Last Looks: John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars w/ Ed Brubaker

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Speaker 1 So the movies we talk about on this podcast all share a certain quality that begs the question, how did this get made? But you know what? A great movie is in the eye of the beholder.

Speaker 1 And whatever movies you're into, you should know that Paramount Plus has a mountain of them. New movies.

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Speaker 1 What's up, Breather? Is Ed Brubaker's new book based on his own experience writing a TV show from Amazon? And are the ghosts of Mars against rock and roll?

Speaker 1 All this and more and a brand new how did this get made? Last looks, hit the theme.

Speaker 1 I was giving you a look.

Speaker 3 Hello, all you orca whale aliens.

Speaker 1 I am your ghost host with the most Big Daddy Paul and welcome to How Did This Get Made?

Speaker 1 Last Looks, where you, the listener, get to voice your issues on John Carpenter's Ghost of Mars, a movie that Discord user Quantum Volt thinks should have had the tagline, Ghosts of Mars.

Speaker 1 Sometimes the cure for possession is drugs.

Speaker 1 Thank you, Quantum Volt, for that alt movie title. And a big shout out to Quinn for that spooky.
John Carpenter-inspired opening theme song.

Speaker 1 I'll let you know that our John Carpenter of Mars shirt, which is a Big Daddy Paul, is available in the How Did This Get Made store.

Speaker 1 You can go to hdtgm.com and pick it up as a coffee mug, a sticker, whatever you'd like.

Speaker 1 It's actually a pretty great design, something you could wear out and could maybe fool people that this is a little-known John Carpenter film.

Speaker 1 Remember, if you have an alt movie tagline or a title, submit it to us on the discord at discord.gg slash hdtgm. And if you have a last looks theme song, go ahead and tell us

Speaker 1 to play it by uploading it on hdtgm.com. That's all you have to do.
Just click on the submit a song button on our homepage. Remember, keep them short.
15 to 20 seconds is best.

Speaker 1 All right, coming up on today's episode, we'll be hearing all of your corrections and omissions on John Carpenter's Ghost of Mars.

Speaker 1 Plus, Jason and I will chat with legendary comic book writer Ed Brubaker, who you might remember from our Daredevil episode. We get Ed's thoughts on Ghost of Mars.
He is a huge fan.

Speaker 1 And we will also discuss how Ed approached adapting his book, Criminal, into a brand new show for Amazon. Amazon, plus a whole lot more.

Speaker 1 And don't worry, as always, the end of the show will reveal next week's film.

Speaker 1 All right, everybody, if you're hearing this on Friday, How Did This Get Made is going to be in Philly tomorrow, November 8th. You can buy tickets at HDTGM.

Speaker 1 You know, and if you missed it earlier in the week,

Speaker 1 and this is an awkward transition to get into, but I do think it's worthy to take a moment.

Speaker 1 This week we lost our producer, Avil Halley, and I was able to record something

Speaker 1 a little less jarring than just kind of talking about her in the Last Looks episode on our matinee episode that aired on Tuesday. So

Speaker 1 as we all are still just absolutely gutted from the loss of Avril,

Speaker 1 I feel like that's a better place for you to hear how we all are feeling and what we all are going through. So I appreciate everyone who has written

Speaker 1 their wonderful and beautiful condolences on the How Did This Get Made page.

Speaker 1 And again, we just send so much love to Averill's family and friends.

Speaker 1 And if you want to just support Averil, check out her page on Instagram, Movie Bitches, and of course her YouTube channel where you can see some of her amazing work. If you like RuPaul's drag race,

Speaker 1 I mean, Averill and Andrew were doing some great, great, hilarious stuff.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, we miss her very, very much. And like I said, listen to our Matine Tuesday episode to hear a fuller episode devoted to her.

Speaker 3 Whew.

Speaker 1 Okay, let it out.

Speaker 1 And now we'll go back into show mode and say, last week we talked at length about Ghosts of Mars. We had questions and we might have even missed a few things.
Here's your chance to set us straight.

Speaker 1 Fact check us, if you will. It is now time for corrections and omissions.

Speaker 3 Corrections and omissions.

Speaker 3 You were wrong.

Speaker 1 Thank you, Mad Licks, for that theme song. Love that name, by the way.
Let's go to the Discord.

Speaker 1 Sean McBee writes, I spent the beginning of the movie thinking that everyone was somehow breathing through their goggles, but it's actually these little silver things on their collars, as evidenced by the one shot where Natasha Hendricks can be seen breathing directly from it with accompanying air sounds.

Speaker 1 Now, there's a picture that Sean put up, and he's not lying.

Speaker 1 Maybe it seems like it's outputting enough oxygen in the general direction of their faces to supplement the 80% atmospheric conversion to Earth levels.

Speaker 1 So you just think that they have like a fan blowing on them the entire time. I thought it was through their goggles too, like through their eyes.
We need to get answers, Sean.

Speaker 1 And honestly, this idea that they have just a little vent blowing in their face has

Speaker 1 put more questions in front of this. People.

Speaker 1 Come to the rescue. We may need to ask Ed Brubaker about this.
Unfortunately, we recorded our chat with him a while ago, so I will not be able to ask him.

Speaker 1 But good thing there is somebody in the Discord who can answer this, and that is Flat underscore Baby.

Speaker 1 Flat underscore Baby adds, I just watched it, and yes, the glasses are unrelated to the breathers.

Speaker 1 It's an editing oversight that they just happen to be putting on the glasses and talking about over-the-face masks while also talking about breathers.

Speaker 1 Later on, Nels sucks air from a chest-mounted nozzle, like a camelback tube, and the guy who cuts off his thumb is using a black market breather called a laugher, which looks more like an asthma inhaler whoa okay so i thought he was like vaping or doing drugs too so i guess it's like an asthma inhaler that lasts for a very long time i guess again flat baby you've clarified some things and i appreciate that and what what a what a jump why not just say

Speaker 1 we pressurized mars Why not at that point, right?

Speaker 1 Fun fact 47 writes, why is it in both the movie and the Doom movie, which also takes place in the future on Mars, there's futuristic technology, technology, yet the characters have to hold a flashlight in one hand and their gun in the other.

Speaker 1 You'd think they have figured out the built-in night vision. You know what? You're right.
And I also believe, Fun Facts 47, that there are guns with flashlights on top of them.

Speaker 1 I feel like I've seen enough movies where people are, like, it's a mounted thing, like a scope, but it's a flashlight. Am I right? Am I wrong? Gun owners, let me know.

Speaker 1 Gratuitous silence writes, it sounded like the group thought the diseased miners were ghosts, but I understood it more to be like an infection, i.e. The Last of Us.

Speaker 1 The ghosts were old organisms or spores, not actual spirits that used to be on the surface.

Speaker 1 And when they were isolated and quarantined, maybe an infected species got locked away in that tomb, which then makes more sense that they only travel via wind.

Speaker 1 People respond like crazed zombies when infected, and that the drugs counter the effects.

Speaker 1 But does that make the other things harder, like sentience and seemingly choosing to leave Melanie's body when she takes the drugs? Well, gratuitous silence. We are on the same page.

Speaker 1 I mean, I think the ghosts are the infection. They're the spore that is dormant, that then flies into people's bodies, right?

Speaker 1 So, I guess like ghosts use liberally, that the ghost, the spore is living.

Speaker 1 I mean, or so, what you're saying is there's no such thing as ghosts, um, because the ghosts also have a lot of wherewithal, right?

Speaker 1 Oh, boy, but it's not like zombieism because they are sentient, so they are looking for a host. You know what?

Speaker 1 I think the fact that we have spent more time than clearly John Carpenter might have spent on this

Speaker 1 means that it is time for a reboot. Gratuitous silence.
Please get that going. All right, let's go to the phones.
Mindy, you're up.

Speaker 4 Hey, Paul. My brother and I went to Ghost of Mars and my boyfriend's back this week.
Amazing shows. I think I can explain Ghost of Mars.

Speaker 4 It's a satanic panic movie, and the moral is that if your kids listen to heavy metal, they will pierce their fingers, file their teeth, and become cannibals.

