#2240 - Roger Avary & Quentin Tarantino

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Speaker 4 So you were saying that someone was telling you how to kill someone with coffee?

Speaker 3 Okay, so I got to know all these, you were talking about some

Speaker 3 operators, and

Speaker 3 I got to know through a friend, through a

Speaker 3 billionaire friend who loaned his plane to Clinton to fly those people out of, I think, North Korea. And so from that point on, he was surrounded by these guys.

Speaker 3 And one of them,

Speaker 3 this guy Mikey, which isn't his real name,

Speaker 3 I think he's actually named, they name them all after the archangels. So he was like Michael.
Oh, the other guy Gabriel.

Speaker 3 They take on these.

Speaker 4 There's nothing creeper than an assassin with Billy.

Speaker 2 They look after an archangel.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 And well, you know.

Speaker 3 And so he,

Speaker 3 you know, we got to know each other because of our mutual friend. And I think what happened was

Speaker 3 he and a couple of the other guys, you know, they were placed on me as like for surveillance purposes. Like, you know,

Speaker 3 find out what this Avery guy's about, maybe, or just keep an eye on him or whatever. And they told me right up front, like, be nice to your surveillance.

Speaker 3 You know, like, don't try to lose us or anything like that.

Speaker 1 Cause

Speaker 3 I heard stories about how, you know, they're surveilling somebody in

Speaker 3 wherever, Bolivia. And suddenly some gang attacks their surveillance and they step in, kick the shit out of the gang.
And so I got to know these guys.

Speaker 3 And naturally, you know, I'm a writer and filmmaker. And so I, of course, want to talk to them about stuff.
And they immediately started volunteering.

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah, we've learned all these different ways when I became an operator, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 3 I learned how to kill people without, and I was just making a list now of the 10 ways to kill someone without leaving a trace.

Speaker 1 And I was like, well,

Speaker 3 just like when I told Quentin about this, he's like, well, what are those?

Speaker 1 I'd like to hear those.

Speaker 3 Everybody wants to hear those. And so one of the ones that I think is the best one is you inject someone with coffee.

Speaker 3 Caffeine, like just inject coffee into their bloodstream, gives them a heart attack, and it's untraceable. Later on, they do an autopsy and they just discover.
caffeine in your system.

Speaker 1 That's it?

Speaker 4 That's it. Is this just right into the blood, coffee? It can kill you?

Speaker 3 Sometimes the simple ways.

Speaker 2 Just write into the juggler with a syringe.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 3 Jesus. After extracting whatever information you need to get out of him.

Speaker 1 How much coffee will kill you like that?

Speaker 3 Syringe worth? I don't know.

Speaker 1 Is it the Turkish kind or is it Folgers?

Speaker 4 A Cuban espresso.

Speaker 3 Yeah, but

Speaker 3 he was a medic

Speaker 3 during the war.

Speaker 3 Well, the war. And he was a medic.
And so he

Speaker 3 was kind of identified as somebody who knew how to kill somebody very easily because you know what will work because you're a medic. And so

Speaker 3 I would hear every now and then, I would say I'd kill some guy and some diplomat or something in the Philippines. And I'd hit him with my car.

Speaker 3 And I'd look in my rearview mirror and make a determination, a medical determination of, is the guy still alive?

Speaker 1 Or is he,

Speaker 3 I better finish him off, and put him in reverse and drive him over again a couple of times and then take off. And he's doing that all the time.

Speaker 3 All the time.

Speaker 4 They're doing it. Well, Jamie and I were just talking and they think they have a photo of the guy who whacked that insurance CEO.
Oh yeah, yeah, uh-huh.

Speaker 4 Yeah, they think they have a photo of his face now. Oh, they do, huh?

Speaker 1 Well, I would think with him.

Speaker 2 What time are they or they picked it up later?

Speaker 4 I think, you know, there's cameras everywhere. And that's part of the problem with someone.
I don't think this guy was a professional. I think this guy, if I had a guess, some guy who got fucked over.

Speaker 4 Apparently that company is really bad on denying claims.

Speaker 3 34% denial rate.

Speaker 4 Something almost like 16%. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 3 those guys. I don't think anybody's going to like be crying too hard over that guy.

Speaker 4 Maybe it's family, but that's about it.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 4 It's a dirty, dirty business. The business of insurance is fucking gross.
It's gross. And especially healthcare insurance, just fucking gross.

Speaker 3 Well, actually, all insurance. I live in California, and

Speaker 3 all of a sudden, because I live adjacent to any kind of open space, like nobody will insure my house because of fire. Right.

Speaker 4 And so suddenly it's like I have a house that's uninsurable and it's not just me it's everybody and so it's chaos yeah yeah I have a friend that's trying to sell a house in California and they it turned out it was a hundred and twenty five thousand dollars a year just to get fire insurance yeah yeah like what

Speaker 4 yeah it's insane it's fucking nuts it's insane yeah but you know I was evacuated three times when I lived there I used to live in Bell Canyon, and it was fucking, it was rough.

Speaker 2 I've been really lucky. I live in, I'm almost afraid to say it, all because I've been living in the Hollywood Hills, and I've never, any of the fire stuff happens, never happened around me.

Speaker 4 It is just luck.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 I mean, the benefit of your place is you're at least in a helicopter accessible.

Speaker 3 They're just going to dump all that fire retardant right on top of you.

Speaker 2 I literally am kind of at the top of the hill on a bunch of rock.

Speaker 2 So if the whole fucking place is, it turns into an inferno, I'm still fucked.

Speaker 1 And that place has probably been there a while.

Speaker 3 It's probably withstood all sorts of calamity.

Speaker 4 Yeah, when I was filming Fear Factor, I talked to this guy who was a fire guy for the fire department. He said, it's just going to be a matter of time.

Speaker 4 There's going to be one day where a fire hits L.A. and the wind is the right way, and we're not going to be able to stop it.
It's just going to burn right through to the ocean.

Speaker 4 He goes, it's just a matter of time. We all know it.
I was like, what the fuck, dude? I go, the whole city. He goes, the whole city.
He goes, when those big fires get going, there's not a damn thing.

Speaker 4 Like what happened in Malibu a few years back?

Speaker 1 Like, those are insane.

Speaker 4 I always thought Malibu, those rich people were in the middle of the day.

Speaker 1 That was the closest. Yeah.

Speaker 2 That was like around 93. That actually happened while we were shooting pulp fiction.

Speaker 2 Really? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, there was a, there was a big Malibu fire.

Speaker 2 The big Malibu fire happened while we were shooting pulp fiction. And so we actually set up a TV on the set because Bruce Willis was going to maybe lose his house.
And so he was like, actually,

Speaker 2 so we have the little TV area so we could like, so in between takes, we can watch what's going on with the fire. And they're like,

Speaker 2 and there was all these reports that, no, Bruce Willis and his family are on top of the house with

Speaker 2 their water hose.

Speaker 2 And I go, no, he's not. He's right here.

Speaker 1 Well, the thing is, fires were normal.

Speaker 3 Like, it used to be when I was young, you know, I grew up in California. And so when I was young, fires would burn through Malibu constantly.

Speaker 3 But now they put all those houses in there where there never were houses because the fire is a natural process. It kind of clears the land, cleans the land, and

Speaker 3 it's normal, actually. But

Speaker 3 when you put all that kindling in there, suddenly we end up with these super storms of fire

Speaker 3 where everything's just going crazy.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 I think it's overdevelopment, which is the cause of these insane kind of.

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Speaker 3 Fires that we're getting.

Speaker 4 Yeah, but it's a cool place to live. You're not going to stop people from developing in Malibu.
You know, it's just too nice. No, you're not.
Just take your chances, roll your dice. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Well, but you roll your dice. You take your chances and you roll your dice no matter where you live.

Speaker 4 Yeah, it's just, it's just fucked up when it happens.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God.

Speaker 4 Yeah. I drove home once.
We were filming Fear Factor. We had to stop the set early because the fire was so bad.
This was like 2003 or something, 94.

Speaker 4 And driving home, it took me 55 minutes on the five to get home. And the entire time, the right side of the highway was on fire for 55 minutes.

Speaker 4 Everything, like Lord of the Rings style.

Speaker 2 So three different times you got evacuated from your house? Yeah,

Speaker 1 three different times.

Speaker 2 And so what is like, okay, so you decide what you're going to take with you kind of thing?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 4 Last time, the last time was the last time. It was like, you know, the last big fire in L.A.

Speaker 4 And I came home from the comedy store at like one o'clock in the morning, and my wife and I are looking out the window, and the fire's like maybe five or six hundred yards away, and it's coming over the hill.

Speaker 4 And we were looking at each other, and I said, let's just get the fuck out of here.

Speaker 1 Yeah, right on.

Speaker 4 Let's just get out of here now.

Speaker 4 So we grabbed the kids, got a laptop. took some clothes.
I didn't even have underwear. I just, I said, we could just buy stuff.
Who gives a fuck? You know, who cares? If you have your life.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 I'm always the, I don't want to say the stupid guy, but I'm the guy who for some reason always decides I'm going to stay.

Speaker 1 end

Speaker 1 up with near a fire department.

Speaker 3 There's a fire hydrant across from my driveway.

Speaker 1 You're the guy on the roof where the flood is happening.

Speaker 1 Get off my property.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's me. Like my family went away and I was like, well, they're gonna close it out so we can't get back in.

Speaker 3 I'm just gonna hang out here until I know that it's and you know, at a certain point there was fire like cresting the ridge and I'm kind of watching it.

Speaker 3 I ran down to the fire department to see, you know, like, hey guys, it's it's coming.

Speaker 3 I can see it from my house. And they're all there like hanging out and eating sandwiches and, like, not even worried about it at all.
They kind of looked over at it and said, meh, it's okay.

Speaker 1 It'll be fine.

Speaker 3 It'll just burn a little.

Speaker 4 Yeah, they get a little too blase-blase about fire.

Speaker 1 They're pretty blase.

Speaker 3 By the way, my spec ops friend,

Speaker 3 he's like, fuck those firemen, man. Fuck them.
They get so much like credit for nothing. They barely do anything.
They are on these incredible pension plans. Like,

Speaker 2 he like hates firemen.

Speaker 1 That's ridiculous.

Speaker 4 It is a great job, but you can't get get mad at someone for having a great job.

Speaker 3 For having a great job.

Speaker 4 There's a buddy of mine that I used to play pool with.

Speaker 3 Well, he used to hump it into another country and kill somebody.

Speaker 1 That's well, the thing is,

Speaker 4 he's not getting enough credit.

Speaker 1 That's what it is.

Speaker 1 That's really what it comes to. Well, that's better the way you say it.
Yeah,

Speaker 1 that's the reality of our world today.

Speaker 4 Those people don't get enough credit. But fireman, you know, it is a great fucking job.

Speaker 1 But I like the way he breaks it down. Fuck those guys.

Speaker 1 He's like, they all

Speaker 3 these huge pensions, and everybody thinks thinks they're heroes.

Speaker 1 They're not heroes. Well, it's funny because they're just doing their job.

Speaker 4 The firemen are very comfortable with fire. These people are very comfortable with people dying and dying because of them.
Exactly. They just get real,

Speaker 4 they get blase-blase about murder.

Speaker 1 I had a.

Speaker 3 It's not murder if it's sanctioned by your own country.

Speaker 1 Wonderful. What a cool loophole.
Yeah, isn't it?

Speaker 2 I had an interesting thing. You know, it's like, you know, when you live in the Hollywood Hills, you're paying actually, you know,

Speaker 2 pretty decent property taxes. So you get, there's, you you know,

Speaker 2 there's a little vig that comes with it. You know, you get a, there's a reason why you, you know, you don't have to wait two hours during when you're

Speaker 2 during election. You just go to the, you go to the local elementary school.
You're in and out in five minutes when it comes to election day. But also

Speaker 2 it's one of those stupid things that you do that like like,

Speaker 2 what was the fucking idiot where you turn on the burner and then you like leave the room for a while. All right.
And then you come back and all of a sudden your kitchen is flaming.

Speaker 2 and so

Speaker 2 has that happened to you that happened to me once

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 So the alarm goes off and I hit the button Let the fire department know and then I

Speaker 2 put it out. I put it out like pretty much immediately

Speaker 2 and then

Speaker 2 Maybe five minutes later, it could have been three five minutes later

Speaker 2 The fire truck is at my door

Speaker 2 so i didn't even have time to say hey it's uh you know it's it's okay now it's okay and so there's an entire fire truck at my door and i i let them in i go look guys i'm really sorry i was really stupid you know i i left the room and with the pot on the stove and it went whatever and anyway and uh so i'm really sorry i wasted your time i'm really really sorry i wasted your time

Speaker 1 Having said that, it's nice to see that you guys are here this quick. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and I'm sure they were like, oh, we'll just stay.

Speaker 1 They're selfie.

Speaker 2 And they were like, yeah, yeah, you're right. Yeah, right.
Yeah, exactly. Your property taxes pay for something.
Are you sure you don't want us to come in and just make sure?

Speaker 1 I go, yeah, go ahead if you want.

Speaker 4 The problem is sometimes they have to chop through the walls to make sure that the wall is not fire and embers inside. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Spray it all down. Get it.
It's a hard fucking job when it's a hard job, though.

Speaker 4 The thing is, most of the time they're just chilling. You know, they get to cook, they eat, they work out.

Speaker 3 I take ice cream down to our guys.

Speaker 3 I'll go out and buy a bunch of ice cream or some pizzas and take it down just on random days. Just to

Speaker 1 have that. That's cool.

Speaker 3 Well, it was funny. I'm okay with the fire guys.

Speaker 2 Well, it was actually funny because it was like

Speaker 2 one of the things that was a crackup was like the local fire department. When we worked at Video Archives at our video store, the local fire department

Speaker 2 was a customer. And so they'd rent different movies.
But like, it was almost out of

Speaker 2 five movies that they would rent, four are pornos.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 no, they lived up to their

Speaker 1 career.

Speaker 4 Did you guys work together? Yeah, yeah. No, shit.

Speaker 1 That's how you guys met? Yeah. That's how we met.
Wow.

Speaker 3 Video archives in Manhattan Beach.

Speaker 1 How fucking cool is that? From like 84, yeah. Yeah.
84 for about five years. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Maybe a little bit before 84.

Speaker 2 Well, I started officially at 84 because

Speaker 3 I was a customer before.

Speaker 1 Well, I was a customer before. Yeah.
Yeah. I was a customer before.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 I predated Quentin as one of the employees. So I was there.

Speaker 1 Look at you guys. Yeah.

Speaker 1 actually, yeah, that's us. That's crazy.

Speaker 2 A very unfortunate shirt on my part.

Speaker 4 There was a lot of unfortunate shirts in the 80s. Everybody was confused.
They cut the drugs off in the 70s. No one knew what to do for 10 years.

Speaker 1 That's exactly it.

Speaker 4 Yeah, it's crazy. Like, you would have never thought back then that that industry would completely vanish.
You thought Blockbuster video is going to be around forever.

Speaker 2 Well, you know, one of the things that

Speaker 3 I didn't think think film was going to vanish either. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
I didn't think the theater experience was going to go away either.

Speaker 2 But one of the things, though, that was the

Speaker 2 death keel to video stores that no one ever liked.

Speaker 2 When they were talking mom and pop, when they're talking old people to like, hey, you know, you've retired from your business. You've got a nice little nest egg.

Speaker 2 If you want to invest in a nice little business where you get to work with your neighborhood and be in a nice little store with your family, You know, video stores, that's a good business.

Speaker 2 Well, I don't know anything about movies. Well, you have people to help you, you know, help you choose the titles and everything.
So there was a lot of people that invested in this stuff.

Speaker 2 And it seemed like a good idea. The reason that it seemed like a profitable idea was the idea of like, well, you know,

Speaker 2 I sell you this video cassette.

Speaker 2 And you pay for the video cassette. But the minute you rent it past the point

Speaker 2 where paid for you paid for the video cassette yourself, then everything else is you. All that other money that you make from here on in is just all profit once you pay for the actual cassette.

Speaker 2 Of course, you'll have some cassettes that don't rent as well, but you know, but that's the way it works out. But it should work out great.

Speaker 2 Well, again, that sounds like a pretty good business model. Well, if I spend this money and then, you know, five years from now, boom, everything is

Speaker 2 profit.

Speaker 2 Where

Speaker 2 it all fell apart is the idea that you always have to get new shit.

Speaker 2 Because like life, it's not a bookstore. Well, bookstores need to get new stuff too, but it's not a library.
Life doesn't stand still.

Speaker 2 Every month, there's new titles coming out, and you have to be competitive, and you have to get the new titles. And so

Speaker 2 even if that were the issue, that wouldn't be that big of a deal. But if you're a mom-and-pop store, you only have so much room.

Speaker 1 It's a space.

Speaker 3 It's literally a shelf space.

Speaker 2 Within three to four years, you're bursting out of the seams of videos. You're just bursting out.
You've got no more room. You've got no more room.
And so now all of a sudden, rather than having

Speaker 2 your tapes facing out, now everything is

Speaker 2 sideways.

Speaker 3 Spine facing.

Speaker 2 Spine facing. And you've got to really,

Speaker 2 and it just never stops. It never stops.
Next month, and you got to get this. And next month, you got to get that.
And next month, you got to get that.

Speaker 4 You need a Costco-sized building. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, yeah. Well, again, if you have four different video stores or if you have a chain, you can move things around and it's easier.
But when you're a mom and pop, that's just it.

Speaker 2 You know, if you're a mom and pop store and you have a bike store,

Speaker 2 you don't have to keep getting new bikes every month.

Speaker 2 If you have a pottery store, you don't have to keep getting new

Speaker 3 regardless of your inventory.

Speaker 1 Every single month, yeah.

Speaker 3 You constantly have to grow your inventory.

Speaker 2 Every six months you get something cool. You don't need to get it every month.
And you're defined by you having the new shit.

Speaker 3 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And then there was another problem when

Speaker 3 companies that were massively funded, like Blockbuster, came onto the scene, they would go in and they would kind of do this sort of gray market purchasing where they would buy

Speaker 3 50 diehards. And a mom and pop store can't afford to buy more than one or two diehards or three maybe to satisfy your clients.

Speaker 2 The thing is you'd spend, you spend the money like, okay, like, you know, one of our big titles when we in the early days of video was Top Gun.

Speaker 3 Yeah, Top Gun.

Speaker 2 Perfect. Yeah.
So you get like, you know, you'll get even the mom and pop stores. You'll get 12

Speaker 2 or 15.

Speaker 3 Because everyone wants to see it. And at some point, it's going to be out and it's going to be checked out.
And so you've got to satisfy your.

Speaker 2 Well, you're going to, yeah, you'll rent all 15 of those for the next two weeks. You know, it's going to be, you know, it's going to be good.
But then now you have to sell them off

Speaker 2 for $10 a piece

Speaker 2 once

Speaker 2 the desire has died away.

Speaker 3 It largely fell on us because we were a smaller store, and we had a blockbuster just a block away, basically.

Speaker 3 Not even a block.

Speaker 1 What are you talking about?

Speaker 2 In the same fucking story.

Speaker 3 Basically,

Speaker 2 not a block away. It was in the...

Speaker 3 On the block. Yeah.

Speaker 2 In the shopping center that we were in.

Speaker 1 And yeah, it's...

Speaker 2 Well, you're missing the most interesting thing. It's not about the book buy.
The book buy is what it is.

Speaker 2 But that's every mom and pop store has to deal with that,

Speaker 2 dealing with a

Speaker 1 franchise.

Speaker 3 It changes your strategy, though.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but what Blockbuster would do,

Speaker 2 and they were famous for doing this, they were famous for doing this,

Speaker 2 but particularly they were strategic about it, is like, okay,

Speaker 2 we're going to go into this town. Okay, we're going into Manhattan Beach.

Speaker 2 What's the biggest video store? What's the most popular local video store in Manhattan Beach? Well, that would be Video Archives. They're right on Sepulveda.

Speaker 2 You know, They're right across the street from the Warehouse,

Speaker 2 which

Speaker 2 was one of the big rental forces.

Speaker 1 Before Blockbuster, it was

Speaker 1 Warehouse, Warehouse Records and Tapes.

Speaker 2 And they still managed to survive across the street from Warehouse.

Speaker 2 And then what does Blockbuster do? They buy the Shaky's Pizza that is in our shopping center, our shopping center.

Speaker 2 And they moved into the Shaky's Pizza. Because it's like, well, okay, with the Warehouse and with these video archives guys, well, this is obviously the place to be.

Speaker 2 So they just bought out the Shaky's Pizza and opened up, and they still couldn't shut us down. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Wow. I'm sure they had the attitude of, well, just brush them aside.

Speaker 1 Oh,

Speaker 1 of course that's how they do it.

Speaker 3 And so consequently, because you can only get three or 12 Top Guns, whatever it is, it's not as many as Blockbuster is getting, you end up having to focus on, like, how am I going to convince my clientele to watch something other than Top Gun this weekend?

Speaker 3 And so if

Speaker 3 you landed on us to basically say, oh, you can't get get Top Gun. Well, how about this movie? Well, but

Speaker 2 it's the difference between being a cool coffee place and being Starbucks.

Speaker 1 Or

Speaker 2 a franchise bar and a cool little Joe's bar. And the bartender knows you.
Right.

Speaker 2 You know, so it's like, look, if you just absolutely, positively need Top Gun that weekend, then go across the street to the warehouse and get it.

Speaker 2 We have what we have. But we had customers that came in every fucking day.

Speaker 2 and part of their day or every other day you know when their tamps were rent were due and they were people of the neighborhood and they came in and uh not only did they rent stuff they dropped stuff off and then they rented new stuff out but like they came in to talk to us for 20 minutes or 45 minutes like every other day and there's no algorithm to tell them what to do we're the algorithm yeah you have to know oh this guy oh they're on a date night so they're gonna want this kind of rom-com type movie movie, or this guy, he really likes, you know,

Speaker 3 Vietnamese hooker porn

Speaker 1 tapes.

Speaker 3 I got to make sure to find something like that for him. And those kids, they're going to want, you know, some skate stuff.
So I've got to learn all about the Bones Brigade videos and stuff like that.

Speaker 3 And so, you know, you just kind of figured out, like, how can I upsell the stuff that they haven't heard of?

Speaker 1 Because

Speaker 3 invariably, anybody who comes in, they...

Speaker 2 But you're making it just sound a little bit more cynical than it was.

Speaker 1 You are making it sound more cynical than it was.

Speaker 1 More like the the challenge. Because like a married couple.

Speaker 1 Totally, we're like a married couple.

Speaker 1 It wasn't that funny. Without the benefits.
Tell them the whole story, honey.

Speaker 1 Just tell them the whole story.

Speaker 2 We were just hanging out, and they're coming and hanging out, too.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and we would pop a movie on and like,

Speaker 3 you know, pop the movie on and be watching scenes from it and be talking about the scenes.

Speaker 3 And a customer would come in, or many customers would come in, and they'd just become part of the conversation. And we would have like, you know, a chat room.

Speaker 1 Oh, no, I'm not.

Speaker 3 Like a chat room in the.

Speaker 1 No, no there was like no there was there there was about like

Speaker 2 15 customers that like

Speaker 2 you know i talked to

Speaker 2 five hours a week every week for five years yeah you know because they come in and i'm like we'll spend at least 40 minutes every other day

Speaker 2 and i expected to see them and you know the i watched what i watched on tv i saw what i saw at the movies and then they saw what they saw in the movies they watched what they watched on tv we all talked about it and they talked about the videos and what else we're going to get and da-da-da-da-da-da.

Speaker 1 And if you like that, you're going to like this. About our lives and everything.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 So at what point in time while this is all going on, do you guys decide we need to make our own fucking movies?

Speaker 1 It was always the case. Well, we were always thinking.
Well,

Speaker 2 Roger and

Speaker 2 Roger had another friend that, he was a guy that connected me and Roger together was a guy named Scott who took his own life at a certain point of review.

Speaker 3 His father owned another video store that I worked at as well and that Quentin used to come into.

Speaker 2 But the thing is, though, that while I was just thinking about making movies, Roger and Scott were like making movies on Super 8.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And they were making little horror films and little zombie movies

Speaker 2 on Super 8.

Speaker 3 Supernatural Thrillers.

Speaker 1 And they're shutting down.

Speaker 1 Work Turns is a zombie movie. Yeah, well, yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's kind of an

Speaker 3 zombie movie.

Speaker 3 More of an afterlife film.

Speaker 1 Okay, maybe. Okay.

Speaker 2 But you're making like legit horror films. I'm just thinking about this stuff.
And these guys are like Sam Raimiing it, you know, like Sam Raimi.

