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#2240 – Roger Avary & Quentin Tarantino Podcast Episode Description
Quentin Tarantino is an Academy Award-winning writer, producer, and director known for films such as “Pulp Fiction” and “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” Roger Avary is a Tony Award-winning director, screenwriter, and producer known for “The Rules of Attraction” and his collaboration with Tarantino on “Pulp Fiction.” Together, they host the second season of their podcast, “The Video Archives,” available now.
www.patreon.com/videoarchives
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#2240 – Roger Avary & Quentin Tarantino Podcast Episode Summary
In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, the discussion centers around the evolution of media consumption, particularly focusing on the rise of podcasts as a replacement for traditional talk shows. The speakers reflect on how podcasts have democratized the platform, allowing anyone with an interesting perspective and setup to create engaging content. This shift is compared to the era of iconic talk shows and film critics like Siskel and Ebert, highlighting how podcasts have filled the void left by such figures.
The conversation also touches on the business model of podcasting, specifically the use of platforms like Patreon. The speakers discuss the strategy of offering a truncated version of their podcast for free, while full episodes and additional content are available to subscribers. This model is designed to cater to dedicated listeners who are willing to support the show financially, fostering a community through direct interaction on message boards.
A recurring theme is the importance of creating content for a passionate audience rather than focusing solely on maximizing listener numbers. The speakers emphasize the value of engaging with their core audience, who actively participate and support the podcast, ensuring its sustainability.
Overall, the episode provides insights into the changing landscape of media, the opportunities for content creators in the podcasting space, and the significance of building a loyal listener base through platforms like Patreon.
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#2240 – Roger Avary & Quentin Tarantino Podcast Episode Transcript (Unedited)
Speaker: 0
00:01
Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out.
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00:03
The Joe Rogan experience.
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00:06
Showing my day Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
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00:11
Alright. Here we go. We’re rolling.
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00:13
So you’re you’re saying that someone was telling you how to kill someone with coffee?
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00:16
Okay. So I got to know all these, you were talking about, some His
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00:20
name’s John McPhee.
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00:21
Some operators. And, I got to know through a friend, through a billionaire friend who, loaned his plane to to Clinton to fly those people out of, I think North Korea. And so from that point on, he was surrounded by these guys. And, one of them, this guy, Mikey, which isn’t his real name.
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00:44
I think he’s actually named they name them all after the archangels. So he was ai Michael
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00:49
and the other
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00:50
guy Gabriel. And, like, they they take on these
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00:56
there’s nothing greater than an assassin with biblical archangel. Yeah.
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01:01
And, well, you know and so, he, you know, we got to know each other because of our mutual bryden. And, I think what happened was, he and a couple of the other guys, you know, they were placed on me as, like, for surveillance purposes. Like, you know, find out what this Avery guy’s about maybe or just keep an eye on him or whatever.
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01:22
And they told me right upfront, like, be nice to your surveillance. You know, like, don’t try to lose us or anything like that because, you know, I heard stories about how, you know, they’re surveilling somebody in wherever, Bolivia. And suddenly, some gang attacks their surveillance, and they step in, kick the shit out of the gang. And so, so I got to know these guys.
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01:44
And naturally, you know, I’m a writer and filmmaker, and so I, of course, wanna talk to them about stuff. And they immediately started volunteering. Oh, yeah. We’ve learned all these different ways when I became an operator. Blah blah blah.
Speaker: 0
01:55
Ai 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. Ai was like, woah. Just like when I told Quintin about this, he’s like, well, what are those? I’d like to hear those. Everybody wants to hear those.
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02:10
And so one of the ones that I think is the best one is, you inject someone with coffee. 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: 2
02:26
That’s it? That’s it. Is this just right into the blood? Coffee can kill you?
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02:30
Sometimes the simple way is
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02:31
to get ai. Like, just ai into the jugular in a with a syringe.
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02:34
Yes. Jesus. After extracting whatever information you need to get out
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02:37
of him. But he was much coffee will kill you like that?
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02:40
Sorry for ai? I don’t know.
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02:41
You know, is it the Turkish kind or is it, Folgers?
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02:45
Yeah. Cuban espresso.
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02:46
Yeah.
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02:46
And but he was a he was a medic, you know, during, during the war. Well, the war. And, he was a meh. And, so he, you know, was kind of identified as somebody who knew how to kill somebody very easily because you know what will work Yeah. Because you’re a medic. And so, yeah, I would hear every now and then, I would say I’d kill some guy and some diplomat or something in the Philippines.
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03:11
I’d hit him with my car, and I’d look in my rear view mirror and make a determination, a medical determination of, you know, is the guy, still alive or is he 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.
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03:29
All the ai, they’re doing it.
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03:30
Well, Jamie and I were just talking. They think they have a photo of the guy who whacked that insurance CEO.
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03:35
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Uh-huh.
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03:36
Yeah. They think they have a photo of his face now.
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03:38
Oh, they do.
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03:39
Well, Well, I would think with another time where
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03:41
they or they picked it up later.
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03:42
I think, you know, there’s cameras everywhere.
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03:44
Yeah.
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03:44
Yeah. And that’s part of the problem with someone, and I don’t think this guy was a professional. I think this guy if I had a guess, some guy got fucked over. Apparently, that company is really bad on denying claims.
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03:57
Uh-huh. Thirties 34% denial rate. Something like
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04:00
that. Ai 16. Yeah. Yeah. So those guys. I
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04:04
don’t think anybody’s gonna, like, be crying too hard over that ai. Yeah.
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04:08
Maybe it’s family, but that’s about it. Yeah. It it’s a dirty dirty business. The business of insurance is fucking gross. It’s gross. And especially health care insurance just Yeah. Fucking gross.
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04:18
Well, actually, all insurance. Ai live in California and, all of a sudden because I live adjacent to any kind of open space, like, nobody will insure my house because of fire. Right. And so suddenly, it’s like I have a a house that’s uninsurable and it’s not just meh, it’s everybody. Mhmm. And so it’s chaos. Yeah. Yeah.
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04:35
I ai a friend who’s trying to sell a house in California and they it turned out it was sai $125,000 a year just to
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04:43
get fire insurance. Yeah.
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04:45
Yeah. Like, what? Yeah. It’s insane. Fucking nuts.
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04:48
It’s insane.
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04:49
Yeah. But, you know, I was evacuated 3 times when I lived there. I used to live in Bell Canyon and Yeah. Yeah. You know, it was fucking it was rough for me.
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04:56
I’m look, I’ve been, like, I’ve been really lucky I live in I’m almost afraid to say it. Alright? Because I’ve been living in the the the Hollywood Hills, and I’ve never any of the fire stuff happens never happen around
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05:05
me.
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05:06
It is just luck. Yeah.
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05:08
I mean, the benefit of your place is you’re at least in a helicopter accessible Well, that is They’re just gonna dump all that fire retardant right on top of you.
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05:16
I literally am kinda, at the top of the hill on a bunch of rock. Ai? So if the whole fucking place just turns into a inferno, I’m still fucked. And I think that place
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05:24
has probably been there a while. It’s probably withstood all sorts of calamity. Yeah. When I
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05:28
was filming Fear Factor, I talked to this guy who was a fire guy, for the fire department. He sai, it’s just gonna be a matter of time. There’s gonna be one day where a fire hits LA and the wind is the right way and we’re not gonna be able to stop it. It’s just gonna burn right through to the ocean. He goes, it’s just a matter of time. We all know it. I was like, what the fuck, dude?
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05:47
I go, the whole city? He goes, the whole city. He goes, when those big fires get going Yeah. Yeah. There’s not a damn thing.
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05:53
Like, what what happened to Malibu a few years back? Like, those are Sai I always thought Malibu, those rich people Well,
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05:59
that was the closest yeah. Shah was the close that was, like, around 93. That actually happened while we were shooting Pulp Fiction.
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06:06
Really?
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06:07
Yeah. Well, there was a there was a big Malibu fire. The big Malibu fire happened while we were shooting Pulp Fiction. Fiction. So we actually set up a TV on the set because Bruce Willis was gonna maybe lose his house. And so he was ai, actually, sai we have the little TV area sai we could, like so in between takes, we can watch what’s going on with the fire.
Speaker: 1
06:27
And they’re ai, as it and there was all these reports that, no. Bruce Willis and his family are on top of the house with the, with their water with their water hose. Like, Ai go, no. He’s not. He’s right here.
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06:39
Well, the thing is fires were normal. 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. But now they put all those houses in there where there never were houses, you know, because the fire is a natural process.
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06:54
It kinda clears the land, cleans the land, and, it’s it’s normal, actually. But, you know, when you put all that kindling in there, suddenly we end up with these, like, super storms of fire just where everything’s just, you know, going crazy. Yeah. It’s I think it’s over development, which is the cause of these insane, kind of fires that we’re getting.
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07:17
Yeah. But it’s a cool place to live. Yeah. You’re not gonna stop people from developing in Malibu. You know? It’s just too nice. No. No. You’re not Just take your chances, roll your dice.
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07:25
Yeah.
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07:25
Yeah. Yeah. Well, but you roll your ai. You take your chances and you roll your dice no matter where you live.
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07:30
Yeah. It’s just it’s just fucked up when it happens. Like,
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07:33
Oh, my god. Yeah.
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07:34
I drove home once. We were, filming Fear Factor. We had to stop the set early because the fire was so bad. This is ai 2003 or something, 94. And driving home, it took me 55 minutes on the 5 to get home, and the entire time, the right side of the highway was on fire for 55 minutes.
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07:49
Everything, ai, Lord of the Rings style.
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07:51
So so 3 different times you got evacuated from your house?
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07:53
Yeah. Meh. 3 different times.
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07:55
And so what is, like okay. So you decide what what you’re gonna take with you kind of thing?
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07:59
Yeah. Last time the last time was the last time. It was, like, you know, the last big fire in LA. And, I came home from the Comedy Store at, like, 1 o’clock in the morning, and my wife and I are looking out the window and the ai, like, maybe 5 or 600 yards away, and it’s coming over the hill.
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08:14
And we were looking at each other, and I said, let’s just get the fuck out of here.
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08:17
Yeah. Right on.
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08:18
Let’s just get out of here now. Just 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? Yeah. You know? Who cares?
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08:28
If you have your life. Yeah. I I’m always the I don’t wanna say the stupid guy, but I’m the guy who, for some reason, always decides I’m gonna stay. Ai, I’m gonna end
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08:37
Oh, you’re that old guy.
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08:38
I live near a fire department. There’s a fire hydrant across from my driveway.
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08:42
The guy on the roof where the flood is happening. Yeah.
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08:45
You’re not on my property. 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. 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 the ridge, and I’m kinda watching it.
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08:58
Sai ran down to the fire department to see, you know, like, hey, guys. It’s it’s coming. It’s I can see it from my house. And they’re all there, like, hanging out, eating sandwiches and, like, not even worried about it. They’re like they kinda looked over at it. It’s it’s okay. It’ll be fine.
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09:12
It’ll just burn a little.
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09:13
Yeah. They get a little too blase blase about fire.
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09:16
Too blase. Meh by
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09:17
the way, my spec ops friend, he’s ai, fuck those firemen, man. Fuck them. They get so much, like, credit for, like, nothing. They have barely do anything. They’re on these incredible pension plans, like, rah
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09:30
rah rah.
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09:31
He, like, hates firemen.
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09:32
That’s ridiculous. Well That’s a well, it is a great job, but you can’t get mad at someone for having a great job.
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09:38
For having a great job. Yeah.
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09:39
There’s a buddy of mine that I used to play pool with.
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09:41
Well, you sai actually hump it into another country and kill somebody. So
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09:44
That’s well the thing is he’s not a real
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09:46
tough job. He’s not getting enough credit. That’s what
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09:48
it is. That’s really
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09:49
what it comes from.
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09:50
Well, that’s better way to say it.
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09:52
Yeah. That’s the that’s the reality of our world today. Those people don’t get enough credit. But ai, you know, it is a great fucking job.
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09:59
But I like the way he breaks it Fuck to his cock.
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10:02
It’s like they all That’s
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10:03
what they say.
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10:04
Huge pensions, and everybody thinks they’re heroes. They’re not heroes.
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10:09
Well, it’s funny because They’re
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10:10
just doing their job.
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10:11
The firemen are very comfortable with fire. These people are very comfortable with people dying and dying because of them. You know, they just get real they meh blase blase about murder. I
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10:20
hear that.
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10:21
It’s not murder if it’s, sanctioned by your own country. Is that wonderful? Yeah. What a cool loophole. Yeah. Isn’t it?
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10:27
I had a a interesting thing. You know, it’s like, you know, when you live in the Hollywood Hills, you know, you’re paying actually, you know, you pretty decent property taxes. So you get there’s, you know, there’s a there’s, you know, there’s a little vig that comes with it.
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10:39
You know, you get a there’s a reason why you you know, you don’t have to wait 30 minutes during, when you’re, during election. You just go to the you go to the local, elementary school. You’re in and out in 5 minutes, alright, when it comes to election day. But also, it’s one of those stupid things that you do that like like like, what sai the fucking idiot where you you turn on the burner and then you, like, leave the room for a ai.
Speaker: 1
11:01
Alright. And then you come back, and all of a bryden, your your kitchen is is flaming. Alright. And so,
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11:10
has that happened to you?
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11:11
That happened to me once. And, so the the alarm goes off, and I hit the button. Let the fire department know. And then I I I put it out. I put it out, like, pretty much immediately. And then maybe 5 minutes later it could have been 3. 5 minutes later, the fire truck is at my door. Woah.
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11:38
So I didn’t even have time to say, hey. It’s, 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 meh. I go, look, ai. I’m really sorry. I was really stupid. You know?
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11:52
I I left the room and then with the pot on the stove and it went whatever in any way. And, so I’m really sorry I wasted your time. I’m really, really sorry I wasted your time. Having said that, it’s nice to see that you guys are here this quick.
Speaker: 0
12:06
Yeah. Yeah. And I’m sure they were like, oh, we’ll just get a selfie. And And
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12:09
and they were like, yeah. Yeah. You’re right. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Exactly. Your private taxes pay for something. Are you sure you’re doing us to come in and just make sure?
