boy.

No, here's what I'm going to do.

Just one of them.

Okay.

Warhaws.

You know what?

That's a good way to do it.

If you just did one.

This is the thing I'm doing for year 10.

2025, year of Ben has one nickname per episode.

Exactly.

I think that's a nice way to look back and look forward.

I love that.

What is Ben's David Lynch name?

Great question.

Huh.

Figure it out later.

Yep.

We're here to talk about

how we end 2024.

Fine.

You will have heard it by this point.

The films of

Steven Spielberg, starting with this week's film, Jewel.

No, a bit of a controversial

start in terms of, there is some debate.

You know, have you watched the John Williams Disney Plus documentary yet?

No.

He goes out of his way, Spielberg, to say my first movie, Sugarland Express.

Which I understand because

I think at the time,

that was his first cinematic release.

And we can dig into this a bit.

And back then, they didn't have Peacock, you know, and Paramount Plus.

God, I can't even imagine.

The lines were not blurry.

It was like, if you're a TV movie, well, then that was on TV.

You didn't get to.

Imagine what it must have been like to live through an era without Peacock.

You don't even get to see supersized cuts of the office.

I don't remember.

I don't remember.

I mean, thank God I was born in the year 2020 and I never had to witness it.

I entered humanity just weird to think that my children will never know.

Right, we're well, they might.

I mean, Peacock may not make it.

Like, I'm not trying to be rude to Peacock, but it could leave.

I shudder to think, but they certainly arrived in a world with Peacock.

You have three post-Peacock children.

Insane.

That's a way to think about a demarcation of time.

It's been eight years since we covered Spielberg and five years since Peacock launched.

It's banned.

April 2020.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Named after the NBC logo.

Oh, I had no idea.

Look, the world was grieving.

A global pandemic had us in its grips.

And NBC Universal said, we have the cure.

Peacock?

There's no vaccine yet, but there is

a vaccine for the soul.

And it's called Peacock.

It's a great way to start what's probably one of our biggest series we've ever done.

10th anniversary, Jewel.

Kodrassic Cast.

Ben

had seen Jewel before.

It sounds like you're saying Jewel.

Yeah, have you seen her before?

Where's she at?

Her hands are small.

Sometimes she's in a boat.

But they're her own.

Famously lived in her car.

Right.

All right.

That's the joke.

If that were true, I would have heard about it.

No, I've never seen this before.

I caught a little bit of it on TV.

I have this distinct memory of and just being like, what the fuck is this?

What?

Yeah.

Like, this is so slow and moving and very

everyday

interaction.

It just was out of context, it was really weird to just catch it on cable TV.

But was it not until you watched it in earnest for this podcast that you realized, oh, that's that thing I saw years ago?

Yes.

Yes.

So at the time you were watching it, you did not know it was Steven Spielberg's first film.

Duel.

No.

We are certainly covering Duel, which, yes, was made for television,

but then did get years later.

Well, it got a theatrical release

overseas back then.

Yes.

And years later, it did get in a limited

kind of capitalized upon the Spielberg mania.

Who?

Stephen Spielberg.

Stephen Spielberg.

Stephen Spielberg.

So we are certainly.

We always planned, if we ever return to Stephen's career earlier on, to lead off with Jewel.

Very fun movie about a guy driving a car who a guy driving a truck is mean to.

Look, we've covered this ground a little bit before in the history of the podcast where most TV movies of any quality would get theatrical releases overseas.

Because they didn't have televisions over there.

They said fireplaces.

Is that crazy?

Peacock didn't exist until 2020.

Europe didn't get TV till 98.

Yeah.

Before then, they just had the radio.

Those are just facts.

Yep.

There would be the radio releases of movies

or TV shows where someone would be like, this is happening now.

Just describing it.

Something like Jericho Mile, the Michael Mann TV film that we covered on this show, and we cover it as a bonus.

You made a really good TV movie like that.

They put it in theaters.

The Ewok movies got theatrical releases.

The Battlestar Galactica pilot

was really good

movies.

But, you know, we have a lot of international listeners, and sometimes they'll be like, why aren't you covering this as a legitimate film?

It got a legitimate release gear.

It was presented to us as a movie.

And I think for us, a lot of it is how was the thing intended?

Right.

Right.

And its construction, its conception, what did they think this was?

And Duel is this kind of odd example where, and we'll back up and we'll get into this more in depth, but he makes this TV movie that's basically his second TV film,

or I guess

a third in a way.

We'll get into this.

But Airs on TV is kind of a smashed success.

Almost immediately there's a desire to release it in Europe.

It is 75 minutes long they're like this is a little too short so he shoots new footage yeah basically 15 extra minutes so the cuts are not wildly different but they are different they are different and there's a whole second round of shooting to kind of amp it up to theatrical level him coming back to it even a little bit stronger as a filmmaker sure then that goes to europe and then eventually gets a theatrical release and since then there has been ongoing debate of do you count this as his first movie or not and i'm with you david i think this counts as his first movie.

I do too.

But I do prefer the TV cut.

Is that controversial?

I kind of just don't need the extra stuff.

Just leave me in the, you know, leave me

tight, tight.

I like it tight.

We can get into this.

I don't hate the extra stuff.

Yeah.

I just don't think you really need it.

Did you get the 4K Steel book?

No, I didn't get the 4K Steel book.

I'm struggling.

Kind of a rookie.

You're struggling right now?

Yeah, I'm just watching movies on my phone while i burp a child i'm doing my best over here you know what helped put those twins to sleep what a clean 4k transfer of steven spielberg's duel you're saying the movie's boring

no i'm saying

your your twin sons would sense the relaxation that comes from being in the hands of a master yeah even at his earliest stages they go oh this guy knows what he's doing he knows how to make a picture right and they immediately hong shoo hong shoo and what more soothing sound than the sound of a truck horn

I was watching it here in the office before we recorded, right?

I got my 4K in here.

It looks incredible.

It's a beautiful transfer.

Ben, would you mind moving this chair a little bit so my remote signal can hit?

Just move that chair a tiny bit.

This is the thing I want to show you because this caused a lot of controversy.

in the nerdiest corners of physical media online debate, okay?

This beautiful, beautiful, beautiful 4K transfer.

A bucicle 4K transformation.

It's a bucicle 4K transfer.

A lot of people like you prefer the TV cut.

And they were like, okay, perfect 4K restoration really treated with respect of the theatrical cut of the movie.

And then they listed special features.

There's the TV version.

That's included.

Great.

It says it's an HD.

You have your options.

Yeah, so it's not in 4K.

It's an HD.

Then you play this.

It is the worst AI quote-unquote restoration.

Oh, no.

It is basically unwatchable.

Whoa, yeah.

I'm going to fast forward to a point of movement so you can see this and we can get your reaction live.

But there's like.

Cars moving.

I got some credits going here.

It's a nice car.

I know it's like kind of a, you know, nice car, evil trick.

Broken down old.

Yeah.

Plymouth or whatever.

You can see a little of how waxy it looks.

It does look a little shiny.

And it feels like they took a standard deaf file

and wanted it to say it was HD.

So they like tried to upscale it.

But the way they did that was just

right.

Oh, it looks very odd.

And it gets worse as it goes along.

It looks like it has some weird Photoshop filter on it.

It does.

Like his face looks too smooth.

Yes.

But then the outline of like the silhouette of his profile is really strong.

There's like a black line as if it looks like it's like posterized.

Yeah.

Bit odd.

Yeah, it gets worse as it goes along, unsurprisingly, as it extends into proper

action.

Wait, what's going on here?

It's insane.

It's worse.

I'm almost like, is our projector broken?

Like, that's what it's making me think.

Look at the sign in the back.

It looks like

3D glasses.

Right, without the glasses.

It looks like there's Vaseline on the side.

There's different problems every 30 seconds.

But it sucks because basically it's like this should exist in a valid form as its own validation.

I mean, even if you just want to show it to me in, you know, just standard TV.

Like, funny.

This is my point.

It's genuinely better to just watch a shitty YouTube version of it than watch this.

Right.

Right.

Yeah.

Turn it off.

Yeah.

Let's keep it playing so we can give ourselves headaches.

David, let's crack open the dossier.

Wait a second.

It's only one line and it says go watch the fablements.

JJ,

you are fired.

No, I'm going to open the dossier so we can talk about an under-discussed figure in American cinema, Steven Spielberg.

Stephen Alan Spielberg, Griffin.

You learn something new every day.

Like Michael Sarah in Barbie.

He was Alan.

He was Alan.

Born December 18th, 1946.

Did you know that?

Nope.

What's the sign?

Of course, that would make him a Sagittarius.

Oh, totally.

That makes

sense.

So 1941 was a prequel.

Yeah, he was.

to his birth, sure.

Born in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Actually, apparently, there's been some controversy over his birthday because it's often recorded as happening in 1947,

which is something that Spielberg, I think, sort of maybe miss like helped massage the truth about to get out of a contract.

It doesn't matter.

This is not important, JJ.

Was he maybe pretending to be older than the current career?

He was pretending to be

Yes.

But I think he used it.

He basically pretended to be a year younger to get a contract dismissed.

Okay.

Or like he pretended to be.

Yeah, I don't know.

It doesn't matter.

Steven Spielberg, born to parents Arnold and Leah.

No, I'm sorry.

No.

To parents Paul Dano and Michelle Williams.

Yeah, there we go.

JJ.

Big whiff on your part.

And Arnold, of course, sorry, Paul Dano went to high school with Leah's brother, Bernie.

So that's how they knew each other.

They started dating after high school.

And Leah, of course, was a musician.

She went to the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music.

Arnold was in the Air Force.

They got married after the war.

And Michelle Williams, sorry, Leah, was planning to be a concert pianist.

Yes.

But she stopped doing it and had three,

four kids, Stephen and three girls, Anne, Sue, and Nancy.

And of course, as we know, they moved to New Jersey and there was like a tornado there and it was all very metaphorical.

And eventually they ended up in Arizona.

And, you know, it was to get away from the Seth Rogen.

Yes.

Because he was so sexy and hot.

Yeah.

I'm just doing the fable.

And non-threatening ways.

Right.

In a kind of a friendly way, but still, like, there's a real tension there.

No, I mean, look, there, it's what JJ even reached out to us and was like, do you guys mind if I spend more time than usual trying to prepare this first dossier?

Because he was like, it's actually harder for me to pin down the pre-movie career Spielberg story than I thought it would be.

And I think part of that is because he was kind of tight-lipped about his personal life.

Until more recently when he finally got into it?

Yeah, I mean, there was a lot of him speaking in very general terms and then people inferring a lot from his films.

Right.

So there was like, well, clearly this guy never got over his parents' divorce.

Right.

And then I feel like there was a lot of psychoanalyzing from him.

And then when they did the HBO documentary, whatever that was, yeah, like six or seven years ago, I remember he started talking more openly about his relationship with his parents, and his parents are in that documentary together, right?

Being very sweet with each other, but right, talking about obviously, yes, Seth Rogan and yes, like that one time she had the monkey and all that stuff.

And Seth Rogan was like, Why am I getting dragged into this?

I never met the woman.

Impression fell apart.

It really fell apart.

It really fell apart.

I had it for like two seconds, maybe.

An early memory, of course.

But then Fabelman's, of course, like...

Is the film he made?

Yes, unpacks more of it.

But also, we should acknowledge Fabelman's is a fictionalized movie.

It is.

It's consolidated.

It's dramatized.

But I think it's

close.

For example, he remembers the first film he attended is The Greatest Show on Earth.

Sure.

Where he

saw the circus on screen and he was freaked out, right?

The train wreck.

Jimmy Stewart is the clown.

Um,

it is as he puts it, I was disappointed by everything after that.

I didn't trust anybody, I never felt life was good enough, so I had to embellish it.

It begins his obsession with Hollywood storytelling.

This is the thing that I think, and certainly we've talked about a lot, but uh, Fableman's provided such an effective codex for me and understanding him in a way I hadn't before

is like, oh, the kind of like core truths of this guy are: one, he is like hypersensitive and feels things really deeply.

Two, the only way he knows how to process those things is through filmmaking.

And three, he is kind of scared by how effective he is at manipulating other people's emotions through filmmaking.

That his like prodigious gift is something he doesn't quite understand and that he always feels a little guilty about.

Speaking of his parents, obviously, as well, the two sides of Spielberg.

His father, the technician,

precise, computer-obsessed.

You know, he was in that movie, Ruby Sparks.

Of course.

And then his mother, right?

Yeah.

Sort of the Dawson's Creek of the family, in a way, right?

Artistic.

Used to date Ed Frog.

That's a big failing of the last dance, right?

That she's just not in it or talks about it.

Should be in it.