Speaker 3 They're making their shit in their backyard and working on it for like three months and stuff yeah and um you know like i i was friends with all the punk guys because it was like la punk and um so they were always in my movies all the all the punks were in my movies and because they were media literate they loved movies and so they were easy to pull in and uh and to be in the film so they were always playing like you know the gang of punks who beat somebody up or something

Speaker 3 so it must have been cool working at a video store though because it's essentially like you have it's like an education well when the time came where we actually wanted to be making movies where we were talking about making movies because i can remember when i think it was

Speaker 3 it was around the time of sexualizing videotape or maybe she's got to have it no no definitely sex liz and video but i remember uh you coming to me and saying the moment is happening yeah yeah it's happening like small a small movie is is possible to get made like like it's happening for us for guys our age yeah i mean i i mean the one you know

Speaker 2 it was like the the sexizing sexizing videotape was sort of like the

Speaker 2 Seattle band that broke. All right.
But I was already looking at

Speaker 2 Blood Simple.

Speaker 1 Was my Inn. That's a great movie.

Speaker 2 Was My In, all right. Where it was that was, okay, it's an artistic movie.

Speaker 2 It's arty. It's funny.

Speaker 2 It can play the arthous. It can play the art house or it could, but there's a genre base to it.
Yeah. There's a genre base.
It's like, you know, it's a thriller.

Speaker 2 It's a It's a film noirie kind of thriller done in a certain kind of way, but it's a genre base. Yeah, I go, that's the way you do an art film.
You do it, you make it a genre-based art film.

Speaker 3 If you keep one foot in...

Speaker 2 Because it's entertaining.

Speaker 3 If you keep one foot in exploitation in some way in genre, if you keep your foundation in genre, then you can do whatever you want. Like, my favorite filmmaker is Stanley Kubrick.

Speaker 3 I love Kubrick movies.

Speaker 1 Okay,

Speaker 3 one can pretty much look at all of his films and say each and every one is a genre film. He's got a science fiction movie.
He's got a horror movie. Even Barry Linden as a costume drama at the time.

Speaker 2 It's a costume genre. It's a genre.

Speaker 3 That was a solid, bankable genre.

Speaker 2 The book is definitely

Speaker 1 a pulpy genre. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 The book was serialized, wasn't it? It was like Thackeray wrote them in like an episode.

Speaker 1 It was like a soap opera.

Speaker 2 But that was a very

Speaker 3 popular book at that time. Yeah, and so yeah, it was all

Speaker 3 if you can, if you can, and I knew this making my first film, and I know Quentin, you were talking about it.

Speaker 3 This was the conversation we were actively having of we have to make sure that we make a movie people want to see, like a genre film, like, and I was calling them exploitation movies at the time.

Speaker 3 Like, I want to keep one foot in exploitation. And then, but at the same time, I'm like, well, I kind of also want to make, like, you know, I want to elevate it as much as possible.

Speaker 3 And so when the time came for me to make my first,

Speaker 3 first film, Killing Zoe,

Speaker 3 you know, it was like I knew it was going to be a bank robbery because I wrote it around a location. You know, we found this while they were scouting for Reservoir Dogs, Lawrence Bender,

Speaker 3 or maybe you also had scouted that location, found this bank location. And Lawrence called me up and he's like, hey, I'm calling all the writers I know.
I found this bank location.

Speaker 3 And if you can, if you have a script that takes place in a bank, we can kick together a couple hundred thousand dollars and make a movie there. It's like this complete, solid, amazing location.

Speaker 3 And I said, oh my God, Lawrence, this is your lucky day. I happen to have a script that takes place in a bank.
And then I just quickly wrote one

Speaker 1 based on the location.

Speaker 3 And as I was writing it, I was thinking, okay,

Speaker 3 I know that it's going to be a bank robbery. It's a bank.
And so I know it's going to be a bank robbery. And that's my solid bankable genre that I'm going to

Speaker 3 stick with.

Speaker 3 But I knew I wanted to do something more with it. And I had just traveled through Europe and I had been telling Quentin the stories of traveling through Europe.

Speaker 3 He's like, oh, you should do a movie called Roger Takes a Trip. And

Speaker 2 I still think it should have been called.

Speaker 1 I think it's a different movie. I think it's a different.
I don't think it's a...

Speaker 2 No, they kind of made Roger Takes a Trip.

Speaker 1 Just added bank robbers in it.

Speaker 2 But it's still Roger Takes a Trip.

Speaker 3 I had been in Paris. I had bumped into a guy that I knew from Los Angeles who was a French guy.
And he was like, oh, I'll show you the real Paris.

Speaker 3 And I went out with him and his friends, Henrique, Jean, Claude, all the characters from the movie. I went out with him and his friends.
And we,

Speaker 3 you know,

Speaker 3 he drove me through Paris. And next thing I know, he's doing heroin.
And I'm like, and and it sort of with you no not with me I

Speaker 2 now we do heroin.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it was like now we do heroin hold my arm.

Speaker 3 I did hold his arm and like I had never yeah, yeah, I had never seen anything like that like he tied his arm off is like hold my arm.

Speaker 1 No, no, no, hold my arm

Speaker 1 off. Yeah, you

Speaker 3 Roger hold my arm while I shoot up. Jeez.
So

Speaker 2 he doesn't quite know that this is all gonna happen, that

Speaker 2 everything else has been a preamble to this.

Speaker 3 Yeah, suddenly that happens and then he just needed a heroin partner. Yeah, and his friends are like, oh, doing it in the nose doesn't even affect me anymore.

Speaker 1 You know, things like that.

Speaker 3 And I'm like writing these lines down like, this is great shit.

Speaker 3 And so I get back and I tell Quentin like about this whole story and about these guys and going, you know, driving around the Champs-Élysées.

Speaker 3 This is where the fags sell themselves.

Speaker 3 Oh, now we go into the nightclub down below.

Speaker 1 And we do more heroin. I'm like, what about the cops?

Speaker 3 Aren't the police going to say anything?

Speaker 3 It's safer here than on the, you know, anyway, like, you can do heroin anywhere in Paris. And it was like, no, I work at Le Monde.

Speaker 3 Like, all of it was like, basically everything in that movie, I, you know, was stuff that I'd actually seen.

Speaker 3 And so when the time came to make it as a bank robbery film, I just, you know, I'm thinking about it. I'm like, well, it's a bank robbery movie, but it's going to be about these guys.

Speaker 3 And it just became a movie about a guy going someplace and

Speaker 3 everything that he thought he knew is wrong.

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Speaker 3 You think

Speaker 3 you haven't seen your friend in a while, you go see him. Okay,

Speaker 3 it's all about that kind of friendship and misconception. He's downstairs at the bank.
Jean-Hughlab, the bad guy, is upstairs. The chaos is going on upstairs.
He has no idea what's going on upstairs.

Speaker 3 And so this kind of just...

Speaker 3 became what the movie was about. And so I just quickly wrote the script.
And then,

Speaker 3 you know, we ended up not even using that location to shoot the movie in. It came together later and I ended up shooting in downtown L.A.

Speaker 1 instead.

Speaker 3 But it was...

Speaker 3 The seed was planted. The seed was planted.
And so the idea was, okay, I'm going to make a French film out of it. Because I'm like in L.A., I'm making a film.
What can I do that would be different?

Speaker 3 Like that would make this more than just a bank robbery movie. And because of the experience I had just had, I was like, well, I'm going to make a French film.

Speaker 3 Okay, I had no business making a French movie.

Speaker 3 I didn't even really speak French. I just thought it would be kind of cool.
I like, you know, a cool French girl and like greasy, dirty French guys, French criminals.

Speaker 3 And I always loved, you know, Alain Delon and Le Samurai, you know, the way he wears a suit and the way he carries a gun and the way he walks around. I just like, I, you know, just adored all of that.

Speaker 3 And so it was like, well, let's put all of that kind of

Speaker 3 space that's in my brain into the movie. And then the movies tend to take on a life of their own.
They tend to be like children.

Speaker 3 You know, it starts off as a concept, as a conception, it has a conception, and then it has an infancy. And then you're raising that child to become the movie.

Speaker 3 And along the way, you're really just kind of protecting it and trying to allow it to grow into what it's going to grow into without forcing it to become something that it's not.

Speaker 3 And it's a little bit of a balance. You have to be a good parent, which means you have to give it a little bit of freedom to grow into something that you don't know what it's going to be.

Speaker 3 But at the same time, you have to be willing to, you know, be strong with it as well.

Speaker 4 That's a very underappreciated movie

Speaker 3 it's a fucking great movie i think i'm i think i'm really good at making underappreciated movies i think i've had i've built a career with underappreciated movies those are the classics that you would look for in a video story yeah yeah absolutely you look for the movies that were really good that no one knew about dark day afternoon's not in but we can get you killing zoe

Speaker 2 my favorite moment in the movie well i like it when the guy gets burned alive all right you know the the hamburger scene that was

Speaker 2 but uh uh i remember they were trying to talk you to cut out of it they go no no, you can't cut that out.

Speaker 1 I'm taking my name off. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 No, Quentin did that.

Speaker 3 Actually, Quentin was a great gorilla to have on my side at that time.

Speaker 4 Why would they tell you to cut that out?

Speaker 1 Well, they're like, well, I don't know.

Speaker 1 Everyone is too rough.

Speaker 2 It's too rough as a two rough.

Speaker 3 Everyone's afraid.

Speaker 1 Everyone operates out of fear.

Speaker 1 I'm taking my name off.

Speaker 3 The only people that don't operate out of fear, I think, is the director and the actors. Those are the ones who, if everything's working right, you're fearless.

Speaker 4 It's always executives that fear.

Speaker 2 But it's the scene that my favorite scene is the the scene with Hugh Anglon when he walks into the close-up. Oh, yeah.
And he's just like, wait a minute.

Speaker 2 He's like remembering what he heard and he's remember and he realizes.

Speaker 3 Okay, so that's a good example of because the movie was shot for a second.

Speaker 1 Explain the scene better.

Speaker 3 The scene was shot for.

Speaker 1 Explain the scene better.

Speaker 3 The movie was shot for very little money. We had no money to make it.
So I had to shoot the entire upstairs first and then the downstairs because it's like doing a company move.

Speaker 3 But I had kept I knew that you know when writing and this is sort of a kind of a rule that we had was

Speaker 2 one make a genre movie to explain the scene I'm going to

Speaker 2 I said explain the scene. Don't tell me what you felt about at that moment.

Speaker 1 You missed the exit.

Speaker 3 The scene was a replacement for another scene that was in the movie that was too expensive to shoot.

Speaker 1 That's the shortest. What does that have to do with what I like?

Speaker 3 What I replaced it with was, and I had to fight for it, was a single shot. Because originally originally he goes downstairs and he sees a bunch of like guys coming in through the sewer.
So

Speaker 3 he starts machine gunning people in the sewer because there was like a little sewer man hole in the bottom of the bank. I was like, well, let's use that.

Speaker 3 And so I had this whole thing and the bond company showed up and you're like, you're behind schedule and you've got to like,

Speaker 3 you know, we're going to, you've got to cut pages. And I couldn't cut anything and I'm shooting upstairs, downstairs stuff.

Speaker 3 And so it's like I had to have something because he leaves the scene and then comes back angry. And so I knew I needed to have something.

Speaker 3 And originally I had this whole scene where the cops are coming in and he reacts to that. And so I said, well, okay, I just need one shot

Speaker 3 because it's all I could had time to do because the fucking bond company. And so I set up, which were actually really cool to me.

Speaker 3 They were actually, Film Finances was great.

Speaker 3 They, I just set up a single camera. I asked for a kind of a Kubrickian lens, a nice wide, like maybe a 14 millimeter lens.
And I just had John Hughes walk up into a close-up.

Speaker 3 And I just had him do, I said, just walk into a close-up and just start looking around and just start seeing things coming out of the walls.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 3 is that the shot you're talking about? And he does like a little magic trick beforehand, like,

Speaker 3 that's not the one you're talking about?

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 3 That's the great shot. That's a great shot.

Speaker 2 No, the scene I'm talking about is, but that's why I wanted you to explain it because I hadn't seen it in a long time. But it was...

Speaker 1 See, is that the? Well, that's the shot.

Speaker 3 That's the shot I'm talking about. Look, he's looking into the walls.
He's looking around.

Speaker 2 But I thought the whole idea about it is the idea that

Speaker 3 I added those lines of dialogue in. No, but I thought I did some ADR.

Speaker 2 I thought the whole idea is

Speaker 2 he puts it all together. He realized that there's something going on, that the cops are doing this, or Eric Stoltz is dirty with him.

Speaker 1 And it all hits him.

Speaker 2 He's ready to do something else, and he walks into a close-up, and it all hits him. But now we, the audience, know what's going on.
Yeah. And then he's just like, wait a minute.

Speaker 3 Well, it just shows that sometimes if you can't do what you want to do, what you come up with is better.

Speaker 3 And this was an example of it rained that day and I had to use the rain. That's sort of the example.

Speaker 2 The frustrating part for me about what you're talking about is like, I don't care how the sausage was made.

Speaker 1 I like the sausage.

Speaker 2 I wanted you to talk about the sausage.

Speaker 1 Well, not the factory.

Speaker 1 You don't want to know what's in that sausage.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I wanted to just hear it. You have no idea.

Speaker 1 I wanted to hear about the Italian sweetness.

Speaker 3 Well, it was very sweet, but it started off sour.

Speaker 3 It started off sour because I couldn't do what I wanted to do. And so I just came up with something that was, well, he puts it together in his head.

Speaker 2 So, I mean, I still think that sequence is exhilarating because it all boils down to an actor's face.

Speaker 3 Well, I had Tom Savini on the set because, and I couldn't afford Tom Savini, but I found his number and before I shot, and I called him up in Pittsburgh, and I said, Tom Savini is a makeup effects artist who did Dawn of the the Dead.

Speaker 2 He did all the effects for Dawn of the Dead.

Speaker 3 And not to mention all the great Friday the 13th, all the Slasher movies.

Speaker 2 He's the superstar of practical makeup effects of horror films of that era.

Speaker 3 He was in Vietnam and saw some shit.

Speaker 3 And every time I'm talking to him about stuff, he's like, oh yeah, well, you know, if you're bleeding from back here, you know, there's only two small veins and blah, blah, because when your head gets knocked off, like he's seen all this stuff.

Speaker 3 And so

Speaker 3 this is his way of processing it. But Tom came in and I couldn't afford him.
I called him up on the phone. I was like, hey, can you, do you think I'm a young filmmaker? I'm,

Speaker 3 you know, I'm your biggest fan.

Speaker 3 I like the makeup effects, blah, blah, blah. Okay, he flew himself out.
We had no money to pay him. I think we paid him like some tiny amount.

Speaker 3 He flew himself to LA, put himself up, worked on the film, and he made that burn makeup on that burned guard in the vault out of Vaseline paint and tissue paper.

Speaker 3 And I watched him make, it was the most unbelievable thing how he made blisters and burn effects. And it was like watching one of the great artists work.

Speaker 3 Tom is

Speaker 3 an incredible guy. He's an incredible, incredible guy.

Speaker 2 Well, you were asking earlier on about, whoa,

Speaker 2 you're working at a video store. Did you ever think, you know, when did you start thinking about making your own stuff?

Speaker 2 Well, I was thinking about making my own stuff for like a long, long, long time, but these guys were actually doing it.

Speaker 2 But there is the truth while i thought about it like for a long long time and always figured i would do that eventually i did fall asleep for a few years

Speaker 2 you know it was uh uh because uh working at that store i just got caught up in the little life there and it was you know it's interesting because um

Speaker 2 you know you spent your 20s going to comedy clubs and you know building building a career so I'm spending my 20s there

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 well, it's one of those things where it's like, well,

Speaker 2 this isn't my dream.

Speaker 2 This isn't what I wanted to do working at a video store for years.

Speaker 2 I wanted to actually make movies. It's not my dream, what I'm doing.

Speaker 2 But it's dream adjacent.

Speaker 2 It's close to my dream. It's close to my dream.
I get to watch movies all fucking day. I get to talk about movies all fucking day.
I don't have to work at a pizza parlor.

Speaker 2 I don't have to, I'm not delivering pizzas.

Speaker 2 I'm not busting ass as a bartender. I'm not busting ass doing menial jobs.
I mean, this is the kind of job I,

Speaker 2 that, you know, I'd do if I, I'd go to the store if I wasn't paid to go to the store.

Speaker 2 You know, so it's like, you know, but but for a couple of years, it did put me to sleep.

Speaker 2 It did kind of put me to sleep. It put my ambitions to sleep for a little bit because I was happy enough.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I was happy. And just one of these days I'll

Speaker 4 Right, but you didn't have the fire.

Speaker 2 I didn't have the fire. And when I got the fire, when I eventually got the fire back again, and it was a life-changing thing.
It was a life-changing day. It was

Speaker 2 we had a buddy of ours named Steve-O. Yeah.
And he was one of...

Speaker 2 We had different living arrangements. And at one point in time, me and Steve-O were living in the same house together, renting

Speaker 2 towards the back of the store.

Speaker 3 The dude house.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 It was where everyone would hang out.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 2 but now Steva was older than the rest of us. So if like he was about like almost five years older than us, but he didn't seem like it.
He was a young guy.

Speaker 3 Yeah, like five years younger mentally.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or emotionally.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 And,

Speaker 1 but.

Speaker 1 So he hits 30

Speaker 2 and he starts changing. He starts changing like drastically.

Speaker 2 I mean, he was like one of the funniest guys I ever knew. And he was this really, really funny stoner dude and really cool.

Speaker 2 And all of a sudden, he's like angry about things. And now he's not quite as funny.
And now he's got this issue. And so we're roommates.

Speaker 2 And there's this one night that he's kind of like all, he's kind of disgusted with his life.

Speaker 2 And he starts... ranting and he and

Speaker 2 he's describing a situation that was very common

Speaker 2 if you were a kid growing up without a you know without a degree or anything yeah in the 80s especially in california where it's like you can't get any really good jobs but like you can work at licorice pizza

Speaker 2 And if you're an okay employee, you could like work at Licorice Pizza for a couple of years. And maybe you could even become assistant manager or a manager.
And maybe they send you to another store.

Speaker 2 And maybe you work there for three years and that's really great. But then, you know, all of a sudden the district manager doesn't like you.
You run a file of somebody higher up in corporate.

Speaker 2 And all of a sudden, next thing you know, you're fired and you're out in the street.

Speaker 3 Again, it's management.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Okay.
And so now you've just spent three years at Licorice Pizza. Now, now you could get a job at TRW or some places like a real job job.

Speaker 1 Or,

Speaker 2 well, those are kind of hard to get, but you can work at Warehouse Records and Tapes tomorrow. Because you just had three years at Licorice Pizza.

Speaker 2 Same thing with Wild West Clothier, same thing with Miller's Outpost, same thing with any of these kind of stores.

Speaker 2 Next thing you know, you're 28 and the only jobs you've ever had are minimum wage jobs behind a counter that

Speaker 2 were designed for kids to pay for their gas.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 2 And then you've like spent your entire 20s doing that.

Speaker 4 And then you start getting bitter.

Speaker 2 And you start getting bitter.

Speaker 2 He was not just bitter about the job aspect of it.

Speaker 2 But I knew he was, oh my God, he's telling me the truth. I'm learning something here.

Speaker 2 Because Because he goes, you know,

Speaker 2 you know, Quentin, you think that we're this really great team. We're this really great crew.
Well, we are. I mean, you know, this is that time in your 20s.

Speaker 2 We're like your group of friends or your family, you know.

Speaker 1 And I'm like, well, we are.

Speaker 1 Quentin,

Speaker 1 at

Speaker 2 20,

Speaker 2 I worked at South Bay Cinemas. And I hung out with a bunch of guys just like you.

Speaker 2 And some girls there too. But it was a bunch of guys just like you.
And then I stopped working at South Bay Cinema. Then I worked at Miller's Outpost and hung out with a bunch of guys just like you.

Speaker 2 And we did everything just like we do. We went to movies together.
We went out and we dated amongst the girls there, everything.

Speaker 2 Then I worked at Alicia Pizza for four years with a bunch of guys just like you.

Speaker 2 I've wasted my life. hanging out with a bunch of guys just like you.
And they all go away at a certain point.

Speaker 2 And I realized this guy's kind of telling the truth.

Speaker 2 He's showing me a truth about himself.

Speaker 2 This is coming from somewhere. And then all of a sudden, he still hung around us.
He still liked us.

Speaker 2 But then he started making it a point to touch base with some of his high school friends that were still around. So he's not just hanging out with guys.

Speaker 2 four years younger or five years younger than him. Anyway, I'm turning 25 around this time.

Speaker 2 So I'm having my own little, okay, well, what have I done with my life so far? So far, fucking nothing.

Speaker 2 So I'm having my own little anxiety hitting 25, but I'm seeing what it's like five years from now.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 When you turn 30.

Speaker 3 Yeah, window to the future.

Speaker 2 When you're tuned 30 and you're in this situation.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 there was like one night.

Speaker 2 That I had what I used to call I would do it every once in a while. I haven't done it in a long time.

Speaker 2 Thankfully I would have a Quentin to test fest

Speaker 2 Where I'd stay up all night long and rather than give myself excuses

Speaker 2 I would look at everything

Speaker 2 That I'm fucking up in my life or everything I'm not doing or whatever and just not give myself any fucking excuses out just like

Speaker 1 nail it

Speaker 2 and I would spend like all night laying out everything I'm doing that's wrong and then I would spend the last two hours figuring out how I can change it.

Speaker 2 And as opposed to just doing it and then going to get some sleep and then you forget about it and fall back into your, you know, your routine,

Speaker 2 I decided to change my life. And I was like, look, the problem is that I'm living in the South Bay.
And even though I drive to Los Angeles,

Speaker 2 one, I got to not worry about this job anymore. I got to just move to Hollywood.
I got to get involved there. I got to meet other people that are in the business.

Speaker 2 And if I have to work manpower jobs, you know, where you just work like four days at this place and four days at that place, well, then that's fine.

Speaker 2 And by the way, I shouldn't be making money until I'm making money doing what I want to do.

Speaker 2 And not that that was ever a danger.

Speaker 1 All right. But,

Speaker 2 but then, you know, the next thing I knew, you know, I was, I moved out of the South Bay. And then I couldn't move into Hollywood.
I couldn't afford Hollywood, but I could afford Koreatown.

Speaker 2 And that was close enough. And

Speaker 2 literally the minute I kind of moved out there, I met a guy who wrote

Speaker 2 low-budget horror movies. And then through him, I met other guys that wrote low-budget horror movies.
And this guy who directs a few low-budget horror, and this guy who produces a couple.

Speaker 1 And, well,

Speaker 2 but yeah, you meet one person and that introduces you to three other people. Now, all of a sudden, I actually knew people who were actually making movies.

Speaker 2 And the thing about it was it was like, also, well, if these guys can do what I can do,

Speaker 2 because they weren't too special. Right.
Yeah. You know,

Speaker 3 that's the weird realization that you end up having.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And then literally, it wasn't like everything changed, but like within a year and a half from moving out of the South Bay and moving into the Hollywood area, within a year and a half, I was finally able to make a living as a as a writer.

Speaker 2 You know, getting like a $7,000 for this rewrite on this script over here. $4,000 for this polish over here, another $10,000 for this rewrite over here.

Speaker 1 Well, shit.

Speaker 2 I mean, I would make $10,000 a year

Speaker 2 through all of my 20s before that point. So

Speaker 2 if I can make $15,000 from writing, oh my God, that was the greatest thing in the world.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 4 It just takes being around people that are actually doing it. So you realize it's possible.

Speaker 2 It's the realizing it's possible, but it's also a situation where it's like,

Speaker 2 as opposed to talking to your buddies about comedy in Minnesota, your buddies who like comedy, no, you're at the comedy store and you're dealing with comedians every fucking night. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And you're with the, you know, you're in the place where the shit happens and you're, you, you're hearing how the laughs work. But also, like, you know what's going on.

Speaker 2 Oh, Caroline's Comedy Hour is doing the tryouts for this.

Speaker 2 And, you know, Chuck

Speaker 2 Chuckles is doing this thing or that thing. Oh, and there's this sitcom going on.
There's the funny neighbor guy.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 At any moment.

Speaker 2 You're plugged in.

Speaker 3 Yeah, at any moment, there's a circle of people rising in any industry. Yes.
And it's just a matter of finding those people. And those people will all gravitate towards the same things.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and they have the thing where it's sort of like, you know, like, hey, Benny, we have a spot for you that could be really, you know, I can't do it. But my friend Joe could do it.

Speaker 2 How about giving Joe a chance?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Okay, well, will you back Joe up? Yeah, I'll back Joe up. Okay, yeah, well, let's call your friend Joe.
Can he be down here at nine? Yeah, he can be down here at nine.

Speaker 2 Well, that's how you get a fucking fucking gig.

Speaker 4 This is exactly what we tried to do when we built the mothership here. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 What we've done.

Speaker 4 We decided when we left LA, like, we need a place where comics have a hub. And when we were all in Austin, we all just moved to Austin because of the pandemic.

Speaker 4 And all of a sudden, we were allowed to perform indoors. It was crazy.
In November of 2020, we were doing shows indoors.