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12:15
Sai ai yeah. Go ahead if you want.
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12:18
The problem is sometimes they have to chop through the walls to make sure
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12:21
that the wall is not ai
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12:22
and embers inside. Yeah. Spray it all down.
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12:25
Get it It’s a
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12:25
hard fucking job when it’s a hard job, though.
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12:27
Mhmm.
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12:27
The thing is most of the time, they’re just chilling. Yeah. You know? They get to cook. They eat. They work out.
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12:32
Oh, I take ice cream down to our guys at the like, I’ll go out and buy a bunch of ice cream or some pizzas and take it down just on random days just to,
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12:41
well, actually, it was ai. That’s
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12:42
cool.
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12:42
Well, it was I’m
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12:43
okay with the fire guys.
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12:45
Well, it was actually funny because it was ai, one of the things that was a crack up. It was like the local fire department when we worked at video archives at our video store. The local fire department, was a customer. And so they’d rent different movies, but, like, it was almost out of out of 5 movies that they would rent, 4 are pornos. Yeah.
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13:07
No. They lived up to their They just literally ran career.
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13:10
Did you guys work together? Yeah. Yeah. No shit.
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13:12
That’s how
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13:13
you guys met? Yeah. Uh-huh.
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13:14
That’s how we met. Wow. Video ai in Manhattan Beach. How fucking cool is that?
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13:19
Ai, like, 80 4. Yeah. Yeah. 84 for about 5 years.
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13:22
Yeah. Maybe you had a little bit before 84.
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13:25
Well, I started officially at 84 because
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13:27
I remember meh before?
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13:28
Well, I was a customer before.
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13:29
Yeah. Yeah.
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13:30
I was a customer before. Yeah.
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13:31
I I predated Quentin as, one of the employees, sai I was there. Look at you guys. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, yeah.
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13:38
That’s that’s us.
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13:39
That’s crazy.
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13:41
Very unfortunate shirt on my part. There was
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13:45
a lot of unfortunate shirts in the eighties. Everybody was confused. They cut the drugs off in the seventies. No one knew what to do for 10 years.
Speaker: 1
13:52
That’s exactly it.
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13:53
Yeah. It’s it’s crazy. Like, you would have never thought back then that that industry would completely vanish. You thought Blockbuster Video is gonna be around forever.
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14:02
Well, you know, one of the things that that,
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14:05
Ai didn’t think film was gonna vanish either. Yeah.
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14:08
Yeah. Exactly. I didn’t
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14:09
think the theater experience was gonna go away either.
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14:11
But one of the things, though, that was the death keel to video stores that no one ever ai when they’re talking mom and pop, when when they’re talking old people, to, like, hey. You know, you you’ve retired from your business. You’ve got a nice little nest egg. If you want it if you sana 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 that’s a good business.
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14:39
Well, I don’t know anything about movies. Well, we, you have, people to help you, you know, to help you choose the titles and everything. So there’s a lot of people that, like, invested in this stuff, and and it seemed like a good idea. The reason that it seemed like a profitable idea was the idea of, like, well, you know, I sai you this video cassette, and you you you pay for the video cassette.
Speaker: 1
15:02
But the minute you rent it past the point that, where you 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. And, of course, you’ll have some cassettes that don’t ai as well, but, you know, but that’s the way it works out, but it should work out great.
Speaker: 1
15:20
Well, again, that sounds like a pretty good business model. Well, if I spend this money and then, you know, 5 years from now, boom, everything is is a a profit. Where where where it all fell apart is the idea that you always have to get new shit because, like, life it’s not a bookstore.
Speaker: 1
15:44
Well, bookstore need to get new stuff too, but it’s not a library. Life doesn’t stand still. Every month, there’s new titles coming out, and you have to be competitive, and you have to get the new titles. And so even if it if that were the issue, that wouldn’t be that big of a deal.
Speaker: 1
16:03
But if you’re a mom and pop store, you only have so much room.
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16:08
Mhmm. Yeah. So It’s a
Speaker: 0
16:09
speak it’s literally a space shelf space. Within
Speaker: 1
16:12
3 to 4 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 your your your tapes facing out, now everything is, you know, ai
Speaker: 0
16:30
Speak facing.
Speaker: 1
16:30
Spine facing. And and you’ve gotta really, and and and it just never stops. It never stops. Next month, then you gotta get this. And next month, you gotta get that. And next month, you gotta get that.
Speaker: 2
16:40
You need a Costco ai building.
Speaker: 1
16:42
Yeah. Well yeah. Well, again, if you have 4 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. You know? Meh and pop store and you have a bike store, you don’t have to keep getting new bikes every month.
Speaker: 1
16:59
If you have a pottery store, you don’t have to keep getting new
Speaker: 0
17:02
Regard regardless of your inventory. Single month. Yeah. Constantly have to grow your inventory.
Speaker: 1
17:06
At least 6 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: 0
17:13
And then there was another problem when when 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, you know, 50 Ai Hards. And a mom and pop store can’t afford to buy more than 1 or 2 Die Hards or 3 maybe to satisfy your clientele.
Speaker: 1
17:36
Title. Yeah. The thing is you’d speak you spend the money, ai, okay, like, you know, one of our big titles when we in the early days of video was Top Gun.
Speaker: 0
17:44
Yeah. Top Gun. Perfect example.
Speaker: 1
17:45
So you meh, like you know, you you you’ll get even the mom and pop stars. You’ll get 12 or 15.
Speaker: 0
17:52
Because everyone wants to see it. And at some point, it’s gonna be out, and it’s gonna be checked out. And so you’ve gotta satisfy your
Speaker: 1
17:58
Well, you’re gonna yeah. You’ll rent all 15 of those for the next 2 weeks. You know, it’s gonna be, you know, it’s gonna be good, but then now you now you have to sell them off Mhmm. You know, for $10 a piece, you know, once the the, you know, once the the the desire has died down.
Speaker: 0
18:13
Largely fell on us because we were a smaller store, and we had a Blockbuster just a block away, basically.
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18:18
Not even a block. What are you talking about? In the same fucking
Speaker: 0
18:20
Yeah. Basically, in
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18:21
the same It’s not a block away. It was in the On the block. Yeah. In the shopping center that
Speaker: 0
18:27
we were in. And yeah.
Speaker: 1
18:28
And Well, you’re you’re missing the best the most interesting thing. It’s not about the the bulk buy. The bulk buy is that’s what it is. It’s it’s but that’s every mom and pop store has to deal with that depending dealing with a Sure. Franchise. Well,
Speaker: 0
18:40
what It changes your strategy, though.
Speaker: 1
18:41
Yeah. But what Blockbuster would do and they were famous for doing this. They were famous for doing this. And, but particularly, they were strategic about it. Is ai, okay. We’re gonna go into this town. Okay. We’re going into Manhattan Beach. What’s the biggest video store? What’s the most popular Yeah. Local video store in Manhattan Beach?
Speaker: 1
19:04
Well, that would be video archives. They’re right on some of it. You know, they’re right across the street from the warehouse, alright, which is, like, was the big which is one of the big
Speaker: 2
19:12
Yeah. Rent
Speaker: 1
19:12
Before Blockbuster. Blockbuster, it was rent, was, warehouse, warehouse, erections, and tapes. Mhmm. And and they still managed to survive across the street from warehouse. And then what does Blockbuster do? They buy the Shakey’s Pizza that is in our shopping center. Our shopping center. Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
19:31
And they moved into the Shakey’s Pizza because of, like, wow. Okay. Warehouse and with the these video archives guys, well, this is obviously the place to be. So they just bought out the Shakey’s Pizza and opened up, and they still couldn’t shut us down.
Speaker: 0
19:43
Yeah. Wow. I’m sure they had the attitude of, well, just brush them aside.
Speaker: 1
19:47
Oh, of course that’s of course how they got it.
Speaker: 0
19:49
Sai, consequently, because you don’t you can only get 3 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 gonna convince my clientele to watch something other than Top Gun this weekend? And so it Well landed on us to basically say, oh, you can’t get Top Gun. Well, how about this movie?
Speaker: 0
20:08
Well, ai
Speaker: 1
20:09
the time sai. But, you know, it’s, you know, it’s the difference between being a cool coffee place and being Starbucks. Right. You know? Or or, you know, a a franchise bar and a cool little Joe’s bar. Ai. And the bartender knows you.
Speaker: 2
20:22
Right.
Speaker: 1
20:22
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. Ai. We have what we have. But we had customers that, like, came in every fucking day and part of their day or every other day, you know, when their tanks were rent were were due.
Speaker: 1
20:42
And they were people of the neighborhood, and they came in. And, 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.
Speaker: 0
20:57
And there’s no algorithm to tell them what to do. We’re the algorithm.
Speaker: 1
21:01
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
21:01
You have to know, oh, this ai, oh, they’re on a date night, so they’re gonna want this kind of rom com type movie. Or this guy, he really likes, you know, Vietnamese hooker porn tapes. I gotta make sure to find something like that for him. And those kids, they’re gonna want, you know, some skate stuff. So I’ve gotta learn all about the Bones Brigade, videos and stuff like that.
Speaker: 0
21:23
And so, yeah, you just kinda figured out, like, how can I upsell the stuff that they haven’t heard of? Because invariably, anybody who comes in
Speaker: 1
21:31
Well, you’re making it just sound a little bit more cynical than it was. And you are making it sound more
Speaker: 0
21:35
cynical than More like more like the challenge. Because ai a married couple. Yeah. But, totally, we’re like a married couple. It wasn’t that simple. The benefits.
Speaker: 1
21:44
Tell the whole story, honey. We’re just telling the whole story. We were just hanging out, and they’re coming and hanging out too. Yeah. And and
Speaker: 0
21:51
we would pop a movie on and, like, you know, pop the movie on and be watching scenes from it and be talking about the scenes. Then a customer would come in ram many customers would come in, and they’d just become part of the conversation. And we would have, like, you know, a Oh, no.
Speaker: 0
22:04
Like a chat room in the No. No. There was, like
Speaker: 1
22:08
no. There was there there was about, like, 15 customers that, ai, you know, I talked to 5 hours a week every week for 5 years.
Speaker: 0
22:21
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
22:22
Yeah. Because they came in, and I’m like, what’s been at least 40 minutes every other day? And I 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 and then they saw what they saw in the movies. They watched what they watched on TV.
Speaker: 1
22:35
We all talked about it, and they talked about the videos and then what else we’re gonna get and da da da da ai.
Speaker: 0
22:39
If you like that, you’re gonna like this.
Speaker: 1
22:40
About our lives and everything. Yeah.
Speaker: 2
22:42
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: 0
22:48
Well, it was always the case.
Speaker: 1
22:49
Well, we were always thinking well well well, Roger and and, Roger had another friend that it was a guy that connected me and Roger together. It was a guy named Scott who who, took his own life at a certain point of
Speaker: 0
23:00
His father owned another video store that I worked at as well and that Quentin used to come into.
Speaker: 1
23:04
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: 0
23:11
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
23:12
And they were making little horror films and little zombie movies on on on on Super 8. And then, like Supernatural thrillers.
Speaker: 0
23:17
And they’re just the word turns
Speaker: 1
23:20
is a zombie movie. Yeah. Well, yeah. Yeah. What’s it?
Speaker: 0
23:22
Yeah. It’s kind of an yeah. It’s kind of a zombie movie. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. More of an afterlife movie.
Speaker: 1
23:26
Maybe. Okay. And but, but you’re making, like, legit horror films. I’m just thinking about this stuff, and these guys arya, like, Sam Raimi ing it. You know? Like, Sam Raimi, they’re making their their shah in their backyard. They’re working on it for, like, 3 months and
Speaker: 0
23:40
stuff. Yeah. And, you know, like, I was friends with all the punk guys because it was, like, LA punk. And, 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, and to be in the film.
Speaker: 0
23:55
So they were always playing, like, you know, the gang of punks who beat somebody up or something. Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
24:00
So it
Speaker: 2
24:00
must have been cool working at a video store, though, because it’s essentially ai you have it’s like an education.
Speaker: 0
24:05
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 it was around the time of Sex Lives in Video tape ram maybe She’s Gotta Have It.
Speaker: 1
24:17
No. No. Definitely Sex Lives in Video tape.
Speaker: 0
24:18
But I remember, 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.
Speaker: 1
24:32
Yeah. I meh, I I mean, the one you know,
Speaker: 2
24:35
it was like
Speaker: 1
24:35
ai the sex ai and videotape was sort of like the, ai, the Seattle band that broke. Ai? But I was already looking at, Blood Simple was my was my end. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: 2
24:49
That’s a great movie.
Speaker: 1
24:49
Was my end. Alright? Where it was that was okay. It’s an artistic movie. It’s it’s arty. It’s funny. It can it can play the arya houses and play the art house circuit, but there’s a genre base to it. Yeah. There’s a genre base. It’s ai, you know, it’s a thriller. It’s a it’s a film noir y kind of thriller done in a certain kind of way, but it’s a genre base. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
25:11
I go, that’s the way you do an art film. You do it. You make it a genre base art film.
Speaker: 0
25:16
If you keep one foot in in because it’s entertaining. Yeah. 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. I love Kubrick movies. Okay. One can pretty much look at all of his films and say each and every one is a genre film. He’s got his science fiction movies.
Speaker: 0
25:37
He’s got a horror movie. Even Barry Lyndon as a costume drama at the time
Speaker: 1
25:41
Is a costume genre. It’s a genre.
Speaker: 0
25:43
That was a that was a solid bankable genre.
Speaker: 1
25:46
The book is a definitely a a a pulpy genre at this time.
Speaker: 0
25:49
The book was serialized, wasn’t it? It was ai Thackery wrote them in, like, like, an episode. It was like a soap opera.
Speaker: 1
25:55
But that was a very popular popular book at that time.
Speaker: 0
25:58
Yeah. And so, yeah, it was all if you can if you can and I knew this making my first film, and I know, Quentin, you were talking about it. This was a conversation we were actively having of we have to make sure that we make a movie people wanna see, ai, a genre film, like and I was calling them exploitation movies at the time.