Speaker 4 That's why every time we see the zombie Martian ghost acting up, it turns into a bizarre 80s music video. The only part I can't explain is why drugs saved the day.

Speaker 4 But still, the movie has satanic panic written all over it. Thanks for a great show.

Speaker 1 Mindy, I love this take. I mean, yes, the drugs, we can't really, I guess, drugs is cool, but rock and roll isn't.
I don't know, but I love that idea that

Speaker 1 this is about rock music. I mean, the music in the movie is also like kind of rocking too.
So is it like

Speaker 3 a meta satanic panic movie?

Speaker 1 Like, rock and roll comes to Mars and then it controls all of us, and we don't want to work for the man anymore.

Speaker 1 Rock and roll sets us free, and they try to put the rock and roll in the cave, but you can't keep rock and roll down. No, you can't.
And you know what?

Speaker 1 Rock and roll lives as long as you don't do drugs because the best rock and rollers have been killed by drugs, right? Is that maybe where we're at? Mindy, you're a genius. I love it.

Speaker 1 Next up, Fuzzy from Connecticut.

Speaker 3 Hey, Pop. I'm watching Ghost from Mars.

Speaker 1 Neither June nor Jason commented on the fact that Pam Greer was wearing leather gauchos.

Speaker 1 I was shocked and disappointed. Anyway, I thought it was a trench coat.
Definitely long leather gauchos. Love the show.
Thanks. First of all, thank you, Fuzzy, for not expecting me to

Speaker 1 comment on those leather gaucho pants. I like that you're just like, no, I'm not even going to say I'm disappointed in you.
You know I wouldn't go there. But yeah, I agree.

Speaker 1 I'm also disappointed in them. But you know what? Here's the thing.
There's so much other stuff not making sense in this that the gaucho pants might be the only thing that does.

Speaker 1 Let's go back to the Discord. Frosted Nebula, aka.
That's Jafar. We love Jafar.
Jafar was a presence in our last LA shows and many other shows in the last year. Jafar, what do you got?

Speaker 1 Towards the end of the DVD commentary with John Carpenter and Natasha Hendrich, Carpenter is talking about Natasha downplaying her acting, and she says, well, John, every day when you got to set, you would say loudly, this is the biggest piece of shit I've ever made.

Speaker 1 And it didn't inspire much confidence in the rest of the team. Whoa, I thought that they were in separate places when they said these things about the movie.

Speaker 1 But no, Frosted Nebula, aka Jafar, says it is one of the most awkward commentary tracks I have ever heard. Wow, wow, wow, wow.
Well, you know what?

Speaker 1 You get paid to do commentary tracks, so I guess they wanted some of that money. But I am now definitely going to go hunt down this DVD and listen to that.
That sounds ideal.

Speaker 1 All right, CNU 2007 writes, as it turns out, Big Daddy Mars is from the underworld and just wants to destroy Mars. This is Canon, as seen on my official Big Daddy Mars trading card.
Wait, what?

Speaker 1 There were trading cards for Ghost of Mars? Well, yes, there is. Our producer, Scott, has an image here.

Speaker 1 This is a mint card I'm looking at. And I will tell you some of the things that were on the back.
Hobbies for this is Big Daddy Mars. Headhunting and body piercing.
I love that he has hobbies.

Speaker 1 Facts you didn't know. Big Daddy Mars has over 200 body piercings.
Okay, so the hobbies and the facts you didn't know kind of go together. I like that he has body piercings.

Speaker 1 Again, is this a miner that had body piercings? Because I would imagine that, well, I guess maybe he got to work. I mean, he must be sore.

Speaker 1 That ghost came out, found a minor, and then just started piercing the hell out of himself.

Speaker 1 Description, the beast of the night is a true wanderer, a roamer who brings devastation and pain to all he encounters, a product of the underworld.

Speaker 1 His desire to reap disaster upon Mars is malicious and destructive. Watch out, for he can steal one's soul and damn it for eternity.
With his presence alone, tranquility is impossible on Mars.

Speaker 3 Wow.

Speaker 1 When a training card fills in that much backstory, you know you got some problems. W.
Rosencrantz writes that this might be controversial, but... They should remake Ghost of Mars.

Speaker 1 The basic ideas could be turned into something fun.

Speaker 1 It was big enough that they could benefit from advertising, a name people already know, and the original wasn't sacred to anybody, so the remake won't automatically be worse. Well, you know what?

Speaker 1 I love this idea.

Speaker 1 As a matter of fact, I already brought it up that we should have done it, you know, that maybe Gratuitous Silence should have done it, but maybe now the question is: who from the Geek Squad should be in this?

Speaker 1 Because I feel like this is a good Geek Squad movie. Maybe it's maybe Jason and I could be in it with June.

Speaker 1 We're with the Geek Squad. Maybe we get killed early.
I don't know. I think there's a lot of options here.
So let us know who you would cast in the Ghost of Mars remake.

Speaker 1 And the best person who who writes up a little description with a cast, we will read it here on the next last looks. Wow, wow, wow.
I'm blown away.

Speaker 1 So many great corrections and omissions this week, but there can only be one winner. And look, the gaucho pants, yes, no one mentioned it.
That was a very shocking omission.

Speaker 1 I will say that knowing the breathers are not actually goggles, Sean McBee, that's pretty great.

Speaker 1 Now, I would also say that CNU 2007

Speaker 1 might win, but I don't know. I mean, the fact that CNU has a trading card is pretty impressive.
You know what? That's what I'm going to pick.

Speaker 1 If you have trading cards for Ghost of Mards, you should win something. All right, CNW 2007, you are the winner, and you get this amazing song from Garrett Parker.

Speaker 3 Hit it,

Speaker 3 people of Earth.

Speaker 1 You win nothing. Okay, if you want to chime in with your own thoughts about the latest episode, please hit up our Discord or leave us a message by calling 619-PAL Ask.

Speaker 1 Coming up after the break, Jason and I will sit down for a chat with Ed Brubaker. So stick around.

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Speaker 1 Welcome back. Now, every Tuesday, we re-release a classic How Did This Get Made episode back onto our feed.

Speaker 1 This week, like I mentioned, we did something a little bit different to celebrate our producer Avril Halley, celebrate her life, and we wanted to

Speaker 1 make something that she might enjoy. So last week's matinee covered the 2020 Chloe Grace Moritz film, where gremlins get loose on a plane, right?

Speaker 1 It's one of our least selling shirts where a gremlin is on the wing, but it's called Shadow in the Cloud. And you'll understand why we picked that one if you take a listen.

Speaker 1 And by the way, if you're not watching Dark Web with Rob Hubel and I, some crazy stuff has been going on. Check out Dark Web.
Our studio burnt down.

Speaker 1 Rob and I now are in the woods, fending for ourselves, high on mustard. But enough about that.
It is now time to talk to a true legend. That's right, Jason and I get to join our pal, Ed Brubaker.

Speaker 1 Now, Ed Brubaker is an Eisner award-winning artist, a brilliant graphic novelist, a television writer. He is just an all-about gem who also has a bad movie club.

Speaker 1 His new book in the criminal series is called The Knives. It's available right now.
We're going to talk about that in a bit.

Speaker 1 The hardback version of his Friday series comes out next week on November 12th. And this TV show, based on his criminal series, which I saw the first two episodes of and I loved,

Speaker 1 does not have a release date yet. We're going to talk about it a little bit.
And his experience adapting it, which I think you can also get a little taste of if you read Knives.

Speaker 1 You are in store for a very fun conversation because not only are we going to talk about all that, but Ed was so mad that he was not the guest for Ghost of Mars.

Speaker 1 All right, so without any further ado, please, John Astonish, hit the theme song.

Speaker 3 Jason and Paul, just chat. June and Paul, just chat.

Speaker 1 Tall John Shearer, just chat. How did this get made? Last look, just chat.
Welcome back to the show, Ed. And first question: you are a ghost of Mars aficionado, an expert?

Speaker 3 How it? I, okay.