Speaker 4 And, you know, you couldn't go on Twitter because they would call you a big super spreader, a fucking monster. But everybody started moving here.

Speaker 4 And by the, you know, by the time 2020 rolls around, there's like 15, 16 world-class comedians that didn't used to live in Austin that are here now. And we were like, let's build a club.

Speaker 4 And so we bought the Ritz Theater

Speaker 4 where

Speaker 4 some of your movies are played. Yay.

Speaker 1 This is fucking crazy.

Speaker 4 And when we put it together, the whole idea was like, have a place where people can come. We have two nights of open mic nights,

Speaker 4 Sunday and Monday night. So there's always a chance to get on stage.
There's always a guy that's a real talent.

Speaker 4 Adam Egot is a real talent coordinator. He's really gonna watch you.
He's really gonna give you advice. And you're around the best comics in the world all the time.
And everybody knows it's possible.

Speaker 4 And everybody treats you the way you would want to be treated if you were starting.

Speaker 4 So you're just one of us. You just started, but you're not, we're not better than you.
We're not, we're not, there's nothing special about us. We're just telling you.

Speaker 4 We started walking, and now we're 15 miles in. You're 15 feet in.
Just keep walking.

Speaker 1 Okay, but let me, okay, but let me ask you a question.

Speaker 2 Let me ask you a question.

Speaker 2 When I watch some of the things on the comedy store now, because you know I really love going to the comedy. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And they treat me really great there. It was really cool.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 the mythology of the place is you go down there and open Mike 9. And if you have something to offer,

Speaker 2 then you work your way up and then you're the doorman and then

Speaker 2 you work your way up. But it seems like.

Speaker 2 That was then, that was a long time ago. Now it seems like people are almost paying 10 years right? Or eight years before they actually

Speaker 2 are getting up and getting paid.

Speaker 4 Not necessarily.

Speaker 4 Like Tony Hedgecliffe started at the comedy store. He started as a doorman, you know, and he worked his way up to selling out Madison Square Garden two nights in a row.

Speaker 4 I mean, it is possible to still be a doorman.

Speaker 1 And I met Tony when he was just on the start now.

Speaker 2 I'm figuring that that's a spot, but it seems like, but if you have to wait five years.

Speaker 4 Well, you don't get good for 10 years.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, okay, yeah. It takes forever.

Speaker 4 Comedy is like making a mountain out of layers of paint.

Speaker 4 It takes forever.

Speaker 1 You have to fail.

Speaker 3 You have to have the opportunities to fail.

Speaker 4 Well, there's also no one who can tell you how to do it.

Speaker 4 Writing a film,

Speaker 4 you have a protagonist, you have the antagonist, you have a plot, you have a bunch of stuff that you can kind of create and formulate.

Speaker 2 Would you really, but would you really say that it takes 10 years to be a solid comedian?

Speaker 4 It takes 10 years to be a real headliner.

Speaker 1 Well, a headliner,

Speaker 1 that's a little different. That's a little different.

Speaker 4 Well, that's when you're a real comic.

Speaker 1 Yeah, when you can do an hour.

Speaker 4 You can do an hour, and then you could write another hour.

Speaker 4 You kind of know who you are.

Speaker 1 Because it takes years to build that.

Speaker 2 But also to be a headliner, you can't be enough of a, you have to be enough of a name of a drawer to actually draw an audience.

Speaker 4 Yes.

Speaker 4 Yes. And you have to, usually, you go on the road with a headliner, and then the people get to see you.
Oh, I remember he was here when Tom Segura was in town.

Speaker 1 That guy's really good.

Speaker 4 We saw him then, and he did 15 minutes. Now he's going to do an hour.
This would be great. And it's sort of that kind of a deal.
But it's the same sort of situation where most people don't.

Speaker 4 Like if you're in Pittsburgh, you don't know what to do. You know, you go up, there's a couple open mic nights, everybody sucks, and there's no inspiration.

Speaker 2 It's not set up for comedy and it's in a fucking pizza parlor.

Speaker 1 Exactly. And it's good on the weekends.

Speaker 2 And it doesn't work, and you go, well, I guess this is not for me. Right.

Speaker 4 It's good on the weekends because they'll fly in, you know, Greg Fitzsimmons, some headliner, and you'll get to see a real comic for a weekend. So you get a little bit of an education from that.

Speaker 4 And maybe if you're lucky, the club owner will let you open for him or do 10 minutes on that show.

Speaker 4 And you kind of get a a feel what it's like to perform in front of a real audience that's there to see a real comic. But you got to be around,

Speaker 4 like comedy doesn't exist in a vacuum. There's no great comedian that lives in some small town by himself.
Like

Speaker 4 you could find some great blues artist.

Speaker 1 Or a great novelist.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 4 Novelist is probably the best one because you kind of live in your own head. But you have to be around the other people that are doing it.

Speaker 1 Which is exactly why Quentin moved to Hollywood. Yeah, exactly.
Get away from these losers.

Speaker 1 You had to do it, but you really do have to do it. You're a dead weight.

Speaker 1 I recall living in Hollywood as well.

Speaker 3 Yeah, you did.

Speaker 3 Freaking Franklin. Yes, you're Franklin.
He was from Plumber Park.

Speaker 4 Your bitter friend gave you a valuable little piece of information.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he did. No, very much.

Speaker 4 You need those. You need those little moments.

Speaker 2 Oh, I knew I was hearing the truth. And I knew I was hearing a coming attraction.
Yeah. Because I was already feeling it at 25.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 2 Am I throwing my topsoil years away?

Speaker 4 Right, right. The topsoil.
Exactly. And it doesn't come back.

Speaker 1 It doesn't come back.

Speaker 4 You never get to be 21 again. Let's hit reset.
Yeah. Yeah.
You get one weird march through this life. And if you don't, if you have.

Speaker 2 You can throw it away until 23, but from 24 on, you need to be thinking about what you're doing for the rest of your life.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Get it going.

Speaker 4 Yeah, get it going. Yeah.

Speaker 4 I think these conversations are so important for young people to hear because there's a lot of people out there that do have ideas and sometimes they have a little bit of a fire and then maybe they have a job that's kind of cool like Jews was and they get sedated.

Speaker 3 Almost the worst thing that can happen is getting comfortable, which I think is what you were talking about.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 But, you know, I mean,

Speaker 1 it all worked out.

Speaker 2 Okay. It all worked out really, really good.
And the thing about it was, you know,

Speaker 2 I did get comfortable, but I got comfortable in a cool place. And ultimately, I did have the energy and the wherewithal to ultimately get dissatisfied with it

Speaker 2 and want more. You know, the alternative would have been me working at

Speaker 1 a department store for those four years. Yes.
Right, right, right.

Speaker 2 And then then I would have been like, really been miserable.

Speaker 1 Right, right.

Speaker 2 Here I'm able to, I mean, you know, in this instance, I'm still involved with film. I mean, the, the part that the sedative part was the idea that it was close enough to what I wanted to do.

Speaker 1 Right, right, right.

Speaker 2 It was close enough. I could get, I could get it.

Speaker 4 But there's guys like that at the comedy store. There's a friend of mine at the comedy store that was a bartender in the back bar, and he wanted to be a comic.

Speaker 4 But he was there, it was like five years after I met him. I'm like, hey man, you got to quit this fucking job.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4 Because you're here with all the greatest comics in the world, but you're not going on stage. Because you're making good money.
And that's the velvet curtain

Speaker 4 that's pulled over your eyes.

Speaker 3 I worked on Lords of Dogtown, the movie about Zephyr surfboards and skateboarding and polyurethane wheels and surfing. And I'm not

Speaker 3 a surfer or anything, but my entry point into that movie was Zephyr surfboards was exactly like video archives. And I imagine that this is like this in in a lot of places where,

Speaker 3 you know, you have a shop, they make

Speaker 3 skate, they do skateboards, and they've got a shaper guy there, you know, Skip Englum, who's a surfboard shaper, and he was sort of like Lance, the guy who owned video archives.

Speaker 3 And he started a shop and he's selling to all the kids locally.

Speaker 3 And all the kids who like love surfing, you know, like Stacey Peralta or Tony Alva or guys like that, they would just go hang out there just like we would go hang out at the video store.

Speaker 3 And so I looked at that and I was like, okay, I don't really know anything about these guys other than growing up in the beach community but my real entry point was i understand gravitating towards what you love and wanting to be close to it and that if a video store is the closest thing to hollywood in your town that's where you go or if it's if it's not a movie theater and so well you know it was it was it was funny because uh

Speaker 2 when i first started when i started at the video store, I'd like,

Speaker 2 it was great because,

Speaker 2 you know, like I said, said, I got to hang out in this place that I enjoyed and I'm surrounded by movies. I'm talking about movies.

Speaker 1 Access to all those titles.

Speaker 2 But then also there was also the situation of, you know, I became like a little film critic in that town. You know, it was like I was like

Speaker 2 the store was my little village voice and I was the Andrew Sarris there. I was the critic.
And people would come in and at a certain point, like, oh, Quentin, what should I get? You know?

Speaker 2 And the thing is, I'm not just like holding court on my own personal taste. Pretty soon they got a really good idea about my taste.
But the thing is, I'm usually gearing it towards the people.

Speaker 2 I'm not going to

Speaker 2 get some housewife to watch some gonzo movie that I

Speaker 2 gonzo violent movie that I really like.

Speaker 2 I'm gaming, I get to know her.

Speaker 3 Get to tailor it.

Speaker 2 And so I'm putting something in her hand that I think

Speaker 2 she's going to appreciate. And I kind of know what kind of comedy she likes.
I know who she likes, stuff like that. And so I'm really kind of

Speaker 2 gearing it in a certain way. And

Speaker 2 that felt really good. It felt like I said, I felt like a film critic.

Speaker 2 Yeah. You know, but one of the things that I forgot I was going to go somewhere with that and I forgot, I lost my train of thought.

Speaker 2 But one of the things that ended up happening.

Speaker 2 And I hope I didn't say it the last time I was here.

Speaker 2 That ended up happening is we became really famous in the neighborhood. We were the video guys.

Speaker 2 And, you know, our store was a little different than most of the businesses that were in

Speaker 2 Manhattan Beach. And so everyone kind of knew us.
We were the video guys. So in a strange way,

Speaker 2 it was a

Speaker 2 precursor to what it would be like to be famous with the whole world kind of knows about you like that. In Manhattan Beach, I'm like walking down the street and people are like, hey, Quentin,

Speaker 2 hey, Quentin, Hey, how you doing? How are you doing? You know, I'm like, I'm at the working at the store. I'm walking to the jack-in-the-box to get a Coke and come back.
And then, you know, but

Speaker 2 we'd walk into the man's movie theater. All right, that was by the theater, you know, and me and two of the guys would walk in to go see a movie.

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Speaker 2 We walk down the aisle and we hear, hey, those are the video archives, guys.

Speaker 1 Those are the video archives guys. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 I was in San Francisco once and the guys from Red Cross, the punk band, they were customers of ours. I was like, oh, they're doing a signing at this local record shop.
I'll just go show up.

Speaker 3 I'll just show up there on Haight Ashbury. And I walk in and immediately the McDonald Brother guys were like, hey, it's the video store guy.

Speaker 1 Hey, man,

Speaker 3 come back behind with us.

Speaker 3 I don't think they talk like that.

Speaker 1 They kind of talk like that.

Speaker 4 It's good to get that slow drip, get a little bit of a taste of it before you actually get famous.

Speaker 1 Just to get a feel of what it's like.

Speaker 3 It still doesn't give you the the full, it's like, you know, oh, I'm just going to smoke a little weed compared to I'm going to mainline, you know, heroin.

Speaker 2 Oddly enough, the thing that it did

Speaker 2 was

Speaker 2 it made me feel part of a community which I had never felt with before. I actually felt part of the Manhattan community.

Speaker 1 The Manhattan Beach community.

Speaker 2 I felt part of the Manhattan Beach community. I was part of the Manhattan Beach community.
You know, the people knew me there.

Speaker 2 And I was an upstanding member inside of that community.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 4 Yeah. The fame thing is no one can teach you how to do that.

Speaker 4 There's someone, there needs to be like a group of people to get together with people that are about to get famous and say, hey, listen, we're famous already.

Speaker 4 Let me tell you how fucking weird this is. And I don't know if you were prepared for this.

Speaker 3 We were first trying to make true romance. You know, Quentin had this amazing screenplay, and it was like we were going to try to do it at Cone Brothers style.

Speaker 3 We had just seen Blood Simple, and we were like, okay, I'm going to produce. Quentin's going to direct.
We're going to go out and make this.

Speaker 3 Our first thought was, okay, we've got this database of doctors and lawyers and housewives in Manhattan Beach. We're going to go to the video store.
You know, we ended up not doing that.

Speaker 1 You were going to ask them for the money.

Speaker 1 We never had the balls to actually ask anybody for money. Yeah, it was.

Speaker 3 Thinking about getting money and actually getting money or something.

Speaker 2 We strategized about it a lot, but we never actually.

Speaker 3 I drew up full partnership papers before

Speaker 1 that whole dream failed

Speaker 3 of doing it that way.

Speaker 4 Yeah, nobody knows what it's like to actually be successful until you are. But in the beginning, did you guys feel like pretenders? Did you feel fake? Did you have imposter syndrome?

Speaker 2 I didn't have imposter syndrome because I did a movie and I was really happy with the film. But the thing is, what I felt like, I'll tell you exactly how I felt.
I didn't feel like imposter syndrome.

Speaker 2 Well, I guess a little bit. There is that, all that, like, waiting for somebody to tap you on the shoulder.
The fuck are you doing again?

Speaker 1 Get out of here.

Speaker 3 Who would let that guy in?

Speaker 1 Right. Get the fuck out.

Speaker 2 What I had was

Speaker 2 I felt like I was a reporter deep undercover, all right, on the opposite side of the line.

Speaker 2 Right. This isn't really me.
I'm like those people over there.

Speaker 1 All right, right. But I'm deep undercover.

Speaker 2 I can give you reports

Speaker 1 from the front of what it's like here

Speaker 1 on the battle line.

Speaker 4 Right. Well, maybe that was a good thing, though.

Speaker 2 It was a really cool thing.

Speaker 4 Because I think that's one of the things you did with your films is you did shit that was very risky.

Speaker 4 Like we're talking about executives and all these different management people that are going to come in and fuck with your thing and don't do that and cut that out.

Speaker 4 But you had a sensibility, not of a person in management, but of a person that I know what I like. I know what I like.
And I think I can think differently than these people do.

Speaker 2 Oh, no, no. No,

Speaker 2 one of the things we talked about, we had a little theory about it, was that gave us a bit of a superpower when we were first brought into, well, once we had established ourselves that people knew that you'd read our scripts or you knew we were yeah we had something to offer

Speaker 2 we would walk into rooms and we realized that

Speaker 2 and and look I'm not here to make fun of Hollywood executives some of those guys look look

Speaker 2 You don't know how bad some of these movies, these scripts are. They actually, oftentimes they actually make them better.

Speaker 2 They're really, really terrible. All right.

Speaker 2 When they go through the sausage factory, oftentimes they get better

Speaker 2 believe it or not

Speaker 2 but the thing is though you'd walk in there and

Speaker 3 you don't become

Speaker 2 this super successful executive by being doubling down on your own opinions

Speaker 2 You kind of want to get the temperature and

Speaker 2 get a consensus going on.

Speaker 2 You're not the maverick. That's not how people establish themselves as executives.

Speaker 2 The D-girl

Speaker 2 doesn't become the head of the development process by

Speaker 2 being the punk rock person who's

Speaker 2 shooting for the plimsols.

Speaker 2 They're looking for Rolling Stone.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 2 film people, film

Speaker 2 geeks and film, you know, film buffs,

Speaker 2 the one thing they have is their opinion and they have spent years defining their opinion and they almost have nothing to show for their dedication to cinema other than their highly evolved opinion so you put them in a room and say well what would you do well it's about time you asked me and then you and then all of a sudden you take the strong point of view

Speaker 2 and the room the the term in hollywood is he who has the strongest point of view in the view he who has the strongest point of view in the room wins yeah and executives don't have the strongest point of view you know but the maverick artist who only can hear the sound of his own voice he definitely has the strongest point of view right but it's refreshing to them yes you know invariably they hire you because you scare them a little you're a little scary and they like to they want it they want to be like a little thrilled by that right but then you know like a girlfriend or something they want to change you they think they're going to make you normal exactly right and then and then it falls on you to just stay true to that initial guy who was in the room.

Speaker 2 I had a really interesting situation where I had a guy who was an executive who actually directed a movie. And he was talking and be like, oh, I've seen these jokers out there.

Speaker 2 And, you know, what they do isn't so special. I think I could do it.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 2 so he finds a book and then

Speaker 2 they adapt it. And now he's...
doing the movie. And, you know, he's getting through it.
Everything's working fine. He's getting through it.

Speaker 1 And then

Speaker 2 he realizes the difference between himself and a director because there's a he's dealing with another director about something because he's an executive.

Speaker 2 So he's dealing with another director about another movie. And he asks him a very important question about his movie.

Speaker 2 And the way he answers it, he realized the difference between him and that director.

Speaker 2 And he goes, I realized,

Speaker 2 oh,

Speaker 2 see, he's a real director because he sees the movie.

Speaker 2 He sees the movie in his head. The question I asked, he went into his head and he saw it.
He saw it.

Speaker 2 And he could actually answer it. Oh, the flower pot is green

Speaker 2 because he sees the entire picture. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I don't see it.

Speaker 2 I'm just doing my best.

Speaker 2 I see it written, but I don't see the movie in my head. I'm just doing my best with the written material.

Speaker 4 He's the comedy central executive that thinks they can be a comedian. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Right on.

Speaker 4 And then they get on stage and they eat shit.

Speaker 4 What you were saying is exactly what happened to Chappelle.

Speaker 1 Oh.

Speaker 4 The Chappelle show. Yeah.
Like they loved him. He's this wild dude.
And then all of a sudden, this is too wild. This is becoming

Speaker 1 successful.

Speaker 1 We can change you.

Speaker 4 They want him to stop saying the N-word. They want him to stop a bunch of different things on the show.

Speaker 2 And we'll give you all this money if you roll over.

Speaker 4 They gave him literally the devil's deal. We're going to give you $50 million, and this is what you're going to get.
And he's like, no, I quit. I quit everything, and I'm going to go to Africa.

Speaker 4 I'm going to hang out in Africa for a while, and I'm going to quit stand-up for 10 years and come back and still be the best.

Speaker 3 That is so the right move.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God.

Speaker 4 Well, look, he's a legend now, but that's really him. If you're around him,

Speaker 4 he's an artist in the truest sense of the word.

Speaker 1 Absolutely.

Speaker 3 You know,

Speaker 3 when I was young, one of my first jobs was actually given to me by one of our customers, this guy, John Langley, who did that show Cops.

Speaker 3 And so, like, he was, you know, getting his power turned off and stuff, like, you know, constantly. And he was struggling to get by.

Speaker 3 And he would do these little things with Geraldo Rivera that Quentin and I would work on as PAs every now and then.

Speaker 2 And the Dolph Lundgren exercise video.

Speaker 3 We worked on the Dolph Lundgren exercise video together.

Speaker 3 We were picking up dog shit in Venice Beach with our hands so that Dolph could do aerobics on that little grassy knoll.

Speaker 1 Hilarious.

Speaker 3 And so, you know, I'm like the first, I'm a PA working for him, a driver. I'm running around town.
My car is like the transmission is going out. I'm trying to figure out what am I going to do.

Speaker 3 This is not what I want to do. I don't want to work on cops, but like I need the job.
And so

Speaker 3 I go in and I meet with John, and he's been a customer of ours, and he's fatherly-like to me.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 I go into his office and I sit down. And cops has just started.
And it started because of a Writers Guild strike.

Speaker 3 And, There was a Writers' Guild strike, and so Fox was like, Well, that show has no writers. And so they ordered his thing, and he went from nothing to like, I'm buying yachts.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 I'm collecting vineyards.

Speaker 2 Not only that, though, I remember when he first came up with the idea with his partner, Malcolm Barber. Yeah.
All right. So he comes in and he's like, hey, we've got a really good idea for a show.
So

Speaker 2 he's describing cops before cops has ever been made.

Speaker 2 And his first idea was, it wasn't called cops, it was called the real Miami Vice.

Speaker 4 The problem was it doesn't scale out to the whole country.

Speaker 2 Well, they defined it. They refined it.

Speaker 1 That's the way they would.

Speaker 3 I asked him, I said, John, like,

Speaker 3 you've worked in this business a long time. He was an AD for a long time.
What kind of advice can you give to a guy like me who's trying to work my way up?

Speaker 1 He's like, well, what do you want to do ultimately?

Speaker 3 I said, well, I want to direct films. Well, then be a director.

Speaker 3 Don't work your way up the the ladder. Don't try to be a grip and work your way in.
Just be a director.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 I heard that. And he's like, start at the top.
It's the best way to go. Just start at the top.
And,

Speaker 3 you know, just tell people you're a director. Put yourself in that.
Otherwise, people will just pigeonhole you. They'll just say that's who he is.
He's a grip or he's a PA or he's,

Speaker 3 you'll have to work your way up. Just tell people who you are.

Speaker 3 So I thought about it. I was like, okay,

Speaker 3 I quit.

Speaker 3 And he's like, what? I said, I quit.

Speaker 1 I'm a director.

Speaker 3 And I left. I walked out.

Speaker 3 I mean, I gave him notice. And I walked out.
And he sat there and he later told me, years later, told me, man,

Speaker 3 I thought that was the most audacious, ballsy thing.

Speaker 3 I gave you advice and you took it right away.

Speaker 3 And okay, never mind the fact that it took me years of just telling people I'm a director. I directed super eight movies.

Speaker 1 Like,

Speaker 3 I was not a director. I was a poser.
I was faking it until I made it. But I told people what I was and what I was doing.
And eventually it stuck. Eventually, enough people hear it.

Speaker 3 And all those people who you end up going into a room and pitching your idea and they say no, eventually they see you at Can running around, you know, trying to do foreign sales.

Speaker 3 They're like, hey, maybe that kid is a director. That was all it took.
It was just believing in yourself. It's funny that guy.
When no one else believes what you believe.

Speaker 2 The guy he's talking about, John Liley, who created cops,

Speaker 2 he was a really good customer, and his wife Maggie was really lovely.

Speaker 3 Morgan, all of his kids.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 2 I heard the story came back to me later that

Speaker 2 when I got the deal to make Reservoir Dogs, just little by little, through the Manhattan Beach community, they started hearing, oh, hey, Quentin's making his movie.

Speaker 2 Quentin got his movie off the ground. He's actually making his movie.
He's not at the video store anymore. He's actually making a movie.
Good for him.

Speaker 2 And who knows what's going to happen to it, but it's happening.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 2 I think they were having a little dinner party at their house. And then Maggie mentions to

Speaker 2 John about what happened.

Speaker 3 Really?

Speaker 2 That's actually happened? It's actually happening. Yeah, no, they've got production offices and everything.

Speaker 2 They're making the movie. And he goes,

Speaker 2 Everybody, raise your glass.

Speaker 1 Yeah. To Quentin.

Speaker 2 He did it. Good for Quentin.

Speaker 1 Raise your glass.

Speaker 2 I'm getting Terry. I just even thinking about it.

Speaker 3 You know, I just have to say, John Langley, you know, because

Speaker 3 I had some shit happen to me in my life. I spent some time in jail.

Speaker 3 I kind of screwed up my life. But when everything went down, when everyone in Hollywood dropped me like a hot rock, John Langley was there.
Our customer, John Langley,

Speaker 3 because

Speaker 3 we lost everything. He loaned me some money.
He gave me my first job when I got out of jail, writing something for very little money, but

Speaker 3 he wanted me back in the saddle.

Speaker 4 I love the things you wrote from jail.

Speaker 1 Oh, thanks. Yeah.
Thank you.

Speaker 4 They were really good. It was really interesting.
It was like this super intelligent writer who's in jail.

Speaker 4 It's

Speaker 1 different sort of thing.

Speaker 2 Roger's working on a book about his jail experiences that is fantastic.

Speaker 3 I kept a really detailed, super detailed journal about everything everything that's going on around me. And it became a really, I mean, that was an

Speaker 3 very intense experience being placed into a room, having the doors closed, and you're just left with yourself. And everything, all your things which define you get stripped away.

Speaker 3 Everything gets kind of dropped and you lose. who you are and you're just left with your remorse and regret for why you're there.

Speaker 3 And you have a lot of time to think about things. And,

Speaker 3 but having said that, as a writer, there was a concrete bench that I could sit on. I had golf pencils.
I could buy sheets of paper. And

Speaker 3 I've never in my life been more productive. I've never wanted to write more than when everything was taken away.
And I've never felt more about the world. And I've never,

Speaker 3 yeah, I've,

Speaker 3 it was a very monastic, I was telling Quentin at one point, it was kind of monastic-like, you know, you're, you're,

Speaker 3 you're in a secular kind of, you're in a cell. You're in a cell and you're

Speaker 3 with a bunch of God dudes and you're writing. You know, it's like you're, I became a scribe.