Speaker: 0
26:17
Like, I wanna keep one foot in exploitation. And then but at the same time, I’m like, well, I kind of also wanna make, like, you know, I wanna elevate it as much as possible. And so when the time came for me to make my first first film, Killing Zoe, you know, it was ai Sai knew it was gonna be a bank robbery because I wrote it around a location.
Speaker: 0
26:36
You know, we we found this while they were scouting for, reservoir dogs, Lawrence Bender. Uh-huh. Or maybe you also had scouted that location. You 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: 0
26:51
And if you can if you have a script that takes place in a bank, we can kick together a couple $100,000 and make a movie there. It’s ai this complete sana amazing location. And I said, oh my god. Lawrence, this is your lucky day. I Ai happen to have a script that takes place in a bank. And then I just quickly wrote 1 based on the location.
Speaker: 0
27:10
And as I was writing it, I was thinking, okay, you know, I know that it’s gonna be a bank robbery. It’s a bank. And so I know it’s gonna be a bank robbery, and that’s my solid bankable genre that I’m going to, to stick with. But I knew I wanted to do something more with it, and I had just traveled through Europe.
Speaker: 0
27:28
And, and I had been telling Quentin the stories of traveling through Europe. He’s like, oh, you should do a movie called Roger Takes A Trip. And, I
Speaker: 1
27:36
still think it should have been called.
Speaker: 0
27:39
Ai, I think it’s a different movie.
Speaker: 1
27:40
I think
Speaker: 0
27:40
it’s a different I don’t think it’s a
Speaker: 1
27:42
No. You ai made Roger Takes A Trip. Just added bank robbers in it. I had been But it’s still Roger Takes A Trip.
Speaker: 0
27:47
I had been in Paris. I had bumped into a guy that I knew from Los Angeles who was a French ai, and he was ai, oh, I’ll show you the real Paris. And I went out with he and his friends, Henrique, Jean, Claude, all the characters from the movie. I went out with him and his friends, and we, you know, he drove me through Paris.
Speaker: 0
28:04
And next thing I know, he’s doing heroin, and I’m like, and and it started With you? No. Not with me. I I
Speaker: 1
28:10
I know we do heroin.
Speaker: 0
28:11
Yeah. It was ai, now we do heroin. Hold my arm. I did hold his arm. And and, like, I had never ai anything like that.
Speaker: 2
28:17
Like, he tied his arm off? He’s like, hold my arm?
Speaker: 1
28:20
No. No. No. He ai was the tying arm.
Speaker: 0
28:22
Yeah. You
Speaker: 1
28:22
Roger was the tying arm. Roger, hold
Speaker: 0
28:23
my arm while I shoot up.
Speaker: 2
28:25
Jeez. So But it’s like,
Speaker: 1
28:26
yeah, he doesn’t quite know that this is all gonna happen, that that that that everything else has been a preamble to this.
Speaker: 0
28:32
Meh. Suddenly, that happens and then He
Speaker: 2
28:34
just needed a heroin partner.
Speaker: 0
28:35
Yeah. His friends are ai, oh, drinking to the nose doesn’t even affect me anymore. You know, things like and I’m and I’m like writing these lines down, like, this is great shit. And so I meh back and I tyler Quentin, like, about this whole story and about these guys and going, you know, driving around the Champs Elysees.
Speaker: 0
28:52
This is where the fags sell themselves. Now we go into the into the ai down below, and we do more heroin. And I’m like, what about the cops? Aren’t the police gonna send anything? It’s safer here than, you know and you’re like, you can do heroin anywhere in Paris. And it was ai no.
Speaker: 0
29:11
I work tyler Mans. Like, all of it was, like basically, everything in that movie, I you know, was stuff that I’d actually seen. 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 gonna be about these guys.
Speaker: 0
29:26
And it just became a movie about a guy going someplace and the and everything that he thought he knew was wrong. You know, like, you think, you know, you haven’t seen your friend in a while. You go see him. Okay. It’s all about that that kind of friendship and misconception.
Speaker: 0
29:45
He’s downstairs at the bank. Jean Ygrene Sana, the bad guy is upstairs. The chaos is going upstairs. He has no idea what’s going on upstairs. And so this kind of just became what the movie was about.
Speaker: 0
29:57
And so I just quickly wrote the script, and then, 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 LA instead. But but it was
Speaker: 2
30:10
The seed was planted.
Speaker: 0
30:11
The seed was planted. Sai the idea was, okay, I’m gonna make a French film out of it. Because I I’m, like, in Sai. I’m making a film. What can I do that would be different? Like, that would make this more than just a bank robbery movie? And because of the experience I had just had, I was like, oh, I’m gonna make a French film. Okay. I had no business making a French movie.
Speaker: 0
30:29
I didn’t even really speak French. I just thought it would be kinda cool. I like, you know, cool French girl and, like, greasy dirty French ai, French criminals. And I always loved, you know, Alain Delaun and Meh Ai. You know, the way he wears a suit and the way he carries a gun and the way he walks around.
Speaker: 0
30:49
And I just, like, I, you know, just adored all of that. And so it was ai, well, let’s put all of that kind of 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. You know, it starts off as a concept, as a conception has a conception and then has an infancy, and then you’re raising that child to become the movie.
Speaker: 0
31:12
And along the way, you’re really just kinda protecting it and trying to allow it to grow into what it’s gonna grow into without forcing it to become something that it’s not. And 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 gonna be.
Speaker: 0
31:28
But at the same time, you have to be willing to, you know, be strong with it as well.
Speaker: 2
31:33
That’s a very underappreciated movie. It’s a fucking great movie.
Speaker: 0
31:37
I think I’m I think I’m really good at making underappreciated movies. I think I had a I built a career with an underappreciated
Speaker: 2
31:43
movie. Those are the classics that you would look for in a video store. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
31:46
Yeah. Absolutely.
Speaker: 2
31:47
You look for the movies that were really good that no one knew about.
Speaker: 0
31:49
Dog Day Afternoon’s not in, but we could get you killing so. Right.
Speaker: 1
31:54
So my favorite moment in the movie well, I like it when the guy gets burned alive. Alright. You know, the the the hamburger scene.
Speaker: 0
32:00
That was Yeah. Yeah. But,
Speaker: 1
32:02
I remember they were trying to talk to you to cut out, and they go, no. No. You can’t cut that out. I’m taking my name off here. Yeah. Yeah. No.
Speaker: 0
32:08
No. Quinn did that. Actually, Quinn was a great gorilla to have on my side at that time.
Speaker: 1
32:12
But,
Speaker: 2
32:13
Why would they tell you to cut that out?
Speaker: 1
32:14
Well, they’re like, well, I don’t know.
Speaker: 0
32:16
It’s too rough.
Speaker: 1
32:17
It’s too rough. It’s too rough. It’s too rough.
Speaker: 0
32:18
Everyone’s afraid. Everyone operates out of fear. Taking
Speaker: 1
32:21
my name off of that.
Speaker: 0
32:21
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: 2
32:28
It’s always executives that fuck everything up.
Speaker: 1
32:30
But it’s the scene that ai my favorite scene is the scene with Jean Huong Lan when he walks into the close-up.
Speaker: 0
32:38
Oh, yeah.
Speaker: 1
32:38
And he’s just like, wait a minute. He’s, like, remembering what he heard, and he’s and he ai,
Speaker: 0
32:47
Sai the movie was shot for
Speaker: 1
32:50
Ai the explain the scene better.
Speaker: 0
32:51
Right? The scene was shot
Speaker: 1
32:52
Explain the scene explain the scene better. I will.
Speaker: 0
32:54
The movie was shot for for very little money. We had no money to make it. Sai I had to shoot the entire upstairs first and then the downstairs Because it’s like doing a company move. But I had kept I I knew that, you know, when writing and this is sort of a, kind of a rule that we had was, 1, make a genre movie.
Speaker: 0
33:13
2
Speaker: 1
33:14
Explain the scene.
Speaker: 0
33:15
I’m going to.
Speaker: 1
33:18
I Ai said explain the scene. Don’t tell me that you what you felt about at that moment.
Speaker: 0
33:22
You missed the exit. The scene was a replacement for another scene that was in the movie that was too expensive to shoot.
Speaker: 2
33:27
That’s the short end.
Speaker: 1
33:28
What does that have to do with what I like?
Speaker: 0
33:30
What I replaced it with was and I had to fight for it, was a single shot. Because originally, he goes downstairs and he sees a bunch of, like, guys coming in through the sewer. So he starts machine getting people in the sewer. Because there was ai a little sewer manhole in the bottom of the bank. I was like, oh, let’s use that. And so I had this whole thing.
Speaker: 0
33:46
And the bond company showed up, and you’re ai, you’re behind schedule, and you’ve gotta, like, you know, we’re gonna you gotta cut pages. And I couldn’t cut anything. And I’m shooting upstairs downstairs stuff. And so it’s ai I had to have something because he leaves the scene and then comes back angry.
Speaker: 0
34:02
And so I knew I I knew I needed to have something. And, originally, I had this whole scene where the cops are coming in, and he reacts to that. And so I said, okay. I just need one shot and because it’s all I could had time to do because Mhmm. Fucking bond company.
Speaker: 0
34:14
And so I set up which were actually really cool to me. Mhmm. They were actually film finances was great. They, I I just set up a single camera. I Ai asked for a kind of a Kubrickian lens, ai nice wide, like, maybe a 14 millimeter lens. And I just had John Hugue walk up into a close-up.
Speaker: 0
34:31
And I just had him do I Ai sai, just walk into a close-up and just start looking around and just start seeing things coming out of the walls. Well And No. No. No. Is that the shot you’re talking about?
Speaker: 0
34:43
He does, like, a little magic trick beforehand, like
Speaker: 1
34:46
No. Is that the one
Speaker: 0
34:46
you that’s not the one you’re talking about? No. That’s the great shot. That’s a great shot.
Speaker: 1
34:51
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, Here it is. See, is that the shot? Well, that’s the shot.
Speaker: 0
35:00
That’s the shot I’m talking about. Look. He’s looking into the walls. He’s ai around.
Speaker: 1
35:05
But I thought the whole idea about it is the idea that
Speaker: 0
35:10
I added those lines of dialogue in.
Speaker: 1
35:12
No. But I thought
Speaker: 0
35:13
did some ADR.
Speaker: 1
35:14
I thought the whole idea Ai thought the whole idea is is he puts it all together. He realized that there’s something going on, that the cops are doing this, or Eric Stoltz is is dirty with him. All the and it all hits him. He’s 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.
Speaker: 1
35:33
And then he’s just ai, wait a minute.
Speaker: 0
35:35
Well, it just shows that sometimes if you can’t do what you wanna do, what you come up with is better. And this was an example of it rained that day, and I had to use the rain. That’s sort of the example.
Speaker: 1
35:47
The first thing ai for me about what you’re ai is, like, I don’t care how the sausage was made. Ai the sausage. I wanted you to talk about the sausage. Well
Speaker: 0
35:54
Not the not the factory. You don’t wanna know what’s in that sausage.
Speaker: 1
36:01
Yeah. I wanted to just You have no interest here. About the Italian sweetness?
Speaker: 0
36:06
Well, it was very sweet, but it started off sour. 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. But and I Don’t
Speaker: 1
36:16
mind me. I still think that sequence is exhilarating because it’s all it all calls boils down to an actor’s face.
Speaker: 0
36:22
Well, I had Tom Savini on the set because, and I couldn’t afford Tom Savini, but I found his number. And before I shah, and I called him up in in Pittsburgh, and I said, Tom Savini is a makeup effects artist who did Dawn of the Dead.
Speaker: 1
36:34
He did all the effects for Dawn of Dead.
Speaker: 0
36:36
Like and not to mention all the great Ai 13th, all the slasher movies. Like
Speaker: 1
36:40
He’s the superstar of of of practical makeup effects of horror films of that era.
Speaker: 0
36:44
He was in Vietnam and saw some shit. And every time I’m talking to him about stuff, ai, he’s like, oh, yeah. Well, you know, no. If you’re bleeding from back here, you know, there’s only 2 small veins and blah blah. Because when your head gets knocked off like, he’s seen all this stuff.
Speaker: 0
36:57
And so 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, you know, I’m your biggest fan of Ai I’d like you the makeup effects, blah blah blah. Okay.
Speaker: 0
37:16
He flew himself out. We had no money to pay him. I think we paid him, like, some tiny amount. He flew himself to LA, put himself up, worked on the film, and he made that burn makeup on that burn guard in the vault out of Vaseline paint and tissue paper. 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: 0
37:41
Tom is incredible guy. He’s an incredible, incredible guy.
Speaker: 1
37:48
Well, you were asking earlier on about, woah. You’re working at a video store. Did you ever think you know, when did you start thinking about making your own stuff? Well, I was thinking about making my own stuff for, like, a long, long, long time, but these guys were actually doing it.
Speaker: 1
38:01
But there is a truth ai I thought about it, like, for a long, long time and and always figured I would do that eventually. I did fall asleep for a few years. You know? It was, because, working at that store, I just got caught up in the little life there. And is you know, it’s interesting because, you know, you spent your twenties going to comedy clubs and, you know, building building a career.
Speaker: 1
38:30
So I’m still in my twenties there. And, well, it’s one of those things where it’s like, well, this isn’t my dream. This isn’t what I wanted to do working at a video store for years. I wanted to actually make movies. It’s not my ram, what I’m doing.
Speaker: 1
38:50
But it’s dream adjacent. It’s 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. I don’t have to I’m not delivering pizzas.
Speaker: 1
39:05
I’m not I’m not I’m not busting ass, as a bartender. I’m not busting ass doing menial jobs. I mean, this is the kind of job Ai, that, you know, I I do if I I’d I’d go to the store if I wasn’t paid to go to the store. You know? So it’s like you know? But but for a couple of years, it did put me to sleep. It did kinda put me to sleep.
Speaker: 1
39:26
It put my ambitions to sleep for a little bit because I was happy enough.
Speaker: 2
39:30
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
39:32
I was happy. And just one of these days, I’ll
Speaker: 2
39:35
Right. But you didn’t have the fire.
Speaker: 1
39:36
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, we had a buddy of ours named Steve O. Yeah. And I he was one he, we had different living arrangements. And at one point in time, me and Steve O were living in the same house together, renting in the back of towards the back of the store.