Speaker 3 Look, remember DVDs? Yes. Remember, remember,

Speaker 3 remember the aughts? Remember Obama? Those

Speaker 3 Halcyon days?

Speaker 1 My favorite Mark Marin guest.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I am a John Carpenter fan who is married to someone who is an even bigger John Carpenter fan. Got it.
Nice.

Speaker 3 And Ghosts of Mars came out at this era where we had built, like, we used to live in Seattle and we had built like a little theater room in our basement that could fit about seven people comfortably.

Speaker 3 And so I would just have these evenings where I would just like, I'm going to watch like three sci-fi movies tonight.

Speaker 3 And Ghosts of Mars, I believe, is one of the most fun, re-watchable John Carpenter movies from that

Speaker 3 era. Like, I would rank it 10 times better than his fucking vampires movie.
Well, but there, therein lies my question for you, Ed. Why re-watch the movies from the bad era? Right.

Speaker 3 Like, what's the benefit of that? It's what you just said, it's one of the best movies from that bad era. I mean, I don't know that I would qualify Ghosts of Mars as bad.

Speaker 3 It's not prime, no Carpenter, but like, I mean, Memoirs of an Invisible Man. Are you going to watch that ever again? No.
Like,

Speaker 3 I mean, there's no amount of money, but Ghost of Mars, like, it's so fucking weird. It's almost like the ultimate John Carpenter movie because it has that weird thing where he's always like kind of

Speaker 3 about violence and the downfall of society, but also about matriarchies and how, and like powerful women. And so I kind of loved that.

Speaker 3 I also loved the fact that Courtney Love like walked off the shit after three days.

Speaker 3 I want to know.

Speaker 3 I love that. I love that component of it.
And I love the John Carpenter, these are my themes. These are the things I'm interested in.
It just did not come together satisfyingly in a way, even for us.

Speaker 3 It was like, what a blast. You know, no, it didn't land right for me.
I think it's his era where he got. not interested in action scenes.

Speaker 3 So like both vampires and that one, the action scenes often go to like a montage showing you what happened in moments. And you're like,

Speaker 3 or happen off-screen. Or like Pam Greer is killed off screen.
Yeah, go ahead.

Speaker 1 The fact that like he, you know, does a transition cut or like a cut when they're walking down the hallway, a lot of weird editing choices.

Speaker 1 And I think from reading my interviews with him about this movie, where I feel like it failed was he was trying to make a dumb B movie, but it was too smart to be as dumb.

Speaker 1 Like the ending scene, the chrome guns. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And like, I'm like, that's the movie.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 1 But like, I think he has a hard time walking that line or, or I don't know. It's like

Speaker 1 it presents more serious than I think he intends. And that's where I feel like he needs that help in my mind.

Speaker 3 No, I agree.

Speaker 3 I think there must have been some push from the studio on some of this stuff because, yeah, it's just, it felt like he, to try to address studio notes, tried to do some interesting things in the edit.

Speaker 3 So it's like, you don't see if she dies or not. And like, structurally, it's so weird, but I found it fascinating.
And I also loved like the dumb performances.

Speaker 3 And what a weird phase to have Jason Statham, you know, where Jason Statham can't decide if he's bald or has hair.

Speaker 1 We talked about this. This is an important moment for us.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Yeah.
No, as a baldist,

Speaker 3 you know, I, because Jason Statham is one of the only bald sex symbols that we get. Like, even in pornography, we don't have bald sex symbols that often.

Speaker 1 No, you need

Speaker 3 in pornography.

Speaker 3 And how do you think

Speaker 3 you see that man's face at all?

Speaker 3 Let's be clear.

Speaker 3 Even in pornography, we don't have to know. It's rare.
I mean, look, Mr. Hare, you're nothing but hair.
Paul and I can talk about

Speaker 3 the Larry David Club. Yes, this is important for us.

Speaker 1 We look at these bald men.

Speaker 3 Jason just turned his screen off.

Speaker 1 But I will say that there are some things that I really love about it. I think, and I know this is now probably just a rumor and it's not true, that

Speaker 1 this was supposed to be like the third Escape From movie, like

Speaker 1 Escape From Mars, because like Desolation Williams looks and dresses like Snake Pilskin, or Pusskin, sorry. Pusskin.

Speaker 3 That's true.

Speaker 1 You know, but I would have loved Kurt Russell. Like, that would have, I think they just want, you wanted some more dumb stuff.
It just,

Speaker 3 what the movie lacked that so many other John Carpenter movies have is everybody is dour and down.

Speaker 3 Yes. Nobody has that light touch.

Speaker 3 Nobody has that kind of that swagger, that wink that, you know, everybody is

Speaker 3 like gritty and realistic or trying to be in a way that is like, oh, I need somebody who has a little bit of a light touch, a little bit can let the steam out of this, you know?

Speaker 3 I mean, I think that Ice Cube was intended to be that. And for me, it works because I'm a huge Cube fan.
I love Cube. And honestly, that's when I, those are my favorite parts of the movie.

Speaker 3 Like, literally, I cannot ever go to that taco shop on Sunset that's like right near Desconso without just hearing in my head, drop the gun, Desconso.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 like, just the weird names of character. I love the dumb shit that Carpenter puts in his stuff that's just so idiosyncratic and him.
Like Desolation Williams. What a fucking name.

Speaker 3 great when i did sleeper there's a character named genocide jones and that is a tribute to john carpenter the way he names characters what is it napoleon williams in uh assault on precinct 13 it's like napoleon somebody it's always like a really flamboyant first name and a very generic you know like like slaughterhouse bill i mean it's it's very uh thomas pynchian right with the like one battle after another like all the names mean something but here's the thing: I like Ice Cube,

Speaker 1 and I think, though, he falls into that category of not knowing how to walk that line between

Speaker 1 dumb, tough guy. Like, that's what like Kurt Russell has in spades, right?

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 1 You believe that he could maybe win in a fight, or that, like, he's got a bravado and ego. And I feel like with Cube, it's like, no, this guy's just cool.

Speaker 3 Like, there's like, no, no, he's the same guy from Friday.

Speaker 3 Right, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 3 He's great, but he lacks that.

Speaker 3 What's wonderful about Kurt Russell, especially in these movies, let's say Big Trouble, is that character loses fights. That character

Speaker 3 is willing to be embarrassed, you know, or willing to be, and that we don't have in this. Everybody's at maximum heroism, you know.

Speaker 1 I agree. Like, you want just somebody that just feels like

Speaker 3 them. Right.

Speaker 1 Or, or you just have Natasha Hendrich not be, like, you need somebody to have,

Speaker 1 like, everyone was too cool and too tough. And if that's the version of the movie and you're making a B movie, then you need to make them dumber, but also cool and tough.

Speaker 1 But I feel like they were just cool and tough, but maybe that's directing. I don't know.
Everyone seems so pissed off. Every interview that I read, they're like, he fucked us.

Speaker 3 Oh, he saw what we were doing. Yeah, even Ice Cube is like, I'm a big John Carpenter fan, but don't watch that movie.
And I'm like, oh, man, I feel bad.

Speaker 3 Because it's like, it's literally the, it's the last thing Carpenter made that I think is interesting at all. Yeah, I don't know if he's made anything

Speaker 1 he made one movie after that I think in 2000

Speaker 3 Amber Heard movie or whatever that I made something yes I mean he's like in an insane asylum.

Speaker 1 I don't know did John Carpenter ever talk about working with Chevy Chase because that is really interesting to me.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, I don't love to know oh that to me is like that because that's got kind of peak Chevy Chase, like right where he's like, not peak, but like,

Speaker 1 oh, it's not gonna go great, right? Like, yeah, but like, you could tell he'd be like an asshole. Oh, I bet you there's some good stories there.

Speaker 3 Also, because John Carpenter is so no bullshit. Yeah.
He's like, he, he says what's on his mind. I love that.
That's true. Apparently, according to the

Speaker 3 blank check, Beverly D'Angelo is the only person who has never said a bad thing about Chevy Chase.

Speaker 1 There's always, always one defender, only, always one.

Speaker 3 I will point out Beverly D'Angelo was married to like Al Pacino forever. So like Jeffy Chase is probably not a big deal.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 So much more easier to handle.

