FH Mini 124 - Bad Movie Godfathers, with Harry Medved and Harry Pallenberg

Hey, listeners.

I hope you're not skipping this part of the show because I have an exciting announcement.

Max Fun Drive is, of course, coming up very soon.

And

as has become traditional for us during Max Fun Drive, we drop an extra full episode

during the drive period.

So, over the drive period, you know, including the little bonus days on either end that they kind of add as a grace period.

During that period, we will be doing three full shows, and the theme is no spideys.

Yes, movies without Spider-Man.

We'll be talking about Venom, the last dance.

We'll be talking about Craven the Hunter.

We'll be talking about Heartbeats, another movie that doesn't have Spider-Man in it.

It's hard to find three, but we did it.

So I hope that the listeners, that's you, enjoy it.

And I hope that you remember us.

Come Max Fun Drive Time because you're what keeps the show running okay back to the show

hey welcome to the flop house i'm dan mccoy i'm stuart wellington i'm elliot kalen that's my name and i'm telling it to you and that's it okay stop talking ale because we've got guests we've got on the show we have

one of the writers of the golden turkey awards uh harry medved and we have harry hallenberg am i saying that right uh who is uh the other Harry's producer on a new show?

That's right.

We have not a new show, I guess.

But some podcasts only give you one Harry.

This podcast gives you two Harry's.

This extra Harry podcast today.

Um,

incredible value for the amount we're charging them.

This is it's like it's like they're stealing Harry's from us.

Now, one half of the Harry's has to cut out a little early.

So, uh, let's get to that stuff.

Let's get into it.

Yeah, yeah.

Um,

he's a TV producer.

You guys met, as I understand it, on what is beloved by all of the California-based podcasters I know, a show called California's Gold.

Is that true?

That is true.

Yeah, I'll let the other Harry take it.

Go for it.

That is correct.

We were doing a looking to do a show on movie locations, and Harry Medved had sent his book in called Hollywood Escapes, which is about movie locations.

And we decided we picked

Leo Creole State Beach, which is also known as Corman Beach, because Roger Corman filmed many excellent, excellent top movies there.

And so we did the interview with Harry, and we got Roger Corman to come out.

Oh, wow.

And it was one of the more popular episodes.

And our show is rather highly rated on PBS, but it was definitely one of the fan favorites.

We got more mail and interest every time it aired.

And Harry and I were like, wow, we should do a whole show like this.

And so that was like 2009.

And, you know, it took many years and starts and stops and other projects in between.

But now we have a show called Location Land, which is just that.

We travel around to movie locations and get filmmakers and actors and super fans and location scouts to tell us sort of the behind the scenes inside secrets.

And when we did that show at Leo Creo State Beach, there were a bunch of other people who wanted to join us, including a director named Randall Kleiser, who did a little movie back in the 70s called Greece with John Travolta and Illumina and John there.

So we thought, God, there's so many other stories we can tell.

All these filmmakers, location managers, and actors want to go back and retrace the steps of all the classic films that they shot, whether it was Attack of the Crab Monsters or the Karate Kid.

And so we thought we got to get the show going.

Oh, those are two different movies.

Yes.

Sounds like a Corman movie.

And we actually did meet the Karate Kid.

We actually did get Randall Kleiser on one of the the Location Land episodes, and we drove down literally in the LA River that you've seen in countless chase scenes, including

a road scene.

And, you know, it was amazing, him recounting his stories and sitting exactly where Olivia Newton-John sat watching the race.

Oh, that's cool.

And it was pretty special.

It's such a fun show, and it's such a great idea for it because

there is something very magical about being in the place where a movie was made.

And it's like a thin membrane between cinematic reality and our reality that you can kind of like puncture in uh in a very briefly in your imagination and especially in this area i'm in los angeles also dan and stewart of course are still in new york being pummeled by weather of some kind

i made and there's uh from what i can tell there's no movie shot in new york city none unfortunately it's never there's never been a movie shot or made or even set in new york yeah by law but uh the the while when you're traveling around los angeles it's just amazing because so much of the movie making apparatus is here how many of these locations have multiple lives as places that movies and other stories have been made?

It's really whenever the place that my family likes to go to is Vasquez Rocks.

And whenever we're there, I'm like, I saw that rock in this western.

I saw that rock in this western.

That's the rock that Kirk is fighting the Gorn next to.

Like, it's just, it's just so, it's really fun to see you going to these places and

kind of bringing that magic to it.

It's really fun.

Absolutely.

And there's a whole like tourism called set jetting where people, you know, literally travel around the world.

I know white lotus is sort of put that back on the map but you know well before white lotus that was a thing

and it is you know it's a multi-billion dollar industry where people really follow the locations so Elliot you said that about New York you know the the movie them about the giant killer ants was originally set in New York oh I didn't know that and they because it was supposed to be like King Kong like these giant ants taking over New York And apparently Warner Brothers couldn't get permission to actually shoot there.

So somebody said, I just saw this other movie shot there in the storm tunnels underneath the L.A.

River.

Let's just go shoot there.

And so they actually wrote a letter to the mayor of New York City saying, sorry, we're not going to shoot in New York.

We're going to shoot in L.A.

So we found so many movies about the destruction of Los Angeles.

And as you know, there's so much.

craziness about people saying the Hollywood sign was destroyed.

It was in flames and the recent fire.