There are a lot of problems with that movie, but I'd put that chief among them.

They don't even try to address her absence, right?

Stephen Spilberry's mother's mother's absence from Venom 3.

Yeah, they don't.

They're not mentioned.

I'm sorry about Venom.

Hey, David, I'm sorry about Venom.

Spielberg remembers at a young age, his dad coming home with a transistor and showing it to his children and being like, this is the future.

And Spielberg says that he took it and put it in his mouth and swallowed it.

And he remembers this as this kind of like confrontation.

Like he was trying to be funny, but it was very tense.

Spielberg says it's just it's as if i was saying that's your future but it doesn't have to be mine which is funny to think about because i do feel like spielberg is seen as a a cutting-edge filmmaker when it comes to technology yes for pretty much his whole career yes like it's not like spielberg is a guy who like takes a while to chop to she's usually breaking through some big barrier if he's making like a you know bigger scale movie yeah he's also talked a lot uh as an adult i think especially since his father passed away and he's felt more comfortable talking about his parents without fear of upsetting.

Both his parents died at the age of like a billion.

Like they both have these like long lives, which is great.

Hey,

fantastic.

Like his dad was 103 when he died.

And his mom was like 100?

Yeah.

And like they were right.

But he said that, you know,

I think his father did not.

totally know how to relate to people.

He's 97.

He was like a genius.

Yes.

Very smart, but didn't know how to relate to people, but was like in a time where people didn't understand what he was so good at.

And Spielberg's like, if he were born 10 years later, he would have been a wildly successful, publicly hailed genius.

Right.

Just maybe slightly early for the computer age or whatever.

Like, too early without being a pioneer in terms of discovering the basic building blocks of the thing, where he was one of the first people to understand it and know how to do it well, but was like a little too late to be the groundbreakers and a little bit too early to be the people who knew how to evolve it.

And he just kind of became a journeyman computer guy in the field that then ultimately would end up like ruling the world.

He was born at the exact wrong time to just be a kind of like drone, you know, a well-paid, high-level drone.

Meanwhile, his mother, apart from appearing on Dawson's Creek, is just like very energetic, childlike.

He describes her as this kind of like, you know, musical person in all these ways and like, you know, kind of never grew up in a way.

And,

you know, it's all just watch the Fable ones.

I should also mention that on top of his dad being a computer genius.

Both parents, also, by the way, just say, like, Steven, intense kid.

Like, it's like, as much as he has mythologists his parents so much, they're both like, he was really a lot.

Like, he was a really intense kid and kind of tough to wrap your brains.

This is what I'm saying about, like,

the whole slam on Spielberg for a long time that we, I'm sure, will comment on as we like read the reviews and such at the time these wildly wildly successful films got released, right?

Is he's like Peter Pan syndrome, overgrown child, doesn't engage with adult world, is just making hollow entertainment.

He's like a slick showman, but he's like dumbing down culture.

And this guy is like avoiding adulthood and reality.

And I think,

once again, the movie The Fable Mans makes it very clear that part of this complex is that he was like brought into an adult world prematurely and burdened with like his parents' problems in a way that I think kind of bifurcated him, right?

In one way, he's like too aware of the adult world from too young an age and then feels the need to escape and look back and all this other stuff.

But it also feels like he was a kid who felt things way too intensely as a child, was very burdened by like, you know, a sort of like fear of reality.

And it makes sense that like the ability to control the universe around him and make these stories that are these ecstatic expressions of emotions in sort of novel, entertaining ways isn't avoidance as much as it's as i was saying before processing

ben what's up griff this is an ad break yeah and i'm just i'm this isn't a humble brag it's just a fact of the matter despite you being on mic oftentimes when sponsors buy ads based on this podcast the big thing they want is personal host endorsement.

Right.

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

But something very different is happening right now.

That is true.

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

This is laser targeted.

The product.

We have a copy that asks, is the product a porch movie?

It certainly is.

And what is today's episode sponsored by?

The Toxic Adventure.

The new Toxic Avenger movie is coming to theaters August 29th.

Macon Blair's remake of

reimagining, whatever.

A reboot of the Toxic Avenger.

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

Yeah.

I'm going to see it.

We're

excited to see it.

But Ben, you texted us last night.

This fucking rules.

It fucks.

It honks.

Yeah.

It's so great.

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

Peter Dinkledge, Jacob Tremblay,

Taylor Page, with Elijah Wood, and Kevin Bacon.

Tremblay is Toxie's son.

His stepson.

His stepson.

Okay.

Wade Goose.

Yes.

Great name.

Give us the takes.

We haven't heard them yet.

Okay.

You got fucking Dinklage is fantastic.

He's talking.

He plays it with so much heart.

It's such a lovely performance.

Bacon is in the pocket too, man.

He's the bad guy.

He's the bad guy.

There's a lot of him shirtless.

Okay.

Looking like David.

David sizzling.

Yep.

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

He certainly does.

He's having a lot of fun.

Tell us some things you liked about the movie.

Okay, well, I'm a Jersey guy.

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

Yes, yes, that's right.

The original film.

Yep.

I grew up watching toxic and trauma movies on porches

with my sleazy and sticky friends.

It informed so much of my sensibility.

Your friends like Junkyard Dog and Headbanger.

Yeah, exactly.

Making Toxic Crusader jokes.

And so when I heard that they were doing this new installment, I was 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 something that means a lot to me.

And they knocked it out of the fucking park.

It somehow really captured.

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

uh great action it's really fucking funny it just it it hits all of the sensibilities that you would want in an updated version.

Cineverse last year released Terrifier 3 unrated.

Yeah.

Big risk for them there.

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

And one of the huge hits.

More interesting, yeah, theatrical box office phenomenons the last five years.

Want to make that happen again here?

Tickets are on sale right now.

Advanced sales really matter for movies like this.

So if y'all were planning on seeing Toxic Avenger, go ahead and buy those tickets.

Please go to toxicaver.com slash blank check to get your tickets.

Blank check one word.

In theaters August 29th.

Yup.

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

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

Summon the Nuts is in reference to a

psychotic new metal band.

Hell yeah.

Who are also mercenaries.

Cool.

And drive a van

with a skeleton giving two fingies up on the grill.

And that's all I'll say.

Okay.

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

I'm excited to see it.

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Yeah, he, you know, he was intense.

There's a lot of stories about it.

Anyway, in 1957, you watch the family's, they moved to Arizona.

Spielberg says his most formative time.

He's lived there from the age of nine to 16.

Leah, his mom, sorry, Michelle, doesn't want to move there.

Right.

Sees it a bit of a barren wasteland.

She's really struggling at that point.

Sure.

His dad's best friend was dating a porn star next door, and it turned out that he had a surprisingly large penis.

What movie is that?

Girl Next Door.

I thought if I said next door, the Paul Dano character.

Right.

I forgot he's in that.

This character's name is Klitz.

I haven't seen that movie in 20 years.

I regret to inform you it's a 10 out of 10 master.

Oh, is that right?

Is that so?

You know who endorses that take?

I don't.

One, Steven Spielberg.

Oh, he loves the Girl Next Door.

He actually loves the car.

He likes Luke Greenfield's, the whatever.

He wrote Luke Greenfield a letter when he watched it.

When he moves to Arizona, what does Spielberg get his hands on?

A camera.

A camera.

A movie.

A camera.

Filming trains crashing together and his mom dancing around.

Taking control of his own universe, documenting, reconstructing, reverse engineering, all of it.

It's the tool for him to make sense of everything.

His family was Jewish, but what he calls storefront crochet.

I think probably similar.

Can we double-check that?

I think probably similar to the family my mom grew up in, where it's like, you know, they were a Jewish family.

They went to, you know, they did all this stuff.

Right.

But they were also this like very American post-war family that was trying to assimilate.

And, you know, my dad's family was incredibly similar.

But this is also like, you get your bar mitzvah, you go to synagogue, you keep kosher in the sort of like, you know, kind of like straightforward way, not in like the mega-intense way.

But, you know, the post-World War II thing of like

Jews wanting to be American above all else,

but they're never going to overcome being perceived as Jewish above all else by everyone else.

It comes up in the Fablemans a couple of times.

Good movie.

Check it out.

Yeah.

We're going to put footnotes on this episode in the episode notes that are just watch the Fablemans.

Truly.

When you read so much of this stuff, it is kind of like LOL Watch the Fablemans.

He had a bully who treated him like shit when he was like 13 years old, and he cast him at that age in a war movie he made called Escape to Nowhere because he would make all these little movies with his friends.

And like that won the kid over.

So Spielberg is using the power of movies to, you know, be friends with people.

In the Fablemans, the bullying is they call him Bagelman, right?

And they put a bagel in his locker.

And when we did that episode, we were discussing, like, what do you think the actual thing was they were saying to Spielberg?

Right.

And I think JJ dug up that it was Spielbug that used to make fun of him for looking like a bug.

Damn.

So then he brundle-flied their ass.

He did.

He went into a teleporter.

He went to his dad and he's like, you know, he's good at that computer stuff.

As he's a teenager, he has some family in the LA area, sneaks onto the Warner Brothers lot, sees the making of the movie PT109, which I think is the dramatization of

Cliff Robertson,

John Kennedy's war service.

Pretty solid movie.

Sure.

In 1963, he gets brought onto the Universal lot by Chuck Silvers, who will be important later.

In 1964, he makes a feature-length movie called Firelight.

He premieres it

at

a theater in Phoenix.

I think he, you know, makes 500 bucks or whatever.

There's a whole story about it.

But this list is two and a half hours long.

No one, it has never been publicly.

It's not

viewable except for some little snippet that he's made public.

I mean, but this is right when his parents divorce.

Okay.

Michelle Moose back east.

Or no, they moved to California, and that's when the divorce happens.

Right, that's what it is.

I was going to say, we

had talked about wanting to do a Spielberg Shorts episode on Patreon.

It feels like Amblyn is the only one of them that's properly watchable, which is basically his last short film before he becomes a professional director.

I always thought they were more out there because you'd sometimes see clips of them played in like documentaries and retrospectives and stuff, but he doesn't let the full versions out there.

There's also the weird, very Fabelman's-esque

sort of origin story of he asked two film-obsessed kids.

in his neighborhood once he was successful in the 80s and 90s who are making their own films.

Hey, can you work on restoring my old Super 8 films, which Spielberg retained?

Right.

And those two kids, I believe, were Matt Reeves and J.J.

Abrams.

Right.

That is true.

They've like sifted through his, you know.

So these things have been like restored and preserved, but Spielberg doesn't let people see them.

Yes.

Yet.

So he moves to California.

I think that's where he was the most bullied, but it's also where he gets the most into movie making and stuff.

He

wanted to go to USC or UCLA, which are the big film schools schools out there back then, especially.

Doesn't get in because he has bad grades.

Instead, he goes to California State College at Long Beach, which does have like some film courses, but isn't really anything so, you know, robust enough.

So he just starts sneaking onto the lot.

He starts working as a production assistant on the John Cassavetes film, Faces.

A big

kind of turning point for him.

Absolutely.

He's watching how Cassavetes treats the cast, you know.

He's obviously seeing one of the great American filmmakers work.

That's very interesting.

But he's also seeing like

one of the great American filmmakers figure out his style, and his style is trying to tear down how movies are sort of workman-like Hollywood films.

He's seeing the actual guts of the process of everything.

And there are varying stories about like, did Cassavetes fire him?

Did Spielberg quit?

Like, Cassavetes, by all accounts, kind of took a liking to him and said some impactful words to him.

And the story gets like muddy in terms of what exactly happened, but it felt like Cassavetti's clock that Spielberg had a lot going on in his head and seemed to have a lot of gumption and drive.

He tries to make a little bicycling drama called Slipstream, meets Alan Davio on that movie, who will shoot a lot of great Spielberg films, but they never finished it.

Then he makes Amblin, a 26-minute film that he shot on 35 millimeters,

that is sort of his turning point where he presents that.

We're actually going to cover it because you can see that one.

We'll cover that on the Patreon very soon.

January

in a few days.

But he presents that and gets a deal at Universal, essentially.

That short is him basically intentionally trying to make something that can be a proof of concept, cell real.

Like, it's him trying to level up from his childhood short films to, like, this is a calling card.

Yeah.

Doesn't get an Oscar nomination for best short.

Wow.

Something of a snub, but it's well regarded.

Goes to James.

After it, eventually.

Yes, he does.

Yes.

He goes to Sidney Sheinberg, who is the VP of television production at Universal, basically the most powerful person he has any connection to through this Silver's guy.

The Silver's guy is the guy that Greg Grumberg plays in Fabelmans, who was...

Sorry, I'm sorry.

His name is Greg Grumberg.