Speaker 1 I did a short film with Beverly D'Angelo, who was absolutely lovely, very sweet, kind.

Speaker 1 But the funniest detail I remember is that we were going to set. We were at this restaurant.

Speaker 1 She pulled up the set and gets out of the car and she's like, nah, Al's in there. Like Al just sat in the car the entire day because they were going going to go to a concert that night.

Speaker 1 So, he was just out in the car. The car didn't turn around, the car didn't, like, he just sat in a parked car for maybe eight, ten hours.
And I love, like, I just love that he was there.

Speaker 1 Didn't come in, didn't roll the window down, just sat in a parked car. And you check all the time.

Speaker 3 I wonder what the concert was.

Speaker 1 It was like for their kid. I feel like

Speaker 1 it was like it was a band that both of them would not be going. Sure.

Speaker 3 Like, it would be the equivalent of

Speaker 3 vampire weekend. Like, exactly.

Speaker 1 It felt like something very odd like that.

Speaker 1 Just to give you

Speaker 1 a little sneak in, because I had to Google this as we were talking.

Speaker 1 John Carpenter claimed that Chevy Chase and Daryl Hanna were the stuff of nightmares and impossible to direct.

Speaker 1 In particular, Chase would often refuse to wear his special effects makeup and would remove it prematurely, ruining a day's worth of filming.

Speaker 3 Oh, my God.

Speaker 3 Wow.

Speaker 1 I need to dig into this movie a little bit more.

Speaker 3 But you're getting Chevy on your show, right? Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 Chevy will be on the show.

Speaker 3 He's an improv. He's going to.
Oh, he's so comfortable on stage.

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Speaker 1 Ed, you've been out in LA a lot, and that is because,

Speaker 1 well, I mean, you've lived in this world. Your stuff stuff has been optioned.
You are a legend in the business, but you got to be the showrunner of one of your projects for Amazon, right?

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah, criminal. I, God, it's been like three years, it feels like, since it started, but yeah, no, I

Speaker 3 had developed it at Legendary before the pandemic. And then

Speaker 3 a couple of the people from Legendary ended up being execs at Amazon, and so they revived it over there.

Speaker 1 Now, I will say that I got to see two episodes of the show, early cuts of the show.

Speaker 1 And it was fantastic. You gave me a lifelong dream come true, which was you screened it for me.
And can I mention the other person?

Speaker 3 Shane Black. It was

Speaker 1 amazing. It was amazing because I also

Speaker 3 had the same note too, which was really annoying.

Speaker 1 The best thing about Shane Black, I will say as a lifelong fan of of him, was he he gave notes the way like Columbo would leave an investigation, like bag in hand, like, I'm just about out the door, turn around, like, well, and then for a half an hour, he was almost out the door, like, well, one more thing.

Speaker 1 And then had these thoughts, but it was so funny because he had the body language of someone that was leaving, but the deep, smart notes of someone who was like, well, yeah, I'm cracking into this.

Speaker 1 It was, I loved watching it. I hung on every word.

Speaker 1 And I think at the beginning, he might have thought that I was like an Amazon executive. So I think he was careful to understand who I was before he gave any feedback.

Speaker 3 I told him who you were. All right, good.

Speaker 3 Well,

Speaker 1 I'm a fan.

Speaker 3 It was one of the coolest things. That was really crazy because he was mixing the Parker movie

Speaker 3 at the same time. So he was on the lot for a couple weeks at the same time as us.

Speaker 3 And Shane, you know, I met through Brian Judovich and Drew Pierce a long time ago, and he's a big fan of criminal and a big fan of my graphic novels and stuff.

Speaker 3 So we have gotten together a few times and, you know, he gives me advice about like writing stuff. And, you know, I consider him sort of like one of my mentors in this field to some degree.

Speaker 1 And it's great because so much so, Ed, that on the cover of your new criminal book. book, The Knives, you got a Shane Black quote right on the front.
Brewbaker and Phillips, don't hit a wrong note.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I was very, I was very thrilled about that. There's nobody better.
I didn't want to ask him for a while because I was like, I got to get to know him better before I hit him.

Speaker 3 I don't want to just have him think. Like, I really like the guy.
Like, he invited us to a party at his house a little while ago.

Speaker 3 Wow.

Speaker 3 It was crazy because it was like a really big, like, Hollywood party, like, that's in a Shane Black movie. Oh, I was just like, oh, wow.

Speaker 1 Okay. You got to say yes to the Shane Black invite.
I mean,

Speaker 3 totally. I'm probably more comfortable talking about what happened in Criminal than I am about that party.

Speaker 3 You should be. I just maybe shouldn't say I got invited.
No, you could say you got invited.

Speaker 1 But I will say the new book, the new criminal book Knives, is about this cartoonist who's going to Hollywood in the era of peak TV to work on an adaptation of his comic strip.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 1 I'm just wondering how much of this is based on what you just told us coming to Hollywood to make criminal.

Speaker 3 I have to say, it was, I loved this book. I mean, like, just to set it out, I think these books, the criminal books, are some of the great modern books.
I love them.

Speaker 3 The Knives catches us up with some of the characters that we've been following in a bunch of other criminal stories.

Speaker 3 And so it was both great to spend time with characters that I love and that I've been spending time with for years. But then, exactly to Paul's point, the Hollywood stuff was making me laugh so hard.

Speaker 3 When he gets to go to town and gets to be part of the room and starts to like dress and talk differently and become a douche and then immediately gets kicked out i was like this is incredible it's i realized after i started it it needed to be like a kafka-esque about a guy not becoming a cockroach but becoming a tv writer yeah because It is like a metamorphical decision that you can make at some point.

Speaker 3 And someone asked me how much of it was true. And I was like, oh, God, Jacob is always a worst-case scenario character for me.

Speaker 3 Like, his childhood reflects a lot of pieces of my childhood, like growing up as a nerd who's like too much of an introvert, but who always wanted to be different.

Speaker 3 But like the emotional parts of his journey of like coming to Hollywood and like going from wanting to be like an individual artist to wanting to just be like a cog in the machine and how like every now and then you wake up and you're like, what the fuck am I doing?

Speaker 3 And like that part of it was very real.

Speaker 3 And one of the things that I didn't realize being the showrunner, like,

Speaker 3 I guess I realized because I've been in enough television now to know how much rewriting happens after the scripts are already in production.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you've worked on some very interesting shows that, without naming names, that have had a lot of restructuring after.

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah, no, when we were watching episode one of Westworld, we had like a viewing party at my my house of all the season one writers.

Speaker 3 Our co-EP on that first season, literally, I had to stop her from like punching the screen because she's like, what is this? Because it was completely different than what we had done.

Speaker 3 She's like, the first 15 minutes are a completely different show. Westworld, a show that is famously

Speaker 3 went smoothly. Yeah, it was, it was, I mean, I was on season one when it was, I think everyone still thinks season one is the best season of that show.
And I learned a lot on that show.

Speaker 3 But, you know, like all of those scripts, we would write drafts and then the showrunners would rewrite them.

Speaker 3 But I didn't realize how much on shows where the showrunner isn't adding their name to things, that they've literally rewritten sometimes almost every.

Speaker 3 I mean, there are some episodes of Criminal that I rewrote every single word on, and there are some where I only rewrote like 80%.

Speaker 3 And there's like a couple where I didn't do almost anything, you know, so it was like, oh, this is just weird. But then in post, you end up doing so much changing and writing and rewriting and ADR.

Speaker 1 But that's the job, right? Like, I mean, when you are the, you're, you're the showrunner, you're going to do so much,

Speaker 1 you know, work and, and your name will always be associated with it.

Speaker 1 Like, no one will ever say, oh, you know, like, will reference anybody else but Vince Gilligan when you talk about breaking bad as far as like, yeah, I mean, yes, and there were brilliant writers on there who are, you know, all great, yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah, but it's like that was a murderer's row of great writers. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And the same thing for Lost. It's like, that's, and you will always get that heat.
But it's funny when people who are in that position opt to put their name on everything as if

Speaker 1 they will be forgotten. Or it's like, yeah, it's a weird, it's a weird choice.

