[Bonus Preview] Deep Cuts: October 2025

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Speaker 2 Hello, everyone, and welcome back to your favorite podcast, Full Stop, that just so happens to be about movies movies and how it's nearly impossible to make one, let alone a good one, let alone your favorite podcast, Full Stop, that just so happens to be about movies.

Speaker 2 I'm David. I'm going to be facilitating this conversation.

Speaker 2 This is our second deep cuts episode where we will be making any corrections, although I don't think we have very many, asking some questions of Lizzie and Chris, and finally talking about a through line between the October movies, October spooky movies that we discussed.

Speaker 2 Just a quick heads up to say that if you are not a subscriber at the $5 $5 tier above, either on Apple Podcasts or on Patreon, this will only be a partial release for the full episode where we'll cover additional questions like how and why what went wrong came to be, book-to-film adaptations that we'd love to see, and movies we probably won't cover and why that is.

Speaker 2 Subscribe. Lizzie, Chris, what's up?

Speaker 5 Not much.

Speaker 5 I loved our October movies. I loved a spooky month.
I thought this was a really fun roundup of films and episodes.

Speaker 5 We got a lot of really fun responses to the Blair Witch episode, which I loved reading through and especially hearing from people who either saw it at Sundance.

Speaker 5 We had a few people come forward and say that they saw it, which is amazing.

Speaker 5 And also had some people come forward and say they saw it in theaters and that they thought it was real.

Speaker 5 So that was kind of fun to hear from people who were directly impacted by that super viral and famous marketing campaign.

Speaker 5 But we did get one email from Gregory M that I wanted to share because I think this is really nice. So this is what Gregory had to say.

Speaker 5 I just listened to the Blair Witch episode and wanted to share a personal anecdote about Mike Williams. That's Michael C.
Williams, who played Michael C. Williams in the Blair Witch project.

Speaker 5 He said, I grew up with him. He might be one of the most genuinely nice, caring, and talented human beings I've ever met, much less shared a stage with.

Speaker 5 He married his high school sweetheart and they're still happily married, raising a family in our hometown. He directs shows on the stage we shared in high school.

Speaker 5 You could always count on him to say just the right thing to cheer you up or defuse tension.

Speaker 5 Everyone who met him loved him and anyone who shared a stage with him knew he had it and actually had about the best shot that a kid from a small suburban town could to make it in the industry.

Speaker 5 We were all thrilled when the Blair Witch took off and devastated when it basically ended his career before it even started.

Speaker 5 And he said, thank you for giving him the credit and respect he's been due for a long, long time. I thought that was really nice.

Speaker 5 And again, he's wonderful in that movie. And, you know, as we discussed, the contribution that those actors made is monumental to the success of that film.

Speaker 5 Even just learning that it was entirely his idea to kick the map into the river was crazy. Like that's a massive plot point in that movie.
So wanted to share that.

Speaker 5 Thank you, Gregory M, for sending that in.

Speaker 5 And thank you, Michael C. Williams, for it sounds like just being a lovely human as well as a really good actor.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that was such a cool email.

Speaker 2 Also, apropos of the people who got to see the Blair Witch premiere at Sundance, Lizzie and I got to see the Sundance/slash world premiere of Hereditary when we were there with Worm. We did.

Speaker 2 That was one of the coolest things ever. No one knew what to expect, and it was one of the best horror movies I've ever seen.

Speaker 5 Tears were leaking out of my eyeballs because I was too scared to close them. Yeah.
A wonderful memory of Sundance.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Chris, how are you doing? Doing good.

Speaker 2 That's all I got.

Speaker 2 All right. So we'll kick it off here with some questions.
And we solicited our patrons with questions and said that we would go on a popularity sort of basis.

Speaker 2 So the ones that got a lot of likes, we would prioritize. And so I did do that.
Some of the questions are a little more on the Chris Lizzy side of things than the movie side of things.

Speaker 2 So I'm trying to balance that out. But the first question, which I think is nice because a lot of people liked it, is how is your post-fire recovery going?