I just met somebody from overseas who said, but I heard all of LA's gone.

It's just gone, right?

I saw it.

I saw the Hollywood sign on fire.

And it's like, no, this all came from AI and the movies.

And

anyway,

you live not too far from some of the burn areas, right?

And I think very, yeah,

very close.

Unfortunately, it affected quite a number of people that we know.

Luckily, we're fine where we are.

But

it was one of these very strange things in that, you know, to get to get serious for a moment.

It was one of these moments where you do start to feel like I've seen.

this happen in the movies and it feels like I'm in a movie right now, but not in a fun way, in a bad way.

And the thing it felt like to me the most was being in New York during September 11th, which similarly was like, I've seen this in movies, but in the movie, it's not horrifying.

Like in the movie, I'm okay with it, but not now.

Yeah.

But it's like a Roland Emmerich trailer.

Yeah, exactly.

But it is true.

Stuart, you made a good point that New York does have plenty of movies.

And on the scale of how many King Kongs per city, LA is behind New York by quite a few King Kongs, at least three.

Yeah.

Elliot, shut up about King Kong because we got to get all the juice we have from Harry number two before he has to jump off the call.

And so we'll, you know, we'll get back to some of the other stuff later, but

before you have to go now, Harry Palenberg, your father was a producer and uncredited writer and maybe have done other stuff for the runner-up for the worst movie ever in Harry Medved's Golden Turkey Awards book.

And we're talking about, of course, Exorcist to the Heretic, which we talked about for a Flophouse charity stream actually during lockdown.

And so,

one, I want to know, how do you react when you learned that Harry had named it the second worst movie ever?

And two, do you have interesting stories about it?

Because I think that we all kind of enjoyed how weird that movie is.

It's a strange movie.

Absolutely.

Yeah,

he was a writer, and I think his title is Creative Associate, which he had a few times.

And, you know, it sort of was a catch-all for, you know, just a guy who helped John out a lot because they were lifelong friends, and John Borman, the director, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Um, so I assumed all these guys know that much better than

maybe

for the audience, it's for the audience.

They know it's Johnny B who directed X-Chines.

It was weird, it was interesting.

I do have a couple of uh very vivid memories.

The first memory is that uh, we got uh, I got a bunch of candied locusts because there were tons of locusts in that movie.

Uh,

yeah, and uh, you know, some of the many of the dead ones were candied, so that was the first time I ever ate a candied locust.

Thumbs up.

And I

remember Linda Blair and the scene where she's teetering on the edge of the skyscraper.

I was allowed on set for about five minutes of that time, but as a, you know, I think I was like 10 years old at the time, maybe nine,

I was a little too energetic and enthusiastic.

And my mother was a little panicked by the idea of me running around.

You know, it really was like a far drop-off.

I mean, there was ledge below, but it was like a 40-foot ledge, so you wouldn't go all the way to the street.

But you'd still get hurt, really.

You'd literally kill yourself.

Yes, yeah.

And in the very last scene of the movie,

there's an ambulance that rolls up, and I am in the back of that ambulance.

Oh, wow.

So that was very fun for me.

For fun, though, you weren't like injury.

It's because you fell off onto that ledge.

Yes.

And I did get to try the synchotron machine that, you know, the sync everybody up.

Wow.

And sadly, on the night it premiered,

I do remember, you know, after the premiere going to Muso and Frank's restaurant in Hollywood that's sort of legendary and also in tons of movies.

And it was not the normal kind of dinner party that I sat through where everyone was enthusiastic and

drinking the red wine and really happy.

It was very murmured and

depressed.

Like I could clearly tell something was wrong and things were not going well.

Wait, how old were you?

I mean, like, nine or ten, yeah.

Oh, wow.

Um, it's like that scene in Ed Wood where they're reading the uh the reviews and the newspapers.

Yes, I mean, they were, you know, it did get sort of laughed off the screen.

Um,

and as far as when I found out that Harry said that, I don't think I was insulted or offended at all.

I think everybody felt, you know, if not in agreement as to the, you know, the second worst ever, like they, they knew it wasn't good.

Um, and I know they recut it.

Like, I think it got pulled from the theaters that first weekend weekend and got recut and re-put out.

And I think there's three different endings you can find on different videotape versions.

My clue.

Yeah.

I mean,

I admire that movie for trying to do something very different, though, because so many sequels are, let's just rehash sort of exactly what was

popular about the first one.

And that really blazes its own trail.

And it might be a weird trail, but I like watching it.

You do have to admire that they didn't just go like, now another girl has been, or this time a boy has been taken over by the demon.

It's two Max von Seidax.

And I did, I did.

I did read some Facebook posts about people were talking about it recently for some reason.

And I saw there was a huge chain.

And I read them to my father.

And, you know, people talking about how awful it was and how it actually sort of is okay.

And he got a look at it.

He thought it was funny.

And,

you know, he enjoyed it.

So.

Well, that's cool because the movie that actually beat Exorcist 2

is a film that is directed by Edward D.

Wood Jr.

called Plan 9 from Outer Space.

And that's why Harry, the other Harry, came to me, Harry Medved, and said, if we're doing this show, Location Land, why don't we retrace the steps of Plan 9 from Outer Space?

And I said, that's an awful idea.

Why would you want to do that?

The whole film is studio bound.

The best thing about Edwood's movies are the dialogue, the acting, not the locations.