Speaker 3 I got to say, like, I've talked to a lot of showrunners about it. And coming from comics, it's very weird to me not to have my name on anything I write.
I have like a

Speaker 3 sort of an authorship. kind of go about it.
So it's just, it's a weird thing in the industry.

Speaker 3 And I can kind of see it both ways where it's like, like I think the problem is that the critical community that talks about television is unaware of it or right even if they're unaware of it

Speaker 3 or if they're aware of it, they still feel because so-and-so was listed as the writer, they want to give that person credit because they don't want to disc. And I agree.

Speaker 3 It's just a gray, it's a weird gray area, but like the showrunner is really the voice of the show.

Speaker 3 Like Criminal, in the end of the day, I have credit on one episode, but that show feels more like me and my work than anything else that's ever existed.

Speaker 1 Well, it's interesting because it's like, I think that there's a, this weird misconception, like what you're saying.

Speaker 1 Like, when you go for the Emmys, a show is like an episode is nominated, which I think is such a flawed concept. It should be, nominate the show, right?

Speaker 1 Nominate, like, who cares about the specific episode? It's, this is the writer's room. This is the thing.
And, you know, and like you said, it should be everyone should take part in that. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But like, because a lot of the times what happens is, and I think this is the thing that was written about in Difficult Men, like, you know, there was a Sopranos episode that was written by a junior writer and

Speaker 1 David, was it David Chase? David Chase. Yeah, was like upset about it because it was like, oh, this person's out in front of this Sopranos episode, even though

Speaker 1 it goes through a process.

Speaker 3 It's not like, you know, it's nothing singular. I mean, famously, Matt Weiner,

Speaker 3 if you got 20% of your dialogue through a David Chase rewrite, you considered that a victory.

Speaker 3 Like, if you had any dialogue in an episode of the Sopranos with your name on it that wasn't rewritten by Chase.

Speaker 3 I mean, by the way, David Chase can rewrite anything I ever write and not put his name on it. I'd be very happy.

Speaker 3 He is my fucking hero.

Speaker 3 I can't wait for his MK Ultra show. No, I literally, I have two different showrunner friends who have watched like

Speaker 3 people on their staff win Emmys that like they rewrote that episode page one and and was like and the person didn't even thank them.

Speaker 3 And so it's like, it's a weird, so like, but how often does that happen to you? Like once in your life, maybe. So yeah, it's just a weird industry and it is very collaborative.

Speaker 3 So, but because of that, I think going into it, I didn't, I honestly didn't understand how much work I would do in post. Right.

Speaker 3 Like by the time I was in post,

Speaker 3 in that way. Yeah, it was just me.

Speaker 3 I remember when I went out to lunch with Shane like the next day after that screening I was saying that to him and he said look writing this writing the script and making it like the script and the production that's the ingredients right like post is when you cook it yeah and it's like are you a great chef do you have great chefs working for you you know like well but this is like the thing i always like that i found because as somebody who's written comics or just a very uh small handful of them it was backwards right?

Speaker 1 Because like when you get to work on TV, you conceive the idea, then

Speaker 1 you cast people and it kind of changes and you're shooting it and it kind of changes again based on location and actors and things that happen in the moment.

Speaker 1 And then you're editing it and it happens, you know, it's like you're kind of developing all the way from inception to completion and comics or, you know, or anything like a graphic novel is locked.

Speaker 1 Like you give, I mean, yes, you have your idea, but it's got to go all the way through the process. So I imagine.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and it's got a deadline usually, too. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I imagine that that might have been fun, though, to have more time to ruminate within a specific episode or go back, like to do reshoots, like you said, you know, and go, oh, I could tweak that.

Speaker 1 And I didn't realize that that was something that could actually connect here. It's that's the fun part of it, I think.

Speaker 3 Yeah, no, I, yeah, no, I really loved Post, honestly.

Speaker 3 Like it was, it was, it was long at times, but like my, like learning to work with my editors and and also seeing like where like, oh, this, this episode isn't working. How can we fix it?

Speaker 3 And, like, restructuring. Like, it had never occurred to me because Reffin, I would look at the cuts and stuff, and he didn't really want to hear what I had to say about what he was doing.

Speaker 3 That's a

Speaker 3 I would love a podcast that would never get published that is just you talking about working with

Speaker 3 Nick Wake. Well, I'm pretty sure he'd be fine with it.
Like,

Speaker 3 I told him that he was that I had based a bad guy in one of my books on him.

Speaker 3 And he's like, oh, you should do a memoir about like our time working together I can help you with it I'm like yeah Nick you don't get to write my memoir about

Speaker 3 our about our crazy relationship our show was memoir worthy I mean

Speaker 3 dude yeah there's so many stories for the show and they keep coming out every now and then and it's just like oh wow yeah that was a crazy three years of my life too it's just yeah but a totally different experience than you know doing but what a sense of authorship you have over a criminal now in a a way, that do you feel like it is as close to the kind of work that you and Sean get to do

Speaker 3 in the books, basically? I think, you know, I mean, I think it's as close to feeling like

Speaker 3 my books as anything. Like, I've had several things like

Speaker 3 where people have tried to adapt my stuff that haven't gotten made, where I haven't been involved at all. And

Speaker 3 one of the things that's that I think I've realized more as I work in Hollywood about

Speaker 3 what makes my stuff my stuff.

Speaker 3 Like, I'm not saying my stuff is the greatest stuff. Like, yeah, you guys obviously think my stuff is the greatest stuff, but it's the greatest.

Speaker 3 And I have no problem

Speaker 3 putting that out into the world.

Speaker 3 But seriously, like, I think I realized in the last

Speaker 3 couple of years, because when other people adapt my stuff,

Speaker 3 they kind of sometimes they miss the part that makes it me.

Speaker 3 And like what I do generally is I use genre tropes or genres to write really character-driven, grounded stories where the people within these tropes are acting like real people, like you or me or people you know.

Speaker 3 So you can identify with these people, but they're in this big genre story.

Speaker 3 And I also do things to subvert your expectations based on what you think would happen

Speaker 3 because of the genre.

Speaker 3 So often when people are adapting my work or have tried in the past to adapt my work into movies and stuff, like incognito, like great writers worked on incognito, but the studios that were trying to turn that into movies didn't understand how you could do a black comedy about a super villain in witness protection.

Speaker 3 So they would constantly force them to turn it into a superhero origin story. Yeah.
And then it's like, well, that's

Speaker 3 like, no, you're not going to make a superhero origin story about somebody no one's ever heard of.

Speaker 3 And they want it to be, they would rather it be the it's what it's it's literally what happens to jacob in the knives yeah you know they want it to be generic they take the the the kind of kafka-esque character that he's created in the comics of this detective who finds himself in these absurd worlds or these absurd cases and all they want to make out of it is just a straight pi show yeah without any of the trappings of Kafka.

Speaker 3 And then Jacob, that's the crucible that Jacob goes through in his Hollywood chapter in the knives.

Speaker 3 And then we find him later, and he's back at home, back writing, back in the basement, back drawing and writing comics. He appears to be doing like, what's the new character, Ed? It's a Basil Beaver.

Speaker 3 Basil Beaver. Basil Beaver.

Speaker 3 Private Eye, who is, who looks like, it's like a black sad character, I feel like. Right.

Speaker 3 I don't know. That part of it really came out of nowhere.
I was like, I like the idea of him sketching and making fun of the producer of the show.

Speaker 3 And, you know, and I just had this idea that he draws him as like some kind of a beaver or an animal or a weasel or something. And he's masturbating as he's like saying something.

Speaker 3 And then I, and then I was just like, I. What if when he goes home, he just keeps drawing more funny animal things?

Speaker 3 And then it becomes like that's his next thing because he's not going to do Frank Kafka anymore because they ruined it. It's so funny.

Speaker 3 I love there's so many of your books that take place inside of Hollywood, whether it's old Hollywood, I'm thinking of Fatale

Speaker 3 or

Speaker 3 Fade, the Fade Out is another one.