Speaker 3 I started, I mean, I was a scribe beforehand, but I really, really, it became my escape, being able to write, being able to fall into things and to be able to travel into another world.

Speaker 3 And then also also people find out you're a writer and they're like, hey, man, would you write my yo essay? Would you write my girlfriend?

Speaker 3 I want to write her a love letter. I need your help.
So I wrote like a ton of love letters.

Speaker 1 That's actually good practice for dialogue. Oh, yeah.
No, totally, totally. No, actually, I heard some

Speaker 3 amazing dialogue.

Speaker 2 And you're writing your Robin Hood script, all right? So that's your way to get out of the cell is to write his Robin Hood script.

Speaker 3 You know, I, well, there's a book cart, and so I'm, you know, every now and then you go through the book cart and mostly it's like Tom Clancy novels. They love Tom Clancy and stuff like that and

Speaker 3 Clive Barker novels and things like that. But lo and behold, I found this old penguin paperback of, you know, an old, old version of Robin Hood written by E.
Charles Vivian.

Speaker 3 And I'm like, oh man, this is going to be great. And I start reading it

Speaker 3 and it's like they get into Evil Hold, which is like this castle where, you know,

Speaker 3 Marion's father is being kept.

Speaker 3 and nobody knows it and he's there and he's not away at crusades he's in this prison and robin hood goes into the prison and in the moment when he's in the prison how he sees the other prison the the wretches that he has to leave behind because they're too wretched to even come out like how bad the prison is and what he's seeing inside and his observations

Speaker 3 I was shaking after reading it. I'm shaking thinking about, I mean, the entire experience now, but, you know, it was such a

Speaker 3 vivid depiction. I'm like, well, I'm adapting this because I'm feeling it right now.
I'm feeling like what it's like. I'm feeling what it's like to have authority, to have the boot on your neck.

Speaker 3 I mean, rightfully so, but I, nevertheless.

Speaker 3 And so I started writing, you know, my version of Robin Hood

Speaker 3 on, you know, pencil and paper. And as I'm writing it, like, I was crying as I wrote it.
I was looking at the pages the other day and there's like teardrops like

Speaker 1 all over it, like on every page.

Speaker 3 That's like, holy crap. It's like when you're writing like that and you're feeling that much, it's not a bad thing to cry when you're writing.
It's like, thank God I'm feeling.

Speaker 3 Like I'm feeling something and it's traveling into the page.

Speaker 3 And also, because I had been a working writer in Hollywood for a long time, just by speed, I had fallen into the very bad habit of composing at my computer, at my laptop, like one of those assholes who goes to Starbucks and sits I was that guy and so I'm sitting and I had kind of become used to that well writing by hand in

Speaker 3 well incarcerated it reconnected me with like pen to paper or pencil to paper and

Speaker 3 I It reminded me that not only like when you write something down, you have a different relationship with the word.

Speaker 2 No, I consider the pen is the antenna to God.

Speaker 3 It is the antenna to God. And also, when you type it into the computer, that's a process of rewriting.

Speaker 3 And so you're losing an entire section of it. And so it reconnected.

Speaker 1 I couldn't agree with you more.

Speaker 4 Tell me, explain this more to me. This is fascinating to me because I've heard many people say this about comedy, that they have to write on paper.
I don't. I write on a laptop.

Speaker 4 I've always written on a laptop. For me, it's...

Speaker 4 What I like about writing, even writing on paper, is that it takes more time to write the word appreciate than it does to think about what it means to appreciate something.

Speaker 4 Like the word appreciate, you know what it is instantly, oh, he appreciates this, but to write appreciate, it takes longer, so there's more thinking.

Speaker 4 And more thinking, I feel like when you have more thinking, there's more little different ways you might alternately branch off with your ideas.

Speaker 2 I don't think I

Speaker 1 That is not false.

Speaker 2 Not that I've ever written an hour-long stand-up comedy show. All right.
But

Speaker 2 I would think that your writing is different than my kind of writing. Sure.
You know, it would like, I would think, as far as writing stuff down, it's like notes and ideas and

Speaker 2 funny word phrases

Speaker 2 or this and that and the other. But then you're working it out.
You're saying it. You're saying it.
You're saying it. You're saying it.
And then you get your story right.

Speaker 2 And maybe you say it into a recorder. Maybe you do this or you do that.
But you know, but probably it doesn't even look right when you

Speaker 2 even when you type it up on a on a thing, it doesn't look right.

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 2 It's the way you tell the story.

Speaker 4 What I was going to get to is that when you when I type, I can type quicker than I can write by hand. And the problem with comedy is it comes quick and slippery.

Speaker 1 And also you can get a little lit. You can edit.

Speaker 2 No,

Speaker 2 that makes a tremendous amount of sense. I mean, we're writing stuff that has to hold up on the page.

Speaker 1 Right. That has to hold up as writing.

Speaker 4 I'll write a 1500-word essay, and I'll use one line. Like, there's one thing in there that might be a bit.
But I'll write all this other shit on transportation.

Speaker 2 It's like strip mining.

Speaker 3 You just pull all that dirt out and just process it.

Speaker 1 That's

Speaker 4 exactly what it's like.

Speaker 1 I've tried to write.

Speaker 2 So you open up your mind about

Speaker 2 just let loose on public transportation. Yes, yes.

Speaker 4 And I'm not even trying to be funny. I'm just trying to write, and then I'll find something funny in it.

Speaker 4 And then

Speaker 4 that's the starting point. Now I take that, cut it, copy it into a completely fresh document.
Now, what is this?

Speaker 1 Okay, but look at that. How do I get to this?

Speaker 1 It's whatever works.

Speaker 1 Let me ask you a question.

Speaker 2 Is it

Speaker 2 you on either typing or whatever,

Speaker 2 is it you doing that

Speaker 2 eight-page thing on

Speaker 2 transportation? Or is it more likely that you're just pacing around

Speaker 2 doing a running monologue on public transportation?

Speaker 4 Well, I'm sitting still, right?

Speaker 4 If that's what you mean. The thing about typing is I type good.
So not great, but I don't have to look at the keys, and I can type pretty quickly.

Speaker 4 And if I have a good laptop, like a ThinkPad, that has a lot of finger travel, then you really feel it. And I get into like a zone.
And then it's just about like...

Speaker 2 Yes, but no, you actually do write your notes. Yeah.

Speaker 4 And then it's just about trying, but they don't always come out the same way because sometimes when you bring them out on stage, the moment lets you know this is not the way to go. It's this way.

Speaker 4 And then all of a sudden you're like, God, how did I not see that in front of the computer? Because you weren't in that vibe of the crowd. Like it's a you don't do it on your own.

Speaker 4 You have to do it with them. It's like the one art form that literally cannot be practiced in solitary.
Yeah. You have to do it.

Speaker 4 So when I write, I write like that, but I also write things down on pieces of paper. I also write, like, whenever I, if I have an idea, I got to catch it.

Speaker 3 Well, they're not going to give you that computer in jail.

Speaker 1 That's true.

Speaker 3 You're going to be forced to write it on

Speaker 3 pencil, and that's going to be an okay experience.

Speaker 4 But what is it that makes it to you like the hand of God? Like, what is it about writing on paper?

Speaker 2 My little analogy of it is: you can't write poetry on a computer.

Speaker 1 Why not? Well, because

Speaker 2 I'm going for a rhythm. Right.

Speaker 2 I'm going for a rhythm. And then

Speaker 2 there's a connection between my chicken scratch and this paper and this pen as opposed to

Speaker 1 this other thing.

Speaker 2 And the more unintelligible and only I can read it, the more legit it kind of is. And the thing is, and it's it's vomit.
It's absolutely vomit.

Speaker 1 Okay, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da.

Speaker 2 When you write by hand, you overwrite. You way, way overwrite.
Because you're just blah, you're just getting it out there. You're getting it out there.
Then after all the vomit happens,

Speaker 2 then you sit down with a typewriter or then you sit down with a thing and now you take the vomit and you tame it.

Speaker 2 And now you make it, now you make the sentences work. And now there's more crazy.

Speaker 1 This is a blah.

Speaker 2 Okay. Now you may, and now you come up, and now you, now you make it work like a writer.
Now you make the page work, now you make the sentences work.

Speaker 2 Can we stop for a second while we're in the restaurant?

Speaker 1 Yeah, of course. Hey,

Speaker 2 you have cigars, don't you?

Speaker 1 Yeah, you want a cigar?

Speaker 4 Yeah, I want to cut it.

Speaker 1 Let's have some cigars.

Speaker 2 He doesn't do anything fun.

Speaker 1 I'll have a cigar. On Joe Rogan's show, I will have a cigar.

Speaker 1 He doesn't do anything fun. That's the truth.

Speaker 1 You don't do anything fun? Really?

Speaker 1 Nothing?

Speaker 3 Well, then maybe I should talk about this.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I should talk about it.

Speaker 3 Maybe I should talk about it. Are we on?

Speaker 1 Can I go?

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I don't do anything fun.

Speaker 3 Don't do anything fun. No, you know.

Speaker 1 Making movies is fun. Well, that's the fun.
From the cutter?

Speaker 2 I thought that was a cutter. That looked cool.
I was like, is that a cutter or is that brass knuckles?

Speaker 4 What are you saying about fun?

Speaker 3 I don't do anything fun.

Speaker 1 Well, you know, after

Speaker 3 what happened to me,

Speaker 3 I mean, I should probably tell the whole story, and maybe I eventually will here, but,

Speaker 3 you know, I went to jail

Speaker 3 for a DUI-related incident

Speaker 3 that caused

Speaker 3 manslaughter. And one of my passengers

Speaker 3 died.

Speaker 3 And,

Speaker 3 you know, after that and going to jail and whatnot,

Speaker 2 he's not the funnest guy to get drunk with. Yeah, I don't.

Speaker 3 It's kind of what it is.

Speaker 3 If I go to a party or something like that, I don't want to be seen holding a drink with, you know, even with water in it.

Speaker 2 I'm teasing him, but

Speaker 1 I get it.

Speaker 1 Of course.

Speaker 1 Who wouldn't fucking get it?

Speaker 2 But then you add the fact that he's a vegetarian. I mean, all the

Speaker 1 bunch of shit. You're a vegetarian? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Why do you do that? Because his wife made him. That happens.
That happened to a friend of mine.

Speaker 4 He sneaks out burgers every now and then.

Speaker 3 I also have a kind of

Speaker 3 an animal thing. I had a pig

Speaker 3 as a pet.

Speaker 3 And man, when you look at those eyes, those are human eyes.

Speaker 3 And I looked into it and it looked into my eyes.

Speaker 3 I had chickens before that.

Speaker 1 You know what it's like? Chickens are like cats.

Speaker 3 They want back scratches and stuff. And I just just couldn't, like, after a while, I just couldn't do it.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 4 There's people that are feral.

Speaker 4 You ever met a feral person? You don't want to let them sleep in your house. Yeah.
You met a wild, crazy person. You're in jail.

Speaker 1 So push that thing up.

Speaker 4 You had it right.

Speaker 1 You had it right. Did I? Yeah.
This thing right here? Yeah, push that up. Send the intelligence down.

Speaker 1 I'm sorry. Push it down.
Pull it down. Yeah, sorry.

Speaker 4 Pull it down. Sorry.

Speaker 1 Hey, like, you've taken this.

Speaker 4 Yeah, they're great. Foundation cigars, shout out.

Speaker 4 You've been around feral people, right? You don't want feral people living in your house.

Speaker 4 You don't want to take some murderer and give him your car and let him come and sleep in your room.

Speaker 1 It's different.

Speaker 4 I should take you around some wild pigs.

Speaker 1 Wild pigs are like little demons.

Speaker 1 They make orc sounds. Wild pigs are wild pigs.
No, I get it. You hear them fighting with each other.

Speaker 3 There are people who are like that also.

Speaker 1 Exactly. That's my point.
But my point is.

Speaker 4 Domesticated people are awesome.

Speaker 4 Domesticated people like yourself and myself, we're fun to be around. We're nice people.
We know, you know, we're not going to rob you. No one's going to kill you.

Speaker 4 There's a difference. What the wild,

Speaker 1 the wild is. I'm going to describe that.

Speaker 1 It's different.

Speaker 4 So I understand that you wouldn't want to eat animals, but they eat each other. And it's just this bizarre cycle of life.

Speaker 1 I think

Speaker 4 it's where you're getting your animals from. Are you getting your animals from

Speaker 1 like

Speaker 4 these mass factory?

Speaker 3 That's the other part of it is I think there's a line in Highlander 2 where Sean Connery says, I don't eat anything that I cannot identify.

Speaker 3 And I kind of feel like that as well. Like, I don't have a lot of trust for large industrial.

Speaker 3 But you can systematize.

Speaker 4 You can get meat from a farm.

Speaker 4 You can get it from a ranch. You could go to one of those,

Speaker 4 you know, they have those.

Speaker 4 What are those? Farmer's Market type deals. So you can go meet a rancher and you can buy beef from them.

Speaker 3 I am not like one of these people who are like, oh, never, never. Like, you know, if I am in the right place in the right environment and the right

Speaker 3 food is there, like if there's a, like, if I'm

Speaker 3 on an island in Greece and the guy comes up from the boat with a basket of fish and which one would you like?

Speaker 1 Right. I'll take that one.

Speaker 3 You know, sure.

Speaker 1 Do you at least eat eggs? Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Okay. So you dagger.

Speaker 3 You just eat eggs like they're going out of style.

Speaker 4 Yeah, that's good.

Speaker 1 So you're probably getting what you need.

Speaker 4 Cool. As long as you eat eggs, I tell people, like, eggs are free.
No one's getting hurt. Especially if you have your own chickens.
That's the greatest thing in the world. We have 15 chickens.

Speaker 3 There's nothing like

Speaker 3 eggs straight from a chicken.

Speaker 1 Oh, it's great. Nothing.
It's also

Speaker 4 karma-free. Like, the chickens are having a good time.
No one's getting hurt.

Speaker 4 They're all treated like pets.

Speaker 1 Like, hey, girls, I love chickens.

Speaker 2 I've always actually thought

Speaker 2 that

Speaker 2 an exotic pet would be to have like a chicken.

Speaker 2 Like one chicken. Yeah.
And just like treat it like a dog and treat him like, hey, that's my chicken.

Speaker 3 He hangs around. You got to get a couple of them.
They need to have a pecking order. Yes.

Speaker 1 They like to hang out with each other.

Speaker 3 Goebbels figured that one out.

Speaker 3 Yeah. He was a chicken farmer.

Speaker 1 Was he really? Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 Oh, no shit. He was a chicken farmer.
That's how he

Speaker 3 worked out all of his policies in the camps. We shouldn't talk about that.

Speaker 1 Don't want to connect that to chicken farming. It's just,

Speaker 4 you know, it's like the name Adolph, right?

Speaker 1 You You can't use it anymore. You say, can't have that little mustache anymore.

Speaker 1 You can't have a challenge.

Speaker 2 You can't have that cool mustache.

Speaker 1 Michael Jordan tried for a little while. Yeah.

Speaker 4 That's how competitive that guy is. Like, fuck that.
I can wear that mustache.

Speaker 1 He had a Hitler for a while.

Speaker 6 I think I can't make it happen.

Speaker 3 I'll make it happen.

Speaker 1 He just decided he was going to force it through.

Speaker 3 You know, as far as writing in jail, I'm just thinking about it right now.

Speaker 3 One of the other things I had to contend with was

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Speaker 4 Rated M for mature.

Speaker 3 They would confiscate anything that I wrote.

Speaker 1 Oh.

Speaker 3 So,

Speaker 3 you know, like once a week or once every two weeks or so. Why would they do that?

Speaker 4 Was it illegal to write?

Speaker 3 I was considered a security threat by what I was writing. And

Speaker 4 oh, because you were telling the truth about what was going on.

Speaker 3 That, and then when they sent me in, like, I was placed in this like solitary confinement thing, like in the hole.

Speaker 3 And, you know, you're in there and like, I'd never been anything like that before in my life. I was thinking, this is like fucking Guantanamo, except it made me think about it.

Speaker 3 I've got due process at least. And so I'm in this like

Speaker 3 crazy, Kafka-esque, mechanized, totalitarian environment.

Speaker 3 You're in a room where you have no window and the lights are on 24-7.

Speaker 3 And, you know, I don't care what anybody says. You go into a room three days deprived of sound and

Speaker 3 the understanding of time, you go crazy after

Speaker 3 two days.

Speaker 3 You're insane. They broke me after two days.
I was like, oh, I'll do some yoga. I'll meditate.

Speaker 3 No problem. No, after a while, if the lights are on 24-7 and you can't hear anything, it's like being inside of a seashell.
You go slowly nuts.

Speaker 4 Is that by design?

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah, for sure. It's by design.
It's like you're placed into a. And, and

Speaker 3 so

Speaker 3 about once a week, like in, when I was in population, um, about once a week, the, you know, middle of the night, or, you know, the lights are down, and suddenly the lights

Speaker 3 come on bright. The lights are always on, but the lights come on bright, and suddenly a bunch of guards come rushing in through the doors, you know, they just

Speaker 3 storm into the tank, into the section, and they pull everybody out of their cells, and they strip everybody naked, and they put you up against a wall.

Speaker 3 So you're up there with like, you know, Sancho and, you know, Leroy and like everybody's suddenly you're all, you know, one moment you're being kept separate and next thing you know, you're all naked together, standing up against a wall.

Speaker 3 And they're going through everybody's cell and they're just ripping your cell apart, looking for anything.

Speaker 3 And usually they're looking for tar heroin or a shank or a weapon of some kind or works or some kind of cell phones, anything. Like they're looking for anything that's considered contraband.

Speaker 3 Okay, for me, they were looking at my writing because when I was in solitary at that time, like literally on kites, a kite is a like a requisition form that you send out to the guards.

Speaker 3 You're not allowed to talk to the guards.

Speaker 3 They don't want to talk to you. You tell them what you want on a kite, and then you give them the kite, and then they take it off, and maybe it gets answered.

Speaker 1 I'd never had one answered in my life.

Speaker 3 And so

Speaker 3 they come in, they strip everybody naked, they take all your clothes, and they're under the guise of we're, you know, we're doing a laundry exchange.

Speaker 3 And so everybody gets new clothes and you end up with like these big baggy pants and or something too small for you. And they would look for contraband for everybody.

Speaker 3 Well, with me, they would look for whatever I was writing because when I was in solitary, I was writing,

Speaker 3 you know, like maps. I would map the place like a fucking idiot.
Like I still was,

Speaker 3 you know, I'm writing about, oh, Eisenhard the guard. I saw him watching, you know,

Speaker 3 like literally saw him watching on a little TV Nazi propaganda, like triumph of the will is playing on his TV and he's watching it. Oh, I'm going to write that down.

Speaker 3 So they didn't want me writing all my stuff. They were like, that guy is a fucking threat.
You get whatever he's written.

Speaker 3 And so I noticed that whenever I was taken out of my cell to shower, to go to yard, to do whatever, that they would come in and just take whatever I had written.

Speaker 3 So I learned that they couldn't take or open letters to my attorney.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 because it's privileged.

Speaker 3 And so what I would do is I would just write and then whenever I had to leave my cell, like to go to yard, or if they were raiding the cells and taking everybody out and looking for contraband, I would just quickly seal the envelope.

Speaker 3 My writing would go in, you know, I always left it when I was working in the letter to my attorney. And then as soon as they would rate it, I would just seal the envelope and then that would go out.

Speaker 3 And then he would send that letter to my daughter, who would then type up the pages that I was writing. And so that's how I wrote several scripts was like that.
Wow. And

Speaker 3 yeah, because little.

Speaker 2 What did you, what did you, you said you read some of Roger's writing when he was in prison. What did you read?

Speaker 1 You,

Speaker 4 where did you publish it? I don't remember where I was reading it.

Speaker 1 Well, was it on Twitter? I had several things.

Speaker 3 Okay, so first of all, I was placed.

Speaker 3 I was sentenced to go to a low-security, like a country club facility. I went to a low-security facility.
And I went in there and you know you have access to stuff.

Speaker 3 It's more like a camp almost and you're there and you're incarcerated, but it's a light incarceration almost. And I had access to a cell phone.
And so I started tweeting.

Speaker 3 And these were the early days of Twitter.

Speaker 3 And so I started tweeting, oh, they found tar heroin

Speaker 3 in Pudgy's cell and they dragged him off. And, oh, they,

Speaker 3 you know, this happened over here oh they uh so-and-so shaked so-and-so oh they've rolled up so-and-so and taken him away I was like tweeting this stuff

Speaker 3 and this is the early days of Twitter and

Speaker 3 Roger Ebert who was like at that time the biggest on Twitter was following me and he put me on blast

Speaker 3 like he

Speaker 3 he suddenly decided that he would tell every and like all of a sudden one day overnight like the story kind of went everywhere in the world he put you on blast in a positive way well he just told everybody that, oh, this is happening.

Speaker 3 Somebody is, Roger Avery, Academy Award-winning writer, is tweeting from jail and tweeting from behind bars.

Speaker 3 At the time, now it's like nothing. People do it all the time.
People, like,

Speaker 3 I've got.

Speaker 4 Chiff Knights doing podcasts for you.

Speaker 3 I've got a friend who's one of those January 6th guys, and

Speaker 3 he sends me tweets all the time.

Speaker 1 You got a friend who's a guy who's a guy who was in the January days, though.

Speaker 4 You got a friend who was a January 6th guy?

Speaker 3 Well, he's still there. He's like

Speaker 3 hundreds of days in jail

Speaker 3 without any kind of, without trial.

Speaker 1 Without process.

Speaker 3 I mean, tell me if I'm wrong, but... Like, that's not how it's supposed to be, is it?

Speaker 1 That's not how it's supposed to be.

Speaker 3 You're supposed to have a due process of some kind.

Speaker 4 Well, especially when you watch the actual footage of how it went down.

Speaker 3 Oh, I watched it live, and there was that guy, that anti-faw guy, waving people in,

Speaker 3 like, moving them in. They were moving,

Speaker 3 block stockade, the blockade things. They were moving them out and cops were waving people in.
They were opening the doors for people.

Speaker 4 I want you to think about it this way. In the most heavily armed nation the world has ever known, why would you have an insurrection with no guns?

Speaker 3 Yeah, you got to have guns. Machine guns.

Speaker 4 Those guys weren't planning on an insurrection.

Speaker 3 No.

Speaker 4 And then you have the factor that there was agents

Speaker 4 in the crowd, and we don't know how many. There's government agents in the crowd that were inciting people to go in.

Speaker 1 That's what they do.

Speaker 3 And I want to know who that cop was who shot that woman.

Speaker 1 Yeah. What about that? Yeah, the whole thing's crazy.

Speaker 4 The whole thing's crazy. And there's this thing that cops died.

Speaker 4 No cops died that day. That's not true.
No. The cop who died, he died of a stroke.
And I believe it was a stroke, a stroke or a heart attack.

Speaker 3 But well, like everything, there's a lot of misinformation being given to us by the main street.

Speaker 4 But it gets attributed to it, you know, sort of like when anything happens to anyone four years after the vaccine, they attribute it to the vaccine.

Speaker 1 Oh, it was probably the vaccine.

Speaker 4 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Could have been the guy just had a fucking heart attack.
But this guy who is a cop, he did not die there. He was not killed by the protesters.

Speaker 4 And you watched the video of the shaman dude with the fucking buffalo hat.

Speaker 1 They're walking him around.

Speaker 4 The cops are

Speaker 1 showing him around. They're guiding him.

Speaker 4 How would you ever think that that is going to let you wind up in jail?

Speaker 4 How would you ever think that if you're an unsophisticated guy who was wearing fucking face paint and you're kind of a kook, which and you're part of, you think you're part of a movement, which is really scary.

Speaker 4 You know, people get a part of a movement and they,

Speaker 1 fucking, yeah, we're all doing it.

Speaker 4 And then you've got literal government agents encouraging you to do it, moving barriers, letting you in. They were playing chess, and these idiots were playing checkers.
Yeah, and

Speaker 1 they all got locked up.

Speaker 3 Well, because nobody was doing an insurrection.

Speaker 3 It wasn't an insurrection.

Speaker 4 You don't do an insurrection without weapons. The whole idea is crazy.

Speaker 3 So there was no presumption that there was going to be any kind of like that you were going to get thrown in jail for a thousand days. And so my pal Jake

Speaker 3 Lang is

Speaker 3 there forever. And every now and then I get a picture of him.

Speaker 3 He's been in like,

Speaker 3 look, I deserve to go to jail. That guy doesn't.

Speaker 3 And most of those guys don't.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I think it was a bad decision, certainly, to go into the Capitol. It was a bad decision to smash Windows, but I want to know who was.

Speaker 1 People have been smashing things like for a whole year before that.