Sorry.

But am I wrong about that?

I think you're right.

The guy who worked on Hogan's Heroes, who was like a distant relative of his, right?

Yeah.

And he goes to meet with Sid.

And

he's like, Sid's like, well, what do you want to do?

How would you like to go to work professionally?

He's basically like, sign this contract.

You'll do some television.

If you do a few TV shows, maybe you can make a feature film.

There were a lot of apocryphal stories for a seven-year contract with Universal.

A long time of Spielberg literally like sneaking onto the lot and holding up an abandoned office.

He put his name on an abandoned office.

Right.

The Catch Me If You Can ass thing, which I think I repeated in Catch Me If You Can episode we recorded eight years ago.

But it sounds like a lot of that was overstated.

That Spielberg was himself

trying to, I don't know, blow up the mythology

of his early beginnings and make it sound like he was a sort of Leonardo DiCaprio-est reck scallion.

Yeah.

Who was banging broads and much like the real Frank Abagnale.

Kind of probably made some of that shit up.

He was like sneaking his way into a prodigious start, but also then told a story that was even more extreme than the reality.

Yes.

So what does he work on?

He works on a little short called Eyes for NBC's Night Gallery, which is a Rod Serling sort of follow-up to Twilight Zone.

It's what if spooky art gallery and every piece of art inspired.

We'll cover that on the Patreon.

But the pilot of Night Gallery is like a 90-minute airing in a two-hour block, three 30-minute segments.

And one of them is Spielberg's first official studio directing job.

Which he made with Joan Crawford, a legendary Hollywood figure.

And he says, she treated me like I knew what I was doing, and I didn't.

So I loved her for that.

So they had a nice time.

But he thought Rod Serling's script was bad as much as he loves Rod Serling.

He was like, it was not his best work.

I'd agree with that.

But he kind of looked at the script and went to Sheinberg and was like, Jesus, like, can I do something about young people, not like an old lady?

And Sheinberg was like, take the job, like, just do work.

You know, so as much as it's not one of Sterling's best scripts, and we'll talk about this on Patreon, it is kind of a perfect

piece for Spielberg to just test out his visual language.

Famously, Joan Crawford called MCA, Lou Wasserman, the head of Universal, and said, like, this nice young man directed me just now.

I am Joan Crawford.

And I want to say, I thought he had a lot of talent.

Right.

It's this fascinating, like, Crawford being in this is kind of a like last rung on the ladder before like death, sort of like how the mighty have fallen kind of thing.

Yeah, sure.

What would happen to so many of these

late 60s?

Right.

Like, I mean, so many of the classic movie stars would retire when they were like 50 or 60 and spend the last 15 or 20 years of their life not working.

And if you did work, by and large, you'd end up being like TV guest star kind of things like this.

And it felt like, you know, they're making a big deal out of like, we got this person, but it does feel like they're sort of a relic in a museum to a certain extent.

But like, she has enough legendary status that even though her career doesn't have a ton of weight, her calling these studio heads and

similar people and saying like, I just worked with this kid and he's got the goods does make everyone take notice.

And yet he kind of struggles to pick another project or get something else done after that.

Supposedly, he wanted to make a movie about Thomas Crapper, the inventor of the flush toilet,

based on a book called Flush with Pride, The Story of Thomas Crapper.

His agent said, I'm sorry, Ben, can I pause the recording quickly just so I can personally option the rights of that book?

If we could just hold for five years.

Y'all know about Thomas Crapper?

I fucking didn't.

You didn't?

Guess what?

I'm ready to formally announce that I will be directing Crapper, the Thomas Crapper story.

People think that Thomas Crapper is the reason, is like the etymology of the word crap.

But apparently that's like not true.

And like the word crap has existed as like old English to mean like kind of, you know, whatever, something like rubbishy

for like millennia or whatever.

Creating the flushable toilet, basically him trying to take back the word.

Yes, maybe that was it.

People, kids have been mocking me my whole life.

Guess what I'm going to do?

I'm going to be the one who gets rid of crap faster than you've ever seen.

That crap is gone.

Another thing he starts working on is The Sugarland Express, a film that he will eventually make, but he's not, we're talking late 60s at this point.

He goes to Sid Sheinberg and says, can I go write?

No one wants me anyway.

Yeah.

Writes some movies.

We should say he does another segment in that first season of Night Gallery.

I guess so.

He's not mentioned here.

He's not mentioned here.

I'm just telling you for a fact he did.

Maybe that came later then, because I'm trying to understand what this kind of,

you know, pause that he went on is because he's really complaining about.

Yeah, that wasn't until 71.

Oh, and so, so that's a, that's a little later, right?

Okay.

He goes off and he writes some stuff.

He wrote apparently a dogfight movie, like a World War II movie.

Okay.

He wrote a comedy about life and the cat skills.

Love to see that.

It was also called Crapper.

Yes, he wrote something called Ace Elite.

Funny.

And Roger of the Skies, which does exist and he has a story credit on.

Never seen it.

Oh, interesting.

I feel like JJ texted me about this if I had ever seen it before, because it's like one of the only...

It's like an adventure movie with Cliff Robertson again about a pilot.

I don't know.

I feel like Spielberg has gone out of his way to distance himself from it to the extent that I had never heard about it until JJ texts me about it.

He disowns whatever the movie was.

He's like, that's barely, you know, I got a story by credit because that's how it goes, but they had changed it by the time they made it.

He comes back to Universal, and then he does

another segment of Night Gallery, some TV shows.

Marcus Well, BMD, The Psychiatrist, an episode of this show called The Name of the Game called LA 2017 that you've been trying to do.

This is the thing I love.

It used to be on youtube in full it's now seemingly gone taken down by universal but name of the game was a weird uh sort of i think they call it a carousel show that was this old format that used to exist to lure more substantial stars into doing television without the commitment of doing 22 episode seasons they design a show where it's like it has three different leads and it cycles between a couple different casts.

So each of these stars only has to do seven or eight episodes a season, right?

So it's it's already this show that's not an anthology, but is a little like piecemeal like that.

Right.

And then there is just this one episode that Spielberg directed that's ostensibly a complete standalone,

basically outside of a framing device, has nothing to do with the rest of the series, and is just a weird dystopian future movie.

It is the first feature-length thing he ever directed.

It was 75 minutes long.

Sure.

It's called LA 2017.

It rolls.

I've seen it.

I've seen it.

I saw when it, because it went up on YouTube a couple of years ago and people were like, this is kind of secretly Spielberg's first movie.

Cool.

And it's a little lost of time.

That show just is kind of completely forgotten.

It's never been released on DVD or streaming or rentable digitally or any of that stuff.

And there was this one YouTube video that now Universal has taken down.

Of course, he also directed the first regular season episode of Columbo, not the pilot, as people sometimes, you know, the pilot had already been made, but it's the first episode.

Yes.

Once Columbo goes to

a series, and it's, of course, called Murder by the Book.

Similarly, 75 Minutes.

It's like that's the Future Link Fish, but it's a Columbo.

It's TV movies that will air within a 90-minute block.

And Duel was intended to be the same kind of thing.

When he's hired to shoot his episode of Columbo, Oscar-winning cinematographer Russell Meadie, who had shot Spartacus and I think was a bit of a hard ass because he followed Kuberic on that movie, who's Kuvrick famously easy to get along with, said, he's a kid.

Does he get a milk and cookie break?

Is the diaper truck going going to interfere with my generator?

I mean, funny.

Pretty funny.

It's pretty funny.

But

generally, he impresses people.

When he works on these TV shows,

he kind of just blows people away.

Peter Falk

said, like, we had some good fortune making Colombo.

Like, our first episode was directed by fucking Steven Spielberg.

Like, obviously, he's not famous then, but now you're kind of like, dang.

David?

Yeah.

You know for a fact that's not how he said it.

Let's face it.

We had some good fortune at the beginning.

Go ahead.

ahead.

Just come in.

I can't do Falk.

Good luck.

Fucking Steven Philip.

I don't know why my Falk sounds like the oldest version of Bob Dylan.

The thing he remembers.

One more thing.

The thing Falk remembers is that like...

They're shooting one scene where he approaches someone on the street.

They shoot it and he's like, where's the camera?

And Spielberg is like, he realizes like across the street with a long lens.

And he's like, you know, that's not something you did on television.

There's this fucking TV show.

Right, right.

Time to make the doughnuts.

Yeah.

Spielberg considers his best work to have been an episode of the psychiatrist.

Interesting.

So maybe we need to watch this.

I don't fucking know.

Anyway.

Saying we need to devote episode time to it, but I shouldn't watch it.

It's a job, though.

Making these TV shows is a job.

It's not an art form for him.

He doesn't have the passion.

Obviously, he's, you know, the stories are more schematic.

He has to work in a tight schedule and all that.

He really wants to make movies.

On to duel.

Richard Matheson, famous writer.

Would you call him a famous writer?

Yeah, what else would he call him?

I don't know.

Legendary writer?

I mean, he is pretty legendary in that he wrote I Am Legend.

This is true.

Heard of it.

Yeah.

No, but was this whole generation of guys

who were like incredible short story writers would write longer length things as well, but like incredible short story writers

went to Hollywood.

Um, apparently, the day that JFK was assassinated, he was golfing, uh, and he drives home and he gets harassed by a big truck.

Okay, and this experience-the second most tragic thing that happened that day.

This experience has him write down on like the back of an envelope, like story idea, truck chases man on high.

But that's how all these guys worked, where they were just like, You just fucking sit at the typewriter every day and you write 8,000 pages

for any half-idea, you sell it to Playboy, which this original story ran in Playboy magazine.

He pitches it to, you know, TV people and they think it's a little too limited, not enough there.

He gives up on it, writes it as a short story in

Playboy Magazine.

Well, I only read Playboy for the naked pictures, so I never noticed the article.

This is the problem.

Apparently, Playboy Magazine has words in it.

As someone who, I will confess, has never really read an issue of Playboy.

Like, I know the old joke was I read it for the articles, right?

right and playboy had genuinely great journalism and all that was it like kind of just at the back of the magazine or was it kind of interspersed

like ben doesn't know when i was like uh when i was in high school i was a penthouse guy i just was i was born after one

red spanky magazine

i also think by the time we were growing up Playboy was

the articles had less juice to them.

No, I know.

I think Playboy, even in the 90s, would still have these glitzy writers and

like Leonard Malton doing like serious interviews of people and shit.

When I was in high school,

Lola Kirk, past and future guest on this show,

was like, you're a horny boy.

I'm giving you a vintage issue of Playboy for your birthday as a present.

For birthday.

For birthday.

I had one vintage issue of Playboy that I hid in my closet.

Nice.

That I remember having a multi-page Lainey Kazan spread.

Hey, where I was like, this is kind of weird to look through when my Big Fat Greek wedding's only like two years out of theaters.

But that was like a 60s issue of Playboy that I would leaf through and genuinely go, like, oh, this did actually used to have good articles.

Sure.

No, I'm sure it did.

It felt more like Richard Matheson's duel.

Right.

It felt like New Yorker with like nudie spreads and some hornier shit.

Yes.

Yes.

So it goes into

Playboy.

Uh-huh.

And people notice it.

Steven

Bocchko.

Bachbochko.

Stephen Bochko, right?

Sure.

Famous TV writer.

Yes.

Is like, this should be a movie.

Brings it to the attention of a TV producer.

Universal has a deal with ABC to make, you know, TV movies.

Yeah.

These slots existed of just like TV movie of the week, and they're making tens of TV movies every year.

So they're looking for old things that could be remade for TV, rip-from-the-headline stories, short stories, original scripts from budding writers.

There's just like, there are slots to fill.

TV movies are going to get made.

When are they programmed?

Primetime.

Like prime time, yeah.

Movie of the week.

All these channels would have their own movie of the week slot, and they'd be competitive slots.

You know, it'd be like one network airs a movie every Monday night at eight or whatever.

They'd be among the highest-rated things, but it also was kind of like a way to establish a farm team, you know, to like test out new directors and writers and things like that, to test out new stars.

Also, like stars they had under contract on long-running shows who were frustrated being pigeonholed into one role.

It was like, oh, we'll let you do a TV movie.

You stay under our umbrella and you get to flex some other side of yourself.

So

it makes its way to Spielberg.

His secretary at the time, Nona, Nona Tyson.

Nona Tyson.

Throws a Playboy in front of him.

Spielberg says he starts laughing.

And she's like, don't look at the girls.

Read this short story.

It's right up your alley.

We should note that also at one point,

Spielberg met with David Lynch, and David Lynch told him the horizon needs to be this way or that way, and all that stuff happened as well.

No, he's two-year-old David.

Yes.

Yeah.