Who cares about the locations of Plan 9 from Outer Space?

This is a question I wanted to ask, actually, because, yeah, it's either a graveyard or it's an actor's house or it's like in front of some cardboard in a small studio.

So were you worried about that?

But even finding like the actor's house, like when we got there, the guy who lived there, we were like waving at his house going like, you know, hey, with Dana Gould was our guest because he does a live show where they do a table reading of the screenplay, actually.

And the guy who lives there came out and he's like, oh, you guys can come.

And he's like, he gets mail to like the Plan 9 house at that address.

So even that guest, you know, the actor's house, which was Tor Johnson's house, you know,

and

so it's interesting to people.

And no one had ever gone to the back, and we got to see the back when the steps were Bella Gossi is sneaking into the house.

So like we got to really match that shot and that felt pretty cool.

And then also match the rosebush shot.

Who knows if it's the same rosebush?

I don't know if Roses lives for 70 years.

I'll say it does.

Don't ruin my illusions.

I want to say it's the same rosebush.

Of course they do.

100%.

But

the studio also was interesting because, you know, like the shot of Tor Johnson struggling up to get out of the, you know, out of the ground, like there's a hole in the ground in the studio, and no one had been in the studio before for location purposes.

I mean, it's now a recording studio, so people go in there all the time, but no one went in there with our, you know, lens, as it were.

And, you know, we got to look at that hole and try and decide, was that really the hole that Tor Johnson tried to crawl out of or not?

And, you know, you have to watch the episode to see.

Yeah.

And well, I mean, i don't know exactly how long you have but i want to try and get these questions in sure while you're here i was wondering you know like if if it's a great accepted great canonical movie there's a lot of uh sort of you know research about it with something like plan nine which is you know, one of the most canonical bad movies, but I assume there's sort of less information out there.

Was it harder to find the locations because of that?

i think it was easy to find because because it is sort of you know the canon of the worst movie ever you know has been hung on that film yeah and people have done videos about it they've looked at it they looked for it and harry had written about it obviously extensively so to me it was easy and also you know i just relied on harry to do all the legwork well for me

i think it was hard for me because A lot of times, like just the police station in the movie where Inspector Clay played by the 400-pound Swedish wrestler Tor Johnson.

He really, but he really inhabits the part of an L.A.

police officer.

With that accent, yeah.

Inspector Daniel Clay and

he's a police officer called you.

He's got that thick Swedish accent.

But yeah, we found the police station just by going back to like old newspapers, newspapers.com and trying to find out where was the police station in 1957 or 1958, whenever they shot it, I guess, in the mid-50s.

And now it's a veteran affording wars building.

So it was just really fun to kind of go around and do this movie archaeology

because I don't believe anything I hear anymore.

And I don't believe anything I find on the internet.

We have to find the original sources from the newspapers saying they shot this film here.

We got to talk to people who actually worked in the film and you actually have to watch the movie to see if it actually shows up in the film.

So there was a lot of work.

Yeah.

I mean, can I just say, I'm going to pivot off of that about watching the actual movie.

We did a show on the Hollywood sign, one of the episodes.

And if you Google like first movie that destroyed the Hollywood sign, like everyone says earthquake.

And like, that's just not true.

And it's pretty easy to watch.

Like, it's really easy to prove that wrong.

Like, Google says

it doesn't appear in the movie.

There's no article newspaper about that.

There's tons of data.

And if you just like spend two and a half hours, you know it's not true.

Yeah, we talked to the director Joe Dante, of course, who did Gremlins and so many other great movies.

His very first film in 1978, I believe it was, was called Hollywood Boulevard.

Yeah, and he was the first one to, oh, actually, before 78.

But anyway, he was the first one to destroy the Hollywood sign.

And we're the first time in Hollywood Boulevard.

He believes he was the first one, and we believe it too.

We believe it based on our research

until we're proven wrong.

But yeah.

Can you prove it didn't happen?

I don't know.

Before we were recording, you teased some Zardaz props that maybe you have.

I just wanted to ask about that.

Harry, do you have Sean Connery's diaper?

I don't have any props, but when we were we lived in Ireland when they were filming Excalibur that my father worked with John Borman on also,

and in the barn, Charlie Borman and I are, you know, the same age, basically,

Charlie and Daisy.

And

we used to ride around

the moors in, you know, bare-chested,

bareback on a horse with like the bullet bands across and like the paper-mâché uh mask that was sort of nodding apart.

Um, Charlie usually got that, I didn't get to use that too often, but um, you know, we did have the bullet bands across our chest, and so that was sort of a fun thing.

That's cool.

Um, that's amazing to be able to do like kids Zarda's dress-up with the actual costume is amazing, exactly.

No, kids Zarda, you know, everyone had horses, so it was very, you know, just kids riding on horses saying the penis is bad, the gun is good, you know,

exactly.

Yeah, did you get to meet charlotte rampling but uh no i don't think i did

but i do have some uh i have some deliverance uh uh memory

i have a i have an arrow from deliverance and some stationary and some some stuff from that and i was actually in the end of that movie too i was in the police car with charlie borman um there's a cop car at the very end and we're like yeah hunched down in the in the bottom of that

So that's really cool.

And at the end, and your dad was like, come watch this movie with me when it was finished?

Or did he feel like you were not ready for it?

Yeah, I was not ready for that one because I was like five at that stage.