Speaker 3 Right.

Speaker 4 That's a very good point.

Speaker 3 It's like we were a culture of smashing things at that point.

Speaker 4 It's also as soon as you find out that there were government agents that may or may not have incited people to go in, the whole thing fucking changes. Like, what are you trying to do?

Speaker 4 Are you there to serve and protect, or is there some other weird shit going on? Because it seems like there is, and no one wants to talk about it because you don't want to be that guy.

Speaker 4 But at a certain point in time, you should be that guy.

Speaker 1 You should go, what's going on, man?

Speaker 3 There comes a point when men of good conscience must stand up and

Speaker 3 speak out against things that are obviously wrong.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 And that is one of them, I think.

Speaker 4 Yeah, that is one of them. It's a big one.
It's a weird one.

Speaker 4 And, you know, there's all this pushback about Trump getting into office because he said one of the first things he said was he was going to release all the January 6th prisoners. Like,

Speaker 6 how long do you think they should be in there for?

Speaker 4 Who's opposing that?

Speaker 3 They should at least be going to trial. Yes.
You should at least be going to trial.

Speaker 3 It is unconscionable to hold somebody for over a year, two years.

Speaker 2 Well, the thing,

Speaker 2 the government has always had a situation where, and we talked about when we did our episode on the Andersonville trial, you know, is

Speaker 2 the one charge that the government can put against you where they don't need direct evidence is conspiracy.

Speaker 2 If they arrest you for conspiracy, that means they don't have direct evidence, but they don't need direct evidence for conspiracy.

Speaker 3 By the way, when I was...

Speaker 2 One thing, that's how they got Manson.

Speaker 1 Right. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's true. Right.

Speaker 1 All right.

Speaker 4 Well, they knew what Manson had done because they were helping him. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Well, I believe that too.

Speaker 1 To read Chaos.

Speaker 1 Books are one of the best.

Speaker 2 Believe me, I read every Manson book that there possibly could read. And then I read that when I throw the rest of them away into fucking trash.

Speaker 1 Chaos is fucking fantastic. Yes.

Speaker 2 Chaos is just fantastic. And he helped me, too, because

Speaker 2 my first AD is a friend of his, Bill Clark.

Speaker 1 Oh, wow.

Speaker 2 And when I was writing the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood book, I go deeper into the Manson stuff.

Speaker 2 And so I had a couple of little questions in my head that that I always kind of wanted to know the answer to.

Speaker 2 So I got Tom's number and I called him up and I was able to ask him some really super like direct questions that could really help my book.

Speaker 3 It's a crazy fucking story.

Speaker 3 You know, when I was in jail, I found out they record everything. They're just constantly recording.
And so somebody's in there and they're like, man, I'd like to kill that DA.

Speaker 3 Well, that's conspiracy. And so they'll wait and like, oh, you're about to get out.
And like, they'll literally start walking out like, ah, stop.

Speaker 3 Oh, God. Remember that thing you said about conspiracy? Let's play that back for you.

Speaker 1 Oh, God.

Speaker 3 Or what you said about killing the DA? Well,

Speaker 3 you're going away again. You're going back to trial.

Speaker 1 That happened a lot. But it's also

Speaker 2 they put guys in your cell to get you talking about shit.

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah, that happened right away. That happened right away.

Speaker 3 They're trying to get you to incriminate yourself deeper.

Speaker 1 constantly.

Speaker 3 It's like a fun game.

Speaker 4 What a fun game. What a fun game.
To serve and protect, incriminate you deeper.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 3 look, I had a,

Speaker 3 as Quentin will confirm, I have my authority issues.

Speaker 1 I always have.

Speaker 3 I always have. I'm suspicious of anyone in power.

Speaker 3 You should be.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's intoxicating. Maybe it would be like this.
Okay, so when Roger... Okay, because part of the thing on our show,

Speaker 2 I'm getting back to what Roger's saying. I'm not changing the subject.

Speaker 2 When we do our show, the thing is when we do our show, we talk about three movies. So I pick three video cassettes.

Speaker 3 The show we're talking about is the Video Archives podcast, which is

Speaker 2 our second season.

Speaker 3 Patreon.com slash video archives.

Speaker 2 But the thing is, all right, so it's like there's like the main movie, then there's that second movie that's like kind of like the main movie, but probably you don't know that much about it, and some wild exploitation thing that I, you know, this is what the fuck is this?

Speaker 2 Let's watch it and find out.

Speaker 2 And one of the things that's about our show is, I don't say, hey, Roger, so find these movies and you watch them and I'll watch them and we'll get together and we'll do it on the phone too.

Speaker 2 No, no, no, we don't do that shit. All right, you know, we get together to watch the movies together.

Speaker 3 Part of it is the experience of being together and watching the movie together through his eyes.

Speaker 3 Watching it through his eyes.

Speaker 2 The reason we came up with the idea of the show is like

Speaker 2 when we reconnected, we started doing what we used to do.

Speaker 3 During the pandemic.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and then we were sort of like, well, hey, let's come up with a way we can get paid to do this. All right.
You know?

Speaker 2 So me and Roger will get together and we'll watch three movies and sometimes even four.

Speaker 2 And then we'll get together, then we have a day off and then we get together on another day and then we record and we're always in the room when we do it.

Speaker 2 But the thing is when Roger comes over to watch the films, I've kind of learned that it's like the Roger. I'm starting, it's three movies we're going to watch.

Speaker 2 I am starting the first movie 20 minutes after you get here because Roger will just get off on some archaic piece of

Speaker 1 thing. The earth is flat.
The earth is flat. And the next thing you know, all right, it's been an hour and 15 minutes later,

Speaker 1 and you're getting further and further and further away, all right, from the

Speaker 2 alchemy we're trying to create with the first movie. So now it's like, though, in 20 minutes, I'm hitting play.

Speaker 1 That's it. So wrap it up.

Speaker 4 That's a problem with podcasts. When people come over, sometimes we have some of the best conversations before the podcast.
So now I have to be rude. I'll be like, stop, stop, stop.

Speaker 1 Let's just not talk. You're all

Speaker 1 catching on. Let's catch that match.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 Yeah, because you got to catch it because it is weird.

Speaker 1 It's a weird thing.

Speaker 4 It's a beautiful thing, though, because it's so open.

Speaker 4 There's no studio people.

Speaker 2 No, even the idea, I mean, one, the idea,

Speaker 2 the idea that

Speaker 2 this has replaced the talk show, the talk shows that we grew up watching, and then like those guys were the kings.

Speaker 2 The fact that podcasting, and you're the king of it, but the fact that

Speaker 2 podcasting has replaced that, but also the fact that

Speaker 2 anybody that has got something intelligent and has got a cool little setup, has got an interesting personality and

Speaker 2 it can sell an interesting conversation theoretically can start a podcast.

Speaker 1 Well, 100%.

Speaker 4 Yeah, the barrier to entry is so low. Think about the barrier to entry when you wanted to be a director.

Speaker 1 Oh, God, Jesus.

Speaker 4 It's fucking crazy.

Speaker 3 Not only that,

Speaker 3 you know, like the old days of television, you know, like Desi Lou,

Speaker 3 we own our content. Like you own your content.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 never mind that it's a podcast. I'm okay with that.
I like the fact that this is something where, for the first time in my life, at least, I'm involved with something where there is nobody else.

Speaker 3 It's me and Quentin who decide everything.

Speaker 3 And, you know, if Quentin wants to do it, we go there. If I want to do it, we go there.
Well, I talked to Quentin. And if Quentin allows it, we go there.

Speaker 3 I mean, basically, what we're doing is the same thing we used to do. That's true.

Speaker 1 At the video store.

Speaker 3 We do what we used to do at the video store. We're talking about the video.

Speaker 2 It's completely terrible.

Speaker 2 I have the kill switch.

Speaker 1 But other than that...

Speaker 1 No, no, no. I didn't mean it like that.

Speaker 1 I never used the kill switch.

Speaker 4 But the kill switch is always there.

Speaker 1 No, not really, not really. Well, I guess.
Theoretically.

Speaker 1 But you know what?

Speaker 2 But you want a theoretical sort of damoclease.

Speaker 1 You know what I'm saying?

Speaker 3 Most times when you've used the kill switch, you've used it on your own.

Speaker 1 I use it on myself.

Speaker 3 You used it on yourself. You actually haven't used it

Speaker 3 on any of my things that I've wanted to do, which is really cool. But basically, we're doing the same thing we used to do.

Speaker 1 We used to sit around and talk about movies.

Speaker 3 And so during the pandemic, Quentin called me up, and we hadn't talked for, I mean, we had bumped into each other. We had bumped into each other a few times.

Speaker 3 But we hadn't really, we had had a little bit of a...

Speaker 1 We had a falling out. We had a falling out.

Speaker 3 And I call it a sort sort of a business-related falling out and maybe if I had been a little more mature I was young as a filmmaker and probably unprepared to deal with the complexities of agents and attorneys and Hollywood and money and fame and the press and the press's agenda and and all of that I was just approaching it like I'm a SoCal Gen X punk filmmaker.

Speaker 3 That was how I approached it. I'm going to do whatever the fuck I want to do.
I'm going to make the movie that I want to make.

Speaker 3 And I, with that attitude of, you know, I know what I want, I know what's right, and nobody can tell me I'm wrong. Because you have to be a little bit of a megalomaniac to be a director.

Speaker 3 You have to be willing to say, no, I'm right, even when everyone is telling you you're wrong.

Speaker 4 And is that how Joker 2 got made?

Speaker 1 I like Joker 2. I like Joker 2.
I know you. I like Joker 2.
I like Joker 2 a lot. I've seen it.
I'm just fucking around.

Speaker 1 I will defend Joker 2.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I'll defend the movie as well.

Speaker 1 I can't wait to watch it.

Speaker 2 I don't know if I need more fucking press on that.

Speaker 1 I can't wait to watch it and then talk to you about it afterwards.

Speaker 4 Because Tim Dylan said it's the worst fucking movie that's ever been made, and he's in it.

Speaker 3 You know, I can. Well, that may have colored his perception, though.

Speaker 4 Oh, but Tim thinks everything sucks.

Speaker 1 It's like the beauty of Tim.

Speaker 4 No matter what everybody's saying is amazing.

Speaker 4 Tim loves to talk shit about August.

Speaker 2 I'll tell you, the funniest thing...

Speaker 2 That I've heard for a while on YouTube when I was listening to you guys talk is

Speaker 2 he's a guy. I never really listened to his show or anything like that.

Speaker 4 He's fucking brilliant.

Speaker 2 But when he was on your thing talking about the election and when he described Tim Waltz as like

Speaker 2 well that guy just that guy's a goofball who just should be at a county fair eating hot dogs

Speaker 2 I laughed for 15 minutes and played it back about three different times because I thought that was such a funny comic.

Speaker 4 He's always funny. He said it sounds like Kamala Harris is doing voodoo curses.
She's doing gypsy curses, he said.

Speaker 1 She speaks in gypsy curses.

Speaker 4 And he always does this show with these fucking crazy glasses on. Like, that's his new thing.
If you ever watch his show, it's the best because it's literally just him ranting and a producer. And

Speaker 4 the ability to rant as a singleton operator, as a fucking lone person out there without anybody to bounce ideas off of, is a rare talent.

Speaker 4 And he's the best at it I've ever seen. Bill Burr's really good at it as well.

Speaker 4 But Tim Dylan is the best at it I've ever seen he's so fucking good at it and he's just basically performing to one person who's his producer yeah and he's just ranting and so because of that he's got this crazy muscle that he's developed from years of doing that where he just rants about all these different things but it's fucking brilliant I like ranting oh yeah clearly you know

Speaker 4 well that's the great thing about you guys doing a podcast together what I was going to get to is like in the beginning you were talking about replacing the talk show well fucking you guys replace Siskel and Ebert, right?

Speaker 1 Because Siskel and Ebert wanted to.

Speaker 1 Thank you. They're gone.

Speaker 3 That was actually the agenda that Quentin proposed to me.

Speaker 1 Well, both those guys are gone.

Speaker 4 You know what I love watching? Is videos of like outtakes of those guys?

Speaker 1 They're fucking at each other. They fucking hated each other.

Speaker 3 They were so shitty to each other.

Speaker 4 And then they had to be smiley. And

Speaker 4 what a bullshit way to live.

Speaker 3 Do you remember when Vincent Gallo

Speaker 3 wished testicular cancer on Roger Ebert? And then he got it?

Speaker 1 Oh, wow. Do you remember that? Okay, I do.
Well, he got that cancer. Now that you bring it up,

Speaker 1 right?

Speaker 4 Like, he lost his jaw.

Speaker 1 He had to remove his jawbone.

Speaker 3 That was Vincent Gallo cursing it on Twitter.

Speaker 1 Oh, voodoo.

Speaker 3 He apologized after you. Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 I didn't. I think he got it.

Speaker 1 Roger Ebert.

Speaker 2 Roger Ebert said that Brown Bunny was the worst film to ever play in the history of con film films.

Speaker 1 That's exactly what happened.

Speaker 3 And then he went and he cursed him, and then the curse came true. And then he regretted it.
I talked to him. He was like, I wish I had never done that.

Speaker 4 It's crazy if it really worked. That movie, Brown Bunny, I want to talk about that because

Speaker 1 I've always thought

Speaker 4 it's so strange that we can show violence, but we can't show sex. And I know they tried to do that.

Speaker 4 You ever see the lines outside the movie theater when Deep Throat came out?

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4 Carson was in line. Yeah, yeah.
Johnny Carson went to see Deep Throat in a podcast.

Speaker 1 Ben Crosby.

Speaker 2 I heard stories about Ben Crosby arrived at midnight.

Speaker 4 Because people didn't know what they were seeing yet. It hadn't been defined as a genre.
There were nudie movies that people watched the stag parties. And

Speaker 2 there was that little moment in 73 where there was porno chic.

Speaker 1 Yeah. You know,

Speaker 3 Stallone did Italian Stallion?

Speaker 2 Yeah, but that wasn't a popular thing. This was.

Speaker 2 And everyone had to kind of see it. And

Speaker 2 like, oh, hey, maybe this will be a thing. Right, right.

Speaker 2 Maybe this will be a thing now that like, you know, you know, you know, one or three or four porno movies will come out every year that'll be like kind of considered like real movies, you know, couples will go see.

Speaker 2 And that was a whole thing, was

Speaker 2 promoting the idea of couples going to see

Speaker 2 either porno films or just heavenly erotic movies.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 2 You know, like for sexy, for sexy nights.

Speaker 1 Yeah, not like Travis Bickley. It's not like how Travis Bickley did.
No, no, no, no. It's a sexy night.
Now we're going to go.

Speaker 2 We're going to have a sexy night. We're going to go out and see, and then we'll go home and we'll take care of business.
Right.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And it didn't really happen. But there was this hope in the early 70s that that could happen.

Speaker 4 But it's fascinating that it didn't happen because what I was going to get to is like violence, we don't have any problem with.

Speaker 4 But we all agree that consensual sex is way better than someone getting shot in the face.

Speaker 4 But people get shot in the face in movies constantly. You see heads explode and arms getting lopped off and Game of Thrones.

Speaker 1 Bread and butter.

Speaker 4 It's constant.

Speaker 3 I think it's actually gone too far, I think. I mean, this could be from me.
Well, it's not that violence has gone too far. It's the meaningless violence has gone too far.

Speaker 3 Violence without purpose, almost. And I started to recognize this during Walking Dead, but really Game of Thrones, though.
You mentioned Game of Thrones.

Speaker 3 Like, I loved Game of Thrones at first, and then I started realizing, wait a minute, like, they're getting off on me falling in love with characters. And then

Speaker 3 the moment I've... fallen in love with a character, suddenly they're vivisecting their genitals.
You know, it's like,

Speaker 3 and then the cycle begins again. You fall in love with a a different character, and then they're killing them, and they're just doing it like sadistically because

Speaker 3 there's like, there's nowhere to go other than that. They're just pushing the ceiling higher and higher.

Speaker 4 Sort of, but also, if you were living in that world, that would be reality. Nobody lived forever and became the hero of the fucking movie.
There's no heroes back then. Everybody's getting gutted.

Speaker 4 They're getting usurped.

Speaker 2 You're turned into a dungeon, you know.

Speaker 1 Yeah, people get the lights. You're out of the picture.

Speaker 4 It's just, you're getting eaten by dogs.

Speaker 1 This is real.

Speaker 2 And now you have to fight for the next five years against the rats. They're in the fucking dungeon with you.

Speaker 3 But television, at least the television I grew up with, was all about the familiarity of returning to the characters you love.

Speaker 4 Yeah, but there was plenty of characters.

Speaker 4 And you did get to return to the ones that stuck around and didn't get their heads off.

Speaker 1 I just wish I killed other characters. But let me go to anyone else in the list.
I love that.

Speaker 2 Let me give you another example.

Speaker 2 Everyone talks about how great television is now, and it's pretty good. I got to say.
It's pretty good. But

Speaker 2 it's still television to me and what's the difference between what's the difference between television and a good movie because a lot of the tele TV now has the patina of a movie

Speaker 2 all right it it uh they're using cinematic language all right to get you caught up in it and um

Speaker 2 and obviously I'm talking about good shows. We're talking about shows that you're

Speaker 2 talking about

Speaker 2 shows that you're compelled to watch.

Speaker 1 Right, right.

Speaker 1 All all right um

Speaker 2 and so okay so okay i'll use an example of a show i'll use uh uh yellowstone i didn't really get around to watching yellowstone the first three years or so and then then i watched like the first season i go wow this is fucking great i've always been a big kevin costner fan he's fucking wonderful in this all right and i got really caught up in the show and everything and all of a sudden i'm having a good time and you know i've got a couple seasons i haven't seen so i'm watching it

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 2 And in the first season, I'm kind of talking about, oh, this is like a movie.

Speaker 1 This is like a big movie. It's like a big movie.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 the guy who writes that is a good writer. There's good, like, punchy monologues and stuff.

Speaker 2 So then I end up watching like

Speaker 2 three seasons of it. And then I even watched that 1883.
Oh, this is like a good Western show. I like Westerns.

Speaker 1 But then

Speaker 2 after I've watched like two or three seasons or one season of 1883,

Speaker 2 look, while I'm watching it, I am compelled. I'm caught up in it.
But at the end of the day, it's all just a soap opera. They've introduced you to a bunch of characters.

Speaker 2 You actually kind of know all their backstories. You know everybody's connection with everybody else.
And they spend some time selling that out. And then

Speaker 2 everything is just

Speaker 2 the compellingness of the soap opera of what's happening to the children.

Speaker 4 What's the difference between that and a film?

Speaker 1 Well, I'll tell you.

Speaker 2 Because the thing is,

Speaker 2 if you watch Edge of Night Monday through Friday, you get caught up in the dramas of the family and everything.

Speaker 2 But you don't remember it five years from now. You're caught up into the minutiae of it at the moment.
All right, so the difference between is,

Speaker 2 I'll see a good Western movie and I'll remember it for the rest of my life. I'll remember the story.
I'll remember this scene or that scene. And

Speaker 2 it built to an emotional climax of some degree.

Speaker 2 And one, the story is good. It's not just about the interpersonal relationships.
The story is good itself,

Speaker 2 but there's a payoff to it. But there's not a payoff on this stuff.
It's just more

Speaker 2 interconnectional drama. And while I'm watching it, that's good enough.
But when it's over, I couldn't tell you...

Speaker 2 I can remember who the bad guy was in the first season of Yellowstone because it was Danny Houston. I remember him in it.
But I don't remember any of

Speaker 2 the details of it. And I don't remember any of the bad guys for season two or season three.
It's out of my head. It's just completely out of it.
And same thing with 1883.

Speaker 2 When I watched the whole thing and that was like a, that seemed like a movie, except I don't remember.

Speaker 2 Sam Elliott is about the only thing I really remember of it when it was finished. But now

Speaker 2 Red River, I remember for the rest of my life.

Speaker 4 Isn't that though because it's a different thing, right? Because when you go to a film, film is designed for one sitting.

Speaker 4 You sit down in the theater, you're going to get the entire encapsulation of what happens to these characters.

Speaker 2 Okay, I'll give you an example of one that is more than a soap opera and you'll and here's the difference here's the difference okay because yeah you could say that

Speaker 2 look they're in the soap opera business but I'll tell you one that's not okay

Speaker 2 if you watch that first season of now here's one that really works like a movie if you watch the first season of Homeland Oh yeah that first season of Homeland First season's incredible okay yeah very good when it gets to that final episode of the first season and he's got the suicide suicide vest on and he's in the room.

Speaker 2 He can kill the guys that he's been waiting for to do it for the whole movie. And you don't want him to die, but you're kind of into him and you kind of want him to pull it off.

Speaker 2 And then his daughter calls him on the phone before he does it. She doesn't know what he's going to do, but she gets that little sense from him.
That something's weird.

Speaker 2 Daddy, you need to tell me that you're going to come home right now. You need to tell me right now that I will see you later tonight.

Speaker 2 And the entire series has been built to this scene. And it's one of the most emotional scenes I've ever seen in a movie, in a TV show.

Speaker 1 I've ever seen dramatized.

Speaker 2 I've ever seen dramatized. Now, that was a movie.

Speaker 1 That was not a soap opera.

Speaker 2 That built to this moment of him being in that fucking room with the suicide vest on.

Speaker 2 And there was complexity. She doesn't know what she's asking, but we do.

Speaker 2 She's stopping this major thing, and she'll never know that, but we do.

Speaker 1 Right, right, right.

Speaker 2 And he's still committed, but he's more committed to her, and we know that.

Speaker 2 That's just great shit. That's a movie.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 3 And you can't, can you do that every week?

Speaker 2 Now, I didn't say you can do it every week, but I'm saying when the season's over, I need to walk away with more than just the soap opera.

Speaker 4 An impactful moment.

Speaker 2 Exactly. Now, I don't expect you to do that every week, but at the end of the arc,

Speaker 2 if you're telling a continuing story,

Speaker 2 at the end of that fucking season, you need to bam!

Speaker 1 Drop the mic.

Speaker 2 You need to tell me a fucking story, not just dot, dot, dot, dot, dot.

Speaker 1 I see what you're saying.

Speaker 2 And look, while I'm watching it, I'm not asking for that.

Speaker 1 But the fact that it all just disappears once it's over and it's just sand on the beach. Right.

Speaker 4 It's a different thing, though, right? I mean, this is the weirdest thing.

Speaker 1 This is the weirdness of theater experience.

Speaker 2 Here's where it's not a different thing. Part of the thing that makes it different is the fact that everyone's watching these continuing stories, continuing stories, continuing stories.

Speaker 1 Okay,

Speaker 2 if it were Bonanza, where it's just a set-up story, Charles Bronson.

Speaker 2 shows up. He's a half-breed Indian and he's working at the Ponderosa for a while and he gets involved in an adventure and then at the end

Speaker 2 it's done.

Speaker 2 Well, on that show, you have the episodes that are maybe not so good, or the episodes

Speaker 2 are whatever, they're dreading water.

Speaker 4 It's one continual story.

Speaker 2 But then you'll have this great episode with Charles Bronson. Or do they have a great episode with James Blue Coeber?

Speaker 1 They're almost standalones.

Speaker 2 That could have been a movie. They could have expanded that to a movie.

Speaker 4 They're standalones instead of just a long ongoing story.

Speaker 3 Well, the difference is that that's the same thing.

Speaker 1 And it's a long ongoing story.

Speaker 2 It's a long ongoing story that leads to the soap opera aspect.

Speaker 3 Well, it's episodic, and television now has become completely serialized. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 And so, you know, somebody's going in and they're pitching their show, even a really, really good show like Deadwood.

Speaker 3 Okay, Deadwood, I know what they, they probably went in, they pitched, and what they knew that they were going to make was the, was it Wild Bill, the Wild Bill story.

Speaker 3 And they've got Kara Deen, and like, and they know that story, and that show is fantastic as long as they're telling that story, which is like six to eight episodes.

Speaker 3 Once he's gone, I don't think they had a plan.

Speaker 3 That was what they pitched, and it was like they pitched a movie spread out over a number of episodes.

Speaker 3 But it wasn't even the full season.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but by that point in time, now they have all the town characters.

Speaker 1 Well, they've got everybody,

Speaker 3 but I would maintain that for the rest of Deadwood, after Carradine's gone, it's just things are happening. Stuff is happening.

Speaker 3 But I don't remember anything about that show other than the town and

Speaker 3 the various actors that I liked on the show.

Speaker 3 But really, all they had was those first six to eight episodes. I can't remember exactly what it was.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 the thing about it is,

Speaker 1 I'm not.

Speaker 2 I don't say all this, and the sum up of it all is it's useless. It is very compelling while I'm watching it.
But it just doesn't compare.

Speaker 2 to a movie, real story that

Speaker 2 stays with me for the rest of my life in some cases.

Speaker 1 Right, I know what you're saying.