Speaker: 0
40:04
The dude house.
Speaker: 1
40:05
Yeah. It was where everyone would hang out. And but now Speak O was older than the rest of us. So if, like, he was about, like, almost 5 years older than us, but, you know, he didn’t seem like it. He was a young guy.
Speaker: 0
40:19
Yeah. Ai, 5 years younger meh. Yeah. Yeah. Or emotionally.
Speaker: 1
40:23
Yeah. Yeah. And, but so he hits 30, and he starts changing. He starts changing, like, drastically. He’s that I mean, he was, like, the one of the funniest guys I ever knew, and he was just really, really funny stoner dude and really cool. 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.
Speaker: 1
40:48
And so we’re we’re roommates, and there’s this one night that he’s kind of like all he’s kinda disgusted with his ai, and he starts ranting. And he and he’s describing a situation that was very common if you were a kid growing up without a, you know, without a degree or anything, yeah, in the eighties, especially in California, where it’s ai, you can’t get any really good jobs.
Speaker: 1
41:16
But, like, you can work at, Licorice Pizza. And if you’re an okay employee, you could, like, work at Liquorice Pizza for a couple of years, and maybe you could even become assistant manager or a manager, and maybe they sana you to another store. And and maybe you worked there for 3 years, and that’s really great. But then, you know, all of a sudden, the district manager doesn’t like you.
Speaker: 1
41:36
You run a file of somebody ai up in corporate, and all of a sudden, next thing you know, you’re ai and you’re out in the street.
Speaker: 0
41:42
Again, it’s management.
Speaker: 1
41:43
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And so now you’ve just spent 3 years at Licorice Pizza. Now now you could get a job at TRW or some of the places ai a real job job or, well, those arya kinda hard to get, but you can work at Warehouse Records and Tapes tomorrow because you just had 3 years at Licorice Pizza.
Speaker: 1
41:59
Sai thing with Wild West Clothier, same thing with Miller’s outpost, same thing with any of these ai of stores. Next thing you know, you’re 28, and the only jobs you’ve ever had are minimum wage jobs behind a counter that it that that were designed for kids to pay for their gas.
Speaker: 1
42:16
Right. And then and you’ve, like, spent your entire twenties doing that.
Speaker: 2
42:21
And then you start getting bitter.
Speaker: 1
42:22
And you start getting bitter. And but but he was not just better bitter about the job aspect of it. He but he I knew he oh my god. He’s telling me the truth. Ai learning something here. Because he, you know, he goes, you know, you know, Quentin, you think that we’re this really great team.
Speaker: 1
42:41
We’re this really great crew. Well, we are. I mean, you know, that time of your twenties, we’re like you your group of friends or your family. You know? And, like, well, we are.
Speaker: 1
42:51
Quentin, at 20, I worked at South Bay Cinemas, and I hung out with a bunch of guys just like you and some girls there too. There was a bunch of guys just like you, and then I stopped working at South Bay Cinema. Then I worked at Miller’s outpost. I hung out with a bunch of guys just like you, and we did everything just like we do. We went to movies together.
Speaker: 1
43:16
We went out, and we dated amongst the girls there, everything. Yeah. Then I worked at Alicia Pizza for far far 4 years with a bunch of guys just like you. Ai wasted my life hanging out with a bunch of guys just like you, and they all go away at a certain point. And I realized this guy is kinda telling the truth. I this he’s showing me a a truth about him. He’s he’s he I’m I’m this is coming from somewhere.
Speaker: 1
43:45
And then all of a sudden, he still hung around us. He still liked us, 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 4 years younger or 5 years younger than him. Anyway, I’m turning 25 around this time.
Speaker: 1
44:04
So I’m having my own little okay. Well, what have I done with my life so far? So far, fucking nothing. So I’m having my own little anxiety hitting 25, but I’m seeing what it’s like 5 years from now. Yeah. When you turn 30.
Speaker: 0
44:19
Yeah. Window to the future.
Speaker: 1
44:21
When you’re turned 30 and you’re in this situation. And and there was, like, one night 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 ai, thank thankfully. I would have a Quentin detest fest where I’d stay up all night long. And rather than give myself excuses, I would look at everything 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.
Speaker: 1
44:52
Just, like, nail it. And I would spend, like, all night laying out everything I’m doing that’s wrong, and then I would spend the last 30 minutes figuring out how I can change it. Mhmm. And as opposed to just doing it and then going to get some sleep and and then you forget about it and fall back into your, you know, your routine, I decided to change my life.
Speaker: 1
45:16
And I was like, look. The problem is is that I’m living in the South Bay. And even though I drive to Los Angeles, Ai, one, I I gotta not worry about this job anymore. I gotta just move to Hollywood. I gotta get involved there.
Speaker: 1
45:28
I gotta meet other people that are in the business. And if I have to work manpower jobs, you know, where you just work, like, 4 days at this place and 4 days at that place, well, then that’s fine. And by the way, I shouldn’t be making money until I’m making money doing what I wanna do. And not that I was that was ever a danger. Alright.
Speaker: 1
45:46
But, but then, you know, the next thing I knew, you know, I was, I moved out of the South Ram. And then I couldn’t move into Hollywood. I couldn’t afford Hollywood, but I could afford Koreatown, and that was close enough. And, and literally, the minute I kinda moved out there, I met a guy who wrote low budget horror movies.
Speaker: 1
46:07
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. And well but, yeah, you meet one person, and that introduces you to 3 other people. Now all of a sudden, I actually knew people who were actually making movies.
Speaker: 1
46:24
And the other thing about it was it was ai, also, well, if these guys can do what I can do, because they weren’t too special.
Speaker: 2
46:32
Right.
Speaker: 0
46:33
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
46:33
You know?
Speaker: 0
46:34
That’s the weird realization that you end up having.
Speaker: 1
46:37
Yeah. And and then, literally, it wasn’t like everything changed, but, like, within a year and a half from moving out of the South Bay, moving into the Hollywood area, within a year and a half, I was finally able to make a living as a as a writer. You know, getting, like, a 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. Well, shit.
Speaker: 1
47:04
I mean, I’ll make $10,000 a year Yeah. Through all ai twenties before that point. Sai, like, if I can make, like, if I can make 15,000 from writing, oh my god. That that was the greatest thing in the world.
Speaker: 2
47:16
Wow. But it just takes being around people that are actually doing it sai you realize it’s possible.
Speaker: 1
47:22
Well, whether the it’s the realizing it’s possible, but it’s also but it’s also a situation where it’s ai, as, you know, 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.
Speaker: 2
47:41
Yes.
Speaker: 1
47:42
And you were the, you know, you’re in the place where the shit happens, and you’re you’re you’re hearing how the laughs work. But, also, he’s like, you know what’s going on. Oh, Caroline’s Comedy Hour is doing sana tryouts for this. Yeah. And, you know, Chuck, Chuckles or is doing this thing or that thing. Oh, and there’s sai sitcom going, and there’s the the funny neighbor guy. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
48:01
At any moment You’re you’re in the you’re in the you’re plugged in.
Speaker: 0
48:04
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. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
48:14
Yeah. And they have the thing where it’s sort of like, you know, like, hey, Benny. We we have a sai spot for you that could be really you know, I can’t do it, but my friend Joe could do it. Can you can how about how about giving Joe a chance?
Speaker: 2
48:26
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
48:26
Okay. Will you will you back Joe up? Yeah. I’ll back Joe up. Okay. Yeah. Well, let’s well, let’s call your friend Joe. Can he be down here at 9? Yeah. He can be down here at 9. Well, that’s how you get a fucking gig.
Speaker: 2
48:35
This is exactly what we tried to do when we built the mothership here. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
48:39
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: 2
48:39
What we’ve done. Yeah. We decided when we left LA, like, we need a place where comics have a hub. And when we’re all in Austin we all just moved to Austin because of pandemic.
Speaker: 0
48:47
Yeah.
Speaker: 2
48:48
And all of a sudden, we were allowed to perform indoors.
Speaker: 1
48:50
It was
Speaker: 2
48:51
crazy. In November of 2020, we’re doing shows indoors. And, you know, you couldn’t go on Twitter because they would call you a big super spreader, a a fucking monster. But everybody started moving here. 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.
Speaker: 2
49:09
And we’re, like, let’s let’s build a club. Yeah. And so we bought the Ritz Theater, where, you know, some of your movies have played. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: 2
49:16
It’s fucking crazy. And when we put it together, the the whole idea was, like, have a place where people can come. We have 2 nights of open mic nights. Mhmm. Monday and or, Sunday and Monday night. So there’s always a chance to get on stage. There’s always a ai.
Speaker: 2
49:30
There’s a real saloni Egan is a Adam Egan 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
Speaker: 1
49:40
and
Speaker: 2
49:40
everybody knows it’s possible and everybody treats you the way you would sana be treated if you were starting. So you’re just one of us. You just arya. 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. We we started walking, and now we’re 15 miles in. You’re 15 feet in. Just keep walking.
Speaker: 1
49:57
Okay. But let me okay. But let me ask you a let me ask you a question because it you know, when I watch some of the things on the Comedy Stern Neck because you know Ai I really love going to the Comedy Store. Yeah. You know? And and they treat me really great there. It’s really cool. Alright.
Speaker: 1
50:09
But, you know, it the mythology of the place is you go down there and open mic night, and if you have something to offer Yeah. You know, then you, you know, you work your way up, and then you’re the doorman, and then, you know, you you work your way up. But it seems like that was then. That was a long time ago.
Speaker: 1
50:31
Now it seems like people are almost paying 10 years, right, or 8 years before they actually are getting up and getting paid.
Speaker: 2
50:40
Not necessarily. Like, Tony Hinchcliffe started at the Comedy Store. He started as a doorman. Uh-huh. You know? And he worked his way up to selling out Madison Square Garden 2 nights in a
Speaker: 1
50:49
row. Mhmm.
Speaker: 2
50:50
I mean, it it is possible to still be a a doorman. I met Tony when he was just sai starting out.
Speaker: 1
50:55
I’m I’m figuring that that’s a spot, but it seems like but if you have to wait 5 years
Speaker: 2
51:00
Well, you don’t get good for 10 years.
Speaker: 1
51:02
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
Speaker: 2
51:02
That’s fine. Forever. Comedy is like making a mountain out of layers of paint.
Speaker: 1
51:06
Well, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
51:07
You have to fail. Yeah. You you have to have the opportunities to fail.
Speaker: 2
51:11
Well, there’s also no one to tell
Speaker: 0
51:12
you how to do it.
Speaker: 2
51:13
Yeah. Like, writing a film, like, you you you know, you have a protagonist, you have the antagonist, you have a plot, you have a you have a bunch of stuff that you can kind of create and formulate.
Speaker: 1
51:22
Would you really but would you really say that it takes 10 years to be a solid comedian?
Speaker: 2
51:28
It takes 10 years to be a real ai. Like, a guy Oh, a ai? That’s that’s
Speaker: 1
51:31
a little different. That’s a little different.
Speaker: 2
51:33
Well, that’s when you’re a real comic. Yeah. When you can do an hour. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
51:35
Yeah. You can
Speaker: 2
51:36
do an hour, and then you could write another hour. Yeah. Like, you you you kinda know who you are. Because
Speaker: 0
51:41
it takes years to build that
Speaker: 1
51:42
Well, also, the big headline, you have to be enough of a you have to be enough of a name of a draw to actually draw an audience. Yes. Yeah.
Speaker: 2
51:49
Yes. And, you know, 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. That guy’s really good. We saw him then, and he did 15 minutes. Now he’s gonna do an hour. This should be great.
Speaker: 1
52:01
Mhmm.
Speaker: 2
52:01
And it’s sort of that kind of a deal. But it’s the same sort of situation where most people don’t 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: 1
52:14
Set up for comedy, and it’s in a fucking pizza
Speaker: 2
52:16
ai. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
52:17
And it’s good on the weekends.
Speaker: 1
52:18
And it doesn’t work, and you go, well, I guess this is not for me.
Speaker: 2
52:21
Right. It’s good on the weekends because they’ll fly in, you know, Greg Fitzsimons, some headliner, and you get to see a real comic for a weekend. So you get a little bit of an education from that. And maybe if you’re lucky, the club owner will let you open for him or do 10 minutes on that show and you kinda, like, get a feel what it’s like to perform in front of a real audience that’s there to see a real comic.
Speaker: 2
52:38
But you gotta be around, like, comedy doesn’t exist in a vacuum. There’s no great comedian that lives in some small town by himself. Like, you could ai some great blues artist.
Speaker: 1
52:50
Or a great novelist. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: 2
52:52
Yeah. Novelist is probably the best one because you gotta live in your own head. Yeah. But you you have to be around the other people that are doing it. Which
Speaker: 0
52:58
is exactly why Quentin moved to Hollywood.
Speaker: 1
53:00
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. You got away from these losers.
Speaker: 0
53:03
You had to do
Speaker: 2
53:04
it, but you you really do have to
Speaker: 1
53:06
do it.
Speaker: 0
53:06
Dead weight. I recall I recall living in Hollywood as well. Yeah. You did. I Freaking Franklin. Yes.
Speaker: 1
53:11
You’re right.
Speaker: 2
53:11
He was from Plumber Park. Your bitter friend gave you a valuable little piece of information. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
53:16
He did. No. Very much so.
Speaker: 2
53:17
You need those you need those moments.
Speaker: 1
53:19
Ai knew I was hearing the truth, and I knew I was hearing a coming attraction. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
53:23
Because I was
Speaker: 1
53:23
already feeling it at 25. Right. And then Ai
Speaker: 2
53:26
have I am I throwing my topsoil
Speaker: 1
53:26
years away? Right. Right.
Speaker: 2
53:26
The topsoil. Exactly. And when it
Speaker: 1
53:27
doesn’t come back. It doesn’t come back. You never
Speaker: 2
53:30
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: 1
53:42
You could throw it away tyler 23, but at but from 24 on, you need to be thinking about what you’re doing for the rest of your life.
Speaker: 0
53:47
Yeah. Meh it going.
Speaker: 2
53:49
Yeah. Get it going. Yeah. That well, this I think these conversations are so important for young people to hear. Mhmm. Because there’s a lot of people out there that do have ai, and sometimes they have a little bit of a ai. And then maybe they have a job that’s kinda cool like yours was, and they they get sedated.