Speaker 2 And I think it'd be nice to let the audience know what's up with everybody on that front.

Speaker 5 Oh, Chris, you get to answer this.

Speaker 2 It's fine. I don't know.

Speaker 2 Everything's fine. Thank you for asking, but we're good.
There's not much to share.

Speaker 5 Chris is busier than ever. They have a very, very cute new place.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you know, we're in a new rental. It's a great area.
And we've not had any issues with insurance. And I feel very lucky.
And

Speaker 2 everything's fine.

Speaker 5 In terms of us, we are getting ready to return home to Los Angeles, which I'm really, really excited about.

Speaker 5 We've, if anyone doesn't know, we've been in Seattle, David and I have since the fire, basically.

Speaker 5 And it's been great, but I'm ready to go home. So that's, that's kind of where we're at as we're finally returning to Hollywood, except we live 45 minutes to an hour from Hollywood.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that sums it up. We've been up in Seattle.
We're excited to go back to LA, but it's been a good year making the best of a curveball. All right.
second question.

Speaker 2 If you could interview anyone from any film production you've covered, who would it be and why?

Speaker 2 Lizzie?

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 2 I'll go first.

Speaker 2 This just came to me, but

Speaker 2 Bernard Herman, who is the composer for most, if not all, of Hitchcock's films.

Speaker 2 as well as Citizen Kane, which we talked about, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Twilight Zone theme, and many, many others. He was

Speaker 2 notably a very difficult person to work with, especially at a time when composers were not expected to push back very much against studios and directors.

Speaker 2 If I could sit down at a table with him and get a sense of his personality and ask him how he decided to do what he did, he was known for doing really

Speaker 2 wild stuff that in the context of recording a score in that time would have been extremely unconventional. Whereas now you can sort of do anything with digital and put whatever instruments anywhere.

Speaker 2 He was, he would do crazy things. Like he would have, for the day the earth stood still,

Speaker 2 five harps, which is unheard of. You would usually have one harp.

Speaker 2 And for that same score, he used two theremins, which probably was an instrument most people had never heard. It's a, if you don't know what it is, it's a instrument.

Speaker 2 that you play by moving your hand within a magnetic field between two antennas. You know the sound because you've you've heard it a million times.

Speaker 2 Him establishing it in this movie made it iconic for future space alien movies. I'll drop an audio clip here so you can hear what it sounds like.

Speaker 2 He would also do things like having 20 flutes or just one specific instrument played by many people at once.

Speaker 2 He, I think, is as influential as any composer ever in terms of guiding what a film score sounds like today and establishing sort of score musical effects.

Speaker 2 Obviously, you think of the psycho violins, but there were all kinds of things that he did that sort of blurred the line into sound effects

Speaker 2 before the Hans Zimmer of it all.

Speaker 5 Nice. All right, I have two, I guess.
One is Uma Thurman.

Speaker 5 I would love to hear more from her directly about her relationship with Quentin Tarantino and also just her career and sort of, you know, how she feels about a lot of that now.

Speaker 5 And I think she's a really fascinating actress.

Speaker 5 And also just because she's such a physical performer and to be able to hear about, you know, the preparation, physicality of a lot of her roles, stunts, all that, I think would be really cool.

Speaker 5 And then the other one, I'm reaching for the stars here.

Speaker 5 Christian Bale. I

Speaker 5 am obsessed with American Psycho and with him in general. And he's so...
dedicated to every role that he takes on.

Speaker 5 It would be really fun to hear Christian Bale's what went wrongs because it seems like so many things have gone wrong and he just keeps plowing ahead

Speaker 5 and is such an amazingly dedicated actor. So I would love to hear from any of them or so many directors and

Speaker 5 writers that we've discussed. Chris, what about you?

Speaker 2 I would pick Charlton Heston at the time of the making of Ben-Hur. Oh.