I guess he was fucking 25, whatever.

And he's into it.

He calls someone up and is like, I want to do this.

I want to talk to you about it.

He calls up the producer, George Eckstein.

George Eckstein sees him

as he was known, Spielberg at the time as Sheinberg's folly, right?

What was ABC thinking or Universal thinking hiring this like child to this long contract and now he's not doing much, right?

He does, Eckstein needs a director, so he's like, all right, come in for a meeting.

Spielberg shows him some of the Colombo episode.

Extend's like, you'll do, essentially.

We need somebody.

Initially, he's like, can we have no dialogue?

Like, can it truly be silent?

Yeah.

And I think,

you know, at a certain point, ABC is like,

there's not enough room for this kind of arty stuff, but, you know, like, no, we can't do that.

The movie might be even cooler with no dialogue.

Certainly no internal.

Can I make my case?

Yes.

A lot of what's added for the theatrical cut are a lot of the like dialogue interludes of him interacting with other people.

Right.

Him calling his wife.

Yes.

Some of like the gas station stops and shit like that.

Obviously not the bar scene, right?

Yeah.

I feel like,

and I'm happy that Spielberg has not gone back and recut this movie, but I'm sort of like, it makes sense that they insisted on putting the certain amount of voiceover internal monologue stuff in here because they were just like, you cannot have this be completely wordless.

Right.

In the version that has a couple dialogue scenes added, I'm like, if you then took out the voiceover, that's probably the perfect version of this movie.

I just think there's nothing in the voiceover and stuff that

really tells you anything you don't already know.

No, I agree with that.

And it's also just because you could get why, on a writing level, they were like, there needs to be some dialogue to keep people hooked.

What they couldn't have counted for is you're dealing with perhaps the greatest visual storyteller of his generation, a guy who can figure out how to convey all of this just in images and editing.

So, like, everything that's being said in the internal monologue, he as

he's 24 at this point, 23.

How old is he?

When he makes duel, the film came out early,

yeah, he'd be like 22, right?

22, yeah, right.

You could just be like, if you're fucking Sheinberger, whoever, you're like, kid, there has to be some dialogue in this, right?

Right.

And even just it's airing on TV with commercial breaks and whatever.

People are going to turn off the TV.

As you said, you're like flipping through the channels you see and you're like, what the fuck is this?

Right.

Yeah.

Within that context, it makes sense.

Once you've opened this thing up and let it breathe and you're like, we're going to play it in a theater and we can air it out, every single thing that's happening visually underneath the voiceover parts completely conveys what the voiceover is saying.

Right.

Yeah.

I will say I agree with you.

I think that's the perfect version.

Yeah.

But I would say what really.

puts it over the edge for me is if there was a moment where it freezed on the truck and then it said truckus

meanus and then it froze on the pontiac and it said like pontiatic sus good

is

ben one trillion comedy points thank you uh here's a here's another thing ben in terms of just like what the uh ecosystem was for this sort of like tv movie of the week culture yeah um

he

was given 10 days to shoot this he went over it was 13 days right

and as a result of him taking the extra three days, he only had 10 days to deliver a cut to them.

Oh, man.

Like the turnaround on these things, because there just was one airing every week, was as if it was a TV show episode.

Basically, even though these were running as separate productions and they had their own stop and start and they weren't part of the factory line of an ongoing series, it was like, you delivered this to us in like less than a month from the moment we hire you.

Spielberg wants Gregory Peck.

An icon for him.

Peck says no.

Not surprising.

I think Spielberg knows that if he'd gotten Peck, maybe this could have leapt to the big screen.

Certainly he would have gotten more than 10 days.

They're not interested.

It also makes sense with his Joan Crawford history that he's starting to strategize about

I can gain some heat from proving myself to these legendary stars in their autumn years.

And then they'll call people for me.

Right.

Yeah.

They'll see that I respect them and that I know what I'm doing and then they'll endorse me and whatever.

Yeah.

But I feel like Weaver, dennis weaver who they cast is perfect in that yeah because you need someone who's a little nebishy and kind of ground down like if it's gregory peck being like there's goddamn trucks in my way i'm like no one's gonna fuck with him like george c scott

weaver's characterization is fascinating because this is a thing that like to its credit is not telling you too much about this guy right and yet weaver's performance is really specific where it doesn't feel like he's just a stand-in

and yet there are certain things about him that are a little hard to pin down.

For sure.

This guy's like a weird combination of like a little arrogant and glib, but also kind of like Nebuchadnezzar put upon.

Yeah, does this guy have an anger thing or is he kind of right, a pushover bit of a pushover who is like both at the same time in oscillation, which means that he's really compelling to watch because you kind of don't know how he's going to react in any given moment.

Now, Dennis Weaver, it was on a little TV show called Gunsmoke, which is the, at the time, like the longest fucking running thing ever, right?

Right.

And Simpsons is now like gone 20 years or whatever.

Right.

But more recently, he had sort of had a bit of a revival on this show, McCloud,

which I have never seen, but it's an NYPD cop show where it's like...

Was that Darren McGavin?

No.

I don't know.

It's Dennis Weaver.

He's McLeod.

Okay, why do I think Darren McGavin was on the show as well?

Darren McAvan.

Weaver was McLeod.

Weaver was McLeod.

Darren McGavin, I i think the thing you're thinking of is

i don't know i don't know mike hammer maybe i don't know who could say on the other mcloud is um

it's like he's like a an old kind of cowboy type cop from new mexico and now he's in new york yes so he's probably always like

you know what did a cow do this and they're like no it's it's it's new york city baby beep beep I assume that's what the vibe was.

Actually, sounds like prime for a fucking reboot.

It kind of does.

Why are people not like yellowstone in new york right yeah

modern day mcloud would kill spielberg likes dennis weaver who's got who's got a little juice because of mcloud because he's in uh touch and

people right as the sort of sniveling night watchman yeah the motel attendant uh right so he's kind of like maybe we can get a little out of that energy in here the twitchy kind of nervous yeah uh weaver says his agent called him and said they're going to send you a script say yes before you even read it and weaver was like what but then he got the script and he was like, Yep, I get it.

But it was hard to shoot this movie for him because it's all him driving and very little dialogue.

It also just bears repeating.

And it's a lot of him going, like, the fuck.

Should I get over?

David's doing an incredible performance right now.

Um,

it just bears repeating.

I know everyone listening probably knows this, but the Rio Grande line between television and film was so fucking thick at this point, right?

Right?

Like, it was just in terms of like the class and esteem associated with the two.

And especially for any actor, you really had to be strategic in these moves of like, which one are you?

Right.

If people started in film and then went to TV, it would be hard for them to make their way back.

You know, and if you're a guy who is like doing smaller parts in T in film, but then became a leading man on TV.

You know, it's like, is doing a TV movie doubling down?

All this shit.

I don't know.

It's a pretty peacock world.

Thank you.

That's an easier way of putting it.

They look at a lot of cars.

Casting the cars is kind of the biggest thing they have to do.

Yeah.

71 Plymouth Valiant and a 1951 Peterbilt for the truck.

And they kind of customized the truck, I think, to make it look a little scarier.

You know, it's all crudded up with

customizing, do you mean they just threw dirt on it?

They put bugs all over the windshield.

They put

some tanks on the doors, I think, to make it kind of have more of a face, you know?

And so they wanted it to look like a monster.

And

this truck looks perfect.

It looks incredible.

I don't like that truck's vibe.

I hate it.

It also says like flammable on it or whatever.

And you're like, yeah.

Yeah.

This is conjecture on my part.

I admit this.

Dennis Weaver is the star of a great Twilight Zone episode.

Which one?

It's called Shadow Play.

Oh, sure.

It's a guy trying to avoid the electric chair.

Right.

And just knowing how influential Twilight Zone was for Spielberg and Weaver's in kind of a similar position in that, a guy who's trying to like figure out his way out of a seeming inevitability of death.

Right.

You know, I could see that also being another thing that factored into the soup for him.

David, what?

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Who's one other person in the room?

My sickness is so rude.

I sleep easy.

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

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That's an example of a fussy person.

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

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Look, they're, again,

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So

they make duel.

Spielberg insists on shooting it outside.

They wanted to do soundstage.

Yeah.

And it's a big fight.

And

like he went over schedule, as you say, three days over schedule.

Right, which is maybe the equivalent of going three weeks over schedule on a TV, on a real film, a future film.

How could you do this on a soundstage?

It would look

like a janky TV movie.

Yes.

But there's like, look, I love Twilight Zone, and a lot of Twilight Zone episodes are very ambitious in terms of what they're aiming to depict, because that is a show that didn't have like a home-based kind of rotation of sets it could reuse.

There's like a great hitchhiker episode of Twilight Zone that all takes place on the road, and there's very little like real car footage, right?

And most of it is just like a close-up of an actor in front of a rear projection screen behind a picture car, you know?

Sure, they're like, you could see how they were just like, look, don't overthink this.

This isn't a real movie.

Like, Spielberg fighting to make this 50% more of a movie than they want it to be results in him over-delivering on the product, which then commits them to be like, fuck, film some more and make this even more of a movie.

Right.

Yeah.

Um, he's doing lots of master shots, less TV close-ups, he says.

You know, he's trying to, you know, be wider, make it feel more cinematic.

There's like crazy camera placements in this.

There's that's the, he's the king of blocking, yeah.

But beyond that, king of blocking, obviously, right?

It is like the weird kind of just like bone-d preternatural skill this guy had.

They call him the king of movies.

Um, They call him the king of blocking.

No, I was going to say, beyond him just being great at blocking, there's shit where you're like, oh, the camera's like mounted to the grill

in this sort of like side profile shot of the truck with the car behind it and shit like that, where you're just like, on a TV movie, schedule, budget, resources, crew, you choosing to do a setup like that.

is like you're going to have to sacrifice in exchange for putting your foot down and be like, I want this shot.

I want a crane shot, you know?

Like in exchange for doing that,

the payoff is you get fewer setups somewhere else or fewer takes of each setup or whatever it is.

But the guy just like he had the fucking vision.

But he shows the script, the film to ABC, and they're mad that the truck doesn't blow up

because it says clammable right on the truck.

And they think about shooting a new ending that's more explosive.

Literally.

But no.

Spielberg had said, like, I want more of like a slow death where the truck kind of suffers and basically kind of like bleeds out.

I mean, it is an incredible shot.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And then Duel comes out.

Oh, it's also got a really cool score.

Obviously, pre-John Williams for him, but Billy Goldenberg, sort of this like Bernard Herman, you know, knockoff-y kind of score.

Yeah.

But I mean, yeah, John Williams starts on Sugarland and then is his guy for movies.

Save for five movies.

Yeah, save for just a couple of times.

Yeah.

Duel gets rave reviews,

average ratings.

Richard Matheson says he was flabbergasted by how good it was.

Yeah.

And George Lucas has this story of he was at a party at Francis Forcopola's house.

He'd met Steven Spielberg maybe, but they didn't know each other that well yet.

And he's like, the movie's on that movie he made.

And they're watching it.

And then like at this party, everyone starts to like look lock in on the movie yeah like that instead of just checking in with it like everyone just sits down and watches it because they were like this is really fucking good yeah i mean look i'm gonna i'm gonna throw out a take here go ahead this isn't a perfect film right

yeah

in its best sequences it is just like astonishing agreed i mean which is basically all and not just its loudest sequences no right but it's mostly when you're on the road but but some of the construction of some of the sequences you're just like how the fuck is this guy's first movie?

Not only is it just the level of skill, but you're like, most people, it takes two decades to cross the arc of developing the skill.

Then they get ostentatious with their craft and then they learn how to like pare it down and get Spartan and unshowy with it and just communicate.

A lot of people, it takes over 10 years to do that.

And the first movie, he already has this confidence of like an old master.

My big take is,

I think you watch this.

And in the construction of the big showcase moments, the big set pieces, the big sequences, whatever, I would contend like he arrived fully formed as an action filmmaker.

He has better action sequences later in his career, but I'd argue those are largely a product of he knows how to build a better movie around those sequences, he has better resources and collaborators, he has better tools to play with and more time and whatever.

I don't actually think

his

basic craft and understanding of how to put images together to create tension and excitement right evolves past this like i think right you're basically like he was fully formed he's as good then as he was now it was basically everything else rose to his level and i think he says like he watches duel all the time and is kind of like, yeah, fucking crushed it.

He now like studies duel trying to be like, how did I do it?

What did I do here?

Right, exactly.

Because I think it was also in such a state of panic where he has to put this together so quickly with such limited resources, but also he knows like this is his big chance to show himself.

Yeah, that this movie almost comes out of like just like a flow state for him.