Speaker: 0
54:03
Almost the worst thing that can happen is getting comfortable, which I think is what you were talking about.
Speaker: 1
54:06
Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, I mean, you know, it all worked out. Okay? It all worked out really, really good. And the thing about it was, you know, Ai did get comfortable, but I got comfortable in a cool place. And and and, ultimately, I did have the energy and the the wherewithal to ultimately get dissatisfied with it and and and want more.
Speaker: 1
54:25
You know, the alternative would have been me working at at a a department store for those 4 years. Yeah.
Speaker: 2
54:33
Right. Right. Right. Where’s this
Speaker: 1
54:34
Ai I would have been, like, really been miserable.
Speaker: 0
54:36
Right. Right.
Speaker: 1
54:37
Here, I’m able to I mean, you know, in in this instance, I’m still involved with I mean, the the part that the sedative part was the idea that it was close enough to what I ai to do.
Speaker: 2
54:47
Right. Right. Right.
Speaker: 1
54:48
It was close enough. I could get I could
Speaker: 2
54:51
get some There’s ai like that at the Comedy Store. There’s a friend of mine at the Comedy Store that was, he was a a bartender in the back bar Mhmm. And he wanted to be a comic.
Speaker: 1
54:58
Yeah.
Speaker: 2
54:58
But he was there. It was, like, 5 years after I met him. I’m like, hey, man. You gotta quit this fucking job.
Speaker: 1
55:03
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: 2
55:03
Because you’re here with all the greatest comics in the world, but you’re not going on stage because you’re and you’re making good money. And that’s the that’s the the velvet curtain
Speaker: 1
55:11
Yeah.
Speaker: 2
55:11
You know, that’s pulled over your ai. Like
Speaker: 0
55:14
I I worked on Lords of Dogtown, the the movie about, Zephyr surfboards and skateboarding and polyurethane wheels and surfing. And I’m not like like 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 a lot of places where, you know, you you have a shop.
Speaker: 0
55:38
They make skate they do skateboards, and they’ve got a shaper guy there, you know, Skip Englam, who’s a a surfboard shaper. And he was sort of like Lance, the guy who owned video archives. And he started a shop, and he’s selling to all the kids locally and all the kids who, like, love surfing, you know, like Stacy Peralta or Tony Alba or guys like that, they would just go hang out there just like we would go hang out at the video store.
Speaker: 0
56:02
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 Ai 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.
Speaker: 0
56:21
Or if it’s if it’s not a movie theater and so
Speaker: 1
56:23
Well, you know, it was it was it was funny because, when I first started when I started at the video store, I’d ai it was great because, you know, like I said, I got to hang out in this place that Ai enjoyed, and I’m surrounded by movies and talking about movies.
Speaker: 0
56:39
Access to all those titles.
Speaker: 1
56:41
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 ai Sai was like the the the the story was my little, village voice, and I was the Andrew Saracer. I was the the critic. And people would come in, and then at a certain point, I’m like, oh, here’s Quinn. What should I get? You know?
Speaker: 1
57:00
And the thing is and I’m not just, like, holding court on my own personal taste. Pretty soon, they got a really good idea about my my taste. But the thing is Ai usually gearing it towards the people. You know? I’m I’m not gonna, you know, meh some housewife to watch some Gonzo movie that I Yeah.
Speaker: 1
57:16
Yeah. Gonzo violent movie that I really like. I’m I’m I’m gaming. I meh to know her. It’s
Speaker: 0
57:21
a tyler tailor.
Speaker: 1
57:21
And so I’m, you know, I’m putting something in her hand that I think she’s gonna she’s gonna appreciate it. I kinda know what kind of comedy she likes. I know who she likes, stuff like that. And so I’m, like, you know, really kind of, you know, gearing it in a certain in a certain way.
Speaker: 1
57:36
And that’s that that felt that felt really good. You know, it felt like I sai, I felt like a film critic.
Speaker: 2
57:44
Mhmm. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
57:45
You know, but one of the things that I forgot I was gonna I was gonna go somewhere with them. I forgot I lost my train of thought. Alright. Ai, but one of the things that ended up happening, and if Ai I hope I didn’t say it the last time I was here, that ended up happening is we became really famous in the neighborhood.
Speaker: 1
58:04
We were the video guys.
Speaker: 0
58:05
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
58:06
And, you know, our store was a little different than most of the businesses that were in, Manhattan Beach. And so everyone kinda knew us. We were the video guys. So in a strange way, it it was a a precursor to what it would be like to be famous with the whole world ai of knows about you like that.
Speaker: 1
58:28
Mhmm. In Manhattan Beach, I’m, like, walking down the street and people like, hey, Quentin. Hey, Quentin. Hey.
Speaker: 0
58:34
How you doing? How are you doing?
Speaker: 1
58:35
You know, I’m like, I’m at the working at the store. I’m ai to the Jack in the Box to get a Coke and come back. And then, you know, but, we’d walk into the the man’s movie theater. Ai? That was by the theater. You know? And, me and 2 of the guys would walk in to go see a movie, and we we we walked down the aisle and we hear, hey.
Speaker: 1
58:52
Those are
Speaker: 0
58:52
the PDR guys. Guys. Those are the PDR guys. Oh, yeah. I I I was in San Francisco once, and, the guys from Red Cross, the the punk band, they were customers of ours. Sai was like, oh, they’re, doing a signing at this local record shop. I’ll just go show up. I’ll just show up there on Haight Ashbury.
Speaker: 0
59:08
And I walk in, and immediately, the McDonald Brother guys are like, hey. It’s the video store guy. Yeah. Hey, man. Come back. They’re come back behind with us.
Speaker: 0
59:18
Ai don’t think they talk like that.
Speaker: 1
59:21
They can’t talk like that. They can’t.
Speaker: 2
59:24
It’s good to get that slow drip. Get a little bit of a taste of it before you actually get famous. Just to get a feel of of what it’s like.
Speaker: 0
59:32
Well It still doesn’t give you the full it’s like, you know, oh, I ram just gonna smoke a little weed compared to Ai gonna mainline, you know, heroin.
Speaker: 1
59:40
Probably enough. The thing that it did was it made me feel part of a community, which I had never felt with before. I actually felt part of the Manhattan Beach? Oh, yeah. Manhattan Beach. Yeah. I felt part of the Manhattan Beach. Ai was part of the Manhattan Beach community.
Speaker: 1
59:56
You know, the people knew me there. You know, and and I was I I was an upstanding member inside of that community. Yeah. Mhmm. Yeah.
Speaker: 2
01:00:04
Yeah. The the fame thing is no one can teach you how to do that. There there’s someone it needs to be, like, a group of people to get together with people that are about to get famous
Speaker: 0
01:00:11
and say,
Speaker: 2
01:00:12
hey, listen. We’re famous already. Let me tell you how fucking weird this is.
Speaker: 1
01:00:16
And I
Speaker: 2
01:00:16
don’t know if you’re prepared for this.
Speaker: 0
01:00:17
When we were first trying to make True Romance, you know, Quentin had this amazing screenplay, and it was ai, we were gonna try to do it Coen Brothers style. We had just seen Blood Simple, and we were like, okay. I’m gonna produce. Quentin’s gonna direct. We’re gonna go out and make this. Our first thought was, okay.
Speaker: 0
01:00:32
We’ve got this database of doctors and lawyers and housewives in Manhattan Beach. We’re gonna go to the video store. You know, we’d ended up not doing that. No.
Speaker: 1
01:00:42
No. No. We never we never we never had the balls to actually ask about getting money for money.
Speaker: 0
01:00:46
Yeah. It was We ai about getting money and actually getting money or We
Speaker: 1
01:00:51
strategized about it a lot, but we never actually
Speaker: 0
01:00:53
I drew up full partnership papers before, before that whole dream failed, like, of of doing it that way.
Speaker: 2
01:01:01
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 impostor syndrome?
Speaker: 1
01:01:11
I didn’t have impostor 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 impostor syndrome. Well, I guess a little bit. There is vatsal all that, like, waiting for somebody to tap you on the shoulder. Yeah. The fuck are you doing again? Get out of here. Yeah. Ai.
Speaker: 0
01:01:26
Who would let that guy in? Right. The fuck out.
Speaker: 1
01:01:29
What I had was Ai felt like I was a a reporter deep undercover, alright, on the opposite side of the line. Right. This isn’t really me. I’m like those people over there. Right.
Speaker: 2
01:01:45
Right.
Speaker: 1
01:01:45
But I’m deep undercover. Right. And I can I can give you reports from the from the from the front of what it’s like here on the on the on the battle line?
Speaker: 2
01:01:54
Right. Well, maybe that was a good thing though.
Speaker: 1
01:01:56
It was a really cool thing. Because I think
Speaker: 2
01:01:58
that’s one of the things you did with your films is you did shit that was very risky. Like, we’re talking about executives and all these different management people that are gonna come in and fuck with your thing and don’t do that and cut that out. But you you had a a sensibility not of a person in management, but of a person that Ai know what I’d like.
Speaker: 2
01:02:18
I know what I like, and I and I think I can think differently than these people do.
Speaker: 1
01:02:23
Oh, no. No. I would no. I one of the things we talked about, we had a little theory about it. What was, that gave us a bit of a superpower when we were first brought into once we established ourself. The people knew that you read our script, so you knew we were Yeah. We had something to offer.
Speaker: 1
01:02:38
We would walk into rooms, and we realized that and and and and, look, I’m not here to make fun of Hollywood executives. Some of those guys like, look. You don’t know how bad some of these movies these scripts are. They actually oftentimes, they actually make them better. Yeah. They’re really, really terrible. Ai?
Speaker: 1
01:02:59
They some of the the when they go through the sausage factory, oftentimes, they get better, believe it or not. But the thing is, though, you’d walk in there, and you don’t become this super successful executive by being doubling down on your own opinions. You kinda wanna get the temperature and Right. Get a consensus going on. You you you’re not the maverick. That’s not how people establish themselves as executives.
Speaker: 1
01:03:33
The d girl, you know, doesn’t become the head of the development process by, you know, being the punk rock person who’s the you know? Right. Shooting for the for the plimsolls. They’re looking for a Rolling Stone. But, film people film geeks and film, you know, film buffs, the one thing they have is their opinion, and they have spent years defining their opinion. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:04:07
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 meh. And then you and then all of a sudden, you take the strong point of view.
Speaker: 1
01:04:25
And the room the the term in Hollywood is he who has the strongest point in the view he who has the strongest point of view in the room wins.
Speaker: 2
01:04:35
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:04:36
And executives don’t have the strongest point of view. You know? But the maverick artist who 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.
Speaker: 0
01:04:46
Yes. You know, invariably, they hire you because you scare them a little. You’re a little scary. And they like that. They wanna they wanna be, like, a little thrilled by that. Right. But then, you know, like a girlfriend or something, they wanna change you.
Speaker: 1
01:05:00
They think they’re
Speaker: 0
01:05:00
gonna make you normal.
Speaker: 2
01:05:01
Ai?
Speaker: 0
01:05:02
Exactly. And then and then it falls on you to just stay true to that initial guy who was in the room.
Speaker: 1
01:05:07
I had a I had a really interesting situation where I had a a guy who was an executive who actually directed a movie. And he was talking ai, like, oh, I’ve seen these jokers out there and, you know, what they do isn’t so special. I think I could do it. And so he, you know, so he finds finds a book and then they, they adapt it, and and now he’s doing the movie.
Speaker: 1
01:05:29
And, you know, he’s getting through it. Everything’s working ai. He’s getting through it. And then, then he realizes the difference between himself and a director because there’s a he’s dealing with another director about something because he’s he’s an executive. So he’s dealing with another director about another movie, and he asked him a very important question about his movie.
Speaker: 1
01:05:50
And the way he answers it, he realized the difference between him and that director. And he goes, I realized oh, sai, he’s a real director because he sees the movie. Yeah. He sees the movie in his head. The question I asked, he went into his head, and he saw it. He saw it, and he could actually answer it. Below, the flower pot is green Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:06:23
Because he sees the entire picture. Yeah. I don’t see it. I’m just doing my best. I’m I I I see it bryden. Ai?
Speaker: 1
01:06:31
But I don’t I don’t see the movie in my head. I’m just doing my best with the with the written material.
Speaker: 2
01:06:36
He’s the Comedy Central executive that thinks that could be a comedian.
Speaker: 1
01:06:39
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right on.
Speaker: 2
01:06:40
And ai they get on stage and eat shit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Out there. Like, they loved him. He’s this wild dude and then all of
Speaker: 1
01:06:46
a sudden, this is
Speaker: 0
01:06:46
too wild. This is becoming really successful. We’ll make it known. We can
Speaker: 2
01:06:46
change you. They wanted to stop saying
Speaker: 1
01:06:47
the n
Speaker: 2
01:06:48
word. They want to stop a bunch of different things on the show.
Speaker: 1
01:06:59
And we’ll give you all this money if you if you roll over.
Speaker: 2
01:07:01
They gave him literally the devil’s deal. We’re gonna give you $50,000,000 and this is this is what you’re gonna get. And he’s ai, no. I quit. I quit everything. And I’m I’m gonna go to Africa. I’m gonna hang out in Africa for a ai. And I’m gonna quit stand up for 10 years and come back and still be the best.
Speaker: 0
01:07:16
That is so the right move. Oh my god. Well,
Speaker: 2
01:07:18
look, he’s a legend now, but he but that’s the that’s really him. If you’re around him, he’s a he’s an artist in, like, the truest sense
Speaker: 1
01:07:26
of the world.
Speaker: 0
01:07:26
Absolutely. He is. You know, ai 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. And so, like, he was, you know, getting his power turned off and stuff, like, you know, constantly. And, yeah, he was struggling to get by, and he would do these little things with Geraldo Rivera that Quentin and I would work on his PAs every now and then.
Speaker: 1
01:07:48
And The Dolph Lundgren exercise video.
Speaker: 0
01:07:50
We worked on the Dolph Lundgren exercise video together.