I mean, I was much younger.

I did not watch that until I was in high school without my parents.

He's in the movie.

He should be able to watch it.

Strong logic.

Yeah.

There's something about the location plan nine episode.

I just want to say I was struck by the moment where you're at Tor Johnson's house.

You're looking at an exterior light on the house and you're like, oh my God, the lamp from the movie.

And that really struck me for two reasons.

One being the idea of like, yeah, it's, you know, it's just a house.

People still live there.

If there's no reason to replace that lamp, that lamp's still going to be there.

Sort of like a preservation by indifference.

But two, just the fact that like, even if it's a silly movie, it's genuinely exciting to see that lamp.

Like it's amazing because it's in a movie, even if the movie's Plan 9.

And it's not really.

a question, but like, is like, do you have thoughts about that?

Like, that feels like sort of the magic of the show in general, locationally.

And yeah, you know, I will say that I have lived with Plan 9 from Outer Space since 1978.

And I think my brother Michael Medved and I kind of helped popularize it in the Golden Turkey Awards.

So to actually kind of go back, the lines of dialogue in the movie are like old friends.

And so just the scenes in the movie are like old friends, but I've never met them.

You know what I mean?

I've never actually, and unfortunately, there's not one person associated with the movie who's still alive.

All the actors are dead.

So

Yeah, it's 1958.

So,

but to actually be able to go there and touch it, it's like, you know, touching the Western Wall in Jerusalem or something, to actually go to the house, you know, it's a very spiritual place for me, the Plan 9 house.

So to be able to actually go there and have that sense of discovery, and I always wondered, you know, Ed Wood was actually so much more clever than people gave him credit for being.

He shot just some footage of Bell of the Ghosty kind of horsing around outside of Tor Johnson's house a few days before Bell of the Ghostie died, but he had two different scenes, actually three of them, one in a graveyard, one in front of Tor Johnson's house where he's an old man grieving apparently for his dead wife, but then another where he's a vampire, like come back to life and he's skulking around and he's ready to invade someone's house and terrorize Mona McKinnon.

I never knew where that scene was shot.

So to actually discover that it's behind the house, that was super exciting for me.

And that's, I think, what we're trying to do with this show is to capture us as we're discovering these forgotten movie landmarks.

Because there's so many of them around LA that are right underneath your nose and you wouldn't know about them.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Thank you, guys.

Thank you, Harry.

Bye.

Bye, Harry.

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All right, so

the Harry number two, as I've dubbed him, I apologize,

has had to take off.

And yeah, because of scheduling, we sort of did this in odd order.

So I want to go back and sort of reset.

We did a lot of talking about

Plan 9 from Outer Space.

And

eventually, sort of I'll ask you to

talk about that specific movie for people who don't know it.

But I want to start it out really by saying, you know, the Golden Turkey Awards,

the book you wrote with your brother,

really

was a cornerstone of me loving bad movies.

That and Mystery Science Theater in

88.

But your book was even early, even earlier.

It was 1980.

And my older brother had a copy that I read until the binding fell apart.

So

first off, thank you.

for being responsible for our podcast careers.

Not in any, not in any financially

emotional way.

But

that's where I come from with bad movies.

That's what got me interested.

Where do your interests come from?

Well, thank you, Dan, for that.

And it is like you guys were the very first show out there, the very first podcast on bad movies.

I think so, right?

I think that's true.

I don't know if that's true.

I've been billing us as America's first bad movie podcast, probably.

Yeah,

certainly the first one that got any sort of attention.

But just to piggyback on what Dan said just for a second, similarly, I remember so clearly the first time I ever read The Golden Turkey Wards and like finding it in, I think, the house of my parents' friends and just the eye-opening of quality of reading it and being like, oh, there's fun to be had with like bad movies.

Like they're not just things to dismiss.

There's something to be really done with them in a fun way.

And so I'm as curious as Dan, because it's not like you didn't.

come into it through that book because you wrote that book.

So it's not like the book didn't matter.

So how'd you get there?

Thank you, Elliot.

Well,

so two things.

One, and thank you guys so much.

I was 15 years old when I started working on the book called The 50 Worst Films of All Time, which predated the Golden Turkey Awards by two years.

And it was my brother Michael Medved's idea.

Michael had seen, I loved this book called The Great Films.

It was a list of 50 classic films by a New York Times film critic named Bosley Crowther.

And I kept checking it off.

I wanted to go out and see every one of them.

Now, this is back in the days, the 70s.

It really shows how old I am, but you couldn't see these movies in theaters.

They didn't come back just rarely.

You had to watch them on TV in the middle of the night on what they called the late, late, late show.

And my brother kept thinking, my God, why doesn't anyone do a book on the worst films of all time?

And also, there was somebody who predated us, and that was the Harvard Lampoon, the, of course, the student humor magazine.

At Harvard, they had their movie Worst Awards for many, many years.

Now, if you go back and look at some of them, it's shocking.

I just looked at from the 70s.

Here's some of their worst films of the year.

Day of the Locust, Barry Linden, Tommy, Shampoo, Coming Home, The Goodbye Girl, Oh God,

and The Turning Point.

Oh, and Flash Dance.

And Return of the Jedi.

So it just shows.

I can see how a bunch of Harvard, young Harvard guys would be like, eh, at least movies don't have anything to say to me.

They stink, yeah.

And so we were kind of like that.