Speaker 3 And they really are like,

Speaker 3 I love how much you're interested in excavating the true evil of this town.

Speaker 3 I mean, look, when I get to like a Taylor Sheridan level of success, I'll have other things to write about.

Speaker 1 Are you going to also follow him to Universal?

Speaker 3 I mean, he doesn't get there for three years. Maybe I'll get there first.

Speaker 1 I would love it. That's the best.
I love throwing down the gauntlet like that. Yeah.
Fuck yeah.

Speaker 3 I would love it if by the time Taylor Sheridan gets to Universal, you've already got killer be killed and velvet on. It's funny.
I'm like, wait, are we dissing him? No, no, not at all.

Speaker 3 You're like, I love him.

Speaker 1 He is a guy.

Speaker 3 He's wanted us to be on Landman. He would be so amazing.
He's a cartel guy on Landman. Please.
He's a cartel lawyer.

Speaker 1 Come on. I just started watching it.
It's awesome.

Speaker 1 I like Lioness. I like all these shows.

Speaker 1 But it's amazing to me. Someone told me a story about him,

Speaker 1 about Tulsa King, which I loved, which was he talked to Stallone on the phone and was like, well, what do you want to do? And Stallone, you know, told him, I like this, I like this.

Speaker 1 And he's like, okay, got it. And then within four hours, delivered an hour-long show to Stallone.
He's like, all right, I'll do this.

Speaker 3 Well, it was a rewrite of another pilot, though. Okay, got it.
Okay.

Speaker 3 Okay. Yeah.
All right.

Speaker 3 I just heard Terry Winter is coming back on that show. Yeah.
I think in the new season, Stallone was basically the showrunner.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I had auditioned for something on there. I was very excited about it.
And the word I had gotten back was, we're not really a room or a showrunner.

Speaker 1 So it's going to, you know, I was like, oh, okay.

Speaker 3 It is is a, I mean, a lot of my crew came from Bass Reeves, actually. Like,

Speaker 3 like, my line producer had done Bass Reeves. And so, yeah, I had a lot.
That was actually the only way we were able to get Garrett for

Speaker 3 Teague Lawless because he's Tulsa King.

Speaker 3 We had good relationships with 101 Studios. We were able to get them to move him around a little bit.
That's why that reshoot was so crazy that Jason was part of.

Speaker 1 Yes, Jason, we can reveal that you are a part of the televised criminal universe now.

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 Don't get it twisted, everybody. I am the star of Amazon's criminal.

Speaker 3 It is a pivotal role.

Speaker 3 Yeah, Jason, Jason was part of those recently, but yeah, we did, because of actor schedules now, sometimes it's so crazy trying to get, like, I think my friend had a show, and because of an actor schedule, they had to run, for like a week, they had to run four sets to be able to shoot this actor out for the whole show in one week.

Speaker 3 So it was like, oh shit! Like, so yeah, when you get like, so it was like our reshoot schedule was literally just built around being able to, oh, we only have Garrett for these two days.

Speaker 3 And so we shot two, we shot in three days, we shot seven days' worth of material. We had two sets running and a second unit.

Speaker 1 I will never forget

Speaker 1 when

Speaker 1 June's dad passed away. I was in Chicago and there was

Speaker 1 there, you know, I couldn't get to, like, it was a timing thing, right? My flight was going to leave at 11 o'clock at night to get to New York.

Speaker 1 And I was on this independent movie, and they knew that if they lost me for like these four days, it would kind of screw up things.

Speaker 1 The way that they maneuvered that one day to shoot five days of work into this one long day and I made my flight, it was something I will never forget. I was like, holy shit.

Speaker 1 Like when Pete, like we, I mean, because like it was a big deal. It was amazing.
It was truly

Speaker 1 an epic feat where like things are changing. Set dressing is going.
I'm getting like appliances put on me. It was, it was really impressive.

Speaker 1 And, you know, it's not ideal, obviously, but it's amazing when you can make those choices. I think in a weird way, too, you become looser.
You can't hold on to anything.

Speaker 1 You're like, all right, we're just going. We're going to get this thing.
And maybe you find something cool in that moment, too.

Speaker 3 Yeah. No, I love that.
I loved the production. And yeah, I mean, being a showrunner is a really, really fucking hard job with a lot of

Speaker 3 the parts that I didn't like about the job were just the frustrating parts of the waiting or the having to deal with too many people's opinions about a thing.

Speaker 3 But like the working with the actors and the crew and the directors.

Speaker 3 And like, I, you know, I directed like the second unit for our reshoots because like I had given up the idea that I wanted to direct.

Speaker 3 I originally came to Hollywood because I wanted to write and direct.

Speaker 3 And,

Speaker 3 you know, I got to sit next to Dee Reese on an Apple box for three weeks.

Speaker 3 And it was like the best film school ever. And my camera operator, Matt Moriarty, is like one of the best steady cam operators in the world.

Speaker 3 And, you know, I just worked with these world-class actors and crew.

Speaker 1 And well, that's the thing. The show looks amazing.
Yeah. And it's big.
It's a big fucking show. And I feel like that's the thing that I was really

Speaker 1 not shocked at. But like, you know, I think sometimes when you know it's a streaming show, you see

Speaker 1 where the seams are, like, or the cuts. Like, you know, we're talking about John Carpenter not wanting to shoot action.
And you see, like, sometimes shows will move away from that.

Speaker 1 Every now and then they'll really lean in, but this is a show that feels like a movie. It feels like it has all those things that we know from big budget.

Speaker 1 You know, it just has a pace and a tone and energy. It's great.

Speaker 3 I think what's also great about Criminal specifically is both in book form and now in your adaptation, these are the scale and scope of these stories is massive.

Speaker 3 The books take place over the last 50 years. Yeah, 70

Speaker 3 70 now? Okay.

Speaker 3 So like the oh yeah, because now we've caught up to modernize.

Speaker 3 Dead and the dying starts in like 1952 or something. Yeah, okay.

Speaker 3 So what's crazy is you are constantly pushing us through time, not only with these characters who we visit at different times in their lives, but we're also following these characters' families.

Speaker 3 We're following fathers. I mean, so much of it is fathers and sons,

Speaker 3 both on the

Speaker 3 criminal side, mothers and daughters.

Speaker 1 By the way, can I give you my best note? I was pitching a show, a movie actually, to, again, giant person,

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 it was a comedy, and it was about a father and son. And the person stopped me in the middle of the pitch and said, I got to stop you.

Speaker 1 There's never been anything funny about a father and son relationship. And I was like, oh,

Speaker 1 thank you. I get, oh, sure.

Speaker 1 It was the craziest note I've ever gotten and easily disputable. But it was,

Speaker 3 but it was like, I'm just going to go to a show I hate, Frasier.

Speaker 3 That's funny.

Speaker 3 Wait, how do you hate? Wait a minute. Wait, Wait, how are you hating Frazier, Ed? What are you talking about? I'm just mad at him because I was in love with Lilith.

Speaker 3 Oh, of course.

Speaker 3 Of course. For you to come

Speaker 3 to me.

Speaker 1 For you to come that way to it? Oh, my Lord. I love it.

Speaker 1 Well, guys, I'm so sorry. I have to run to go work on that movie about the father and the son, which is now a very serious drama.
All right, I'll let you guys take it away.

Speaker 3 Okay, we've lost Paul, which is great, because now Ed and I, we can just just talk about comics.

Speaker 3 Because Ed, I feel like there's been a long time, correct me if I'm wrong, where a bunch of these books have been out of print or difficult to find. And now they are back or they are coming back.

Speaker 3 I think it's just been, yeah, I think it's just been that they've been, they haven't been out of print, but I've been having to reprint them a lot. But yeah, no, I reprinted all the criminal books.