Speaker 2 The reason being, there was this big open question in the episode as to whether or not Heston would have been averse to the homosexual subtext that Gorvadal claims to have been instructed or permitted to write in between Ben-Hur

Speaker 2 and Masala, the antagonist of the film. And

Speaker 2 we got a lot of responses to that episode.

Speaker 2 I think there were some people who were surprised that Heston was a civil rights activist at the time because he fell into or he slid toward a pretty extreme conservatism, borderline, candidly, borderline white supremacy at the end of his life.

Speaker 2 Some of that may, not to let him off the hook, but may have been tied to dementia, which he suffered from later in life. And so I would just really love to, he seems like an interesting person.

Speaker 2 I thought his diary entries were really interesting. that I read.
And

Speaker 2 my takeaway was that he's a more complicated person than I think we tend to give him credit for because of how rigid he had become late in his life.

Speaker 2 And I would be really curious to just know what he would, you know, what he was like, and ask him some questions at the, you know, again, contemporaneous to the making of the film.

Speaker 2 And he was a relatively young man. And

Speaker 2 maybe he would have been okay with that subtext, or maybe not. Maybe Gorvidal is 100% right.
We just don't know.

Speaker 2 And I would love to learn more about that because it was such an interesting moment in Hollywood. And it was, you know, his most successful film, kind of the, that was the peak of his career in a way.

Speaker 2 Um,

Speaker 2 so that I would do it, Charlton Heston, right at the making of Ben Hur.

Speaker 5 Great answer, which makes me want to change mine to what I should have answered in the first place, which is also a two-parter. Betty Davis and Joan Crawford.

Speaker 5 I want to find out how much they actually hated each other. I think a lot, but you know, you never know.

Speaker 2 How much was them playing to that narrative? Exactly. Yeah.

Speaker 5 How many weights did they put in their bathrobes to be dragged around?

Speaker 2 Good shout out to whatever happened to Baby Jane episode. Yes.
All right. Next, we got a question from Polly, who we met at the live show.
Hey, Polly. It's great to meet you.

Speaker 2 Polly asks, what makes you do the jump from adding a movie to your list to starting to research? How long does it take to research? And are you researching multiple episodes simultaneously?

Speaker 2 I would say, so in terms of how long it takes from an episode to go from the list to an episode, it just depends. There are some that skip the list and it's just, wow, we got to do this movie.

Speaker 2 And we throw it on there right away because it seems like such an interesting story. Others, I think, reveal themselves as the schedule is put together.

Speaker 2 You know, we've made a concerted effort to try to release episodes that are thematically relevant to the releases happening nowadays.

Speaker 2 So we did, you know, Superman, the 1978 version, concurrent to the release of the new Superman. We just did our spooky Halloween months.

Speaker 2 We're going to do a very James Cameron Christmas with Avatar, Fire, and Ash coming out this December.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and Aliens, exactly. So Aliens has been on the list for a while.
It's been one, you know, that we've wanted to cover for a long time. Lizzie pounced on it.
You son of a bitch.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 so I think

Speaker 2 there are some where it's, oh, now it's the 30th anniversary. So now we got to do it.
Or now it's the 40th anniversary. Or just there's something in the news about mostly Kevin Costner, it seems like.

Speaker 2 And so we got to cover that one.

Speaker 5 Which, by the way, we really need to cover Dances with Wolves.

Speaker 2 And Horizon and The Postman. And there's so many.

Speaker 2 Even rumor has it. So I think

Speaker 2 that there's no set. window.
There are movies that have sat on our list for a long time, like The Matrix, the first list I ever made. The Matrix was the second or third movie I put on it.

Speaker 2 And I've just been waiting because it's so good. And I don't know.
I don't know what I'm waiting for, but it's there are some that you almost don't want to touch yet. You want to save them

Speaker 2 because I do think the show's gotten better as we've gone on. And there are a couple I wish we could redo.
And

Speaker 2 okay, so and then in terms of research, I mean, it takes a lot of hours between researching and writing, like 20, 30, 40 hours, you know, of just there's the research part, and now we have researchers who do the initial heavy lift for us, which is amazing.