Speaker: 1
01:07:51
PAs and the
Speaker: 0
01:07:52
Dolph Lundgren ai video. Lundgren exercise. We were picking up dog shit in Venice Speak with our hands sai that Dolph could do aerobics on that little grassy knoll. Hilarious. And so, you know, I’m like the first I’m I’m a PA working for him, a driver. I’m running around town. My car is, like, transmission is going out.
Speaker: 0
01:08:12
I’m trying to figure out what am I gonna do. This is not what I wanna do. I don’t wanna work on cops, but, like, I need the job. And so I’m I go in and I meet with with John, and he’s been a customer of ours, and he’s fatherly like to me. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:08:25
And Ai go into his office, and I sit down. And COPS has just started. And it it started because of a Ai Guild strike. And, you know, 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.
Speaker: 1
01:08:41
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:08:42
Yeah. I’m collecting vineyards.
Speaker: 1
01:08:43
Not not only that, though. I remember when he first came up with the idea with his partner, Malcolm Barber.
Speaker: 0
01:08:49
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:08:49
Alright. So he comes in, and he’s like, hey. We’ve got a really good idea for a show. So he’s he’s he’s he’s describing COPS before COPS has ever been made.
Speaker: 0
01:08:57
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:08:58
And and his first idea was it wasn’t called COPS. It was called the real Miami Vice.
Speaker: 2
01:09:09
The problem was it doesn’t scale out to the whole country.
Speaker: 1
01:09:11
It cost you. Yeah. Yeah. He, Well, he they defined it. They refined it.
Speaker: 0
01:09:15
I I asked him. I said, John, like, you’ve worked, you know, 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, you know, work my way up? He’s like, well, what do you wanna do ultimately? I said, well, I sana to direct films. Well, then be a director. Don’t work your way up the ladder.
Speaker: 0
01:09:34
Don’t try to be a grip sana work your way in. Just be a director. And, I heard that. And he’s ai, start at the top. It’s the best way to go. Just start at the top and, you know, just tell people you’re a director. Put yourself in that. Otherwise, people will just pigeonhole you.
Speaker: 0
01:09:52
They’ll just say that’s who he is. He’s a grip or he’s a PA or he’s you’ll you’ll have to work your way up. Just tell people who you are. So I thought about it and I was like, okay. I quit. He’s like, what? I said, I quit. I’m a director. And I left. I walked out.
Speaker: 0
01:10:12
I mean, I I gave him notice. And, and I walked out. And he sat there, and he he later told me years later tyler me, man, I Sai thought that was the most audacious, ballsy thing that I gave you advice and you took it ai away. And okay. Never mind the fact that it took me years of love just telling people I’m a director. I directed super 8 movies. Like, I was not a director.
Speaker: 0
01:10:39
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. 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 Cannes running around, you know, trying to do foreign sales.
Speaker: 0
01:10:58
They’re like, hey. Maybe that kid is a director. That was all it you know, it was just believing in yourself
Speaker: 1
01:11:04
It’s funny that guy when no
Speaker: 0
01:11:05
one else believes what you believe.
Speaker: 1
01:11:06
The guy he’s talking about, John Ai, who created cops, it was he was a really good customer, and his ai, Maggie, was really lovely. She came she came
Speaker: 0
01:11:14
Morgan and all of his kids. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:11:15
And, I heard the story came back to me later that, you know, when I got the deal to make Reservoir Dogs, you know, just little by little through the Manhattan Beach community, they started, you know, hearing, oh, hey. Quentin’s making his movie. Yeah. 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.
Speaker: 1
01:11:37
Good for him. And who knows what’s gonna happen to it, but it’s happening. And and I think they were having a little dinner party at their house, and then Maggie mentions to, John about what really? That’s actually happened? It’s actually happened? Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:11:53
No. They’ve got production offices and everything. They’re they’re they’re making the movie. Everybody, raise your glass Yeah. To Quentin. He did it. Good for Quentin. That’s awesome. Glass.
Speaker: 1
01:12:06
I’m getting Terry Sai just even thinking about it.
Speaker: 0
01:12:09
You know, I I I just have to say, John Langley, you know, because I had some shit happen to me in my life. I spent some time in jail. 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.
Speaker: 0
01:12:26
Our customer, John Langley, because I lost 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 he he wanted me back in the saddle.
Speaker: 2
01:12:39
I love the things you wrote from jail.
Speaker: 0
01:12:41
Oh, thanks. Yeah. Thank you.
Speaker: 2
01:12:43
They were really good. It was really interesting. It was ai this, like, super intelligent writer who’s in jail. You know? It’s a different different sort of perspective.
Speaker: 1
01:12:52
Roger’s working on a book about his jail experiences that is fantastic.
Speaker: 0
01:12:58
I kept a really detailed super detailed journal about, like, everything that’s going on around me. And, you know, it became a really I mean, that was an it was a 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: 0
01:13:22
Everything gets kind of dropped, and you lose who you arya, and you’re just left with your remorse and regret for why you’re there. And you have a lot of time to think about things. And, but having said that, as a writer, there was a concrete bench that I could sit on. Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
01:13:44
I had golf pencils. I could buy sheets of paper. And, and 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, yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:14:03
I’ve I’ve it was a very monastic I was telling Quentin at one point, it was kind of monastic like. You know, you’re you’re in a you’re in a secular kind of you’re in a cell. You’re in a cell and you’re you’re with a bunch of god dudes. And you’re ai. You know, it’s like you’re I I became a scribe.
Speaker: 0
01:14:22
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. And then also people find out you’re a writer, and they’re like, hey, meh. Would you write my your essay, would you write my girlfriend?
Speaker: 0
01:14:39
You know, I sana write her a love letter. I need your help. So I wrote, like, a ton of love letters.
Speaker: 2
01:14:46
That’s actually good practice for dialogue.
Speaker: 0
01:14:48
Oh, yeah. No. Totally. Totally. No. Actually, I heard some amazing dialogue.
Speaker: 1
01:14:52
And you’re ai your Robinhood script. Ai? And there’s so that that’s your way to get out of, the cell is to write his Robinhood script.
Speaker: 0
01:14:59
I you know, I well, there’s a book cart. And, sai 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 ai. And, 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. And Ai like, oh, man.
Speaker: 0
01:15:22
This is gonna be great. And I start reading it, and it’s ai they get into evil hold, which is, like this castle where, you know, Meh father is being kept. 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 bryden.
Speaker: 0
01:15:40
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. Ai, how bad the prison is and what he’s seeing inside and his observations. I was shaking after reading it. I’m shaking thinking about, I mean, the entire experience now.
Speaker: 0
01:16:02
But, you know, it was such a, a vivid depiction. I’m like, well, I’m 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 on your neck. I mean, rightfully so, but I nevertheless.
Speaker: 0
01:16:19
And, and so I started writing, you know, my version of Robinhood and with on, you know, pencil and paper. And as I’m writing it, like, I was crying as I wrote it. I Ai was looking at the pages the other day, and there’s, like, teardrops, like
Speaker: 2
01:16:35
Wow.
Speaker: 0
01:16:35
All over it. Like, on every page. That’s ai, 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. Yeah. It’s like, thank God. I’m I’m feeling. Yeah. Like, I’m feeling something, and it’s traveling into the page.
Speaker: 0
01:16:52
And also because I had been a working writer in Hollywood for a long ai, 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 since I was that guy. And so I’m sitting, and I had kind of become used to that.
Speaker: 0
01:17:11
Well, writing by hand in well, incarcerated, it reconnected me with, like, pen to paper or pencil to paper. And it reminded me that not like, when you write something down, you have a different relationship with the way Ai.
Speaker: 1
01:17:29
I consider the pen is the antenna to God.
Speaker: 0
01:17:32
It is the antenna to God. And, also, when you type it into the computer, that’s a process of rewriting. Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
01:17:37
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:17:38
And so you’re losing an entire section. And so it reconnected to good ai.
Speaker: 1
01:17:43
Agree with you more.
Speaker: 2
01:17:43
Okay. Tell me explain this more to meh. This is fascinating to me. Because I’ve heard many people say this about comedy that they they have to write on paper. Mhmm. I don’t. I write on a laptop. I’ve always written on a laptop. Mhmm.
Speaker: 2
01:17:55
For me, it’s 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 some 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: 1
01:18:12
Well, I
Speaker: 2
01:18:13
Ai mean, more thinking I feel ai when you have more thinking, there’s more little different ways you might alternately branch off with your ideas.
Speaker: 1
01:18:21
I I don’t I don’t think I,
Speaker: 0
01:18:23
That is not false.
Speaker: 1
01:18:24
Not that I not that I’ve ever not that I’ve ever written an hour long stand up comedy show. Ai? But, I would think that your writing is different than my kind of writing. Sure. You know? It would ai I would think as far as writing stuff down, it’s like notes and ideas and Right. Of of, funny word phrases or Right.
Speaker: 1
01:18:43
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.
Speaker: 1
01:18:48
You’re saying it, and then you get your story. Right? And maybe you say it into a recorder. Maybe you do this or you do that. But, you know, but but probably doesn’t even look right when you when you even when you type it up on a on a thing, it doesn’t look right. No.
Speaker: 1
01:18:59
And so when you tell the story
Speaker: 2
01:19:01
What I was gonna get to is that when you when I type, I can type quicker than I can write by hand. Oh, yeah. And the problem with comedy is it comes quick and slippery. And, also, you get
Speaker: 0
01:19:10
a little lit. You can edit. No.
Speaker: 1
01:19:11
That make that makes a that makes a tremendous amount of sense. I mean, we’re writing stuff that has to hold up on the page. Right. That has to hold up as writing.
Speaker: 2
01:19:20
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: 0
01:19:30
It’s like strip mining. You just gotta pull all that dirt out and just process it.
Speaker: 1
01:19:33
So you Get a
Speaker: 0
01:19:34
little org.
Speaker: 2
01:19:34
Exactly what it’s like. I’ve tried. The right
Speaker: 1
01:19:37
So you open up your mind about
Speaker: 2
01:19:38
A 100%.
Speaker: 1
01:19:39
Just let loose on public transportation.
Speaker: 2
01:19:41
Yes. Yes. And it’s I’m not even trying to be funny. I’m just trying to write, and then I’ll find something funny in
Speaker: 1
01:19:48
it. Mhmm. And
Speaker: 2
01:19:49
then that’s that’s the starting point. Now I take that, cut it, copy it into a completely fresh document. Now what is this? Okay. But let me How do I get to that?
Speaker: 0
01:19:59
Well, it’s really it’s whatever works sai well. The question. Is the best.
Speaker: 1
01:20:02
Is it you on either typing or whatever? Is it is it you doing that 8 page thing on, on on transportation, or is it more likely that you’re just pacing around doing a running monologue on public transportation?
Speaker: 2
01:20:21
Well, I’m sitting still. Right? That’s what you mean. The thing about typing is I type good. So not great, but I I don’t have to look at the keys, and I can type pretty quickly. And if I have a good laptop, like a ThinkPad that has a lot of finger travel, then you really feel it. And I I get into, like, a zone.
Speaker: 2
01:20:37
And then it’s just about, like Yes.
Speaker: 1
01:20:39
I ai. You actually do write your notes.
Speaker: 2
01:20:41
Yeah. And then it’s just about 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. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:20:50
Yeah.
Speaker: 2
01:20:50
And then all of a sudden, you’re like, god, how didn’t I not see that in front of the computer? Because you weren’t in that vibe of the crowd. Like, it’s sai you don’t do it on your own. You have to do it with them. It’s like the one art form that literally cannot be practiced in solitary.
Speaker: 1
01:21:03
Yeah.
Speaker: 2
01:21:03
You have to do it. So when I write, I write like that. But it I also write things down on pieces of paper. I also write like, whenever I if I have an idea, I gotta catch it.
Speaker: 0
01:21:13
Well, they’re not gonna give you that computer in jail. Oh, that’s true. You’re gonna be forced to write it on, on a pencil, and that’s gonna be an okay experience
Speaker: 2
01:21:22
for speak. But what is it that makes it to you, like, the the hand of God? Like, what is it about writing on paper?
Speaker: 1
01:21:29
I well, my little my little analogy of it is you can’t write poetry on a computer. Why not? Well, because we’re it’s we’re I’m I’m going for a rhythm.
Speaker: 2
01:21:39
Right.
Speaker: 1
01:21:40
I’m going for I’m I’m going for I’m I’m going for a rhythm. And then and and and there’s, like, there’s a connection between my chicken scratch and this paper and this pen as opposed to this other thing. And and the more unintelligible than only I can read it, the more legit it kind of is. And the thing is and and it’s it’s vomit. It’s absolutely vomit.
Speaker: 1
01:22:04
Okay. Yeah. You when you write by hand, you overwrite. You way, way ai. Yeah. Because you just you’re just getting it out, and you’re getting it out there.
Speaker: 1
01:22:12
Then after all the the vomit happens, then you sit down with a typewriter or then you sit down with a thing, and now you take the vomit and you and you tame it.
Speaker: 0
01:22:23
Massage it.
Speaker: 1
01:22:24
And now you make it now you make the sentences work. And now you there’s more yeah. This is all blah. 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. Can we stop for a second while we’re in the restroom? Yeah. What’s going on? Pause. You have cigars, don’t you? Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:22:43
You
Speaker: 2
01:22:43
want a cigar? Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:22:43
I will. Let’s have some cigars.
Speaker: 1
01:22:44
He doesn’t do anything fun. I’ll I’ll I’ll answer it.
Speaker: 0
01:22:47
On Joe Rogan’s show, I will have a cigar. Beautiful. He doesn’t do anything fun.
Speaker: 1
01:22:53
Oh, that is the truth. You don’t do
Speaker: 2
01:22:57
anything fun?
Speaker: 0
01:22:57
Really? Nothing? Well, maybe I should talk about this.
Speaker: 1
01:23:02
I should talk about it.
Speaker: 0
01:23:03
Maybe I should talk about, are we on? Or should I can I go? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t do anything fun. Don’t do anything fun. No. You know, Making movies is fun. Well, that’s the fun the cutter?
Speaker: 1
01:23:16
Ai thought that was a cutter. That look cool.
Speaker: 0
01:23:18
I was like, is that
Speaker: 1
01:23:18
a cutter or is that brass knuckles? Cool. What are
Speaker: 2
01:23:24
you saying about fun?