Speaker 2 And like, I mean,

Speaker 2 we'll watch a lot of, you know, I try to watch at least one movie every episode that I haven't seen. And sometimes it's like, well, I haven't seen it since I was 12.

Speaker 1 You know, or I haven't seen it since 12.

Speaker 3 Those are actually the scariest ones to watch because if you loved something when you were young, it's almost like...

Speaker 2 Well, and I'm expecting not to, I'm tougher on stuff now than I used to be.

Speaker 1 All right.

Speaker 2 I was a big champion about stuff. Now I'm not such a champion.
Now I see all the problems with it.

Speaker 1 All right.

Speaker 2 But I will watch something I haven't seen since I was 22. And I saw it like the day it opened.

Speaker 2 And I, you know, and I

Speaker 2 I watch it again. I think I just lost my train of thought.

Speaker 3 Well, actually, I can jump in really quick if you want.

Speaker 2 I'm talking like I'm stoned and I'm not.

Speaker 1 Well, strong cigars.

Speaker 4 Yeah, strong cigars.

Speaker 3 One of the movies we saw that we had seen a million times and we didn't even think that it was going to be anything was Dress to Kill.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Okay, let me set this up a little bit, and then you can take it.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 It was one of those things where we were doing a thing, a special episode with Eli Roth.

Speaker 2 We were taking you know, the Italian Jallo thrillers and thing, okay, what are the American versions of Jallo thrillers? And we figured out there was like four of them.

Speaker 2 And one of them was Dress to Kill. Michael Caine.
Yeah, and so we get together with Eli, and we're going to watch these four movies. And then it comes down to Dress to Kill.

Speaker 2 And it's like, God, I mean, I can't even think about how many times I've seen Dress to Kill. I can't even think how many times he's seen it and how many times that Eli's seen it.

Speaker 2 I mean, we're just huge Brian DePalma fans and Nancy Allen fans and everything. So it was like, how many fucking times?

Speaker 2 And so I almost, almost brought up, I mean, do we even need to watch Dress to Kill?

Speaker 1 I mean, we've got

Speaker 3 a little Congress about it.

Speaker 2 We've got three movies to watch. No, okay, let's just watch it.
We'll just watch it.

Speaker 2 That ended up being one of the greatest screenings of Dress to Kill I've ever seen. All right.
It's in that, in our living room, in my living room, watching it with

Speaker 2 on VHS, Pan and Scan. All right.
The old Wonder Brothers video, because we watch them on,

Speaker 2 we watch them on the actual video cassettes of video archives.

Speaker 1 All right.

Speaker 2 Literally, the tape that we used to rent and handle and shuffle and put back and forth into the drawers and then rent to customers and that has been sitting on the shelves with the number on it and everything for the we've seen the movie a bunch of times but something about watching it with the three of us and then just sitting there and it's so good but but but but but it was Roger who was adding to it it was Eli that was adding to it and I was adding it to them yeah you know and like we just had this like appreciation for the movie watching it with the three of us in this situation.

Speaker 2 The fact that we even considered not even watching it was just like sacrilege.

Speaker 3 And we saw things in it that we had never seen before. That was the other thing.
It's like, I saw things during that screening because

Speaker 3 of feeling watching the movie with you guys that I had never thought about before. And so it opened up all sorts of avenues.

Speaker 3 You know,

Speaker 3 most frequently you watch a movie and it doesn't live up. I'm afraid to watch movies again

Speaker 3 a lot of the time.

Speaker 3 That was just one of those happy incidences where the movie really lived up.

Speaker 3 It stayed strong. Even when we'd seen it hundreds.
I know.

Speaker 2 I mean, you could not... It would be hard to pick a movie that I've seen as much as Jessica.

Speaker 4 See, this is the better version of Siskel and Eubert.

Speaker 1 This is exactly what I'm talking about.

Speaker 4 The completely unproduced, uninfluenced version.

Speaker 2 Well, I told Roger Roger when we finished the first season, and I go, you know, Roger, if we do this the right way,

Speaker 2 in three or four years' time, we could be considered like Cisco and Evans.

Speaker 1 100%.

Speaker 4 It's just a matter of getting it out there.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4 I think there's just a bunch of people that aren't aware of it yet.

Speaker 3 They will come.

Speaker 3 Build it, and they will come. What I love about the way we're doing it now, because our first season, we just...
you know, we just put it out.

Speaker 3 And we had a partner with Sirius XM back then.

Speaker 2 And this season, you know, they kind of went out of business in their own for their podcasting thing a little bit.

Speaker 1 Oh, did they?

Speaker 4 I thought it was Pandora now, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, they kind of turned into a different thing.

Speaker 4 They just changed their whole podcast deal with the Caller Daddy chick.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think they did, yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 4 So I guess they're trying to get back into it.

Speaker 1 And I think some other people as well.

Speaker 2 They paid us a lot of money to do it. And we actually did pretty good for our little archaic little movie.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Speaker 2 Show that goes on about two hours.

Speaker 1 So really

Speaker 3 niche type.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And we, we, you know, can you guys do Jaws? No, we don't want to do JAWS.
But that's the best part of it.

Speaker 4 Do whatever the fuck you want to do.

Speaker 2 That's exactly it. But the thing is, they were like,

Speaker 2 so we actually had about like 2 million listeners, which was like, hey, that was pretty good for us, for us doing our little stupid

Speaker 2 movie show

Speaker 2 about VHS.

Speaker 1 And it's all about VHS.

Speaker 2 It's about the VHS.

Speaker 3 And we're talking about the box art.

Speaker 1 We're talking about VHS tapes.

Speaker 2 We watch the film. We talk about the trailers that are in front of the movie.
All right. We talk about the transfer.

Speaker 4 By the way, the movie VHS is one of my guilty pleasures.

Speaker 1 I mean, that's a good feel, yeah.

Speaker 4 That's a good movie. The one with the devil lady? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 She turns into a devil. The four different stories or three different stories, yeah.

Speaker 4 But that one is worth it. Just sit through the other three for that one.
The devil lady was fucking amazing.

Speaker 2 But I think they were expecting us to

Speaker 2 do like

Speaker 1 Susan Kane.

Speaker 2 They weren't even going to do like Dak Shepard kind of numbers.

Speaker 1 Right, right.

Speaker 2 And we were never going to do that with what we're doing.

Speaker 1 Right, right, right.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And, you know, and so we're talking about.

Speaker 1 But you could, though.

Speaker 4 People want to see it. They want to listen to it.
It's just a matter of just it bitten.

Speaker 4 They'll realize they wanted it once they hear it. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 That's what it is.

Speaker 4 It's like, oh, we want them to only talk about Citizen Kane.

Speaker 1 No, then, no.

Speaker 4 No, no, it's got to be whatever the fuck they actually want to talk about.

Speaker 4 And then you'll learn about that movie that you never heard about. Maybe you go see it, and then you'll have a deeper appreciation of why these guys love movies.

Speaker 2 But one of the things that was interesting when we did it, when we were like, okay, so when we made our deal, we're thinking, okay, well, maybe we'll do it here for two years, and we own the show, and then we want to take it to Patreon so we don't have to do commercials.

Speaker 2 Right. Okay.
And now when I did commercials, I did it with a

Speaker 2 70s DJ announcer voice.

Speaker 1 All right.

Speaker 2 Because I felt like such a sellout that I'm not going to do it in my voice.

Speaker 1 And I know that's it.

Speaker 1 The Dotson 750 is coming, and it's coming soon. You know, and I did it like the real Don Steele.

Speaker 2 That was my whole thing.

Speaker 2 Doing it like the real Don Steele.

Speaker 3 I just did those readings readings like myself, and people started commenting on Twitter. They were like, man, Roger Avery.

Speaker 1 ZipRecruiter can

Speaker 3 fill your placement in the...

Speaker 1 Some people even get, in the first week, they get qualified candidates only on ziprecruiter.com. Look, I like solo stoves.

Speaker 3 They're great. But I found myself doing like, you know, stainless steel ads, basically, and talking about solo stoves.

Speaker 3 And suddenly people on Twitter were saying, Roger Avery will sell you sour milk from a sick cow.

Speaker 1 It's like, well, I don't know if I want to like be shilling stuff like that anymore.

Speaker 4 Well, you just have to only approve the ads that you want to do. Like, I approve ads.
I don't like just let them

Speaker 4 give me every ad. I'm like, I can't do this one.

Speaker 1 Well, we say it all the time.

Speaker 3 But our thing, our thing is we're not even under that kind of pressure now.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. The thing about it,

Speaker 2 I thought about it. That would be kind of cool.

Speaker 1 Is look, if we go to Patreon, we'll lose a whole bunch of, uh we use we'll lose a whole bunch of listeners but

Speaker 2 you know we'll put a put a 40-minute version of the show out there for free you know but if you want to get the whole show then you've got to like you know you you got to subscribe and if you just subscribe you get the show if you pay if you pay five dollars you get our show boom boom and if you pay eight dollars then you get an extra special show that we do and we're gonna there's a still a truncated version of it available for everybody to listen to you like the first part of it come for the rest but the thing is though, is what I like,

Speaker 2 and some people are sort of like, hey, fuck those guys. And they're like, well, okay, fine.
All right. And look, I get it.

Speaker 2 I'm the guy that, I'm the guy in my 20s, would go to happy hour at the bar, all right, and nurse a beer while I ate all the pizza and the chicken wings.

Speaker 1 And that was my dinner.

Speaker 1 So I get that.

Speaker 2 And by the way,

Speaker 2 if you want to wait till the end of our season and then join for a month and listen to all of our shows that way, you can. That's an easy way to do it.
You can get everything for free for a month.

Speaker 2 You can get everything you want in a month.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 that's not who we're doing it for.

Speaker 2 We're doing it for the people who care about the show and are subscribing to it. And those people, those are our audience.
Right. And then they write on the message board and we write them back.

Speaker 2 And like, so we're doing it for those people. And as long as we can make enough to just do the show, we're cool.

Speaker 3 And the general feeling is, wow, this is like a $5 film school because you've got a couple of guys talking about movies and talking about how to watch movies, how to appreciate films, how to read a film.

Speaker 3 And then

Speaker 2 hopefully just genuinely compelling discussions.

Speaker 3 And using our experience as filmmakers to discuss even deeper into the movies and to better understand them. And it's

Speaker 3 largely something has happened in culture where

Speaker 3 people,

Speaker 3 they don't know how to argue anymore politely. They don't know how to enjoy an argument with each other before.

Speaker 3 And so Quentin and I, we don't have to like the same movie, just like Sisko and Ebert didn't have to like it.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 we can argue about something, and then afterwards, it's like, okay, let's go do karaoke now.

Speaker 2 It's not a recommend show. We want to pick three movies and we want to discuss them.

Speaker 1 You don't have to like it.

Speaker 2 Even if we don't like the movie,

Speaker 2 if there's an interesting point of discussion about it, well, that's good.

Speaker 2 That's all we need.

Speaker 2 We need

Speaker 2 an interesting conversation to have about this.

Speaker 2 It's not about we recommend you watch this movie.

Speaker 2 Personally, I don't care if anybody watches any of the movies that we talk about. I want them to listen to the show and

Speaker 2 enjoy our back and forth.

Speaker 4 And get to understand how you appreciate movies.

Speaker 2 Yeah, if you want to go out and check the movies out afterwards, fine, go ahead.

Speaker 1 But I don't care if you do or not.

Speaker 3 And we have a really dedicated group of people who have come and they've signed up and they like like I really like what's funny is i really care about these people now it's like they're there and they're like in the club it's like a clubhouse yeah yeah and the people who want to be there want to be there and they're talking and they're talking they're on a message board with quenton and you know all eli is eli roth is uh there and edgar wright and like everybody's like and so it's a we wanted to create a

Speaker 2 something that was like video archives and i wanted and that people could come in and talk and i want at least one of the three movies not every week but at least i want to they're not easy to find.

Speaker 2 I want to come up with like, well, that's not streaming anywhere.

Speaker 1 How am I supposed to get this?

Speaker 2 Well, it's on VHS, you know, get a VHS recorder and buy it on eBay.

Speaker 1 All right.

Speaker 2 And now all of a sudden that little group is like, well, maybe we can buy a, hey, maybe if we buy a VHS and then we can, we'll burn it and we can trade it with everybody else.

Speaker 2 And now they're all doing the work to do that. Well, good.

Speaker 3 My daughter Gala is one of our producers on the show, and she's on the show with us.

Speaker 3 And one of her things is like we get together and we watch the movies at video archives and then we know the films and then she has to, she doesn't have that access.

Speaker 2 She doesn't have access to the, she's not there with us.

Speaker 1 She's like

Speaker 3 she represents one of our one of the people out there. She's got to find it.
So if Quentin finds something that's, you know, pretty difficult to find, she's got to track it down.

Speaker 3 And she usually has a little timetable to do it on.

Speaker 3 And she kind of is doing her proof of concept on, you can get these. You can find these.
She'll find it on VHS. She'll find it on these.
She explains how she

Speaker 2 and you can follow her her guide if it's on youtube she'll tell you it's on youtube however when she goes quentin i just couldn't track this one down i could i'm like yes yeah

Speaker 1 i think that's the real reason he likes to do the show

Speaker 1 that's right

Speaker 1 gotcha

Speaker 1 is everything

Speaker 4 is everything on youtube now a lot a lot of things a lot not everything but a lot of things a lot of things a lot of things Yeah, there's some certain things you can't find on YouTube still.

Speaker 3 And if it's up there and it's not there, it'll be up again somewhere. It's like whack-a-mole.

Speaker 1 Right, right.

Speaker 4 It's like whack-a-mole. There was the Gore Vidal film, the transsexual movie with Raquel Welch.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. Oh,

Speaker 1 we watched that.

Speaker 2 We didn't do an episode on it, but I have the video of that. We watched it.
I have Myra Breckermanic.

Speaker 1 I like that movie. It's a crazy movie.
Well, the idea. She fucks the guy in the ass.
That's the best fucking scene.

Speaker 2 She fucks the guy in the ass. That is the best fucking scene.

Speaker 1 It's pretty wild.

Speaker 2 I like that movie so much, I read the book afterwards because I thought it was so cool.

Speaker 3 I never liked Rex Reid, and I am not gay, but I was actually like, wow, Rex Reed's kind of hot in the game.

Speaker 1 Well, that's what he was trying to do. That was a whole movie.

Speaker 4 You did it. Gorvidale was trying to turn you gay.

Speaker 1 Can you give me that lighter? Yeah,

Speaker 1 that's that.

Speaker 4 That's one of those weird ones. It's difficult to find.
I had to buy a DVD to get it.

Speaker 2 Oh, well, I like that light. The light she has that Keith building up to it.
She goes,

Speaker 2 What's she actually going to finally show her pussy? She goes, Well, it looks like the moment of truth has finally arrived.

Speaker 2 I think Raquel Wallace is just fantastic in that movie.

Speaker 4 Did you ever see those debates that Gorvidal did with William F. Buck?

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, those are almost

Speaker 1 fights. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. Incredible.

Speaker 4 Yeah. But this is, you know, you used to be.

Speaker 3 Gorvidal always won, though.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. Well, he was just,

Speaker 4 he was right and he was better.

Speaker 3 Yeah, he's right and he's better.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he's right.

Speaker 2 But then you have Gorvidal fighting with like a Norman Mailer.

Speaker 1 Yeah. What were they fighting about?

Speaker 2 Oh, no, just they'd get on,

Speaker 2 they'd get him on like the Dick Havis show together.

Speaker 2 He would talk to him, like a Ponce bastard, and the other one would talk to him, like a Nina Anthrozol.

Speaker 3 I'm sure they had dinner afterwards.

Speaker 4 Well, it's just, you used to be able to have those kind of conversations on television, which is really fascinating. Yeah.
It's like now they exist in podcasts.

Speaker 4 You know, and like the Siskel and Ebert thing, which I was talking about, is like, you can't manufacture a friendship. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4 And you can't manufacture a real interest. You can't be a guy who was a local news reporter who auditioned for the role of the guy who reviews movies.

Speaker 1 You know what I'm saying? Yeah, I know exactly what you mean.

Speaker 4 Because it's like this thing that you guys have is what this is the whole new media movement is based on authenticity, right?

Speaker 4 And this is like the whole thing, you want people to not be able to find these movies. You want to just review movies that you want to review.
And that's the beautiful thing about it.

Speaker 4 It's like the perfect show in that regard. Like for a film review show or a film discussion show, it's the perfect show.

Speaker 3 And also when a customer used to come into the store, they had basically three requirements. I want something that's new.
That was always the first one. That's good that I haven't seen yet.

Speaker 1 And I was like, well,

Speaker 3 if you haven't seen it yet, it's new to you. So that takes care of two of those.
And no, we don't have that new one, but let's show you something interesting. And so it was always a matter of,

Speaker 3 you know.

Speaker 2 Well, the thing is, one of the things that, like, and

Speaker 2 there's a lot of movie, there's a lot of movie shows out there on podcasts, and they talk about stuff. And the idea isn't for me to just say, oh, we're better than all those guys.

Speaker 2 We're not coming from that place. But I'll tell you what bugs me about a lot of the other shows is the fact that the people are sincere.
They're completely sincere, but...

Speaker 2 Their film knowledge is fucking abysmal.

Speaker 1 They really don't know what the fuck they're talking about.

Speaker 2 And especially when they're trying to talk about movies from like the 70s or something,

Speaker 2 they were usually born in the 80s. So they don't know what something was like when it opened up, and they don't really have any context.

Speaker 2 They definitely don't have context. That's what they don't have.
They don't have context. They just know whatever they've learned along the way.
And so they just yank stuff out of their ass

Speaker 2 and say stuff that's just wrong a lot. They just misinformation a lot.
We actually fact-check our shit.

Speaker 2 We re-record it

Speaker 2 to make sure that we just don't yank shit out of it. And there is a little bit of yanking stuff out of your ass, but when I'm not sure about it, we look it up.

Speaker 2 And then if I'm wrong, then we change it.

Speaker 1 Well, then also there's the fact that...

Speaker 2 You can count on what we're saying that we're telling you the truth fucking shit. We're giving you...

Speaker 2 I consider it as a film expert that

Speaker 2 my show wouldn't be worth listening to

Speaker 2 if I don't tell you the truth.

Speaker 2 If I don't give you factual information that you can count on.

Speaker 3 Well, also, because you were there during the opening of the film and we're going to

Speaker 1 have the context.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Yeah, we have the context to talk about it.
A lot of these people, they maybe didn't see these movies

Speaker 3 in theaters.

Speaker 2 And the thing is, you know, it's like, you know, my

Speaker 2 writing guru as far as like film writing, but I think writing in general was the New Yorker film critic Pauline Kahl. And she had one

Speaker 1 rule, and I one rule for

Speaker 2 for film criticism and I think this could apply to all writing she goes

Speaker 2 you have to give the reader a compelling reason to read your writing it's just it's that fucking simple it's that there has to be a compelling reason for you to engage in reading analysis.

Speaker 2 And the same thing about talking about cinema. You have to give a compelling reason.
Now, yeah, I like the guys.

Speaker 2 That's a good start. I like their personality.
I think they're kind of funny.

Speaker 2 That's a good start. But there has to be something more than that.

Speaker 4 Well, that's what's more than that, what you just did.

Speaker 1 This passion for it, right?

Speaker 4 That's what's more than that. It's just this severe commitment to it.

Speaker 4 That's what's exciting.

Speaker 2 And then when we talk about the movies, we talk about everything that's good about them. We talk about the things that aren't good.

Speaker 1 Right. Honest.
Yeah, very honest.

Speaker 2 And I can be wrong.

Speaker 2 I don't have have to be right about it.

Speaker 1 You might be wrong about The Joker. I'm not sure.

Speaker 1 It's audacious. It's audacious.

Speaker 2 Because you haven't even seen it.

Speaker 1 You're just jumping on a fucking bandha. I'm just talking shit.

Speaker 4 I'm just trying to wind you up. Talking shit.
I'm just trying to wind you up.

Speaker 1 Sorry.

Speaker 4 What's like an example of a film that you love that other people hate other than The Joker?

Speaker 1 I don't know if I loved it, but okay.

Speaker 2 I liked it a lot.

Speaker 2 I have a ton of those. As a matter of fact,

Speaker 2 I have so many. But when I was younger, particularly,

Speaker 2 I was the champion of the movie that

Speaker 2 all the critics put down and said was the fiasco.

Speaker 1 And I wanted to do that.

Speaker 3 Is it because you're contrarian?

Speaker 1 Can I guess? Yeah. Yeah.
Is it Ishtar? Well.

Speaker 1 I defended Ishtar.

Speaker 2 I defended 1940.

Speaker 3 He was like one of the champions of Ishtar.

Speaker 2 Ishtar, I championed 1940.

Speaker 3 Pushing that tape on so many customers.

Speaker 1 How many of them came back angry? No, Ishtar is a funny movie. It's a funny movie.
Is it really?

Speaker 3 Well, the problem with Ishtar, and we were talking about this a little bit earlier, the problem with Ishtar is that...

Speaker 3 It suddenly became not about the movie, but about the production. Yeah, yeah.
And so people had formed an opinion about whether they liked it or not.

Speaker 1 It was expensive. Because it was expensive.

Speaker 1 It doesn't change your ticket price.

Speaker 4 No, but that is the kiss of death. If you feel like a film is over budgeted.

Speaker 2 Especially comedies.

Speaker 2 It's like critics have a thing about

Speaker 2 spending a lot of money on comedies. It seems obscene to them.

Speaker 4 What happened with this film? Where did the budget go south?

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 2 where the budget kind of went south for the most part was the fact that...

Speaker 2 Like Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman kind of like... had their full freight on the movie.
So Dustin Hoffman got his high, big salary.

Speaker 2 Warren Beatty got his high big salary and so now you know all the accoutrements that go with it and everything that goes with it all right

Speaker 3 i need a plane to fly me back from morocco to new york every weekend if

Speaker 2 no no he's just making that up i'm making that up but that's not unrealistic but it's not unrealistic you know it would be like if when they did uh during the time when they did ish art tom hanks was famous but he wasn't the superstar that he is now right all right so if that had starred tom hanks and peter scolari like the two guys from bosom buddies yeah well then that movie would have been, it would have been, it would have cost a lot less and would have been just as funny.

Speaker 2 Those guys were terrific together and they would have been really good in that role and the film would have been seen for what it is.

Speaker 4 When a film does get labeled as a bloated film, though,

Speaker 4 that is the kiss of death.

Speaker 1 It kind of is.

Speaker 4 Because the general public will turn on it then.

Speaker 1 They want it to fit. But you know what?

Speaker 3 Generally, you give those movies a couple of years, and suddenly they're like these amazing movies.

Speaker 1 Like, oh, my God.

Speaker 3 Well, Water World's a pretty fun film. Shut the fuck up.

Speaker 1 I kind of have a great time watching.

Speaker 3 Water World was the first laser disc I ever bought.

Speaker 1 That ends user right here.

Speaker 4 You can't defend.

Speaker 4 Kevin Costner's The Postman.

Speaker 2 I never saw The Postman. I like the idea of The Postman.

Speaker 3 I remember the screenplay for The Postman was great.

Speaker 2 The idea that I never saw The Postman, but I actually like Kevin Costner.

Speaker 2 I think Dances World is one of the best movies.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Kevin Costner is fucking

Speaker 1 awesome. I love that dude.

Speaker 3 But you're right about the Postman.

Speaker 1 But I've always wanted to see somebody.

Speaker 1 I'm not saying he's right about it because I've never seen it.

Speaker 2 But now that says something that I've never seen it,

Speaker 2 but I wouldn't mind seeing it, and I'll bet y'all like it.

Speaker 4 But then there's films that are so bad they're great, like Showgirls.

Speaker 1 I'd love Showgirls. Showgirls is so good.
Oh, I can defend Showgirls. Showgirls, there's nothing wrong with Showgirls.
I can absolutely defend it.

Speaker 4 I can defend it as an entertainment piece.

Speaker 2 Look, I am not as so bad as Good Guy.

Speaker 1 Okay, I'm not as so bad as good guy. You are as so bad as good guy.

Speaker 2 I'm not as so bad as good guy.

Speaker 4 The sex scene in the pool?

Speaker 2 That's a little ridiculous.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 2 yes, the sex scene in the pool is a little ridiculous, but actually, the fact that it's going for a Hollywood movie that's it's it's it's it's going there was actually interesting to me.

Speaker 2 But what I really liked, what I really liked her in it, but when she beats the shit out of that guy, that's so fucking cool. When she beats the shit out of the guy at the end,

Speaker 2 the guy who fucked over her girlfriend and like beat up his girlfriend, and then she does these spinning roundhouse kicks and beats the fucking shit out of the guy.

Speaker 1 I was like, Yeah, Elizabeth Berkeley, go.

Speaker 3 What I love about Showgirls is normally a movie like Showgirls would be made for under a million, go straight to video, star Robert Davi, and just be this little exploitation movie.

Speaker 3 And here was an example of that being made for $60 million with Paul Verhoeven directing.