Speaker 3 Sean did these new designs and new covers, so they're all branded and I forced him to redesign the whole thing so that we would have these brand spanking new editions ready for when the show debuts and and uh that's been fun to do and these are books that if you have not yet gotten i cannot recommend them enough these are stories that are so fantastic and have been unfolding now for decades

Speaker 3 yeah 20 years right yeah um but not only i i know we're talking a lot about criminal i feel like you've got a new volume of the friday books collected yeah which i think is big friday deluxe hardback coming out which this was one of my favorite things that you did in recent years

Speaker 3 that I feel like I was caught by surprise when you started doing it because it was one of the books that was launched as an online only book that has now migrated to physical copies.

Speaker 3 And it's you and is it Marcos Martin? Yeah, it's Marcos Martin. The absolute genius

Speaker 3 Marcos Martin. Yeah.

Speaker 3 This book is incredible. And is this as close to an all-ages book as you get? I think so.
I mean, there's fucking and swearing, but I guess so, yeah. But it's, I mean, I would give it to a

Speaker 3 teenager

Speaker 3 up.

Speaker 3 I stupidly thought my friend, my friend Tom, who is a is a writer-director I was working with on a movie a couple of years ago, had a, I want to say an eight and a ten-year-old. And I thought

Speaker 3 they're really interested in comics. And I said, look, look through this and blank out all the swearing and stuff.
And I forgot about the monsters.

Speaker 3 And one of them brought one of them to school and got sent home. Yeah, they got sent home from school.
They were having like a little bit of a panic attack. So they might be too young.

Speaker 3 I got my nieces.

Speaker 3 I got all my nieces t-shirts. I had them custom-made t-shirts that just said poop on them.
And I was like, I was very clear just to save their parents the headaches.

Speaker 3 I was like, these are only for at-home. Only these are at-home shirts.
Okay, everybody was excited.

Speaker 3 But one of like a 10 year old snuck it into school and changed at school and then got in trouble and so everybody got in trouble and it was really juicy i loved it i love that's the kind of uncle i like to be too classic uncle yeah i didn't i'm not a dad so i'm the i'm the uncle who's like why is uncle ed outside smoking pot it's like because he doesn't have kids

Speaker 3 the best i also want to shout out the one of my favorite series that you've been doing in recent years are the reckless books

Speaker 3 which are a series of like PI case.

Speaker 3 I mean, if I was talking about it as a TV show, I would say case of the week. These are these are pulpy, you know, pulpy, quick read books that are just a single case.

Speaker 3 They're not as sprawling as the criminal stories are or some of the ones that have these long tail effects into other books. The reckless books, though they have, they relate to each other,

Speaker 3 they are very concise in a lot of ways. Yeah, and they're great.
Yeah, the first five of them cover the 80s, basically. They go from like 1981 to like 1989 or something.

Speaker 3 And for guys our age, for middle-aged guys, it is the sweet spot of PI stories in that it is a Vietnam vet who is down on his luck, who now owns a movie theater in downtown LA and just show, it's like all I want is to live inside of these stories.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's very much my, I made a list of like the things because if you have a recurring detective character, you have to give them like these eccentric things that like, so I was like, what would I want if I, I had been holding on to that idea for like 20 years of like a main character who lived in a movie theater

Speaker 3 and just but didn't let people in. Yeah.
Like it's just oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 This is my movie theater.

Speaker 3 He's like sitting in there with just him and his assistant watching movies. And it's like, you know, this places a path.
This is my holy spot.

Speaker 3 Like, no, and yeah, I'm, I'm, uh, my friend Duffy and I, um, who was uh on Barry and is like the number two on the lowdown, we're currently adapting that as a movie for Amazon that Sebastian Stan is attached to star.

Speaker 3 Incredible. Thank God, because that's something that I've asked you multiple times

Speaker 3 to let me adapt. And you have said, no, I'm doing it.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 And it is one of my all-time favorite books, and one of my favorite all-time ongoing series, rather. And I cannot wait to see it adapted.
I think it's an incredible series.

Speaker 3 I want to ask you about, I've asked you this before, but I'm going to ask you again.

Speaker 3 Because when you publish books in single issues,

Speaker 3 you always put in back matter.

Speaker 3 You always put in, at the end of every issue, will be an essay about a film.

Speaker 3 Usually films, a series of essays across the run of a book that are speaking, that are you have a friend or a film critic. That's a fanatic.

Speaker 3 That are, yes, that are related to the book that you're reading, the movies that relate to the, or sometimes you'll publish the music that you've been listening to or whatever.

Speaker 3 But especially to me, I've found so many great movie recommendations. On those nights where I'm like, what do I want to watch?

Speaker 3 I have a list in my phone that are like the movie recommendations from the back of Ed Brubaker books.

Speaker 3 And that's like real stuff. So, like, where does that live anywhere?

Speaker 3 Because you've, you've fastidiously will not put it anywhere but those books to incentivize people to buy single issues, I think.

Speaker 3 I mean, it was partly to incentivize people, but partly to just make the single issues something special.

Speaker 3 But the thing is, like, a lot of those, I mean, I wrote a lot of them at first, and then I started having friends write them.

Speaker 3 Like, my friend Justin Evans wrote a lot of the ones that are about pulp history. And then Devin Ferracci wrote a bunch of them.
And, you know, and then he got canceled. And

Speaker 3 then

Speaker 3 Kim Morgan took over for a long time, for years, writing them. And like, I just paid everybody like a flat fee for like one-time printing rights.
So the only thing we own officially is the

Speaker 3 art that Sean did for the essays.

Speaker 3 So to be able to do do like a printed collection of all of them, I would need to go back. It's like I've got to get patton and

Speaker 3 some people are dead now who wrote some of them and it's like I can't get a waiver signed by them.

Speaker 3 Like I've thought maybe put up all of them on like a website because then it's like no one's making money off of it and maybe that's maybe that's a way around it.

Speaker 3 I think everyone would be happy if I printed a book with them. I think the people who wrote them would probably be happy.

Speaker 3 The reason I didn't do them in the books originally was because I didn't want to detract from the books.

Speaker 3 And I wanted people to just, because you don't get to the end of a crime novel and have like an essay about, you know, Knight of the Hunter by the author's friend.

Speaker 3 But boy, does it also give us incredible Sean Phillips like Robert Mitcham, Lee Marvin? Like, I love it. Sean started doing those and then got hired by Criterion almost immediately.

Speaker 3 He did like Sweet Small Success, Blast of Silence, because he did that illustration for Blast Blast of Silence in the back of our

Speaker 3 comic when Patton wrote about it. And then Criterion, like our, one of our readers is like the art director of Criterion.

Speaker 3 And so Criterion optioned that movie and hired Sean to do like a whole comic book adapting the opening sequence and

Speaker 3 do a new painted cover. And it's like, so I was like, wow, an article in the back of Criminal by Patton Oswalt got Criterion to release a movie that was

Speaker 3 the most influential movie on Martin Scorsese that no one had ever heard of.

Speaker 3 Incredible. Incredible.
And I only know about that movie because Patton told me about it. Like, that's the thing I miss about the single issues, is that part of it, like the building of the community.

Speaker 3 Yes. And I do kind of miss that from only doing graphic novels.
Yeah, we have a

Speaker 3 next month. We have a,

Speaker 3 it's called Giant Sized Criminal Number One, and it's just like a big 48-page criminal one-shot.

Speaker 3 I think it comes out like the first week of December in comic stores, and it's print-only, comic stores only.

Speaker 3 And I wanted to really reward the comic stores and like sort of incentivize them to know nobody can get this anywhere but at you. So buy

Speaker 3 them, please. Yeah, and this is like really find your local store, go buy it.
This is not like, and you've done this before, you know. Did you, I think you did this with maybe Cruel Summer, did you?

Speaker 3 Or yeah,

Speaker 3 well, when I put out hardbacks, I don't do digital versions until the paperback.

Speaker 3 So, because it's like

Speaker 3 you can't get a hardback book on your Kindle, you know, it's like I noticed like Dan Klows and Chris Ware books are not available at all digitally.

Speaker 3 And I'm like, yeah, because it's a re part of the experience is holding it in your hand and reading it.

Speaker 3 But like in that single issue, I got

Speaker 3 Kieran Gillen. My friend Kieran is like a big comic book writer and game guy, and I got him to write a criminal RPG module that Sean illustrated.