Speaker: 0
01:23:26
I don’t do anything fun. Well, you know, after after what happened to me, I I mean, I should probably tell the whole story and maybe I eventually will here. But, you know, Ai, I went to jail for a DUI related incident, that caused manslaughter. And one of my passengers ai. And, you know, after that and going to jail and whatnot, I
Speaker: 1
01:24:01
He’s not the funniest guy to get drunk with. Yeah. I don’t
Speaker: 0
01:24:03
I I it’s kind of what it is. I you know, if I go to a party or something like that, I I don’t wanna be seen holding a drink with, you know, even with water in it.
Speaker: 1
01:24:15
I’m teasing him, but I you know, I get it. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:24:19
Of course.
Speaker: 2
01:24:20
And who wouldn’t fucking get it?
Speaker: 1
01:24:24
But then you add the fact that he’s a vegetarian. I mean, all the, you know,
Speaker: 0
01:24:27
all the bunch of shit.
Speaker: 2
01:24:28
You’re a vegetarian?
Speaker: 0
01:24:29
Yeah. Why do you do that? Because your wife made them.
Speaker: 2
01:24:33
That happens. Yeah. That happened to a friend of mine.
Speaker: 0
01:24:35
That’s Sai
Speaker: 2
01:24:36
speaks out burgers every now and then.
Speaker: 0
01:24:38
I, I also have a kind of, it’s it’s kind of like an animal thing. I had a pig, as a as a pet. Mhmm. And, man, when you look at those eyes, those are human eyes. They’re Yeah. And, you know, I looked into it and it looked into my I I just I had chickens before that and You
Speaker: 2
01:25:00
know what it’s ai, John?
Speaker: 0
01:25:00
Chickens are like cats. You know, they want back scratches and stuff. And I just couldn’t like, after a while, I just couldn’t do it.
Speaker: 2
01:25:05
Yeah. It there’s people that are feral. You ever met a feral person? You don’t wanna let them sleep in your house.
Speaker: 0
01:25:11
Yeah. Right. You met a
Speaker: 2
01:25:12
a wild crazy person? You’re in jail. So push that thing up. You had it right. You had it right.
Speaker: 0
01:25:16
Did I? Yeah. This thing right here? Yeah. Push that up.
Speaker: 1
01:25:18
It’s an intelligence today.
Speaker: 0
01:25:19
No. Look at that. Sorry. Push it down.
Speaker: 2
01:25:20
Pull it down. Yeah. Sorry.
Speaker: 0
01:25:21
Pull it down. Sorry. Hey. Ai like you’ve Are you digging this?
Speaker: 2
01:25:24
You’ve yeah. They’re great. Foundation Cigars, shout out. You’ve you’ve been around feral people. Right? You don’t want feral people living in your house. You don’t you don’t wanna take some murderer and, you know, give him your car and let him, you know, come and sleep in your room, you know. Yeah.
Speaker: 2
01:25:40
It’s it’s different. Yeah. I should take you around some wild pigs. No. I’ve wild wild pigs are like little demons. They make they make ai orc sounds.
Speaker: 0
01:25:48
Wild pigs are wild pigs. You know, I get it.
Speaker: 2
01:25:49
I hear them fight with each other.
Speaker: 0
01:25:52
There are people who are like that also.
Speaker: 1
01:25:54
Yeah. Exactly. That’s my point. But you’re telling me, like, boars and
Speaker: 2
01:25:56
everything. Domesticated people are awesome. Yeah. Domesticated people like yourself and myself, we’re fun to be around. We’re nice people. We know, you know, we’re not gonna rob you. No one’s gonna kill you. It’s there’s a difference. The what the wild the wild is.
Speaker: 1
01:26:10
Ai that. Yeah. Exactly. It’s different.
Speaker: 2
01:26:13
So I I understand that ai wouldn’t that. Yeah. Exactly. It’s
Speaker: 0
01:26:17
different.
Speaker: 1
01:26:17
So I I understand that you wouldn’t want to eat animals but they eat each other. Yeah.
Speaker: 2
01:26:17
And it’s just this bizarre cycle of life. I think it’s it’s where you’re getting your animals from. Are you getting your animals from of ai a this mass
Speaker: 0
01:26:29
factory That’s the other part of it that’s the other part of it is I I think there’s a line in Highlander 2 where Sean Connery says, I don’t eat anything that I cannot identify. Ai then I kinda feel like that as well. Mhmm. Like, I don’t have a lot of trust for large industrial
Speaker: 2
01:26:46
You shouldn’t. System. But you sai you can get meat from, like a farm, you know, ai, you can get it from a ranch. You you could go to one of those, you know, they have those, what are those farmers arya type deals?
Speaker: 0
01:26:59
Oh, yeah. You can
Speaker: 2
01:26:59
go meet a rancher
Speaker: 0
01:27:00
and you can buy beef from them. I am not like one of these people who arya, like, oh, never never. Like, you know, if I am in the right place, in the right environment, and the ai, food is is there like, if there’s a like, if I’m in 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: 0
01:27:22
Right. Right. I’ll take that one. You know?
Speaker: 2
01:27:37
Especially if you have your own chickens. That’s the greatest thing in the world. We have 15 chickens.
Speaker: 0
01:27:41
There’s nothing like, eggs straight from a chicken.
Speaker: 2
01:27:44
Oh, it’s great.
Speaker: 0
01:27:45
Nothing like eggs from
Speaker: 2
01:27:46
a chicken. It’s karma free.
Speaker: 1
01:27:47
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: 2
01:27:47
Like, the chickens are having a good time. No one’s getting hurt. You’re ai they’re all they’re all, like, treated like pets. Like,
Speaker: 0
01:27:52
hey, girls.
Speaker: 1
01:27:52
I love chickens. Ai would no. I actually really have I’ve always actually thought that an exotic pet would be to have, like, a chicken. You know? It’s ai one chicken. Yeah. And just, like, treat it like a dog. Treat it like, hey. That’s my chicken. He hangs around.
Speaker: 0
01:28:10
You gotta get a couple of them, though.
Speaker: 1
01:28:11
They they need
Speaker: 0
01:28:11
to have a pecking order.
Speaker: 2
01:28:12
Yes. They they like to hang out with each other.
Speaker: 1
01:28:14
I do. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:28:15
Goebbels figured that one out. Oh, what? Yeah. The He was a chicken farmer.
Speaker: 2
01:28:19
Was he really?
Speaker: 0
01:28:20
Oh, yeah. Oh, no shit. Chicken farmer. That’s how he worked out all of his policies in the camps is
Speaker: 2
01:28:26
We shouldn’t talk about that.
Speaker: 0
01:28:27
Don’t ai connect that to chicken farming. It’s just you
Speaker: 2
01:28:31
know, it’s like this the name Adolf. You can’t use it anymore.
Speaker: 0
01:28:34
Can’t use it. Can’t can’t have that little mustache
Speaker: 1
01:28:36
anymore. Right? Can’t have that Can’t have a chakra. Can’t have that cool mustache.
Speaker: 2
01:28:38
Remember, Ai Jordan tried for a little while? Yeah. Mike, that’s how competitive that guy is. Like, fuck that. I can Ai can wear that mustache?
Speaker: 0
01:28:44
He had a Hitler
Speaker: 2
01:28:45
for a while.
Speaker: 0
01:28:46
I think I can make it happen. I’ll make it happen.
Speaker: 2
01:28:48
He just decided he was gonna force it through.
Speaker: 0
01:28:50
You know, as far as writing in jail, I’m just thinking about it right now. One of the other things I had to contend with was, they would confiscate anything that I wrote. Oh. So, you know, ai, once a week or once every 2 weeks or so.
Speaker: 2
01:29:07
Why would they do that? Was it illegal to write?
Speaker: 0
01:29:08
I was considered a security threat by what
Speaker: 2
01:29:10
I was writing. And, going on.
Speaker: 0
01:29:15
That and then when they sent me in, like, I was placed in this, like, solitary confinement thing, like, in the hole. And, you know, you’re in there and, like, I had never been any anything like that sai far in my life. I was thinking, this is ai fucking Guantanamo, except it made me think about it. I’ve got due process sai least.
Speaker: 0
01:29:31
And so, I’m in this, like, crazy, Kafkaesque, mechanized, totalitarian environment. You’re in a room where you have no window and the lights are on 247. And, you know, I don’t care what anybody says. You go into a room 3 days deprived of sound and and and the understanding of ai.
Speaker: 0
01:29:55
You go crazy after, you know, after 2 days. You’re insane. They they broke me after 2 days. I was like, oh, I’ll do some yoga. I’ll meditate. No problem.
Speaker: 0
01:30:05
No. After a while, if the lights are on 247 and you can’t hear and it’s ai being inside of a seashell, You go slowly nuts. Is that by design? Oh, yeah. Yeah. For sure. It’s by design.
Speaker: 0
01:30:17
It’s like you’re placed into a and and, so about once a speak, ai, in when I was in population, about once a week, the, you know, middle of the night or, you know, the lights are down and suddenly the lights come on bright. Lights are always on, but lights come on bright. And suddenly, a bunch of guards come rushing in through the doors.
Speaker: 0
01:30:39
You know, they just storm into the the tank, into the, the section. And, they pull everybody out of their cells, and they strip everybody naked, and they put you up against the wall. 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 the wall.
Speaker: 0
01:31:02
And they’re going through everybody’s cell, and they’re just ripping your cell apart looking for anything. And usually they’re looking for tar heroin or a shank or a weapon of some kind or
Speaker: 1
01:31:14
Or works or some kind.
Speaker: 0
01:31:15
Cell phones. Anything. Ai, they’re looking for anything that’s considered contraband. Okay. For me, they were looking at my writing. Because when I was in solitary for that time, like, literally on kites a kite is a ai a requisition form that you sana out to the guards. You’re not allowed to talk to the guards. They don’t want you to they don’t sana talk to you.
Speaker: 0
01:31:32
You tell them what you want on a kite, and then you give them the ai, and then they take it off, and maybe it gets answered. Ai never had one answered in my life. And so they they come in. They strip everybody naked. They take all your clothes.
Speaker: 0
01:31:49
And they’re under the guise of where, you know, we’re, doing a laundry exchange. 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. Well, with me, they would look for whatever I was writing.
Speaker: 0
01:32:04
Because when I was in solitary, I was writing, you know, like, maps. I would map the place like a fucking idiot. Like, I still was, you know, I’m writing about, oh, Ai, the guard. I saw him watching, you know, ai, literally saw him watching on a little TV Sai propaganda. Like, Triumph of the Will is playing on his TV, and he’s watching it. Oh, I’m gonna write that down. So they didn’t want me writing all my stuff.
Speaker: 0
01:32:29
They were ai, that guy is a fucking threat. You get whatever he’s written. 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, just take whatever I had written. So I learned that they couldn’t take or open letters to my attorney. And so, because it’s privileged. And so what I would do is I would just ai.
Speaker: 0
01:32:53
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. Ai writing would go in, you know, I always left it when I was working in the letter to my attorney.
Speaker: 0
01:33:09
And then as soon as they would rate it, I would just seal the envelope and then that would go out. 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, yeah. Because little yep.
Speaker: 1
01:33:28
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: 2
01:33:33
You, where did you publish it? I don’t remember where I was reading it.
Speaker: 0
01:33:37
Well, was it on I had several things. Okay. So first of all, I was placed I was sentenced to go to a low security like a country club facility. I went I went to a low security facility. And, I went in there and, you know, you have access to stuff. It’s it’s, you know, it’s more like a like a camp almost. And you’re there and you you’re incarcerated, but it’s it’s a light incarceration almost.
Speaker: 0
01:34:05
And I had access to a cell phone, and so I started tweeting. And these were the early days of Twitter. Right. And so I started tweeting, oh, they found tar heroin and so on in in, you know, Pudgy’s cell. And, they dragged him off.
Speaker: 0
01:34:19
And, oh, they, you know, this happened over here. Oh, they, so and so shakes sai and so. Oh, they’ve rolled up so and so and taken him away. I was, like, tweeting this stuff. And this is the early days of Twitter. And, Roger Ebert, who was, like, at that time, the biggest on Twitter, was following meh.
Speaker: 0
01:34:37
And he put me on blast. Like, he, he suddenly decided that he would tell every and, like, all of a sudden, one day overnight, like, the story kinda went everywhere in the world.
Speaker: 2
01:34:50
He put you on blast in a positive way?
Speaker: 0
01:34:52
Well, he’s he just told everybody that, oh, this is happening. Somebody is Roger Avery, Academy Award winning writer, is tweeting from jail And to tweeting from behind bars.
Speaker: 1
01:35:03
Did he but did he
Speaker: 0
01:35:04
have At the time, now it’s like nothing. People do it all the time. People, like,
Speaker: 2
01:35:08
I’ve got a Shuf Knight’s doing podcast.
Speaker: 0
01:35:10
I’ve got a friend who’s one of those January 6 ai and he’s, he’s sends me, like, tweets all the time.
Speaker: 1
01:35:16
Like, he’s
Speaker: 2
01:35:17
You got a friend who was a January 6th?
Speaker: 1
01:35:18
Though. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:35:19
Yeah. Yeah. You got a friend who
Speaker: 2
01:35:20
was a January 6th guy?
Speaker: 0
01:35:21
Well, he’s still there. He’s, like, hundreds of days in jail without without any kind of, without trial.
Speaker: 1
01:35:29
Without processing.
Speaker: 0
01:35:30
Ai I I mean, tell me if I’m wrong, but, like, that’s not how it’s supposed to be,
Speaker: 1
01:35:35
is it?
Speaker: 2
01:35:35
It’s not how it’s supposed to be.
Speaker: 0
01:35:36
You’re supposed to have a due process of some kind.
Speaker: 2
01:35:38
Well, especially when you watch the actual footage of how it went down.
Speaker: 0
01:35:41
Oh, I watched it live. And there was that that guy, that antifa guy waving people in, you know, ai, moving them in.
Speaker: 1
01:35:49
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:35:49
They were moving the the, the block stockade the blockade things. They were moving out, and cops were waving people in. They were opening the doors for people.