Speaker 1 Doing whatever the fuck he wants.

Speaker 3 Doing whatever he wants, making it as big as possible.

Speaker 2 Releasing it, NC17.

Speaker 1 Fuck.

Speaker 3 It's basically the same as one of those sub million dollar exploitation films. It still has Robert Davi in it.

Speaker 3 He's still still playing the same part he would normally play.

Speaker 3 And so it's this opportunity to see one of those weird little, you know, exploitation movies made in this grand fashion, in this huge fashion.

Speaker 1 Showgirl something

Speaker 2 doesn't sit on a special shelf in my

Speaker 1 heart. All right.
All right.

Speaker 2 But I really liked it when I saw it.

Speaker 1 I saw it at the theaters. I like it.
I love it.

Speaker 3 Alyssa Burtley pushes Gina Gerson down the stairs. Is it Gina Gerson she pushes down the stairs?

Speaker 1 Like

Speaker 3 everything about that movie is awesome.

Speaker 3 I think it's great.

Speaker 3 I love the film. I love the film.

Speaker 3 I brought it up to all the, I had a dinner once with like Verhoven and a bunch of the producers of the film. I started going off on it.

Speaker 3 They all sat there at the dinner watching me go crazy over their film. And then at the end of it,

Speaker 3 one of the producers said, well, yeah, that's all nice to hear, but really that movie was just about us doing a lot of cocaine.

Speaker 1 That's exactly what I was just going to say.

Speaker 4 I'm so glad you just said that because I always described that movie as a cocaine movie and I was just casting aspersions with no evidence.

Speaker 1 But it seems like cocaine everywhere. It's a cocaine movie.

Speaker 4 Because it seems like they thought it was great while they were doing it. But it's like, what are you doing? You know, it's one of those things where you think it's great because you're on Coke.

Speaker 3 I have a place in my heart for those big movies like that. I mean,

Speaker 2 that's not the one I would make my case on, but I still don't like it.

Speaker 1 That's not my case.

Speaker 2 That's not my test case.

Speaker 4 Well, isn't that sort of an example of what happened when the 80s were a cocaine culture?

Speaker 4 The world kind of shifted from a psychedelic thing from the 60s and 70s to a cocaine thing in the 80s. And you get movies like that.

Speaker 3 Yeah, you get a little bit more edgy, a little less trippy.

Speaker 1 Well, also, like, a little more ridiculous. But see, look at how.

Speaker 4 See, in the beginning, it's pretty good. This is pretty good.

Speaker 3 An actress dedicated to her role. No,

Speaker 4 this is where you're losing me. This is where you're losing me.
Because how are you keeping a heart on?

Speaker 1 Yeah. And then it's called the honesty of all people.

Speaker 2 The whole thing. Okay, but just watching Eluth with Berkeley's tits, all right, in a big studio movie like this, flopping up and down.
Like, I'm getting my money's worth.

Speaker 1 Well, that was him.

Speaker 4 Because it was from Saved by the Bell. Yeah, but

Speaker 2 actually, I'm not thinking about it from his point of view. I'm thinking about it from the water hitting her face.

Speaker 2 I'm thinking from her point of view,

Speaker 2 that's the unrealistic part.

Speaker 4 That's true.

Speaker 1 True.

Speaker 4 Cocaine movies are fun, though.

Speaker 4 There's quite a few of those that were just like, what is this?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 4 Like, how much Coke was going around in the 80s?

Speaker 2 A lot.

Speaker 1 A lot.

Speaker 4 When you, it was actually Coke.

Speaker 3 It was actually real cocaine. It was like proper cocaine.

Speaker 2 There was this, I mean, it's actually really interesting because it's like one of those things where.

Speaker 3 Remember that customer who used to come in and he would bring in like a rock of cocaine?

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 Drop it on the counter.

Speaker 3 Like a rock of cocaine.

Speaker 3 Boys, here you go.

Speaker 2 A guy whose name was Tuttle.

Speaker 3 The size of a, yeah, Tuttle. Tuttle.

Speaker 1 The size of a coffee mug.

Speaker 3 And he would bring us these things.

Speaker 2 He was was a cocaine dealer. And the thing is, he would rent, you know, we'd let him take the movies out and come back whenever he wanted.

Speaker 3 Whenever you want. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And he would come in, and he'd get his films, and then he would, like, either open up a little, like, a

Speaker 1 skull can, a skull can. Yeah.
All right. It was a bunch of Coke can.
I remember that skull can. Boom.
All right. Or you'd go on the counter.
There you go, boys. Have a ball.
Have fun. Jesus.

Speaker 1 Or you'd take out a Coke Rock. And just like, bam!

Speaker 2 Like, throw it on the counter and it'd bounce off of you.

Speaker 1 There you go, boy. See you later.

Speaker 2 See you in two weeks.

Speaker 6 Like a baseball.

Speaker 3 Like a baseball. And you take a colander and

Speaker 3 just grind it up.

Speaker 1 Like, hey, who wants some?

Speaker 1 Sure. And for the first time, because we're minimum wage kids, for the first time, we actually had, fuck you, Coke.

Speaker 2 We actually had access to Coke in a way that we could never afford. Like, for about a few months, because those relationships don't last that.
No, no, no.

Speaker 1 Coke relationships never last.

Speaker 2 But for a few months, we were like, holy shit, we're in the fucking, you know, we're in the powder.

Speaker 3 Well, he, there was a party once that he came to, and he brought, again, a rock of cocaine and a live hand grenade.

Speaker 1 He put them both down. They usually go together.
Yeah, and it was like, okay, it's a dangerous combination.

Speaker 1 That was a fun party.

Speaker 2 And his name was Tuttle. And we always described excess as tuttle.
Okay, we're gonna, we're gonna get it, we're gonna do a tuttle situation.

Speaker 1 Dude, I'm so tuttled.

Speaker 1 Oh, that's hilarious.

Speaker 4 It became like your Faghesi. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Oh, that's so funny.

Speaker 4 When I worked in Boston at Nick's Comedy Stop, they would offer to pay you in cocaine or cash.

Speaker 4 There was guys who just took the cocaine to certain comics. They just wanted to get paid in Coke.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Wild times.

Speaker 4 You know, that's the 80s.

Speaker 3 It was the 80s. It was the 80s.

Speaker 2 Well, yeah, that was actually even kind of an interesting situation because

Speaker 2 it was also one of those things where

Speaker 2 i was actually really kind of proud of us because we all kind of like woo we all kind of went nutty for like a little bit with this kind of like uh more access to coke than we normally have would have more access to more access to coke than we ever have ever had ever had yeah you know and like because we can't afford that shit all right

Speaker 2 and uh so we all kind of went nuts for like a little bit about it And then we all kind of like, okay, let's.

Speaker 1 Yeah, enough of that.

Speaker 1 Let's bring it together. Well, that's great.
Let's bring it together.

Speaker 2 And we also saw some other people who were like, who

Speaker 2 let it get the best of them.

Speaker 2 And they got really kind of like.

Speaker 4 Like your friend with the story about being bitter.

Speaker 1 It's the same sort of thing.

Speaker 4 Yeah, exactly. It's the same sort of thing.
You go, oh, I know where this is going.

Speaker 2 And so we all like, okay, let's pull back.

Speaker 2 Let's get control of this. And then, and we all did.

Speaker 2 It was all collectively. We all kind of just got our shit together and put it in the rearview mirror.

Speaker 1 Right, right.

Speaker 2 Didn't mean we didn't do it, but

Speaker 2 we would just, it was,

Speaker 1 we controlled it.

Speaker 1 Contrary to your goals. We'll stay with Pop.
We'll stay with Pop. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 yeah.

Speaker 4 When I was growing up, a bunch of people that I knew got hooked on Coke, and that's what kept me from ever doing Coke.

Speaker 3 What stopped, I mean, I had children, and suddenly it was like, oh, my God, like, I have to be on call 24-7. Right.

Speaker 4 You can't be out coked up.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 like,

Speaker 3 that's not going to last anymore.

Speaker 4 That gets in the way of

Speaker 1 mushroom trips.

Speaker 3 And pretty soon my Saturday mornings became more important than my Friday nights. It's pretty simple.

Speaker 1 But my thing about priority switch was

Speaker 2 I wanted to have excess or I didn't, oh, I wasn't that interested in it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you want to take it to 12.

Speaker 2 No, I wanted to have a big pile of it, and we're doing it all fucking night until

Speaker 1 this is gone.

Speaker 2 Until the straw is bloody.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 You know, okay, now I'm stopping now because the straw got bloody.

Speaker 4 I think it's like some people don't have the ability to only do that once.

Speaker 4 Like for whatever reason, some people, they have that thing and they do Coke a little bit, then they just want to keep doing Coke. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Well, that's scary when that happens. It is scary.
That's scary when that happens.

Speaker 4 Because you're captured by a demon. Yeah.

Speaker 3 And it's literally, and I think it's literally a demon captures you. No, I think it's in the classic gin sense of the word where it's whispering into your ear.

Speaker 4 Well, in a sense, it does all the things a demon would do.

Speaker 4 You know, you could say the demons aren't real.

Speaker 1 Okay, but

Speaker 1 they might be real.

Speaker 1 Look, there's pretty good evidence.

Speaker 3 You think there's pretty good evidence There's a lot of

Speaker 4 legitimate evil in the world.

Speaker 4 And where is that coming from? What's that energy?

Speaker 4 What begets that?

Speaker 4 What is the reason why people are willing to mass murder? What is it? What is it? People are willing to launch missiles into cities. What is that? Where's that coming from?

Speaker 4 That would be evil if you defined it in the classic sense of the word. You know, when an invading army comes into a village and hacks people, that's not demonic.
That's not evil.

Speaker 4 You're lighting children on fire and throwing them on thatched roofs.

Speaker 1 That's not demonic.

Speaker 4 Seems pretty demonic. Like a demon would do that.
Whether the physical demon exists is almost like not even important.

Speaker 4 It's like demonic behavior is 100% documented.

Speaker 3 What would Jesus do?

Speaker 1 Yeah, right, right. Just ask yourself that.
But it's a thing.

Speaker 3 It's unlikely he's going to raise a fist.

Speaker 4 Everybody wants to be smart and you want to be secular and you never want to say that you believe in something that's superstitious or ridiculous. So you don't believe in religion.

Speaker 4 You're either agnostic or you're atheist. That's how you get respect.
And it's like this weird thing where you're not willing to consider, like, okay, but what are the actions?

Speaker 4 What are the actions of good and the actions of evil?

Speaker 4 Those are the actions are real, right? And we all know in our heart and our soul when you do a good thing, how you feel, versus when you do how you do a bad thing, how you feel. Like, so what is

Speaker 1 what are those?

Speaker 2 So there's a whole speech in apocalypse now

Speaker 2 when

Speaker 2 Brandos Kurtz tells the story of going into the village and inoculating

Speaker 2 all the children in the village, shooting their arms with

Speaker 2 flu shots or something like that, inoculating them.

Speaker 2 And then

Speaker 2 the soldiers came in and then hacked off all the kids' arms. And then there's like a little pile of arms.

Speaker 2 And Kurt says, you know, so we did all that, then we came back in the village, the next day and we saw the little pile of all the little arms in there where they hacked them off.

Speaker 2 And I cried like a baby.

Speaker 2 Then I started thinking,

Speaker 2 the genius of that.

Speaker 2 The genius of that.

Speaker 1 Because

Speaker 2 these are not monsters. They're not demons.
These are men doing a job. And

Speaker 2 they had the force of will. to take the job and take it to its logical conclusion of what they had to do.
All right, you know, I'm not

Speaker 2 condoning. I'm not condoning what Kurtz is saying.
Kurtz is a fucking crazy person. All right, you know.

Speaker 2 But I'm interested in his perspective of it. But of course that would be Kurt's perspective.

Speaker 3 He's speaking about true power.

Speaker 2 Where he's a god. He's a god worshipped

Speaker 1 by these natives. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Clearly lost his fucking mind in the fog of war.

Speaker 2 He's completely lost his mind in the fog of war.

Speaker 2 But he's talking like Genghis Khan.

Speaker 1 Yes, exactly, like they all talk.

Speaker 4 Yeah. But this is the thing where you're suspicious of power, right? Like, why are you suspicious? Well, you should be because you see where it ultimately leads.

Speaker 4 It ultimately leads to a curse, or it ultimately leads to the way to really be in control of people, like you have to use violence. You can only use words for so long.

Speaker 3 Strong men hold civilizations together.

Speaker 3 That's just a fact of things.

Speaker 3 Both of us have become friends over the years with John Milius.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, uh-huh.

Speaker 1 Who wrote Apocalypse? Who wrote Apocalypse now?

Speaker 3 And, you know, John is the kind of guy who's like, you know, conquerors!

Speaker 1 Conquerors!

Speaker 3 You know,

Speaker 3 and he wrote a script about Genghis Khan.

Speaker 1 You worked on it.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that I worked on with him to help turn it into a series. My daughter and I helped him with it after he had a stroke.

Speaker 3 And,

Speaker 3 you know, you look at his Genghis Khan script, and he's, you know, he's realistically talking about these horrific atrocities that just, you know, sewing people up in felt and lighting it on fire and throwing them in rivers.

Speaker 3 Just

Speaker 3 however you can kill somebody, he figured out a way to do it better.

Speaker 3 And, but at the same time, you know, he invented paper money and he invented the Silk Road and he

Speaker 1 uptrended the East.

Speaker 3 Pulled

Speaker 3 that whole region of the world together under one empire. And, you know, over the course of it, you know, you start out as

Speaker 3 almost like Conan, Conan the warrior Conan the Conqueror Conan the king eventually

Speaker 3 yeah king by your own hand and eventually you you start realizing and John Millius also wrote and directed Conan the Barbarian and so he you know he rightly recognizes that it's strong men who conquer but also who hold together and and maintain order.

Speaker 3 And there's a balance to be had between force and strength and compassion as well. Too much compassion,

Speaker 3 Countries fall apart. Too much introspection.
Countries fall apart.

Speaker 4 Right. And when things are too good.

Speaker 3 When things are too good.

Speaker 4 Things are too easy. And you think they're supposed to be easy.
You don't understand how they became easy and what keeps them easy.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 4 And that's kind of where we are right now.

Speaker 1 It's weird times right now.

Speaker 1 That's how we are. We're in a Conan movie.

Speaker 3 Well, it does feel a little feudal, like we're in kind of neo-feudalistic times where there's highwaymen

Speaker 3 that you have to contend contend with when you go out, and everything's a little more fragile.

Speaker 4 Well, there's also this new thing,

Speaker 4 which is the internet and social media. And there's this new thing that has overcome our minds.

Speaker 4 And it's affecting everyone in this very bizarre way, and it's making people more tribal and more inclined towards echo chambers, more antagonistic against opposing beliefs and views.

Speaker 4 So, what you were saying about like being able to sit and have a conversation with someone and completely disagree, but not take it personally, just disagree about the points.

Speaker 4 We've lost that in our society.

Speaker 3 It's really important to be able to engage with other people to disagree with them. Yes.
And then to know that that's just that.

Speaker 3 We can still have dinner together.

Speaker 3 We can still be friends.

Speaker 2 Okay, so I go on a show and I said that I like

Speaker 2 Joker 2. Well, I say I like Joker 2.
And now there's 150 articles that come out on all these cannibalized articles. One person listens to the thing and writes an article about it.

Speaker 1 And then there's 150 rip-off articles on that.

Speaker 2 And then you read the comments of someone. Man, Quinn's a fucking asshole.
That movie's fucking soaked. Man, he's a fucking asshole for saying this.

Speaker 2 Why am I a fucking asshole?

Speaker 1 That doesn't make any sense.

Speaker 2 That makes me a fucking asshole. It's crazy.
You either like the movie or you don't. All right.
And I'm not plugging the movie.

Speaker 2 I'm not doing anything. All right.
I'm just saying I like it. Who gives a fuck what I like? Right.

Speaker 1 What do you care what the fuck I like? Right. And also,

Speaker 2 but then I'll say, I didn't see something.

Speaker 1 Well, he's a fucking asshole.

Speaker 1 Do you care what the fuck I see and what I don't see? Why the fuck do you fucking care?

Speaker 4 But there's no one in front of him to say that. He's an idiot alone with his phone.

Speaker 4 If he just said it out loud amongst reasonable people, they would turn to him and go, what the fuck are you talking about? But he doesn't get that check.

Speaker 4 Which is also part of the problem with social media.

Speaker 2 Someone will say something that they're like, well, I think he's fucking missing out.

Speaker 2 Well, I'm sure there's a lot of shit I can say that you're missing out on, and I don't care if you miss out.

Speaker 4 Also, you have to be missing out. Otherwise, you don't have a life.

Speaker 4 How much information do you think you can absorb in a day? How much things do you watch and listen to?

Speaker 1 You're not four.

Speaker 3 You've got four movies a day, apparently.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's a lot of time, man.

Speaker 4 You have to miss out. There's going to be shit you miss out on.
Well, the other thing is, if you're a film fan today, you're not just dealing with today's films.

Speaker 4 You're dealing with this insane archive.

Speaker 1 That catalog goes back to Rocky.

Speaker 4 You know, know, it goes back to

Speaker 1 on the waterfront.

Speaker 3 It goes back to the 20s. Good lord.

Speaker 4 There's so many films to watch. No, no, no.

Speaker 2 A film that I saw that was very meaningful to me this year

Speaker 2 is I really liked the story of Bo Jess,

Speaker 2 the French Foreign Legion story. I like French Foreign Legion movies anyway.

Speaker 2 But that's a really cool story. And I really like the whole story of the three brothers in there.
And

Speaker 2 I was familiar with the Gary Cooper version, the 1939 version. Put it on a stamp.
But I'd never seen the silent version. and it starred Ronald Coleman.

Speaker 2 And I watched the silent version recently, and I was blown away by it. The storytelling was so epic, and was so visually just beautiful.

Speaker 2 And we have a little micro cinema in the theater I have, one of the theaters I have in Los Angeles, the Vista. And it's like a little...
20-seat cinema that we just show VHS and 16 millimeters.

Speaker 3 It's our video archives.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's like video archives, the video archives cinema club.

Speaker 2 And it's like literally, it's like the brick and mortar version of video archives, but just like, but like a little Paris back out, back avenue.

Speaker 3 It's like a little clubhouse. I mean, it's open to everybody, but for our core fans.

Speaker 2 And the thing is, and we showed,

Speaker 2 last week we showed the silent version of Bojest in it. And

Speaker 2 I wasn't there at that screening, but I asked the guy who was our manager, they're Matt. I said, how did it go? He goes, Quinn, you would have really loved to have been there for that screening.

Speaker 2 And I go, well, what? He goes, it was so moving. The end of it, and it is really moving.
And it's just like, nobody was talking. It was just, it was so,

Speaker 2 you could hear a pin drop, and then it was over, and everyone was still kind of in this collective emotional state, and they just all kind of left the theater, and they just seen something emotional.

Speaker 2 And they all kind of just moved out into the lobby, and in this emotional state, and it was like, That sounds fucking fantastic.

Speaker 1 That's amazing.

Speaker 3 I mean, I think one of the most magical things about movies is that it can speak to you at different times of your life, you know, at the different windows of opportunity in your life.

Speaker 3 So you might see a movie and not like it, and then, you know, people might see a joke or two today and not really care for it.

Speaker 3 And then five years from now, revisit it and watch it again, and you're in a different place, and culture is in a different place, everything's in a different place, and you have a different perspective on the movie.

Speaker 3 And maybe you like the movie. I hated Blade Runner when it first came out.
Did not like the film. I thought it was awful.

Speaker 1 Really? Awful. Like, boring,

Speaker 3 like muddled, like everything that was wrong. Suddenly I'm seeing Kubrick shots in the end from

Speaker 3 The Shining.

Speaker 2 Roger would say, Blade Runner should have been called Blade Crawler.

Speaker 1 No, I was really hard.

Speaker 3 I was really hard on movies. I was a really angry young guy.

Speaker 1 He was such a prick about shit.

Speaker 2 He's a completely different guy. All right.
Now he's like bends over backwards to be nice about something.

Speaker 1 I go, who the fuck is this guy?

Speaker 3 humble by life well i i now look at i mean having you know been a filmmaker and you know and and knowing the struggle that goes into getting something on screen look i know how hard it is sometimes to get what you have up here on onto screen and doesn't always work and sometimes you're faking it by the time it gets to the cut but you know it it's it's not an easy uh thing to it's not easy so when i watch a uh a movie now i'm applying my life experience to it.

Speaker 3 And I'm like, okay, this movie may not be the greatest movie, but this is somebody's, you know,

Speaker 3 vision. Yeah.
And I'm going to give that, you know,

Speaker 3 I'm going to value that and give myself to it and try to find in it what I like about it. And so I always give every movie a shake, you know, a good shake.

Speaker 2 What's happened with our show that I think is really cool, again, from the fans that follow it and everything, is

Speaker 2 in our first season, we ended up covering about 70 movies, you know, all together. And we mentioned a zillion movies in the course of a show, but like, you know, we covered about 70 movies altogether

Speaker 2 between the three movies that we did over the course of like 26 episodes.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 we kind of created new classics, at least amongst the people who followed the show.

Speaker 2 Because they followed it and they liked it. And they watched some old Mexican horror movie like Demonoid.
And they're like, hey, that was pretty cool.

Speaker 3 Demonoid is amazing.

Speaker 1 And then everybody, and everybody would put it down.

Speaker 2 If you tried to look at anything about it, it would all be shitty reviews about it and everything. But then we talked about it with passion.

Speaker 2 And then we gave the right context in which to appreciate the movie. It's a killer hand movie.
And we gave the right context in which to appreciate the movie.

Speaker 2 And then the people appreciated it under that right context.

Speaker 3 Like, because a movie is old and because maybe they didn't have the money to do it like

Speaker 3 super clean or perfect, yeah.

Speaker 2 Actually, that actually has the most best hand effects of ever.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 That movie in particular is actually a tough one to because it's.

Speaker 1 Is this Demon Origin? Yeah, yeah, it's Demon Origin. So it's a killer hand that fucks everybody up.
And the thing about it. Is this the best

Speaker 1 hand on the loose movie?

Speaker 2 It's a Mexploitation movie. Okay, a Mexican exploitation movie.
But the one that's great about it. Well, she's fantastic, and it's Samantha Egger.
Samantha Egger is. She's become one of our heroes

Speaker 1 from the show. Love Samantha Edgar.

Speaker 1 This movie looks hilarious.

Speaker 2 But what's really cool about

Speaker 2 the Mexican horror genre is they take their tacky horror very seriously.

Speaker 2 It's tacky horror, but they take it really seriously.

Speaker 2 And you appreciate the seriousness that

Speaker 2 they're delivering their payload with.

Speaker 3 And I know how hard it is to do some of the things that they're doing. This is like it's pre-computer graphics.
They have a... limited budget.

Speaker 1 No, they're so good.

Speaker 3 But their vision is so big.

Speaker 3 And you're watching it. You're like, oh oh my God, this is, if you just, like, if you try not to judge it on what a movie looks like today.

Speaker 2 No, but not only just that, what's interesting is when you see some of the effects that they do, there's a couple of the effects. Well, how did they do that? Yeah.
Because it's all done practical.

Speaker 2 And then some of it is like, oh, well.

Speaker 2 I can see how they did that, but oh my God, that's so fucking clever. They figured out how to do it in such a clever way.

Speaker 2 I can see how they did it, but that's so neat because they just figure it out how to do it on camera in a way that sells it.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 And it's a crazy movie also. And it's crazy.
It's like you're inside of some sort of crazy Mexican's head making a horror movie. It's fantastic.

Speaker 4 Well, the horror genre is hard to do to not make ridiculous.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Although the best thing about the horror genre and science fiction is that they're the best vehicles to kind of study culture and sociological issues because you have that abstraction layer that makes people think, oh, I'm just watching a science fiction film or I'm just watching a horror movie.

Speaker 3 Like you watch Dawn of the Dead, and yeah, you're watching a movie about zombies in a shopping mall.

Speaker 3 Or are you watching a movie about the vanishing middle class being drawn to the consumer temple because it's what they remembered from their lives? That was an important place to them.

Speaker 1 Like literally quoting the movie.

Speaker 3 I'm actually quoting my liner notes that I wrote for the

Speaker 3 DVD way back when.

Speaker 1 Let me stop and go to the bathroom one more time.

Speaker 2 The coffee is making me take a touch.

Speaker 4 No worries.

Speaker 1 Go for it.

Speaker 4 We can keep going. Okay.

Speaker 4 so when you

Speaker 4 first got into this like did you have uh like a film that you aspired to create something like like when you first did you say i got you know like it's a composite comedians and be like i want to be the next eddie murphy yeah it's a it was a composite it was a composite i have like a kind of a top three filmmaker you know

Speaker 3 When you're a young filmmaker

Speaker 3 and when you're a young child, you look to your parents to learn how to behave. You know, you're a child and you look to them and you're like, they teach you how to be.
Sure.