Barry Linden.

What a stinker.

Ryan O'Neill won worst actor.

oh by the way they also gave the wrong way corrigan award to a young director named steven spielberg for turning king kong

into um a fish story and tried to pass it off as great cinematic art with jaws so steven spielberg got like a movie worst award for direct

that's a very odd reading of that movie just i don't know do these

does does this have any relation to the what the raspberry the razzies yes yeah so that's the point is that so I'm making a longer story longer, and I'm sorry about that.

No, it's okay.

No, we're also making it longer.

We're going to interrupting.

And

you are.

So

I was working as a ticket taker in high school, as an usher at the village theater in Westwood.

My manager was a guy named J.B., J.B.

Wilson, John B.

Wilson.

And he noticed how much I loved.

bad movies and he knew I was working on a book called the 50 Worst Films of All Time.

We decided to follow it up with a book called The Golden Turkey Awards, which was our satire on the Academy Awards on the Oscar.

And he said, are you guys going to do this every year?

And I said, no, man, I'm just, we're doing this as a lark.

It's fun.

I'm still in high school.

You know, and he said, well, I want to do something called like a Golden Raspberry Awards.

Would you be cool with that?

He said, dude, go for it.

I love it.

So he started the Razzies in about 1980, right after the Golden Turkey Awards was published.

And he made us honorary.

founding members of the Golden Raspberry Foundation.

So the Razzies followed the Golden Turkey Awards.

So it always makes me laugh when people say, oh, is this kind of like the Golden Raspberry Award?

The Golden Raspberries are a little bit like the Golden Turkey Award.

But anyway, so we, there were, there were precedents.

There were people writing about bad movies before we did.

But in our book, The 50 Worst Films of All Time, we also put in a lot of sacred cows, kind of like what the Harvard Lampoon did.

We put in movies like last year at Marion Bad and Ivan the Terrible.

We even picked a movie that was playing at my local theater where I was working at the time called The Omen.

And that's a film that is actually a very good movie.

And it's something I've had to live down for years that I picked it as one of the worst ever.

Well, you were, you were, you were teens, which you've mentioned a couple times, and I want to say, How dare you?

Because I haven't read the book yet.

There you go.

How old were you when you saw the book, man?

You must have been a kid.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, yeah, I think I was digging into it when I was like seven or something like far too young.

I'm sorry, man.

I'm sorry for perverting your child.

Oh, no.

No, it's always here.

It warped my brain in

probably

a good way.

I mean, you can be a serial killer.

They're good.

What's that?

Dan would be a serial killer now if he didn't have bad movies to

seriously.

So you really saved a lot of people, Harry.

Yeah.

There you go.

Another person we saved is Joel Hodgson, who then later told us, and you worked really well

on Mystery Science Theater 3000.

He said that he...

poured through our books that they were definitely the catalyst for Mystery Science Theater 3000.

So we did kind of help start this bad movies, the the movies that are so bad that they're good.

But I'd love to get an opinion from you guys.

What really makes a bad movie?

And for you, what is a good bad movie?

I know, Stuart, you've talked about that sometimes.

Sure.

What is an entertainingly bad movie versus like a depressingly bad movie like Here, which I haven't seen, but I feel like I've seen it because I've listened to your podcast on it.

Robert Simec's film.

You saved me actually a lot of time and money by listening to the show.

We're very happy that we could have done that.

If we can learn one

away from here, then we've done our job.

Yeah, I feel like, I mean, like a bad movie, I mean, the, the hardest thing, the thing, doing the show as long as I have, the, the thing that I keep running into are the, there's like the different tiers of bad movies, whether it's just like a wrong-headed, overly cooked studio thing where there's just like so many cooks involved.

It's been re-edited and like mushed together.

And it's just this like, like soulless mess.

And those I think are probably the worst.

The ones that are the best are the ones that are like passion projects from like a visionary director who has a clear vision.

It's just probably not the right vision, but they like, but you get to see that like ego like on screen.

Like you get to see the director's entire personal self revealed on screen.

And those are the good ones.

Yeah.

And those are the ones we like to concentrate on.

I don't, I don't, you guys somehow make it entertaining when you're talking about those depressingly bad movies.

God love you.

Yeah, I don't know how you do it.

It's not entertaining when you're watching it, but it's interesting to listen about you guys dissecting it.

I don't know how that works.

There's something about a movie where, and I think this goes along with Stirling, where someone's ambition so far exceeds either their ability or their resources or their ground.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so, and I think that's one of the magical things about Ed Wood's movies in particular is he is trying so hard and he's reaching so far, but his arms are so short that he's falling so far short of what he's trying to do.

And there's something kind of like, you know, the movie Edwood captures that it's so nicely in a positive way.

Brilliantly.

There's something kind of beautiful about someone trying so hard for something that everyone else can really see.

Like you can't achieve this.

And he's refusing to not achieve it.

And what you end up with is something where it almost feels like he is.

recreating the rules of what a movie is and how it operates.

There's certain filmmakers who are so off the target that you're like, I don't know if they're inventing a new film, grammar, that is going to look, that's going to look beautiful in the future or what.

Like, it's, it's like you hear something, a song in another language, and you're like, this is affecting me, and I don't understand what it's saying.

Like, this is, you know.

Yeah.

No, it's interesting.

It's interesting that you say that, Ellie, because well, I actually had a question for you, Harry, that was sort of along these lines.