Speaker 3 So there's like a criminal game that you and your friends can play with a deck of cards and a table. You can imagine you're sitting in the undertow post-heist

Speaker 3 trying to fucking backstab each other and dealing with a game master. And

Speaker 3 Kieran wrote that whole thing for me, and Sean illustrated it. So that's like one of our extras in this big 48-page thing.
And then I wrote like a sort of intro to

Speaker 3 who the world and characters of criminal. And, you know, so it was like fun to do that.

Speaker 3 So I think we may, you know, try and do that stuff once in a while just because I just like, you know, being able to create like fun art objects that

Speaker 3 we need community, you know. And I think you are, you also are constantly working with a list of collaborators who I think really reward that, you know, like even what you did with,

Speaker 3 are they called the martini editions? The Darwin Cook Cookies.

Speaker 3 These are the adaptations of the Parker books that Darwin Cook did that they then published in large format that you, I feel like, were very involved in shepherding into existence.

Speaker 3 Am I misrepresenting that? I mean, I was

Speaker 3 part of their PR campaign a little bit, I think, because I wanted to sort of champion that because Darwin had always really wanted to do those.

Speaker 3 And so, when they put out the first one, we did like a big roundtable interview, me, him, and the editor, Scott Dunbier, and Tom Spurgeon, who died a few years back, sadly, one of my best friends.

Speaker 3 And then in the second Martini edition, Darwin had passed away like really tragically. And suddenly I found out he was sick the day before he died.
Oh, wow. So yeah, it was.

Speaker 3 Oh, I didn't know it was so sudden.

Speaker 3 It wasn't as, it was a, it was a few months, I think,

Speaker 3 you know, but it was a thing where everybody thought he was getting better, and then he suddenly took a turn, it sounds like.

Speaker 3 But so for that book, like Sean and I oversaw that book, like edited it and designed Sean designed it, and then we did a new original story for the end of it.

Speaker 3 And I felt too weird writing a Parker story. So I wrote a Grofeld story about Parker and about missing Parker as like a tribute to Westlake and to Darwin.

Speaker 3 But I, because of that, I had to, I have the unique distinction of being the, one of the only people ever to get permission to write an original Parker story by Donald Westlake's widow.

Speaker 3 And I had to write the story first.

Speaker 3 Wow.

Speaker 3 Interesting. That makes sense.
And we've come full circle. Shane Black's new movie, Play Duty, is an adaptation of one of the Parker books.
So

Speaker 3 I think it takes two or three pieces from different ones. And then it, to me, that movie, I really like that movie.
I thought it was a lot of fun, but I felt like it felt like a weird mishmash between

Speaker 3 a Richard Stark

Speaker 3 Parker, but also a little bit like one of the Grofeld books, but also about 50% like a Shane Black movie. Yes.

Speaker 3 Very clearly, I feel like it is. When it wasn't Parker, it felt Shane Black.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and it was like, and I think that that was like one of those ones where, like, the parts that I like the most about it, I think, are the things that the critics maybe didn't like.

Speaker 3 Like, people don't understand Parker as a character.

Speaker 3 Not at all. Yeah, they do not understand.
They want him to be likable. Yeah, they want him to talk about his feelings and have them.
Not at all.

Speaker 3 He is never going to do that. Yeah, I told Shane, I was like, this is one of the best portrayals of Parker since Lee Marvin, honestly.

Speaker 3 He's this stoic asshole. Yeah, but that's what people don't get.
They're like, oh, they want, and it's like, maybe Wahlberg, who's usually such a charismatic guy, usually very funny in things.

Speaker 3 Like, I always think of him in the other guys and

Speaker 3 the daddy movies. Yep, daddy.
Like all his stuff with Will Farrell is what I think of. And I, you know, I love those.

Speaker 3 And so seeing him as Parker, I was like, honestly, I was relieved that it wasn't Downey because I couldn't imagine a version of Downey as Parker because he was like, well, Downey wants he wants to be liked so much.

Speaker 3 Yeah. You know, and that's not Parker.
No, I mean, Downey's one of the best actors in the world. I mean, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is still

Speaker 3 incredible.

Speaker 3 Because he's perfect for Shane. I feel like he's perfect for Shane Black.
But I remember when he was listed, I was like, oh, no, that's. Yeah.

Speaker 3 He should be Grofeld, the guy who talks too much and is an actor and is like flamboyant and stuff.

Speaker 3 But Shane was like, no, he wants to do like a Lee Marvin. And I was like, oh, cool.
Well, let's see it. And then, of course,

Speaker 3 he didn't do it. And Wahlberg instead.
And Wahlberg really does sort of, he's closer. He's very tight-lipped and tough.
And, you know, so I felt like it was a really good Parker.

Speaker 3 But then when I was looking at some of the reviews the first day, I'm like, oh, I'm going to stop reading these. Yeah, I didn't read these.

Speaker 3 It's like the same thing when the guy who's the main critic for the Times doesn't understand what a showrunner does.

Speaker 3 You know, you're just kind of like, okay, so you don't know anything about Parker, but you're going to review this movie. So, okay.
But that's, that's the, that's it. That's where we are.

Speaker 3 That's where we are. That's where we are.

Speaker 3 But I just am hoping that we get like another nice guys movie or something because I just feel the nice guys is a movie that gets better every time I watch it. Give me more.

Speaker 1 Give me more of that.

Speaker 3 Absolutely. Well, I'm being told we got to wrap up.
Ed, I could literally talk about this for the next two hours.

Speaker 3 You're one of the greats. Thanks for making the time.
Thank you. And I cannot thank you enough for having me on Criminal.
It was

Speaker 3 the thrill of a lifetime to spend two hours in makeup having bruises and cuts applied to my body, looking like someone had beaten the shit out of me. It is a pitiful.

Speaker 1 Thank you again, Ed, for joining us now. It is the moment you've all been waiting for.
It is time to announce our next movie.

Speaker 1 Next week, we'll be going from a slow-moving train to a zombie-craving brains. Ooh, I love that.
That's right. We'll be watching the 1993 Teen Horror Rom-com.

Speaker 1 My boyfriend's back. The movie stars Andrew Lowry and Tracy Lind with an A-plus supporting performance by Edward Herman, Mary Beth Hurt, Matthew Fox, and an unhinged Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Speaker 1 Yes, you don't want to miss this one. The IMDb breakdown of the plot says a teenage boy comes back from the dead because he's determined to win the most beautiful girl in school.

Speaker 1 Here's a thing: he's not her boyfriend, and Jason and June love this movie. So,

Speaker 1 are they right? Are they wrong?

Speaker 1 Well, Rotten Tomatoes gives this movie a 13%, and Ty Burr from Entertainment Weekly says, My boyfriend's back is obviously aiming for the subversive high school yucks of 1989 Heathers, but the storyline never bothers to make sense.

Speaker 1 Which, honestly, I agree with. Listen to the trailer.

Speaker 3 They say you only get one chance at life, but for childhood sweethearts, Missy and Johnny, true love will never die.

Speaker 3 My boyfriend's back. He came back from the dead for me.
He's a stinking zombie, you idiot. He may be dead,

Speaker 3 but his heart still beats for the girl that he loves. I would love to go to the prom with you.

Speaker 3 Pretty damned active for a dead guy. My boyfriend's back, rated PG-13.

Speaker 1 You can rent my boyfriend's back on Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video, and Fandango at home.

Speaker 1 Separately, I encourage you to check out Hoopla, Canopy, and Libby, which are digital media services offered by your local library that allow you to consume TV, movies, music, audiobooks, and e-books and comics for free.

Speaker 1 All right, that's it for Last Looks. If you listen to us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, please rate and review us.
Please make sure that you are following us and have automatic downloads turned on.

Speaker 1 It helps the show and we appreciate it. Visit us on social media at HDTGM.

Speaker 1 And a big thank you to our producers, Scott Saney and Molly Reynolds, our engineer, Casey Holford, and our social media manager, Zoe Applebaum, as well as our intern, Quinn Jennings.

Speaker 1 We'll see you next week for My Boyfriends Back.

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