Yeah, as much as it was meticulously storyboarded and everything, he was just like, I just knew exactly how I had to make it.

And he just kind of like put his foot down and got it done.

And he proved his fucking point.

Like it totally worked in the way he needed it to.

Yeah, it's a great movie.

I saw Jewel on TV.

I think on the BBC, the Baby.

The Baby C

when I was 14 or 15 years old.

Yeah.

And I had my Empire Magazine Spielberg edition.

Empire Magazine put out a special Steven Spielberg edition once that had all of his

movies like...

with two pages devoted to them, you know, whatever.

And so that's probably when I first learned about Duel.

Oh, did you know, like before

E.T.

or whatever, you know, he made this TV movie.

And I remember watching it, like seeing it in the listings and being like, I'm going to watch it.

I'm a young cinephile.

Yeah.

And then watching it being like, that rocked and feeling really proud of myself for like having done that.

My parents did not like Steven Spielberg.

They were.

Newman's fucking up again.

I know.

In the 90s, I think they were...

That was a very popular time for people to kind of turn against Spielberg.

Yeah, 100%, of course.

No, once he wins the Oscar for Chandler, especially, I think people are like, it's like when the Red Sox won the World Series where people are like, all right, can I stop hearing about you now?

Yes.

Right.

And he used to be good, but now he's so maudlin and so manipulative.

There was sort of a feeling of like, look, we can't deny Schindler, but.

Everything else he's made in the last 10 years is a failure to recapture how good the first 10 years were.

Right.

And they were sort of like, you know, by mid-90s, they were like, Spielberg's washed.

But I remember within that, despite being a child who was shown E.T.

and Close Encounters very young by my mother as like, these are important and having like a massive effect on me both, I remember saying to me, you know which one is good?

His first movie?

Sure.

When she was in her sort of like Spielberg socks phase.

And because she grew up in Europe, humble brag,

she, I think, she must have seen duel in theaters presented as like.

a movie properly.

Well, we've already mentioned TV didn't exist.

TV didn't exist.

Right.

So yeah, I remember her telling me about it fairly young young and just describing the premise in the way that kind of excited me is like, wait, and that's the whole movie?

She was like, Yeah, it's just a nervous guy, and this truck starts following him.

And I'm like, Why?

Like, you don't know who's driving the truck?

You don't know.

Yeah, it's just this guy going crazy, and this truck coming after him.

There's no explanation for it.

And it's like thrilling.

So, I think, yeah, I probably rented on VHS when I was 10 or 12 or something.

Cool.

Yeah, it rolls.

Ben, did you like it?

It's so impressive yeah

how

much it's a movie yeah

and how much you're on the edge of your seat yes but i think the first point especially that it's like it doesn't feel like a tv movie really no partly because the limited scale makes sense so you're not seeing yeah it push against a budget it can't you know what i mean like you're like it makes sense for it to be fairly stripped well there's a focus to the story but then he's pushing to expand the scale cinematically And he does.

And he does.

All of my problems with it are just when it's him,

you know, kind of futzing around in various locations.

Yeah.

Not that I think those parts are bad.

It's just the only time you kind of feel the movie trying to fill out time a little bit.

Yeah.

Yes.

You know?

Yes.

Like the confrontation in the diner.

It's a diner, right?

Yeah.

With the guy he thinks is the trucker.

It's just one of those scenes where you're like 10 seconds in, you're like, well, this isn't going to be the guy.

sure we're halfway into the movie he's not gonna like go face to face with the truck driver yeah

and it just kind of goes on for like a few minutes of him being like hey buddy can you cut it out and the guy's like what are you talking about hey but should i call the cops the chunk of that sequence with him walking in and recognizing one of these guys must be the guy and that's basically

five stellar minutes of just this guy looking at people sizing them up visually weighing the pros and cons of it could be this this guy, it couldn't be this guy.

Looking at their boots.

Looking at their boots.

I think that's a really interesting

way of like, yeah, how can I like read into a person through like, yeah, the way they have selected their boots, what color it is, how dirty it is.

And then he's running through the mental exercise of approaching each of these guys and confronting them and imagining how they'd react.

Like all of that stuff is fucking incredible.

And you have to think also in the theatrical cut, Ben, that's like the first sequence where he's talking at length.

Yeah.

You know, like, because the opening, which I think is really good, the opening credit sequence in the theatrical cut of the POV of the car,

that is all added.

That was not part of the original TV broadcast.

And I think is just like really immersive, sort of dropping you into the world.

As much as that's the POV of his car, it's an interesting way to start in the perspective of a car on the road and get you into the headspace of a road movie and all of that.

But then like the phone conversation with the wife is added for the theatrical, like a lot of that early stuff is added.

So the length of that scene and how long it goes on makes a little more sense if you think you're watching a broadcast that's been going on for 30 minutes and this is the first time that the movie is kind of stopping long enough to like settle you in.

The wife call I don't need.

I definitely don't need that.

Everything, the less the better, right?

Like I don't want to know who's driving the truck.

I just don't think that stuff.

I think

to its credit, it's not too overstated.

No, it's not.

You can imagine the worst.

They had a fight or something.

One, the fight is about, like, him not standing up enough.

It's like, this guy's kind of just a drip.

It's a bit of a drip.

It's also, there's stakes kind of in that he needs to be home in time because his parents are due at the house for dinner.

So he's like expected to be home and he already has had a fight with his wife.

I think his reactions to all this stuff characterizes him well.

Like it's not like, I don't think it's valuable like backstory shit or like table setting in that way, but I do think you get a lot from seeing him react to some other shit before the truck really enters the picture of just like, this guy's just kind of annoying.

He's not a bad guy.

I think it's key that it's like, this guy didn't like,

this isn't the manifestation of some curse on him.

Right.

This isn't his comeuppance.

He didn't run over a little toy truck.

Right.

Like Matheson wrote a lot of Twilight Zone, and that's what differentiates this from a Twilight Zone or something like that.

That there isn't the supernatural aspect to it.

This isn't like a cosmic balancing.

It's more just giving you a sense of why this guy is particularly ill-equipped to deal with a situation like this.

Right.

His personality defects are like a perfect stew to completely fall apart when face to face with this.

Right.

It's scary

because of the random act of violence

aspect to it.

But also that it's like meaningless.

That's the scariest thing.

But beyond that, as a driver, and you're a driver too, Ben.

Griffin's not a driver.

Debatable.

Just the weird thing.

I'm just driving on the highway of life.

Yeah, and I drive the conversation.

Yeah, that's right.

And we're all kind of surfing the information super highway.

This is true.

Sometimes I wish they'd put a speed limit on that thing.

You know what I'm saying?

Right, but that's not driving.

Maybe do some paving.

I cite that as proof that I'm a surfer, not a driver.

But it is a highway.

Yeah, but I'm surfing it.

You're right.

It is weird that, right, they're like, we're going to call it the web, the spider web.

Yeah.

And you surf it.

Why do you surf it?

It doesn't matter.

Do you, if you said surf the web to anyone under the age of 20, they'd be flummoxed.

Is that like?

I think it would be like me being like,

oh, hello, my baby.

It's just like they'd be like, I guess I know what that is, but you sound like one tiny man on a penny bicycle.

I wonder if they wouldn't even know what it was.

Maybe not.

And I'm like, that was the entire way that the internet was talked about for 25 years.

The web.

Like even that, if I was like, oh, did you find it on the web?

People say web

3.0, though.

Yeah, you're right.

That term's thrown around enough that I think people know.

Now, if I'm saying it to the good Madame, she would know.

Madame Webb.

Yeah, she would know.

And we should, of course, acknowledge that her web connects us all.

And sometimes I do be surfing it, watching it, hopefully on Peacock.

Yeah.

I don't know what it is.

Holding it on Hopen Pepsi can

with my red goggles.

Is there Madam Web 2 this year?

Madam Web 2.0.

Yeah, can they just?

I mean, first of all, the title's right there for the taking.

I'd say, look, we're recording this episode in November.

It will come out in January.

I would say the green load on Madam Web 2.0 largely depends on whether or not it gets the best picture nomination.

We're all in November predicting it will.

We're all assuming, right, it'll squeeze in there.

But by the time it comes out in January, who knows how the fates have changed.

Right.

Maybe like more than 10 films actually were released in 2024.

That would hurt it.

If it turns out that there are more than 10 movies eligible.

Sony's crossing their fingers that the year is going to clean up.

It's not one of those years no one releases any movies.

No, I think, look, if I can.

You're guaranteed a nom.

And maybe I'll, maybe I'll sound foolish here.

I'm making a bold prediction about about the future as far as I'm concerned Sony has one of the 10 spots reserved I think whether or not Madam Webb makes it in is largely dependent on the response to Craven right the if the trap is set one of the five greatest trap artists in history of humanity

so

as a driver that was my point right there is a sort of

you know, like there's the kind of like rules of the road, right?

You know, and then when someone starts being aggro

or even just like crosses in front of you, you know, cuts you off in a weird way.

Maybe they don't even mean to be aggro, but they're just doing whatever they're doing.

It is kind of fundamentally creepier than because you can't talk to them, right?

You can beep your horn and you can go, hey, asshole, and like shake your fist out the window or whatever.

But like you do start, if someone's being weird on the road, that immediate spiral of thoughts of like, what's going on with this car or truck or whatever.

And trucks are scary.

driving with a truck is scary if there's some big-ass truck on the highway i want to get away from it i don't want to be near those things can i contribute some uh non-non-drivers thoughts to this conversation yes everything you just said

are high up on the list all of them high up reasons for why i am terrified at the idea of

driving yes and i wonder how much uh seeing this movie young age also contributed to that i don't think it was the formation of that there's lots of but like this movie just depicts 10 things I think about a lot

as like, why would I ever do that?

Yeah.

I want to get somewhere.

I grew up in the most, I think it's, yeah, the most densely populated state.

New Jersey is very densely populated.

Garden state.

It's really, you know, major car culture, lots of traffic, lots of road rage.

Growing up, my dad warned me:

if someone is getting really crazy and out out of sorts do not fuck around yeah don't engage or just de-escalate or get out of there or whatever and there's so many of those stories too of uh you know a guy pulls a gun or a knife on someone you know when they it they both pull off the the the road and and engage each other

for me it's like i go through the Holland tunnel.

I'm smoking my cigar and it's like the factories and then we're in Newark and there's like pizza land.

Right.

And then it sort of starts to get more and more suburban.

This happens after you woke up this morning.

And then I, right, I go up my driveway.

Got yourself a gun.

And it's kind of like this metaphor for like, you know, how the times they are are changing even in like the modern crime world.

Quick, stop at the bottom bang.

Right, right, right.

The thing you're saying.

Have you ever been to Pizza Land?

I haven't.

It exists.

I think it's still there.

I've been to the strip club.

You've been to the bada bang, the bing.

Did you disrespect the bing?

I would never.

Good, okay, good.

I would never, David.

You disrespected the Bing.

The thing you said, David, about

having this sort of like emotional interaction, this visceral interaction with another vehicle, but the person being kind of anonymous, right?

It's like so much of the road rage thing of like, if you pull up to someone to be equidistant to them, you want to fucking yell at them quickly or like flashing the bird, part of that, I think, is the idea of being able to humanize them and being like, I'm angry at you, a person.

I need you to be a person.

It is what is so evocative in this movie.

And I feel like Spielberg has said the thing he locked into when he read the story after quickly leafing over some pictures of boobs was that it's like fear of the unknown.

Yeah.

And the thing, I think one of the smartest decisions this movie makes is like, there's a certain logic to the idea of maybe you don't show any part of the driver at all because it's what is the scariest thing having no glimpse of the person.

Right.

It's just this machine.

But he will give you these shots that the Dennis Weaver character wouldn't be able to see from inside, you know, the cab of the truck of his foot, of his arm, you know, of his hand on the wheel.

It's always sort of fragmented, but it's like clear shots from almost the driver's POV.

And I feel like you need to do that because the movie needs to underline: like, this is not supernatural.

This is not like a monster.

This is just some guy.

And that's what makes it even scarier:

his motivations are inscrutable.

They are

beyond inscrutable, unknowable.

They are fundamentally unknowable.

There is no rhyme or reason to this.

Is he doing this for sport?

Is he insane?

Is there some backstory?

You don't know?

It doesn't fucking matter.

I mean, just placed in this guy's reality, which is why the fuck is this happening?

And I don't even really have time to consider that because I'm just trying to survive.

But it's easy to figure out or to start spiraling over like, well, is it that I kind of passed him and hung my horn at him being a jerk?

Is it that I'm this, you know, whatever city slicker in my red Plymouth and he's like a salt of the earth rust

and he just has rust and flames.

He's just moving some rust and flammable flames.