And when I was talking about what we call on the show good, bad movies, I think that there's like a feeling that they're exuberantly inept in some way.

Like the stuff like stewart said that is soul-killing is the stuff that is aiming for mediocrity and either succeeding or failing but the stuff that comes from the heart and fills is sort of beautiful still yeah and like it could just be a movie that has a like a character has one really weird line reading and you're like that's amazing i don't know it doesn't achieve what it's trying to achieve but it makes me happy for some reason

i i have a theory and i'd love to get you guys please give me your opinion on this, which is, I really think that Ed Wood had a sense of humor about his scripts.

I think that many of the line readings just killed the jokes.

And that's what makes them funnier.

It's like the actors didn't get the joke.

Like if you think about when Duke Moore, who plays the detective in Plan 9, says, one thing's for sure, Inspector Clay's dead, murdered, and somebody's responsible.

He didn't get it.

It was supposed to be a joke.

He delivered it like it was a Sherlock Holmes deduction.

But I'm sure Ed Wood wrote it as like,

he's dead, murdered, and somebody's responsible.

It was supposed to be a joke.

I think Ed the director, the reason why we called him the worst director of all time in our book, The Golden Turkey Awards, is because he subverted Ed Wood, the screenwriter, who actually had some really clever lines.

And he was so quick and on such a low budget that he didn't do retakes.

So when he had these horrible actors, he just kind of went with a take.

And there's something that, you know, the, the, I haven't read, I'm curious because I'd love to get a look inside Ed Wood's head.

I I read his book years ago, Hollywood Rat Race, where he was a very bitter guy by that point.

But you feel like when you watch his movies, that there's probably a part of him as a director that, like, just is really excited to be doing it and can't bear to tell somebody you're doing it wrong.

This is how you're supposed to say it.

Like, I think there's probably the feeling they had to move so fast, but also the feeling of like, I'm so glad this person is doing this for me.

Like, I can't break them down.

I'm just going to, I'm just going to let them go with it.

That's fine.

You know, 100% agree with you.

I think he was just a super nice guy.

Yeah.

And, you know, unfortunately, I think a lot of people over the years have criticized the Medbed brothers, my brother, Michael, and myself, for being condescending, a little bit patronizing towards Ed Wood's work.

As I go back and I reread our work from 40 years ago or whatever, I kind of get a little bit of that, but we've always loved his movies.

And from everybody that we interviewed, and we were the very first ones to tell the story of Ed Wood, he was just the nicest guy in the whole world.

Everybody just said he would give you the shirt off his back.

And I think it's kind of tragic, in my opinion, that we didn't discover him until right after he died.

I remember going down to rent some of these movies because, you know, we'd be up late at night and I'd be falling asleep in my high school class.

And my teacher would nudge me and say, what are you doing asleep, Medbed?

And I said, I'm really sorry.

I was up till four o'clock in the morning watching Santa Claus Conference of the Martians for a book that I'm working on.

They like didn't get it back then.

You know, nobody understood the idea of.

like movies that are so bad that they're good.

But we went to this 16 millimeter rental place and that's where Ed Wood used to go to rent his Westerns that he would watch at home, apparently.

I don't know how he had the money to do it back then because he was running out of money.

He was kind of getting a lot of liquor.

He strikes me as the guy who would not pay for food, but would pay to rent films to get him at his house.

Yeah.

There you go.

But anyway, so I remember somebody told me you'll find him down there and talk to the guys at Budget Films.

And when I showed up, somebody told me, yeah, you just missed him.

And I went, oh, well, is he in the neighborhood?

When's he coming back?

I said, no, he just passed away.

And I was so sad this because I think he would have enjoyed all this attention.

I mean, I don't know if you guys ever talked to Neil Breen or any of the people that you roast on your show, but I'm assuming these guys love it.

I mean, Tommy Wizzo loves it, right?

Tommy Wizzo definitely.

I think Neil Breen, I think, is such an artiste in his soul that he, I think, probably doesn't like it that much.

But Tommy Wizzo, certainly, and I think Edwood's more that way.

I think Neil Breen is really specific about how his films are shown.

Yeah, like he won't allow them to be shown as part of like a midnight screening or anything that might indicate that they're like not 100%

serious.

Yeah, but I bet you that, I bet you it's just, it's really, it's, it's tragic that that's what happened because I bet you Ed Wood would have said, would have thought, as Tommy Ozo would, attention, like any attention to my work is good attention.

And I will, I will play along with you because I, whatever's getting my work out.

And there's something really, and it shows the power of it that like, you know, I grew up when, you know, the film rental places had been replaced by video stores, but that every video store in the, in the four-town radius that I would go to video stores in had Plan 9 from Outer Space in stock at that store, which is phenomenal.

I grew up in New Jersey that this movie from 1958 that

is ridiculous and made for nothing was

decades later was across the country available, readily available to anyone who wanted to see it, is kind of a dream for a filmmaker, I would think.

Well,

I mean, our conversation has kind of anticipated the question already, and I think I know the answer, but

there's been pretenders to the throne since

Plan 9 was anointed by you guys.

I guess that was a reader's poll from the previous book, I guess, that got Plan 9 to the top.

But

like, you know, you're trolled to or The Room.

But do you feel like, but like, you know, you really like pushed Plan 9 into America's consciousness, which, you know, created this cult around Ed Wood.