Speaker 5 I want to give a big shout out. We work with both Jesse, who is Chris's sister and an amazing researcher, and Laura as well.
Those are our two researchers. And

Speaker 5 that is just an enormous help, especially since we've gone weekly and the stuff that they're able to dig out. I love reading through the research packets that they turn in.

Speaker 5 And basically the way that it works now that we have researchers, and it's not just me and Chris sitting in our dungeons trying to dig everything.

Speaker 5 out from the holes of the internet is we'll go through the packets that they sent us and at least the way that i work is kind of like reading through all the sources that they've been able to pull And then we kind of formulate it into the story that we want to tell over the course of the episode.

Speaker 5 But yeah, it takes a really long time. Also, Christopher, I have a bone to pick with you because you launched this primer format, which I love.

Speaker 5 I've listened to all your primers and I was like, I love these. These are great.
I can't wait to do my own. And then I did my own.

Speaker 2 That's like 50 hours of work. There's a lot.
There are a lot of work. It's like, why did you do this?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And then everyone gets mad at me for saying primers. Why did I do this? I don't know.
But it's, yeah, it's, but it's a, it is a rotating process. So like, you know, I'll get the research, for example.

Speaker 2 I'll start, then I'll dive into the script, finding the story. I'll sometimes go back to Jesse and say, hey, I need more on this, or I'll continue to research it myself.

Speaker 2 And she's already jumped on to the next movie. And so it's, it's a constant handoff.
And that's the only way we can keep it going. And David has, we should also shout out.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I was going to say, and to give credit where it's to other questions asked about the whole process and post-production.

Speaker 2 Edits, it's hard to put a time on them. There's a lot of sort of technical back end.
Usually edits take about an hour for 10 minutes of audio.

Speaker 2 So somewhere around 8 to 12 hours just to edit the rough cut. What I was going to say is to give credit where it's due.

Speaker 2 We've had Karen come on recently, past few months, and she's been tremendously helpful covering episodes. We've added more bonus content.

Speaker 2 And, you know, the Chris and Lazir are speaking to primers, which obviously have music.

Speaker 2 So it's having that support is critical and makes it so that we can actually output the amount of content that we are. All right, Chris, you actually just touched on the next question.

Speaker 2 So perfect timing.

Speaker 2 Are there any movies you've covered in the past that if you were to cover them today, you would either approach differently or reach a new conclusion, either due to more information or a change in perspective?

Speaker 2 I regret the way I talked about religion and the Elmen

Speaker 2 because I was really dismissive. I do still think the book of Revelation is silly.
That's my honest opinion. I do.
I think it's silly, but I think there's a better way to approach it.

Speaker 2 I think I have hopefully gotten better at not being so dismissive.

Speaker 2 And so that's like an obvious one to me. And I do really like that movie.
And I think it's a really important and interesting period of American history.

Speaker 2 And so I think I actually like did a disservice, Lizzie, to you exploring that point in American history.

Speaker 2 But again, by just dismissing it and saying, this is dumb, this is silly, how could anyone believe this? You know, it was, again, it was just a bit of a holier-than-thou approach.

Speaker 2 And I hope I've taken, I tried to take a very different approach with Ben Hurr, for example. I'm not a religious person, that is what I work.

Speaker 2 Thanks for joining us for this October Deep Cuts episode. If you want to hear the rest of the episode, join us at the $5 tier above, either on Apple or Patreon.

Speaker 2 Otherwise, we'll see you on Monday for The Last of the Mohicans.

Speaker 1 Hey, I'm Paige DeSorbo, and I'm always thinking about underwear.

Speaker 3 I'm Hannah Berner, and I'm also thinking about underwear, but I prefer full coverage. I like to call them my granny panties.

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Speaker 1 And the bras, soft, supportive, and actually breathable.

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Speaker 3 That's why I live in my Tommy John pajamas.

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