Speaker 3 And so at the beginning of your life, you're copying your parents. And because

Speaker 3 that's who you love and that's what you're copying. When you're a young filmmaker,

Speaker 3 very frequently you kind of copy your parents, your cinematic parents. And so

Speaker 3 in my case,

Speaker 3 I mean, you know, in many filmmakers, like for instance, Stanley Kubrick, who is one of my favorite filmmakers, who I'm always thinking about his zero-point perspective, his reverse tracking shots.

Speaker 3 I just love the intention of his shots and how he assembles his movies.

Speaker 3 I like everything about his work.

Speaker 1 Kubrick,

Speaker 3 if you love Fritz Lang, you can see that, oh, Kubrick was, that's how he felt about Fritz Lang. Like, when I watch M, I can see the Kubrick shots.

Speaker 4 Is Fritz Lang Metropolis?

Speaker 3 Yeah, he did Metropolis. He did, I mean, like, some of the greatest movies.

Speaker 4 Metropolis is wild.

Speaker 3 Metropolis is a super, super powerful and kind of important movie that's exactly

Speaker 3 talking about everything that's going on today that people should see. The movie I was thinking about was M, which is his movie with Peter Laurie about the pedophile, who's

Speaker 3 and the movie's made in just just before the Nazis took power.

Speaker 1 Oh, wow.

Speaker 3 And so he's making a movie that's really about like kind of the rise of

Speaker 3 the rise of Hitlerian fascism in Europe, but he's doing it through this movie about a pedophile. And it's it's Peter and Peter Laurie is fantastic, and it's actually his first sound movie.

Speaker 3 Like Fritz Langhadden made a sound movie, and so every single shot in the film is based on sound.

Speaker 3 So he'll have shadows talking and the backs of people's heads talking, or even the device of the movie is Peter Laurie whistling Peter Giant.

Speaker 3 That becomes like the device by which they find the killer.

Speaker 3 So the whole movie is about sound. So as a young filmmaker, if you want to learn how to use sound in a movie, that's the movie to see.

Speaker 3 Because every single shot, like it used to be, you would show an empty frame and it would just be a shot of nothing.

Speaker 3 But, you know, now Fritz Lang is able to juxtapose like a woman has lost her daughter. She's calling for her daughter.
And so she's looking for her daughter and she's looking for her and Elsa!

Speaker 3 Elsa!

Speaker 3 And they cut to an empty shot of a stairwell and you hear her. Elsa!

Speaker 3 And they cut to like, you know, an empty playground. Elsa! And then you see the balloon that she was carrying trapped in something, like whipping in the wind.
Elsa!

Speaker 3 And it's super,

Speaker 3 super intense.

Speaker 3 But all he's doing is he's using sound juxtaposed with images, which he couldn't do before.

Speaker 4 Crazy that he just called it M.

Speaker 3 Yeah, M for murderer. And

Speaker 3 this is an amazing, amazing movie. So, Kubrick, see, that's a Kubrickian shot.

Speaker 3 This is where he's Elsa or Elsie.

Speaker 3 I seem to remember more Elsie's.

Speaker 1 There's a few. I think I caught the wrong part.
It's okay. But anyway.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 so Kubrick had his forefathers

Speaker 3 who he used to watch and that he used to look to. And so those would be like my grandparents in a way.

Speaker 3 And so there's this like lineage of cinematic grammar and vernacular that gets carried on from filmmaker to filmmaker.

Speaker 3 And eventually, after you've made enough films, you start walking on your own, you start coming up with new ideas. But for me, it was Stanley Kubrick, John Borman.

Speaker 3 He's the guy who directed Excalibur and Hope and Glory and Point Blank and Hell in the Pacific. I mean, a number of movies.
I don't think Bwenton's such a big fan of John Borman, some of his films.

Speaker 3 I think you're a fan of his writing more than you are his films.

Speaker 2 I have nothing but respect for John Borman.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and John Borman and then Roman Plansky. I think those three guys for me and their work, not the guys, but but mostly their work.

Speaker 3 Like,

Speaker 3 I am a composite. If you watch my movies, I'm a composite of those guys and other people as well.
And

Speaker 3 those are the filmmakers who are important to me. Those were my parents, so to speak.

Speaker 4 Kubrick was such an odd one. Like, his films are so different.

Speaker 4 And he was a weird guy, too. He did, like, complex mathematics in his spare time.

Speaker 1 I do complex mathematics in my spare time.

Speaker 1 Nothing wrong with that.

Speaker 3 No,

Speaker 3 yeah, he's a weird guy, but he was also, I think, thinking three steps ahead of everybody at any kind of given moment.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 3 to be honest, I was just thinking, I just pulled my script from Eyes Wide Shut. I had a script that was from Set,

Speaker 3 and I was reading it over the weekend, and I saw that

Speaker 3 it has this, I mean, I've known this for a long time, but I started really thinking about it over the weekend. It's missing a narration.

Speaker 3 It's missing a third-person narration that was originally in in the movie and that's because the movie was recut and and changed after his death and and they'll and they will um deny it but as a student of kubrick i'm watching the movie and i'm like well kubrick wouldn't do that

Speaker 3 Kubrick wouldn't do that either. And Kubrick would have trimmed this scene.

Speaker 4 I didn't know they recut it after his death.

Speaker 1 Okay, so apparently...

Speaker 1 They finished it. Well,

Speaker 1 that's the party line.

Speaker 3 That's the party line, but I think that they changed the notes, the close-ups, the inserts of the notes. I think those are changed.
It's missing a narration. It's definitely missing a narration.

Speaker 3 You know, a third-person narration. Like that scene where he sees the prostitute who's died.
He's at the morgue and he's looking at her and he's like leaning over her. It's a bed for narration.

Speaker 3 There's this whole thing. What they do instead, because they couldn't say that Kubrick finished the movie because they hadn't done the recording of the narrator yet.

Speaker 3 And so maybe they just kind of clutched it together, except there's an entire thread that's kind of been

Speaker 3 squashed in that film, and that's the two men that are throughout the movie that are constantly in the background of the film who eventually in the final shots of the film, you see like Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in that final scene in the toy store when she's looking at the Rosemary's baby Bessinette, which is totally Kubrick saying something.

Speaker 3 And they never take their eyes off their daughter until the moment they take their eyes off and the final line of the movie is coming up. You see those two guys walking off with the daughter.

Speaker 3 They're taking her away. They've given their daughter to the pedocult.

Speaker 3 That's what's happened at the end of the movie.

Speaker 3 And there's an incident where when they first screened the movie in England,

Speaker 3 people who were outside, apparently, this is all secondhand, by the way.

Speaker 3 There were people who were outside of the theater who could hear inside of the theater Kubrick yelling at all the executives and saying, it's my movie.

Speaker 3 You can't cut it you can't fucking cut my film blah blah blah blah big argument going on then he dies like four days later oh yeah

Speaker 3 so somebody went in and finished the movie but I think when they finished the movie they hid the film the the movie got changed into something else

Speaker 3 and I would love to finish that film I like I'm like

Speaker 4 Have you ever made an attempt?

Speaker 3 I've thought about it. And

Speaker 3 reading the script over the weekend, I started seriously thinking about it. Well, somebody should recut this.
Or somebody should.

Speaker 4 So it would just be a matter of recutting it with narration?

Speaker 3 Well, yes, and no. There's obviously missing.
There would be missing footage now.

Speaker 3 Things have been removed.

Speaker 1 And is that taken simple?

Speaker 3 No.

Speaker 1 Not unless you crack it open and there's no way anybody.

Speaker 1 But hold on. Here's the thing.

Speaker 4 Now we have AI.

Speaker 3 Well, I know. That's

Speaker 4 you're one step ahead of me.

Speaker 1 I'm one step ahead of you.

Speaker 3 I've actually been experimenting a lot with AI.

Speaker 4 The newer versions are pretty stunning.

Speaker 3 I've been working on Runway lately, which is...

Speaker 1 The curve is insane.

Speaker 4 Like the exponential curve of improvement.

Speaker 3 I'm literally, as I'm working on things, I'll be talking to the guys and I'll be saying, well, it'd be nice to be able to move the camera. Okay, we got that tool on Tuesday.

Speaker 3 We're going to give that to you. And so it's like literally whatever you think you can't do.

Speaker 3 Ask us because we probably will be able to do it in a couple of days.

Speaker 3 And so it's advancing so fast and so rapidly that I, without telling you, Quentin, I made a little claymation version of you.

Speaker 1 And I

Speaker 3 have them talking and

Speaker 3 it's kind of funny looking.

Speaker 2 I'm sure a claymation version of me wouldn't be funny looking.

Speaker 3 But it's a claymation version of both you and me.

Speaker 4 How bizarre that something that would have cost like hundreds of millions of dollars.

Speaker 4 Like if you wanted to do a film like a pixel type, you know, one of those crazy movies where you have all this like insane animation. That shit took forever.

Speaker 3 The best work that I've seen of it lately, it was the first time I've been kind of ignoring AI and like, well, I know what it is. It's like form completion with visuals.
And I get it.

Speaker 3 I understand what it is. And we'll see.
We'll see. But I like tactile.
I like tactile. And I do.
But I worked on Beowulf. I made Beowulf with Robert Zemekus.

Speaker 1 Oh, okay.

Speaker 3 And like, that was a big, you know, video

Speaker 1 puppetoon type CGI thing. My original movie.
Motion capture.

Speaker 3 Yeah, my original plan for that movie, because I was going to direct it myself, was to make it in Iceland, under $10 million,

Speaker 3 just really dirty. I wanted it to be like

Speaker 3 an early Terry Gilliam film, like Jabberwalker.

Speaker 3 That was actually the one Neil and I were thinking about when... Neil Gaiman.
Yeah, Neil Gaiman, my co-writer on that film.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 the movie ended up getting made much bigger.

Speaker 3 Suddenly, it was like whatever budget I had was probably our craft service budget. It's nothing like making a $100 million movie.

Speaker 3 It's like, sushi every day, you know, champagne, fly the plane to England, you know, go to whatever you want. It's like,

Speaker 3 it's crazy, but that was definitely not the movie I had planned on making.

Speaker 1 However,

Speaker 3 when we made it, like, and it turned into this big performance capture thing,

Speaker 3 it was fun. Like, working with Zemachis and he's such

Speaker 3 an excitable, like creative genius.

Speaker 3 And even before you were able to do stuff like what he was doing in that film, he was constantly taking, you know, like when he made contact, oh, we'll take that eyebrow off of Jodie Foster.

Speaker 3 And I like that eyebrow thing she does. And so put that on this take.
And so he was like messing with her face and doing all sorts of performance stuff.

Speaker 3 And even when you go back to his earliest film,

Speaker 1 I want to hold your hand.

Speaker 3 I want to hold your hand is almost a visual

Speaker 3 trick, you know, having the Beatles there but not be there. And even though he's not using computer graphics, I think he's just a really super inventive guy.

Speaker 3 And it was so much fun making the movie with him because we were

Speaker 3 inventing technologies. That was

Speaker 3 2010, but I think it's a movie came.

Speaker 4 I'm talking about Beowulf. Let's watch some of that movie.
I want to remember what it looks like.

Speaker 3 It looks probably like a video game pre-cut scene.

Speaker 3 That's what's crazy, right?

Speaker 3 I couldn't make, I've thought about taking Beowulf, importing it into my system, and then just painting over it that's

Speaker 3 which which let's go which by the way you can do easily yeah easily i thought about fixing what this looks like with the beowulf oh geez yeah i mean it looks like a like a video game cutscene at this point yeah but it was kind of cool because everybody looked like that not just the monster

Speaker 3 that's that was kind of cool about it i mean the difference is is that this was actual like

Speaker 3 performances and so we could we could take you know ray winstone and have him ray Winstone doesn't look like that. Like, he looks a little heftier.
And.

Speaker 1 Cuts his own off.

Speaker 1 Cuts my arm off. Cut my own arm off.

Speaker 2 It's funny because

Speaker 3 our original script was much more modest than this, but then Zemachus was like, okay, boys, it costs a million dollars a minute.

Speaker 1 Do whatever you want.

Speaker 4 He stabs a dragon in the heart.

Speaker 1 Oh, no.

Speaker 3 This movie is kind of a,

Speaker 3 I mean, it's a little,

Speaker 3 it's an interesting experience. What happened to me on this film, if you don't mind me? Yeah, go ahead.

Speaker 3 So I was going to make this movie myself.

Speaker 3 I had set it up initially at Image Movers with Zemachus Producing. And then it fell out, and the rights kind of reverted back to me.

Speaker 3 I had to cover the turnaround on it, but the rights reverted back to me, and I was going to go make the movie myself for nothing. And I was trying to set it up.

Speaker 3 And it was really, I was broke at the time and I was not going to make money. And I had to cover the turnaround expenses myself on the film, which were considerable.

Speaker 3 But I wanted to make the movie really bad. And I was working on Silent Hill, this other movie I wrote, and

Speaker 3 I suddenly started getting calls. And it was like

Speaker 3 the producer of Polar Express, this guy Steve Bing,

Speaker 3 wanted to buy the script. He's like, I want to buy it it for Zemekus.
And I said, ah, too little, too late. I'm making it now.

Speaker 3 And I kept saying no.

Speaker 3 And I was working on this film in Canada, and I'm just trying to finish it. And every hour I'm getting a call from agents at CA and they're like.

Speaker 2 Jack Raptor, right?

Speaker 3 Yeah, it was.

Speaker 3 Actually, yeah, it was Jack. How did you know it was Jack?

Speaker 1 Did I tell you that? Well, no, because, well,

Speaker 2 he was Zemekis' agent and became Zemekis' producing partner.

Speaker 3 And so I was getting.

Speaker 1 And he's the guy who gets shit done. Yeah, he is the guy who gets shit done.

Speaker 3 Well, I was like, you know, no, no, no. And, you know, no, I won't.
I'm doing it myself. No, no.

Speaker 3 And Steve Bing, and I said, if another agent calls me, I'm firing the agency. And they're like, will you at least meet with the producer? And so I went ahead and I meet with them.

Speaker 3 And he says, listen, if I don't make this film with Sam Micos, with Bob, I'm going to miss the moment. I'm going to lose the movie.

Speaker 3 It's going to be over.

Speaker 3 Just, what's your price? Just tell me, what's your price? And I said, I don't have a price. I don't work like that.
He said, listen, everybody's got a price.

Speaker 3 I said, well, I may have one, but I'm not going to tell you. And he's like, look, why don't you just tell me? Just discourage me.

Speaker 1 So I said, okay.

Speaker 3 You want me to discourage you? And so I started like making shit up. I need this.
I want that. I want this.
I want this. I tried to come up with how much money had anybody ever made on a script.

Speaker 3 And let's add some money to that. I went over the top.

Speaker 1 He's like, ooh.

Speaker 3 Well, Roger, that is...

Speaker 3 And I had grown a beard to make the movie and like grew my hair long like a Viking to learn about you know why Vikings had beards etc all that kind of stuff I'm making the movie I'm a Viking he said well Roger that is really discouraging but we have a deal

Speaker 3 and I was like and I was like well

Speaker 3 okay and I started driving home and I started like I had never done anything I'd never done something for money before I'd always done it because I for passion and then the money came.

Speaker 3 And this is the first time in my life that I had ever made a choice based on money, this titanic amount of money, and I was, understand, broke.

Speaker 3 And I went home and I cried. And then the check came and nothing dries tears like money.
And then Zendachus invited me into the process, which was really great of him. He really wanted me and Neil

Speaker 3 to be at his side and collaborate with him. And it was a fabulous experience.
But to be honest, I was like, who am I now?

Speaker 3 What does it all mean? I just gave away something I wanted to do my entire life. I've always been chasing this John Borman film, Excalibur.

Speaker 3 I think it's one of the most beautiful movies ever made about the Arthurian legends. And

Speaker 3 if you watch Beowulf and Excalibur, they're very similar, actually, thematically.

Speaker 3 And so

Speaker 3 I was like, who am I now? What does it all mean? You know, I don't even care. I don't even know if I want to make a movie anymore.

Speaker 3 You know, like, what do I have to tell now now that I've just completely sold out?

Speaker 3 And then I was at a dinner and

Speaker 3 a big dinner and I was

Speaker 3 driving home that night and

Speaker 3 I was giving somebody who was at the dinner a lift. My wife was in the backseat of the car and we were, I told my daughter I was going to be home by midnight.
We lived in Ojai and it was dark.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 I

Speaker 3 so I was speeding. I have a lead foot.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 I was speeding to get there. Without getting into the details of what happened,

Speaker 3 I lost control of the car. There was another vehicle, but they fled the scene.
I lost control of the vehicle.

Speaker 3 I think my tire blew, but I was going into a ditch. And I knew I was going into

Speaker 3 this deep ditch because it was right near my house. It's full of rocks and stuff.
And I knew if I go in there, we'll die.

Speaker 3 And so I turned into the thing and then I turned away from it to try to, and the car spun out and I ended up on the other side of the street where I knew there was like a cow pasture and I was like well what's the worst thing that can happen there well it was pretty bad there was a telephone pole and I hit the telephone pole my passenger

Speaker 3 took the impact and my wife was thrown from the car when I came to

Speaker 3 All I could hear was the horn, you know, like my hearing's going to have glass in my mouth and

Speaker 3 I'm injured as well. I climb out of the car and it's dark.
It's really dark.

Speaker 3 But somebody's already arrived-the ex-DA from Ventura County, who did all the drunk driving laws and put those on the books. And he was the first person on the scene.

Speaker 3 I was right near the fire department. They showed up shortly afterwards.
But when I jumped out of the car, I came running around to see what happened. I saw my wife on

Speaker 3 the asphalt. She had been thrown from the vehicle.

Speaker 3 And I

Speaker 3 threw myself

Speaker 3 onto my knees on the pavement, and I found myself in that moment

Speaker 3 asking for the one thing that mattered, which was just life.

Speaker 3 She looked dead.

Speaker 3 And I just, in that moment, I

Speaker 3 dug down, I begged her to come back to life. And I just, I said, I will give anything for life.
Just in any form, I'll take it.

Speaker 3 And in that moment she came back to life. It was like

Speaker 3 the life came back into her. Okay, it was a completely fucked up scene.

Speaker 3 My other passenger is dying in the car or dead. And

Speaker 3 the police are suddenly there. And next thing I know, I'm in jail.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 suddenly, you know, like

Speaker 3 suddenly I found myself in jail. I found myself

Speaker 3 guilty of manslaughter. And

Speaker 3 something that is absolutely irreversible happening, which is, you know,

Speaker 3 someone lost their life at my hand.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 so after that, I, you know, I ended up, I found myself in jail and doing time. And suddenly everything that had come was gone.

Speaker 3 Like, everything that I had made, gone.

Speaker 1 It all went, you know, out.

Speaker 1 All that money you you made?

Speaker 3 To the settlement.

Speaker 3 I didn't even have time to spend it. I didn't even have time to register that it was there.
And it was gone. Because

Speaker 3 it was like it was not real.

Speaker 3 And then you find yourself in jail.

Speaker 3 And suddenly everything is gone.

Speaker 3 Career is gone.

Speaker 3 Everybody stops calling. It's over.

Speaker 3 Two hit films, doesn't matter.

Speaker 1 It's all over.

Speaker 3 In fact, it was right in the middle of the publicity on Beowulf. It was just toward the end of it.
And

Speaker 1 it was,

Speaker 3 it's the most horrible thing that

Speaker 3 has ever happened to me. And

Speaker 3 I found myself then alone in jail,

Speaker 3 incarcerated,

Speaker 3 alone with my remorse and regret and

Speaker 3 and really getting existential about things. Really like

Speaker 3 coming to appreciate

Speaker 3 you know simple existence is the best thing there is.

Speaker 3 People don't appreciate what we have. You don't appreciate it until it's gone and it is can go like first of all we live in bodies of glass.
My wife was horribly injured and

Speaker 3 and it has been a decade to

Speaker 3 not just rebuild our lives, but to

Speaker 3 for her to come back to health, even.

Speaker 3 What it did, though,

Speaker 3 because I would do anything to

Speaker 3 reverse that, to reverse what happened. I would give anything to do it.
And I don't say this lightly, but having said that,

Speaker 3 I'm kind of grateful as well

Speaker 3 because I was

Speaker 3 like asleep walking through life.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 it wasn't until that happened that I completely, like, it changed how I see everything. It was like my third eye opened up.
I don't view anything the same way. I, you know, once you've been

Speaker 3 incarcerated and you've been deprived of

Speaker 3 everything and you have a lot of time to think and be existential,

Speaker 3 you come out of that experience. At least I came out of that experience.
And, you know, I looked at a tree and I was like, okay, that's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my life.

Speaker 3 I hope I never not feel this way, this

Speaker 3 appreciation for a cloud. You know,

Speaker 3 to be able, like when you're in prison, to be able to pet a cat, for example, it's so simple. It's such a nothing thing, you think.
Okay, to be able to pet an animal is like a gift.

Speaker 3 The simplest things are gifts. When I was in jail, it was also a little bit like a comedy.
You know, you have people walking in circles and, you know, everybody's trying to control the outside.

Speaker 3 And so you start really seeing human behavior up front. I mean, when I was in jail,

Speaker 3 you know, I'm there

Speaker 3 literally during the Academy Awards, it's on the TV in the tank. And I'm watching him win, like, for Django.

Speaker 3 So while Quentin is like at the height of things, I'm pretty much at the...

Speaker 2 Watching through bars.

Speaker 1 No one in the bar.

Speaker 3 And not only that, but Greg Shapiro, who produced the rules of attraction for me, my producer, who came and visited me with Robin Wright in the days that followed, he won for Zero Dark Dark 30.

Speaker 3 And so I'm like, there, like,

Speaker 2 like

Speaker 3 to be taken from one point where you feel like you're at the top and you're like, oh, you think you're, uh,

Speaker 3 you think you understand things. No, I'm going to take you and put you at the bottom.
But let me tell you something.

Speaker 3 In that moment, I was sitting on the asphalt and my wife came back to life, I immediately knew what I had to say as a filmmaker after that. It was like

Speaker 3 whatever had, whatever cynicism I had had, you know,

Speaker 3 about the movie and not making it,

Speaker 3 it just

Speaker 3 went away.

Speaker 1 Evaporated, yeah.

Speaker 3 It evaporated. It evaporated.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 the ecstatic experiences, and they were ecstatic, that I had in jail, were like, I mean, you see things kind of for real. When you see somebody, you know, get hanged by their selly

Speaker 3 in a cell.

Speaker 3 Or

Speaker 3 when you know that,

Speaker 3 you know,

Speaker 3 oh, that El Salvadorian MS-13 Hitman guy,

Speaker 3 he's going to kill that

Speaker 3 gay dude.

Speaker 3 He's going to kill him in the yard. I'll go lock myself in my cell.

Speaker 3 Literally, I'll go lock myself in. Shut the door because you know shit is going to go down.
Jesus. And so, like, like, that was like every day.
And so suddenly it was like, you know,

Speaker 3 and also you really know who stands with you after something horrible happens. And

Speaker 3 like John Langley, our customer from Video Archives, ended up being like, like when I, like I said, when I was in jail, he loaned me money. And he gave me my first job when I got out.

Speaker 3 That was our customer who did that.

Speaker 3 And so, um

Speaker 1 like i value our customers yeah

Speaker 3 like and uh and and and especially john and his family and maggie who i like it really is like i talk about john a lot but really maggie she was really my big champion i think and so um anyhow i uh

Speaker 3 um you know

Speaker 3 What it taught me, actually,

Speaker 3 because I was a filmmaker and I was up my own ass most of the time, but what it kind of taught me was, you know,

Speaker 3 be compassionate to other people because you might not know it, but they might be going through shit in their lives.

Speaker 3 You know, and God forbid it be something health-related, which is almost out of your control. But, you know, people are suffering and people are struggling.

Speaker 3 And I used to be a lot more cavalier about people and kind of fuck with people and

Speaker 3 be forceful with people and not really care as much. Now I'm acutely aware of

Speaker 3 people and

Speaker 3 what they may be going through.

Speaker 4 I think this is the best way to wrap this up.

Speaker 1 Perfect.

Speaker 4 Gentlemen, thank you very much. This is an awesome conversation.
This has been really great. Thank you for letting us come up with this.
Three and a half hours just flew by.

Speaker 1 Thank you. Oh my God.

Speaker 2 I actually thought, oh, I guess he's wrapping it up quick.

Speaker 1 No, I think it's three hours. I thought it was like 90 minutes.
Three hours and 50 minutes.

Speaker 2 I thought it was like 90 minutes.

Speaker 4 No, there it is, the Video Archives Podcast

Speaker 1 on Patreon.

Speaker 1 Patreon

Speaker 1 on the right. Patreon.com slash video archives.

Speaker 3 If you just look up video archivespodcast.com, it'll

Speaker 1 be beautiful. Thank you guys.
Appreciate it. Thank you.
Thank you.