There's a I could, you could draw a straight line from your book to the fact that there is a Tim Burton movie about Ed Wood.

Do you feel some sort of weird pride that you rehabilitated this man?

You gave him kind of a happy ending?

Dan, you just, weird pride is exactly right.

I look, I feel like,

you know, as Bella Lugosi said in Ed Wood's Glenn or Glenda, the story must be told.

And I'm so happy that it's been told by so many other people and so beautifully.

Larry Karazewski and Scott Alexander, apparently, I think this is what Scott told me.

There's the screenwriters of Tim Burton's Ed Wood.

They sent us letters in our worst film spole, and they had told us they're working on a script at USC for a project called The Man in the Angora sweater that eventually became the Edwood movie.

So, you know, they were super nice.

They invited us to the set.

Gregory Walcott, the star of Plan 9, has a cameo in the Edwood movie, and he called me in advance and said, Should I do this thing?

Is this going to, anyone going to see this darn thing?

It's going to be embarrassing for me.

And I said, No, you got to do it.

There's nothing else for the residual.

So, I mean, people have recognized that we had a hand in it.

I've been appreciative.

A guy named Rudolph Gray wrote the book, Nightmare in Ecstasy, that was the first serious work devoted to a biography of Edwood.

And I gave him at least like a dozen interviews of with all the folks that we had interviewed, Duffy Manlove, Mona McKinnon, et cetera.

And so I'm just so happy that all of this research that we did has been used to help get the story of Edwood out there and Plan 9.

And as I said, if people want to see more about how Plan 9 was shot, I mean, the work is ongoing.

And so for me, this is exciting.

40 years later, man, am I old, but I'm doing more.

You started very young.

Nothing.

Yeah, well, I was.

But the fact that I get to go and find out more about Glen or Glenda and where it was shot, that this studio, which is right at Santa Monica Boulevard and Western in Los Angeles, just down the street from the Hollywood Forever Cemetery where Vampira is buried.

This is where Ed Woods shot scenes from Glenn or Glenda and Plan I from Outer Space.

Next door is a hotel called the Harvey Hotel.

And that's where Captain Zita, who plays The Devil and Glenn's father in Glenn or Glenda, that's where he lived.

He was a booker for strippers.

And in that same hotel, apparently, that's where Tor Johnson used to say when he was in trouble with, quote, the little lady at home.

He would say, because it's like there were strippers in the hotel.

What can I say?

And this is all right there.

And then Glenn's apartment in Glenn or Glenda is right outside of Quality Studios.

And then across the street, that's where Glenn is window shopping when he's looking at the ladies' lingerie and admiring the lingerie for too long.

And so it's all right there.

Ed Wood did not waste time.

He was like Glenn Eastwood.

He was

running and gunning all day long.

And I feel like visiting these places so close to each other kind of like, I don't know, it, there's something magical about that kind of attitude of like, okay, so we'll shoot this, we'll shoot this over here, we'll do this over here.

Like it's, it's, it's, it's, it's the sort of thing that you expect to see from like, like high school kids or like college kids, but to like for to imagine like a grown, you know, a grown man like having that same level of enthusiasm and like can do despite the fact that like, like we've addressed, he did not have the resources to match his aims.

And to that point, I want to highlight something from the locationland episode where Dana Gould has one of the

flying saucer models.

and he points out, like, oh, there's a scene where they approach the flying saucer, and there's a wall, a square wall, and you're like, well, flying saucers don't have like right angles on it.

But on his model, you can see that they glued a little square to the end of the model to make it logical.

It shows you that Edwood was thinking or somebody on his

was thinking who said, wait a minute, there's a square here, but it's a saucer.

We're going to put a square on it.

So that's huge.

But no, I would love to see a plaque that says Edwood Alley or something, because it's really like a block on Santa Monica Boulevard just west of Western.

That really where he shot so much of his work.

And Baldo Lugosi lives just down the street in his last days,

just Sunset and Western.

So that whole area is very historic for Edwood fans.

And for me, it was just a joy to discover it because I had never been there.

Oh, that's awesome.

I'd never been there before.

And, you know, it's because it's closed to the public and most people have never been there.

So the fact that they opened it up to us was a testament to Harry Pallenberg and the shows that he created before that.

That's so cool.

And it's such a,

just kind of referring to what Stuart was talking about about like that attitude of like, we'll shoot over there and then we'll shoot that thing there.

It shows that Ed Wood, for all the people talking about him as a, as a bad director, understood a basic thing about filmmaking, which is that all you see on all you're going to see is what's on the screen.

So anything outside of that frame.

doesn't matter.

And you can use that, whatever's in the frame,

you can make into anything.

And it doesn't matter what, like, oh, that can't be the door of that can't be the door of a police station that's a house doesn't matter doesn't matter you're just going to see the door you know that it's such a uh it's such a kind of real understanding of um of film grammar but then put to yeah put to this to put to this bizarre use you know yeah it's like that 11-point turn that they make outside of the police station it's like well they were in a rush you know without having trouble getting the door open you know just use it why not it's just so great that's great so for me it's just it's a real joy to visit these locations and it's a real joy to talk to you guys and see how far the craze for bad movies has gone.

And how, how many episodes have you guys done?

Is it like 400 now or something?

There's like something in the 400s of like mainline episodes, but then we have all these movie minutes in the early years and minis later on.