Yeah.

I do have a picture of the driver if you want to see him.

They did.

They did provide one picture of him if you're interested in the picture I want to show you.

The picture I showed Griffin is, if you want to say Griffin.

It's Russell Crowe and the film on Hinge.

Right, Which is like the opposite of this movie.

Yeah.

Where it's like, what if that happened to you?

But rather than it was this unknowable sort of question of like, what does this represent or who is doing this?

It was like a large Russell Crowe going like, fuck you.

I'm going to kill you with my car.

The whole movie.

Right.

And he's ostensibly the hero.

He's like, you cut off the wrong guy, motherfucker.

I do think that's one of our friend Richard Lawson's best jokes ever on the 10 years of this podcast.

I believe it was in the witches episode where we were doing the box office game when theaters had not really reopened of what was in the top 10 the week that the witches went on HBO Max and Unhinged was number one because Unhinged was basically yeah, Solstice Studios released it on like 40,000 screens.

Yes, there was nothing available.

I think it beat Tenet by one week to be the first

widely released film.

Yeah, and you said like Unhinged number one, two million dollars.

And Lawson said, which is a pretty good gross for a documentary.

No, he's not the hero.

He's a villain.

I've never seen it.

I've seen it.

He's the protagonist, but he's a psychopath.

Okay.

It's a falling down type.

Yeah, it's like, what if you were,

you know, were

somewhat aggressive?

Yeah.

No, he's already crazy.

Oh, okay.

Like with a guy behind the wheel of a car, and then it turns out the guy you did that to was Russell

Roided up on rage, not on steroids.

But who's that guy?

Who's the guy he's chasing in the movie?

I wish I could remember without looking it up, but unfortunately, I can't.

Whoever this generation Gigandai is.

Here's the thing I want to.

Is that Karen Pistorius, that actress?

Oh,

okay.

Yeah, I don't know.

I want to state an intent here.

2025, I'm going to really up the number of Gigandai references I make.

Oh, get him up there.

I think it's a perfect time to start reclaiming Cam Gigande.

Do you want to bring up the movie Bad Johnson?

Yeah, that's a movie in which I think Nick Fune plays his penis.

Yes.

It's a comedy in which Camji Gonde's penis comes to life and is played by comedian Nick Theune.

These are fun names to say, Kamji Gonde and Nick Thune in the penis comedy, Bad Johnson.

Bad Johnson, known as Schlong Story in some markets.

Yeah.

You're telling me this film was in multiple markets?

I don't know.

There was a deadline story recently announcing a Cam Gigande Kellen Lutz movie, and I texted David and said, This is like the Pacino De Niro Heat team-up of dog shit.

And what did I say?

I can't remember.

I think I said the dollar store version.

You maybe said it was the penny store version.

Anyway, 2025 is the year Zhigande comes back.

He's back.

Duel.

He'd be good in a dual reason.

Yeah, sure.

Let's do it.

I wanted to ask, have you ever had a scary road rage incident?

Like,

not.

No.

No, I would say no.

I've never had a thing where I'm like, oh my God, this person is like, this is unsafe.

And this person is going to to attack me.

Have you been?

I've had like aggressive drivers fuck with me or yell at me or, you know, I've had shit like that happen.

No, I have this one with the truck that has really, it still stands out to me as one of those things where I'm like, this was a close call for me.

Okay.

I wasn't the driver, but I was in the car.

We were coming back from Hartford, Connecticut.

We went to a Dave Matthews band concert.

You were just riding high on being cool guys.

We were probably, yeah, definitely one of the, it was one of the coolest moments for me in in my life.

Well, you're already on edge because if you're driving back from a Dave Matthews band concept, there's always the risk that you're going to get hit with his shit truck.

That's a real road risk.

If you just

take an underpass, you might get DMB

and dumped all over.

Has that become their legacy?

It's like, no, he's a respectable artist, but that is one of the funniest things that's ever happened.

Anyway, go on.

And we were on 95.

We were kind of like heading basically towards the GWB, but at some point split off

going towards New Jersey.

Right.

And I don't know, maybe he pissed off this tractor trailer.

The tractor trailer went into our lane and we almost swerved into that like, you know, those like yellow plastic barrels that like the exit protect you from crashing.

Filled with water.

yes we almost crashed into that truly it was like the truck really almost led us to crash and he was doing it on purpose

for sure it was very scary this is a dual time kind of situation yeah and we slammed on the brakes and it was very close to us getting into a terrible car accident because of this tractor trailer and as it drove away it honked geez And I've gone by that intersection many times coming back from New England and I think about how I really could have gotten hurt.

Watch it, watch your backs out there, blinkies.

The mad trucker reigns supreme.

Here's another thing.

I pull it up on my iPad because it is a tough, a slightly tough movie to talk through because it is so much just like.

Oh, wait, I'm sorry.

Thank you.

I love how Ben futs for 40 minutes on his console.

But it was worth it.

That power paid off.

Year 10.

Blank check.

Year of miracles.

Soundboard is back.

Kimgi Gundai references out the butt.

Early Spielberg.

Jelly Trilogy on Patreon.

It's 2025.

2025 Year of Miracles.

I love him.

Welcome to Pony Murrs in the Building.

The official podcast.

Join me, Michael Cyril Creighton, as we go behind the scenes with some of the amazing actors, writers, and crew from season five.

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I love the use of talk radio at the beginning of this film.

Sure.

He's driving.

They do drop it a little bit,

which I think is largely because Spielberg wants to be able to make the most out of silence, which he employs very well in this film.

It's interesting, the

John Williams documentary, he credits John Williams with teaching him the power of pulling back and living in silence.

that he will often say to John Williams, like, I think this is a spot where we could use something.

And Williams will be like, you might want no music under this.

And Jaws was like an example of that where he was expecting Wild Wall score and Williams at certain points was like, you want nothing here.

But he's already got such a good understanding of it in this one.

You have such long stretches without him using the score.

And the score in this is totally solid.

I think it's a good score.

It's pretty strong.

Yeah.

But the talk radio at the beginning is interesting because it feels like a smart way to keep dialogue going while not feeling the need to like overexplain this guy,

which is to this movie's credit, that it's like not trying to pathologize him too much.

I know what you're saying of like the dialogue scenes added for the theatrical push it a little more where like the less you know about this guy, the better.

But I do think it's basically the right amount, save for the internal monologue shit.

I don't feel mad to learn a little bit.

I just don't think you need it.

But I also know that it's like at that point, you're getting to be more like a 65 to 70 minute movie that's just car action.

and there's only so many ways to ramp up the tension of one car one truck you know and so yeah no it's a good movie it's a really well constructed movie it's like it has the juice i'm just like sort of running through it here so you have like you know the opening credits from the car p v

his drive yep uh him listening daytime radio then he pulls into the gas station the truck pulls out next he only sees the boots for he has the initial thing with the truck where he passes it and it roars past him and all that and then yes then they're at the gas station sees the boots calls his wife yes uh they talk that out the guy at the gas station who's just a great back in the day man you'd pull into a gas station

hey fill her up with ethyl yeah ethyl ethyl mermin yeah my first question two can i uh the guy is just like can i lift the hood because cars back in the day i guess it's just like i don't know this thing could explode any second guy says you need a new radiator hose He's like, forget it.

But that's Chekhov's radiator hose, right?

That'll come up later.

And you have like a lot of diner.

He fucking orders an aspirin.

Oh, sure.

He's just like, can I have an aspirin?

Yeah, let's go.

It's just back in the day, you could just be like, my head hurts because it's the 70s and I'm drinking like

molten lead or whatever.

Aspirin was on the main aspirin.

Yeah.

Might have been gratis.

Yeah, it probably was.

Asking for aspirin was like a cup of water.

No, Spielberg, the phone conversation

starts on him.

And then in like the foreground of the shot, a woman the laundromat.

Yeah.

Yeah, you're like, oh, this space is also a laundromat.

It does a good job in sort of that like taxi driver phone conversation way of just kind of like immediately sort of emasculating this guy or like decentralizing him.

You're like, the movie isn't even that concerned with him.

He's having a conversation to explain himself.

And the movie's like, yeah, but more important shit's going on.

He's in this woman's way.

She's trying to get her laundry out.

But I just, just, I agree with Ben that I like that the conversation sets up: like, okay, there's like a time crunch.

His wife's already giving him the business about, like, are you going to make it home in time?

He's acting like so beleaguered by everything, right?

Like, my boss is asking me to drive out to meet, but also, my wife's haranguing me about the idea of not coming home in time before I've even made the drive out.

Right.

And also, she's complaining about the fact that I didn't defend her enough at like a work party where it felt like she was being sexually harassed and he can't really defend himself.

Like, you're just like, this guy is just kind of nothing.

I, it is the thing I love about 70s shit where you watch this guy and you're like, I get that this movie is trying to code him as lame.

If this guy walked into a bar today, he'd be like, that's the coolest looking guy I've ever seen in my life.

Now he looks cool.

The glasses are cool.

He looks like one of the sabotage cops.

A little bit.

The glasses are specialists.

Yeah.

But you're like, this is a guy who's trying too hard to be hip.

And then, right, then he's back on the road.

And then this is when shit really gets

scaled up.

Here's a thing I find interesting about Spielberg, and I get into this a little bit on our Jaws episode, which will come out in a couple weeks.

This is like an interesting time for film, right?

This whole kind of like new Hollywood transition point

of studios being like, maybe we don't know what the fuck we're doing anymore.

Right.

Hey, yeah, the Coppola, you want to make the rain people?

Yeah, exactly.

The kind of of shit that results in Scheinberg being like, I don't know, give Spielberg a five-year contract.

We don't fucking know anymore.

The old models aren't working, right?

And you look at this point in time, and there's like a lot of the kind of like old master guys who are really struggling to keep up with the times, figure out how to stay relevant, right?

You have guys like Otto Preminger and like

Billy Wilder who are just like hitting a wall in the 60s and are just like, I have not figured out to keep up.

Right.

Someone like

like transitions beautifully, right?

Comes out of like 50s TV, understands how to become more relevant than ever in the 70s.

But then this whole like era of, you know, the movie brats coming up and even like, you know, Altman and Casavettis, who are older and had already lived a lifetime to a certain extent, both of those guys are obsessed with like kind of ripping down tradition in a lot of ways.

They're like, this is all creaky.

It's too state.

You need to make this feel like relevant and present.

Then you have someone like Bogdanovich, who's like, we lost our way.

We got to get back to the 40s.

Like Bogdanovich's whole thing is like, we need to get more classical in a certain way.

You know, like, and then Coppola is like still figuring out his shit at this point.

Scorsese is figuring out his shit.

They're both in this zone of like trying to make the movies they think they need to make to gain the cachet to make the things they want to make versus Spielberg, who wanted to be an entertainer first and foremost and is viewing any piece as like an opportunity to show his skills.

Right.

George Lucas wants to do a Sebalba movie.

Of course.

He's working towards that.

Yes.

Copla wants to do Megalopolis.

He's working towards that.

Right.

It's Platinum.

Yes.

But Spielberg is this guy who is able to pull from the most exciting new things that are happening while also having this encyclopedic knowledge of the entire history of cinema.

Like this is a movie of a guy using like incredibly classical tools.

He's not fighting against tradition.

He's also not like stuck in some pastiche.

Yeah, but he's right.

He's definitely not tearing down right now.

No, you know.

But he's like a fascinating bridge point

at an era where most people were kind of picking aside.

I do think there was this sense

of

what we're going to do.

We'll tear it all down and

sort of stay the course.

Yeah.

Well, it's what I think was like impactful about him being on set for faces for a couple days and being like, oh, there's maybe like a different performance style here.

But not being like, this is how I want to make movies independent of the system.

Right.

But are there pieces of this I can take?

Yeah.

And put in, you know, and like a lot of his love of John Williams comes from him recognizing John Williams' work in early Altman movies.

So, you know, he's paying attention to that stuff, you know?

Hmm.

There's, I just,

I think there's no, you just watched the documentary.

You know everything.

but I also knew that, like, Williams was an Altman guy before he was a Spielberg guy.

I mean, he made like several Mark Rydell movies, which I think is where Spielberg said he really clocked him and then said, like, the second I have a budget to make a real movie, I'm hiring John Williams.

But when he made Jaws, he used the images score as his temp track.

Is it a good score?

The images score is like a discordant, like, I mean, images is like, you know, Altman's like

repulsion.

It's a good movie.

it's a great movie but it's like they don't remember the score old woman going crazy mostly inside her own brain and inside her own house and it's like clanging noise and like constant sounds he did the long goodbye score yeah and i want to say did he do countdown did he do maybe like one of those other early early ones before altman really had his voice not countdown

not cold day in the park i feel like there are three williams altman scores but maybe i'm wrong about that i can only i think there's only two.