It's probably something more like 600 at this point.

At various lengths, yeah.

17 and a half years.

17 and a half years.

What do you want to do when you're 18?

What are you doing to celebrate when you're 18 years old?

Oh, man.

I'll probably start smoking.

I mean,

I actually have a question.

So I feel we've, we've talked quite a bit about visiting film locations and film sets.

And obviously you've seen, you've had some emotional moments.

Has there been one where you were not expecting like you're like, oh, this won't be a big deal, but then you were there and all of a sudden you, it hit you?

Like, was there a moment that you had like an epiphany or an aha moment where you're like, oh my God, I can't believe I'm here?

Yeah.

When we went down to the LA River with the director of Greece, Randall Kleiser,

and we saw the 6th Street Tunnel.

So I thought, well, what's the big deal?

There's a new bridge over the Los Angeles River, which is all concretized, called the 6th Street Bridge or Viaduct.

There's a little tunnel under that, and the tunnel is historic.

The old bridge had to come down because it would have fallen in an earthquake.

So they revitalized the bridge.

They kept the old tunnel.

And I thought, well, it's just the tunnel.

What's the big deal?

But that is the tunnel where the giant ants from them come out.

It's a tunnel that you you see in Cleopatra Jones.

We found the first film noir shot there called Roadblock in the early 1950s.

And the more we kept watching films, you can see it in the back in Greece.

I mean, it's there in so many movies.

To actually walk into the tunnel and know that L.A.

is going to create like a little city park right nearby it, that was pretty mythical because it's just one of those things where it's right underneath your nose.

And you would never think to walk into this tunnel.

of a storm drain and think that it's a major filming location.

And that is the one thing, and by the way, just to get serious for one second, the location managers are the unsung heroes of the film industry.

So a lot of these guys in Altadena, Elliot, right near you, and also over in the Palisades, are trying to help the fire victims of Los Angeles reclaim some of their

losses with FEMA and with insurance claims because they took photos.

of their homes when they were shooting in their homes.

So they've got these scouting photos.

So if people are are trying to say, yeah, I have these very valuable hats over here or whatever, they've got the photos of it.

And so if anyone listening to this podcast is in Los Angeles and has been affected by the fires or no fire victims, you know, please check out scoutphotos.org.

We did a whole location land episode on that too.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

And we're also planning to do something on the history of Altadena in the movies and the history of the Palisades in the movies.

Well, on that.

I'm good to see those.

It'll be good to have that

to have that remembered and to have it commemorated.

And it's, and it's, just as you, like you're saying, location, location scouts, location managers are very, are the, are such a backbone and they don't

get the credit they deserve for making these things, these like amazing memories that we all share from the movies, making them possible.

And they're helping their neighbors in the community.

I mean, they always have, but that's what they're like the liaison between the film industry and the neighborhood.

So, you know, we're hoping LA is going to rebuild soon and filming will come back to Los Angeles.

I've seen it already.

I know that there's a film just shot on Venice Beach recently.

And so we're going to be following their footsteps as they come back to Los Angeles and film some more.

Well, on that very sweet note, we should start winding down.

I want to say that when I told my brothers that this was happening, my brother Robert said, well, what are you going to do now that you've peaked?

And I'm like, I don't know.

Because it really is.

quite

mind-blowing to know that

just as you inspired us back in the day that now that you have listened to our show and this

are you kidding circle uh thank you you've introduced me to so many movies that i would have never seen or that i don't want to see because i listen

useful

exactly um thank you we'll of course uh put a link to the the plan nine episode specifically in in this episode but uh but you should watch a location land in general i don't know if there's anything else you want to plug before we sign off No, I just keep

passing the torch for more bad movie fans because

I don't know when I was a kid people thought it was just so weird that I was into bad movies like why would you want to spend good money on a bad movie like

there was a film critic uh not Roger Ebert but when we asked a bunch of film critics for their list a guy named Charles Champlin not Champlin but Champlin at the LA Times he wrote to us and said you have to understand that I don't see the worst films except by accident Life is too short and I can take suffering or leave it alone.

And I just, that's the way that people used to look at bad movies.

It was like a trap.

People say, why are you laughing?

This is horrible.

And I was like, but we're laughing because it's like somebody slipping on a banana peel.

It's like, yeah, just, it's funny.

I'm sorry.

I can't help myself.

But it's like, the fact is 40 years later, you guys are still doing this show and

600 episodes, you said?

Around that, probably in total.

I mean, one of these days.

One of these days, people will figure it out and they won't be able to make bad movies anymore.

Once they've cracked the code, we're almost there.

Someday, I hope not.

Then we're all out of business.

I mean, there are days that I think we provide a dubious service, but I like your attitude that, like, you know what?

We're, we're finding joy where we find joy.

And that's absolutely good.

It's

hard to do, but you've got to do it really well.

Thank you.

Thank you for making the trail for us.

We really appreciate it.

Thank you.

Before we go, thanks to our network, Maximum Fun.

Go to maximumfun.org for other great shows.

Thanks to our producer, Alex Smith, for making us sound good.

You can find him online as Howell Dotty.

But for this episode, I've been Dan McCoy.

I've been Stuart Wellington.

I'm Manelia Kalin.

And we've been joined by

Harry Medved and thrilled to be on the Flophouse.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Thank you guys.

Bye.

Thanks.

Bye.

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supported directly by you.