Okay, well, then I'm wrong about it.

Unless he did, like, California Split or something, but I don't think no.

Anyway,

it just looks like it's those two.

Okay.

I mean, Williams

was very close with Altman, and Williams' first wife died filming California Split, which is like a weird fact.

I didn't know until I watched the documentary.

Died how?

Of like a completely inexplicable brain hemorrhage.

She was 41 years old.

She plays like a barmaid in California Split.

Yeah, it's a wild story.

Anyway, my point is, Spielberg is just this guy who's in this very interesting position at the right place in time to know how to synthesize all these different philosophies of what filmmaking could be.

And he made them cohesive.

And even in this movie, it's like, as you said, you can imagine the Gregory Peck version of this.

That's the more obvious, overstated version of what kind of performance exists in a movie that is mostly on a guy's face, a thriller of a guy being chased, right?

And you could see the more obvious old school philosophy is you need a Trotten Heston-esque performance to overcome the size of the story.

Right.

You need someone emoting out the ass.

Yeah, right.

And incredibly, not bad, but over-the-top

sort of screen-dominating, like Gregory Peck.

There's an effectiveness to that, right?

But like he's getting a more naturalistic performance out of Weaver.

And the thing I love the most about this performance is when it starts, Weaver is kind of doing this gritted teeth, nervy tension, stress thing, right?

Yes, it feels like it's going to be a movie about like they broke this guy.

Right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Which they do, but the way that is dramatized, I would argue, is the second half of the movie, his face largely goes slack.

It's like at the halfway point,

it's like this guy is so overtaxed now by this circumstance that he's not even emoting anxiety or tension outwardly.

It's that thing where you're so exhausted that you just kind of go blank.

Yes, because also he's just like, I'm not going to convince anyone that this is happening to me.

It's not going to stop.

He's in pure survival.

Right.

And I just have to, you know, eventually he's like, I just have to beat him.

And he looks more panicked.

Like kind of the most ingenious trap of all.

And haunted because of that.

Right.

But most people would think, oh, hey, Dennis, we need to start at two, and by the end of the movie, you're at your absolute biggest.

And instead, he starts to numb down.

Yeah, which is fine because the action is getting more intense.

So you almost don't need him

to be yelling.

It's great reflective of reality.

Yes.

That's an interesting point, Griffin.

Thank you.

Every once in a while, I mostly think of this movie as just kind of like,

well, I've actually been.

A lot of that.

Yeah.

And I guess the first time I saw it, which may have been the only time I've seen it, I don't think I'd watch Duel since I was a teenager.

I was even more like enraptured by cars, not in that I thought they were cool, but just there's like, I can't, you know, I, I can't imagine being in this scenario.

I'm not driving yet.

Oh, sure.

Like, there's something like fearsome about like, yeah, what do you do if some truck harasses you?

Whereas I look at those shots where it's like the camera is mounted behind the rear wheels on the side and I'm like, this is the most terrifying machine ever created.

Why do we let people drive these?

Now I'm just kind of like, yeah, I would just go to a diner and fucking chill out.

I guess he tries to do that and it doesn't work, but he also picks a fight in the diner.

But this is right.

This is like the failing of this guy.

I mean,

you understand why from how he is basically characterized in the first 30 minutes that when he gets to the diner and he sees the truck pull up outside.

Or rather, the truck's already there, right?

Yes.

So he pulls up, someone's here, walks in and is like, one of these guys is the guy.

He can't get fucking over it.

It gets him so in his head to have to reason with the idea of this being a person, even if that person is still abstract.

Right.

And then you just know he's never going to get over it.

Like, so what do I do?

I try to wait this guy out, but then maybe he's waiting for me.

Or I get in my car and drive away and try to get a head start, but then he'll catch up to me.

Like at this point, the idea of the guy and how inexplicable he is has grown so much in his mind that it's like, he's never going to get over this.

Right?

Like, and this is the, the quote unquote, this is the supernatural element of it too.

He's like, for two hours and be like, is the guy eventually?

We all accept that he cannot like practically shake this guy.

Even if I'm like, yeah, check into a motel for the night.

He'll, the truck needs to go where it's going to go.

We're all kind of like, nah, the truck would just still be there.

The truck would still be there.

And he's trying to do the math of like, okay, my only move left is to make a direct plea to this guy, person to person.

How do I talk to him in a way that stops him from following me?

But you live in his anxiety of being like, do I try to tough guy him?

Do I try to like make an impassioned plea?

Like, what do I do?

And he can't fucking figure it out.

He can't ID which guy it is and he can't figure out the right way to talk to anyone.

And the way he does it, ultimately, only shows how rattled he already is, where it's like, there's no way this guy's shaking this off.

He could get home safely tonight and he'd still be terrified that the truck would drive through his bedroom window.

Like at this point, he's fucked.

He stops at a gas station that has a bunch of snakes,

tries to call the cops there.

Let's call her what it is.

A gas station with a snake lady.

Yes, a snake lady.

She's got a spider too, I think.

Truck destroys

the phone booth while he's trying to call the cops and spread snakes everywhere.

Right.

Best line of dialogue is the woman yelling, my snakes.

My snakes, my snakes.

Maybe she's kind of a queen of the creepies.

Is that fair to say?

Because she's got snakes.

Well, and the spiders, you said, I think that makes her queen of the creepies.

Maybe that she's running that kind of roadside attraction.

Hey, you're bored?

Need gas?

Want to see some snakes?

I've got them.

Any money you want to pay for this, honestly, was fine.

Yeah.

The most Wayne's World part of this movie, though.

Yes.

Where it's like, no, it's not just that he runs through the phone booth while he's trying to call a cop.

It's like, also, there's some snakes.

Now there's snakes.

Yeah.

Oh, one thing I wanted to mention because we just skipped over it, but I think it should be called out because it's so funny is when he gets to the diner, he like kind of crashes into a fence.

Yes.

And causes enough of a commotion that the people in the diner notice.

And at one point, the guy who works there asks him something like, what happened?

And he's like, it was complicated or something to that effect.

And the guy goes, it looked complicated.

And he has that old-timey movie pattern.

And it just like really plays through comedy.

I love that moment.

It's very funny.

Well, we also brush over one of the best parts of the movie.

I mean, he's like, uh, living in the shame of like accosting this guy at the gas station and being like held apart, right?

Held back from him.

Yeah.

And

then he sees that the truck is pulling off.

He tries to run after it.

You know, like, what are you even doing?

Right.

What will happen?

Right.

Then he goes back to his car and he comes across the stop school bus, which is just an ingenious plot

of like they're asking him to help push the school bus.

And what are you going to do?

Not, you know, help a stuck school bus.

And as far as he knows, the truck's gotten a major head start.

It's ahead of him, but he's so fucking panicked of like, should I stop moving?

Can I help them?

What's going on here?

And then the truck comes back into view.

And it's sort of this feeling of like, is the truck going to kill the school bus?

Is it going to go after the school bus?

Is it that evil?

Or is it just about him?

And there's like great Spielberg editing of him getting increasingly anxious by the noise of the children.

Just like completely meaningless, innocuous children like laughing and playing and yelling shit that to him is just driving him insane.

That is added, right?

That's part of the

whole school bus sequence?

Apparently the added stuff,

according to what I opening credits, the phone call with the wife,

is the call with the wife, the school bus, and then some of the railroad crossing stuff.

Okay.

Yeah.

I mean, the school bus, I think, is incredible.

It is good.

So maybe, yeah, maybe I should swing back to pro theatrical cut.

Yeah.

God, the train incident is so sad.

Yeah, that's right after the school bus.

Another thing that, again, you're just sort of scared of as like a new driver where you're like, I can just like drive across the railroad.

There's just allowed, and there's just right, like a little wooden fence stopping me.

Yeah, it is crazy.

But my favorite thing is, like, he sees the truck pulling back, right?

And he's like, fuck, I gotta go.

I can't help the bus anymore.

Right.

And they're like, what?

And he's like, I'm gonna die.

He looks like a coward.

He runs off.

He's cowering in fear.

And then the truck comes up behind the bus and helps the bus.

Like, he is so fucking

that the bus big times him just to make him feel even worse about himself and then sets on its way.

And now it's like, now my sights are back set on you.

And then it goes straight to the train sequence.

Yeah, the train sequence is right after.

Yeah.

Which is,

you know,

the train, the truck tries to push him in front of a train, I guess is the best way to put it.

Yeah.

And then

that's when he tries to slow down and everyone's pissed off at him.

And it's like, it doesn't matter.

The truck just reappears over and over and over again.

And then it's the snake lady.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

And then it's the old people who he tries to talk to.

Very Spielbergy.

Apparently, he used that couple again in close encounters.

Okay.

But it's just, right, it's a great way of showing like this guy can't interact with human beings anymore.

Right.

Him asking for help.

seems suspicious now because he's been like wound up just so thoroughly up by this.

If anyone approached me at like a rest stop, I was like, hey, I know this is going to sound weird, but this one truck keeps appearing and harassing me.

I would just be like, you sound crazy.

And what am I supposed to do about that?

Right.

Except he's saying that with the energy of,

the truck's trying to kill me.

If he called the cops and was like, hey, there's a brown truck.

Right.

They'd be like, okay, anything else?

I'll give you money.

But then it's like they see the truck come and the truck is more antagonistic towards the old couple in a way where they're also freaked out by it, but also like,

we got to look out for ourselves.

Yeah, we got to write your own.

We don't want any trouble.

Right.

And then he,

well, there's the part, then his radiator hose breaks as predicted.

Yes.

He has to coast down the hill

and almost gets crushed there.

And then you have the sort of final showdown.

Yes.

Where he laces traps.

That's the ultimate trap.

And we should just say, too, because it's so ingenious the way this story unfolds that that moment in the journey is the uphill moment where if his car didn't have issues in that moment, he would be able to get away because the tractor trailer is not going to be able to travel up the steep incline as quickly as the car.

So that really would be his moment normally to actually get away.

But of course, it starts overheating and he's now pushing it to the limit of it.

I mean, that's a moment where you're like, oh boy, this guy is ready to like just fucking scrap this car like to save his life.

There's an incredible Spielberg film language thing where you have this wide shot, what feels like a wide shot of just the car cruising on the road.

And it's after a section where he's been free of the truck for a while.

Obviously not free of the anxiety.

No, but you haven't seen the trucks on it.

And then suddenly the car like skids in the middle of the road, seemingly in response to nothing.

And the camera pulls back really quickly.

You realize you were zoomed in and the camera is actually placed under the carriage of the truck.

And you're like seeing him skid and then the camera is revealing the thing that caused him to skid.

And you're basically from the POV of like the wheels of the truck.

And then the next shot is like this fast.

classical camera crane in from the sky into Dennis Weaver in the window as it's just like, I need to figure this out right now.

Like, it is the moment of like,

I must set the ultimate trap of him deciding he needs to take things into his own hands.

Yeah, let's take out the

let's just assume the car is gone.

Like, let's write off the fucking Plymouth.

But it's just like a perfect two shots of like a sort of perspective shift where you're like disoriented by, oh fuck, what I'm seeing isn't what I thought I was seeing.

The image is revealing to me what everyone's been reacting to or what he's been reacting to, followed by the shot that is wordlessly showing his gears running in his head and him like basically throttling into a whole new and then if he sets the ultimate trail.

He sets the ultimate trail.

Essentially, he lets the trucker get the car

and

he goes down a canyon because we just jumped out of the truck, out of the car.

Yeah.

As the truck's going down, he kind of makes this noise.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

uh it's a little louder than that and it's got this kind of roar to it it's kind of cool and we'll amp it up in post

yeah um

and well you know there is of course the train horn

got the discipline

the fact that he's been holding back on this this entire time that's what makes ben honsley a true artist

much like spielberg he knows when you can just pull back,

let folks sit in the silence.

Boom, that one boom.

Distant.

Where's that train?

It's on its way to Chattanooga.

No, he sacrifices his car.

Yes.

And there's this beautiful slow motion where the truck doesn't explode, even though the whole movie has been clocking this flammable truck.

It does say flammable.

I think it's a solid note.

Instead, it kind of just like bleeds out.

You see blood.

Yes.

So there's an implication that the person died.

Yes.

But it also just feels like the truck is dying.

Yeah.

And then kind of a Jawsy ending.

Yes.

I mean, so much of Jaws feels like an expansion of duel, right?

Just sort of like, simplify the monster, simplify the intent.

Yeah.

You know, it's just ordinary people in this crazy situation.

And I think that's why when he's making Jaws, he's like, should I be making another monster movie essentially, which is what this is?

It's what's interesting about how his career went, where like Sugarland Sugarland is so good and ends up feeling kind of anomalous in his career.

It does.

Like what is like the Sugarland Express?

I guess we'll talk about that later.

I kind of would contend nothing.

I think there are movies where he's trying to recapture certain aspects of it.

Yeah.

Like something like the terminal is looking for some of the breeziness of it.

I wish it had found it.

Right, but it's him also doing it in this heightened sort of like capra pastiche kind of way.

That movie was heightened?

The terminal?

No, there's nothing quite like Sugarland, and Sugarland makes sense as this kind of dorky guy being like, Shouldn't I make what all the other like 20-something filmmakers are making right now?

Well, I mean, these kind of personal generational

youth movies, but also car movies, right?

Like Lucas with American Caffini and De Palma did a car movie, and you know, like, right, De Palma, use cars, like all these guys started out making these sort of like youth through the prison of cars, yeah, exactly.

Independent, it's it's kind of similar to Badlands in certain ways, like it has all these things that make sense as like what a lot of his contemporaries' first movies were.

Right.

And then Jaws is like a gig.

I guess Dawah didn't make a car movie to like wise guys.

Yeah, Jaws is a gig.

Which makes sense

based on the success of this.

Like, this is incredible

show reel to be like, I could direct Jaws.

I could make the shark scary.

Right.

But then that changes the course of his entire career.

Jaws?

Sorry.

So, like, once he's made Jaws, how is he not going to make things at the absolute highest level after that?

Like he can't make like, I'm just going to make another Hangout movie.

Right.

But Sugar Land is kind of what was in fashion at that point in time.

Yes, this is somewhat shaggy, like what's to be done with our youth and like, yeah, the open road.

It's just that his was not wildly successful.

So no one was begging him to make another movie like that and his career veered.

It veered.

But no, but Jewel, just like him kind of just like sitting at the top of the hill and just kind of like taking a moment.

It's kind of like in in Jaws when they're just sort of paddling, laughing and crying, basically simultaneously.

Okay,

all right.

It's also, look, we discussed this a lot eight years ago, but it's why there were so many complaints about the second half of Spielberg's career, quote-unquote, him not knowing how to end movies.

It's true, yeah.

And I think it's because the first half, he would end movies, he would get out so quickly.

He would, he would reach the peak of the story and then just end.

Like, he had a real skill set for just like, fucking, I don't need to wrap this up, you know?

And yet, it feels complete.

I mean, yeah,

is the last shot of Duel?

Right.

The credits basically roll over this shot of Dennis Weaver sitting in the middle of the hill, throwing rocks as the sun sets behind him.

And you're like, I have no idea how he gets home.

Beyond that, what is this guy's mental state for the next day, week, month, year, rest of his life?

Back in a car again.

Right.

Like, I love movies that end with, and what the fuck does this guy do now?

Where you've just watched one incident in a person's life, one period, one series of events, and the movie just ends and lets you sit with, and do they ever fucking get over this?

And that's totally what this is.

He just sits there throwing rocks in like a beautiful sunset shot, and then the movie fades to black.

Good shit.

The film was

got a 20.9 Nielsen.

Okay.

So pretty good.

Yeah.

But was the 18th highest rated television movie of the year.

Which means it's only even got like 80 million viewers.

That's what I'm saying.

Even though one-third of America's television viewers watched a duel when it aired, that was basically seen as like average.

It was in the bottom fourth or fifth of that slot.

I actually think I have the TV listings.

You want to know the other stuff that was airing?

I don't have much here.

Okay.

Give me what you got.

So on ABC.

Uh-huh.

Oh, this is, we're not doing ratings game.

We're doing like what?

We can also do the ratings game for that year of television, but I'm just going to tell you.

Give me this right now.

This aired between an episode of The Mod Squad,

which was a very hot show about the youth in and of itself, and an episode of Marcus Welby MD.

Of course.

A very hot show about the youth.

Hot medical drama.

And that's on ABC.

CBS, it looks like the only thing I'm seeing here is Hawaii 5.0.

I'm not sure what else.

And NBC had something called The Search for the Nile, which was a documentary

about, I guess, the people looking for the origins of the River Nile.

Boring.

Okay, so

number one of the TV in 1971.

You're giving me the year later.

Yeah.

Is that right?

Is that what this is here?

So it's 1971 TV ratings.

Okay.

Let's find out.

Let's find out.

Let's find out.

And it would be,

it would be 70 to 71, right?

Because this aired January.

Yeah, okay.

Yeah.

Number one is, wow, a medical drama.

Trapper John?

No, Marcus Welby MD.

Oh, fuck.

Well, with.

I guess this is too early for Trapper John.

What the?

Of course it's too early for Trapper John.

Way too early.

MASH has barely come out.

MASH has barely come out.

The show hasn't started.

Trapper John's going to run off.

The fuck am I thinking?

If we ever do early altman, we're going to have to do all of Trapper John MD on Patreon, right?

No.

I know we're loath to cover TV, but that just feels essential.

No.

Marcus Welby, I have never seen, but that is like your just classic boring-ass.

It's like it's about a family doctor who makes house calls.

It's what I would use as shorthand to make fun of dumb TV from the 70s.

Where you're just like, this is all we've got.

And they're like, yes.

And the people love it.

Number two, however, is something I've fucking never heard of.

Oh, wow.

It was a variety show.

Okay.

Shields Haynes

by

a comedian, a black comedian.

It was one of the first TV shows hosted by a well, it's not Flip Wilson.

It is the Flip Wilson.

Have you ever heard of the Flip Wilson show?

No.

Flip Wilson was huge.

Flip Wilson, like

a massive pioneering figure.

I was thrown off there because I knew Flip Wilson was one of the first, but I thought you would have heard of him.

I mean,

I know him.

Yeah.

Like, I'm looking at Flip Wilson.

I know this face.

Sure.

Yeah, no, Flip Wilson show is a big deal.

He was a very funny comedic actor.

Number three

at the box office is

at TV ratings is

a sitcom starring a sitcom legend, but it's her third sitcom.

Is it Here's Lucy?

It's Here's Lucy.

Yeah, a Mike Carlson favorite.

After I Love Lucy and the Lucy show, it was Lucille Ball's 70s sitcom, which ran for six seasons.

Yeah, that's the thing.

It was like, oh, Lucy's depressing finals old age flop.

And you were like, it ran six seasons.

It was one of the five most popular shows on television.

It's basically a show of, I think, is it her real children play her children on the show as her adult children?

Yes, they do.

Lucy Arnaz and Desi Arnaz Jr.

Yes.

Yeah.

And it's just her being like, ah, my kids won't leave me alone.

She sounds like that.

Yeah, sure.

Number four.

I'm not exaggerating that much.

No, no.

I mean, number four is

a long-running

TV

crime show.

It had kind of a gimmick.

It's not Matlock?

No.

It's not Dragnet?

Kind of a gimmick.

I mean, like the guy, there's something up with the guy.

Ironside?

Ironside.

Okay, there we go.

Raymond Burr.

What's up with him?

He's in a wheelchair.

That was like, you know, it's like, it would always be like, okay, what's your show?

And it's like, it's about a cop.

And he's in a wheelchair or, and he's from New Mexico.

Or, you know, like, there's definitely like some little twist.

That's the hook you needed.

That's how it's something.

Kojak, he fucking has a lollipop.

Yeah, truly.

Who loves you?

This guy's bald.

Yeah.

What makes this cop different?

He's got nice shoes.

Kojak, I've never seen an episode of Kojak.

Detective shoes.

Kojak does seem fun.

Kojak seems like a tremendous amount of fun.

Vin Diesel has been threatening to make a Kojak movie for like 15 years.

He's bald.

Correct.

Number five at the box office.

If that ever happens, I will watch all of Kojak, obviously, so that I can suddenly be a Kojak expert in time to explain what Vin got right.

But every time Vin's like talking about what's coming up, he's like, I'm going to go back to Furia, 10 more Fast and Furious, and then I'm finally making Kojak.

Glad he's making Furia.

Number five is the show that Dennis Weaver did 10 years on before

Gunsmoke.

Still in the top five.

Wow.

You've also got the ABC movie of the week, of which this was one.

Sure.

You've got Hawaii 5.0, as I mentioned.

You have something called Medical Center.

Perfect.

What if there was a medical center?

Hospital show starring James Daly,

who was, of course, Tyne and Tim Daly's father.

So, this is another installment of The Daly show.

Correct.

You have Bonanza, another gunsmoke-esque, long-running Western show.

Gunsmoke, Rawhide, and Bonanza.

I feel like it's just like, like, when I was a kid, rawhide would still be on TV sometimes because it has that great theme song.

Yeah.

And then I would watch two minutes of it and I would be like, it feels illegal that this is on TV in the 90s.

Like, this is too boring.

I think

was Bonanza the one that Altman did?

Altman did a handful of episodes of one of them.

And there's the great line that, like, you could tell which ones Altman directed because they didn't have a plot.

He did two Bonanzas.

Bonanzas, right?

But Bonanza is just not one of those.

There's like 500 episodes about.

I've seen like one or two of Altman's Bonanzas, and they are just like guys talking.

Sounds good.

They're just like sort of a long campfire company.

Just have anything happen.

It didn't matter.

People just wanted to watch TV.

It was still like kind of new.

Right.

Number 10 is the FBI, which I mostly think of from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood at this point.

But that's one of those shows that's like, the FBI are great.

This show is presented in partnership with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Oh, boy.

Right?

Yeah, correct.

Yeah.

But

you know what?

Knowing that ABC TV Movie of the Week was the highest rated one is actually good context to know for this.

Yeah, it was hot.

Spielberg was getting a slot on the best TV movie rotation, and yet his

rated low for the season, but immediately caught the eye of the people who mattered.

This was its second

season, I think, okay, of

whatever.

Yeah.

So, coming up, uh, oh no, third season, sorry.

Coming up on this show

are other Stevens Bill films.

Yeah, um, several of the most successful, popular, and acclaimed movies

in human history.

E.T., Jurassic Park, Close Encounters, Raiders of the Lost Ark.

These are all movies he made.

He made them.

And we'll be forced to talk about them.

Forced.

As David stifles a burp.

Yep, for your viewing entertainment.

But next week is his certainly probably still least seen film.

Right?

Yeah, I think so.

I mean, it's not hard to watch the Sugarland Express, but, you know.

But you know, as I've been telling people that we're doing this series, telling people in confidence because it hasn't been officially announced.

And, and, and friends go, what's coming up?

And I go, we're finally doing Early Spielberg.

They go, oh, man, Sugar Land.

I do feel like there's a growing Sugarland,

but I, because it's different.

You watch it and you're like, this is interesting.

He never quite did something like this again.

And it's so good.

And it's good.

Yeah.

It's far as interesting as a sliding door.

I don't bemoan the filmography we got out of him, but it's interesting to watch and just go like, he could have just made 15 of these and just been a really good filmmaker who someone like pauline kale hailed and never really had a commercial breakthrough yeah

there is a there is a big you know element of luck even involved for someone who perhaps innately is the most gifted filmmaker of all time like i think just in terms of raw understanding of the relationship between images and story he is uh it watching these early ones it's just kind of mind-boggling how fully formed he was out the gate and yet i probably wouldn't put duel in the top 20 Spielbergs.

No, that only spoke to me.

I might put it right outside, though.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, it kind of fucks, though.

Maybe it's number one.

Interesting.

No, I'm joking.

Or am I?

Who knows?

Anything else, Griffin?

We're done.

We did it.

Duel.

Blank check, season 10, year of miracles.

Wait, we're season 10 now?

No, year 10.

Yeah, there you go.

It's like season like fucking 50.

All right.

We should do that.

We should figure that out as well.

What number season this is?

Someone figured that out, not us.

Through mini-series.

Yeah, let us know.

Yeah.

But yeah, Year of Miracles, I'm calling it

Get Ready for All Bangers.

No complaints, all fun.

Yeah, and excited to talk about these movies.

Yep.

Look, there was a certain amount of strategy when I was like,

Is it kind of a bold move to just start off year 10 and finally settle the balance of Spielberg?

Yes.

And your immediate response was, hmm, Hmm, those are the exact kind of movies I'm going to be in the mood to rewatch with two recently born babies.

Yes.

And I said, David,

it was part of the thinking.

Right.

Yeah.

Well, I'm glad we're ending on a high note.

I don't know.

I'm done.

I'm done.

I'm done.

Okay, I'm done too.

I'm sitting on the top of that cliff throwing pebbles at the corpse of this episode.

Thank you all for listening.

The episode was a triumph.

It was.

Tune in next week for Sugarland Express.

And as always.