Speaker: 2
01:35:58
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? They gotta have guns. Machine guns. Those guys weren’t planning on an insurrection. No. And then you have the factor that there was agents in in the crowd, and we don’t know how many.
Speaker: 2
01:36:16
There’s government agents in the crowd that were inciting people to go in. Yeah. That’s what they do.
Speaker: 1
01:36:20
And I sana know
Speaker: 0
01:36:21
who that cop was who shot that woman. Yeah. What about that?
Speaker: 2
01:36:24
Yeah. The the whole thing’s crazy.
Speaker: 1
01:36:26
Yeah. It’s
Speaker: 2
01:36:26
The whole thing’s crazy. And then there’s this thing that cops ai. That no no cops got died that day. That’s not true. No. The cop who died, he died of a stroke. And I I believe it was a stroke. A stroke or a heart attack. But Well,
Speaker: 0
01:36:37
with everything, there’s a lot of misinformation being given to us by the mainstream media.
Speaker: 2
01:36:41
Attributed to it, you know, sort of ai when, you know, anything happens to anyone 4 years after the vaccine, they attribute it to the vaccine.
Speaker: 0
01:36:48
Oh, it was probably the vaccine.
Speaker: 1
01:36:49
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: 2
01:36:49
Yeah. Could have been the guy ai had a fucking heart attack. But this guy who was a cop, he did not die there. He was not killed by the protesters. And you watch the video of the the shaman dude with the fucking buffalo hat. They’re walking him around. The cops are
Speaker: 0
01:37:02
Oh, yeah. They’re showing him around. They’re
Speaker: 2
01:37:04
guiding him. How would you ever think that that is gonna let you wind up in jail? How would you ever think that if you’re an unsophisticated guy who was wearing fucking face paint and you’re 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: 2
01:37:18
You know? Yeah. People get a part of a movement, and they fucking yeah. We’re all doing it. 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.
Speaker: 2
01:37:32
That that that that that that that that that that makes
Speaker: 1
01:37:34
a lot of sense. Yeah. Look at that.
Speaker: 0
01:37:36
Because nobody was doing an insurrection.
Speaker: 1
01:37:37
There wasn’t
Speaker: 0
01:37:38
an insurrection. It wasn’t an insurrection.
Speaker: 2
01:37:40
You don’t do an insurrection without weapons. It’s the whole idea is crazy.
Speaker: 0
01:37:43
So there was no presumption that there was gonna be any kind of, like that you were gonna get thrown in jail for a 1000 days. And so my pal my pal Jay protest. Lang is, he’s been there forever. And every now and then, I get a, like, a picture of him. Ai, he’s been in, like look. I deserve to go to jail. That guy doesn’t. Right. And most of those guys don’t.
Speaker: 2
01:38:03
Yeah. I think it was a bad decision, certainly, to go into the capital. It was a bad decision to smash windows, but I I wanna know who
Speaker: 0
01:38:09
it was. People have been smashing things, like, for a whole year before that.
Speaker: 2
01:38:12
Right. That’s a very good point.
Speaker: 0
01:38:14
Ai like we were a culture of smashing things at that point.
Speaker: 2
01:38:16
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? 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 wanna be that guy.
Speaker: 2
01:38:31
But at a certain point in time, you should be that guy.
Speaker: 1
01:38:35
You should fucking you should
Speaker: 2
01:38:36
go, what’s going on, man?
Speaker: 0
01:38:40
There comes a point when men of good conscience must stand up and, and and speak out against things that are obviously wrong. Yeah. And that is one of them, I
Speaker: 2
01:38:51
think. That is one of them. It’s a big one. It’s a weird one. 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 gonna release all the January 6 prisoners. Like, how long do you think they should be in there for? Who’s who’s opposing this?
Speaker: 0
01:39:06
They should at least be going to trial. Yes. You should at least be going to trial. Right. It is unconscionable to hold somebody for over a year, 2 years now or, like like Well, the
Speaker: 1
01:39:16
thing I mean, the government has always had a situation where, we talked about when we did our episode on the Andersonville ai. Yeah. You know, is the one charge that the government can put against you where they don’t need direct evidence is conspiracy. If they arrest you for conspiracy, that means they don’t have direct evidence, but they don’t need direct evidence Well for conspiracy.
Speaker: 0
01:39:40
By the ai the way, when I was
Speaker: 1
01:39:41
Oh, they’re ai just one one one one thing. That’s how they got Manson.
Speaker: 0
01:39:45
Right. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That’s true.
Speaker: 1
01:39:47
Right. Alright. Because Well,
Speaker: 2
01:39:48
they knew what Manson had done because they were helping them.
Speaker: 1
01:39:51
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I believe that too because Did
Speaker: 2
01:39:53
you read chaos?
Speaker: 1
01:39:54
That that book’s one of the best. Well I believe you. I I read every Vatsal book that they’re possibly could read, and then I read that when I throw the rest of them away in the fucking trash.
Speaker: 2
01:40:03
Chaos is insane.
Speaker: 1
01:40:04
Chaos is just fantastic. And he helped me too because, ai my first AD is a friend of his. Alright. Bill Clark. Oh, wow. And, when I was writing the the, once upon a time in Hollywood, book, I go deeper into the Manson stuff. And so I had a couple of little questions in my head that I always kinda wanted to know the answer to.
Speaker: 1
01:40:24
So I got Tom’s number, and I called him up. And I was able to ask him ai really super, like, direct questions that can really help my ai. You know?
Speaker: 0
01:40:32
It’s a crazy fucking story, man. You know, when I was in jail, they I found out they record everything. They’re just constantly recording. And, so somebody’s in in there, and they’re like, man, I’d like to kill that DA. 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 around, like, stop.
Speaker: 2
01:40:51
Yeah. Oh, god.
Speaker: 0
01:40:52
Remember that thing you said about conspiracy? Let’s play that back for you.
Speaker: 2
01:40:55
Oh, god.
Speaker: 0
01:40:56
What you said about killing the DA? Well, that’s, you’re you’re going away again. You’re going back to trial. That happened a lot. But it’s also never ai.
Speaker: 1
01:41:05
They put guys in your cell to get you talking about shit.
Speaker: 0
01:41:08
Oh, yeah. That happened that happened right away. That happened right away. They they they’re trying to get you to, to incriminate yourself deeper constantly. It’s like a like a fun game.
Speaker: 2
01:41:17
What a fun game. What a fun game. To serve and protect and incriminate you deeper.
Speaker: 0
01:41:22
Well, I look, Ai had a my I as Quentin will confirm, I have my authority issues. I always I always have. I always have. I’m suspicious of anyone in power. And, you should be.
Speaker: 2
01:41:36
Yeah. It’s intoxicating.
Speaker: 1
01:41:38
If it were like this. Okay. So when okay. Because part of the thing in our show I’m getting back to what Roger is saying. I’m not changing the subject. When we do our shah, you know, the thing is we when we do our show, we talk about 3 movies. So I pick 3 video cassettes.
Speaker: 0
01:41:55
The show we’re talking about is the video archives podcast, which is
Speaker: 1
01:41:58
It was our 2nd season.
Speaker: 0
01:41:59
Patreon.com/videoarchives.
Speaker: 1
01:42:01
But the thing is alright. So it’s like there’s, like, the main movie, then there’s that second movie that’s, like, kinda like the main movie, but probably you don’t know that much about it and some wild exploitation thing that I you know, this what the fuck is this? Let’s watch it and find out. And the one of the things that’s about our show is I don’t say, hey, Roger.
Speaker: 1
01:42:18
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. Well, right. No. No. No.
Speaker: 1
01:42:24
We don’t do that shit. Alright. You know, we we get together to watch the movies together.
Speaker: 0
01:42:29
Part of it is the experience of being together and watching the movie together through watching it through his eyes.
Speaker: 1
01:42:33
The reason we came up with the idea of the show is, like, when we when we when we, we reconnected, we started doing what we used to do.
Speaker: 0
01:42:40
During the pandemic.
Speaker: 1
01:42:41
Yeah. And then we were sort of like, well, hey. Let’s come up with a way we can get paid to do this. Ai? You know? So me and Roger will get together, and we’ll we’ll we’ll watch 3 movies and sometimes even 4. 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: 1
01:42:58
But the thing is when Roger comes over to watch the film, I’ve kind of learned that it’s like Roger, I’m starting it’s 3 movies we’re gonna watch. I am starting the first movie 20 minutes after you get here because Roger will just get off on some archaic piece of of of of thing.
Speaker: 0
01:43:17
There’s sai threat. There’s a threat. And the next thing you know, alright,
Speaker: 1
01:43:21
it’s been an hour and 15 minutes later. Was. And you’re getting further and further and further away, alright, from the from the the the alchemy we’re trying to create with the first movie. So now it’s a little, in 20 minutes, I’m hitting play. That’s it. So wrap it up.
Speaker: 2
01:43:37
That’s a problem with podcasts. When people come over, sometimes we have some of the best conversations before the podcast. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:43:43
Yeah.
Speaker: 2
01:43:43
So now I have to be rude. I’ll be ai, stop. Stop. Stop. Let’s not talk. I know. You’re all Come on in. Come on in.
Speaker: 0
01:43:48
Let’s catch that, man.
Speaker: 2
01:43:48
Yeah. Catch yeah. Because you gotta catch it because it is weird. It’s a it’s a weird thing, You know? It’s it’s a beautiful thing though because it’s so open. You know? There’s no one telling like, there’s no studio people at your Oh, god. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:44:02
No. I mean, even the idea I mean, one, the fact the idea, the idea that this has replaced the talk shah, the talk shows that we grew up watching and and and ai those guys were the kings. Yeah. The fact that podcast I mean, you’re the king of the but the fact that that podcasting has replaced that, but also the fact that anybody that it’s got something intelligent, it’s got a cool little setup, it’s got an interesting personality, and it can they can sell sell an interesting conversation, theoretically, can start a podcast.
Speaker: 2
01:44:39
100%. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:44:41
Yeah. It’s the barrier to
Speaker: 2
01:44:42
entry so low. I think about the barrier to entry when you wanted to be a director.
Speaker: 1
01:44:45
Oh, god. Jesus.
Speaker: 2
01:44:46
It’s fucking crazy.
Speaker: 0
01:44:47
Not only not only that, you know, like the old days of television, you know, like Desilu Yeah. We own our content. Like, you own your content. Yeah. And ai mind that it’s a podcast. I’m okay with that. I like the 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: 0
01:45:09
It’s me and Quentin who decide everything. Yeah. And, you know, if if Quentin wants to do it, we go there. If I wanna do it, we go there. Well, I talk to Quentin. If and if Quentin allows it, we go there. It it I mean, basically, what we’re doing is the same thing we used to do.
Speaker: 0
01:45:24
That’s true. At the video store. We we do what we used to do at the video store. We’re talking about
Speaker: 1
01:45:29
completely terrible. I I I have the kill switch. But other than that
Speaker: 0
01:45:33
No. No. No. I didn’t mean it like that.
Speaker: 1
01:45:38
I never used the kill switch.
Speaker: 2
01:45:40
But the kill switch is always there.
Speaker: 1
01:45:42
No. Not really. Not really. Well, I guess, theoretically. But you
Speaker: 0
01:45:47
know what? When when you want
Speaker: 1
01:45:48
you want a theoretical sort of damage clean casing over your head.
Speaker: 0
01:45:51
Most times when you’ve used the kill switch, you’ve used it on your own
Speaker: 1
01:45:54
I used it on myself.
Speaker: 0
01:45:55
Yeah. You used it on yourself. You actually haven’t used it Yeah. Ai, 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. We used to sit around and talk Yeah. About movies. And so during the pandemic, you know, Quentin called me up. And we hadn’t talked for I mean, we had bumped into each other.
Speaker: 0
01:46:13
We’ve bumped
Speaker: 1
01:46:14
into each other a few
Speaker: 0
01:46:14
times. Ai. But we hadn’t really we had had a little bit of a
Speaker: 1
01:46:18
We had a falling out.
Speaker: 0
01:46:19
We had a falling out. And I I call it a sort of a business related falling out. 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.
Speaker: 0
01:46:40
I was just approaching it like I’m a Speak, Meh X, punk filmmaker. That was how I approached it. I’m gonna do whatever the fuck I wanna do. I’m gonna make the movie that I wanna make and I with that attitude of, you know, I know what I sana. 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: 0
01:47:02
You have to be willing to say, no. I’m right, even when everyone is telling you you’re wrong. And,
Speaker: 2
01:47:08
Is that how Joker 2 got made? I like Joker 2.
Speaker: 1
01:47:12
I like Joker 2. I know you you like Joker 2.
Speaker: 0
01:47:13
I like Joker 2 also.
Speaker: 1
01:47:14
I haven’t seen it.
Speaker: 2
01:47:14
I’m just fucking around.
Speaker: 1
01:47:16
I will defend Joker 2.
Speaker: 0
01:47:18
Yeah. I will I’ll defend the movie as well. I’m too late to watch it.
Speaker: 1
01:47:20
Need more fucking press on that.
Speaker: 2
01:47:22
I really hate to watch it and then talk to you about it afterwards. Because Tim Dillon said it’s the worst fucking movie that’s ever been made and he’s in it.
Speaker: 0
01:47:31
You know, I can well, that may have colored his perception though.
Speaker: 2
01:47:34
Oh, but Tim may thinks everything sucks. And it’s like it’s the beauty of Tim. No matter what everybody’s saying is amazing. Like, Tim loves to talk shit
Speaker: 1
01:47:41
about Austin. Tell you, the funniest thing that I’ve heard for a while on YouTube when I was listening to you guys talk is he’s a guy I never really listened to his show or anything like that.
Speaker: 2
01:47:52
He’s fucking brilliant.
Speaker: 1
01:47:53
But when he was on your thing talking about the election and when he described Tim Walt is ai, well, that guy just that guy’s a goofball who just should be at a county fair eating hot dogs.
Speaker: 0
01:48:08
I laughed for 15 minutes. I’ve I’ve played
Speaker: 1
01:48:11
it back about 3 different times because I thought that was such a funny comment.
Speaker: 2
01:48:16
He’s always funny. He said it sounds like Kamala Harris is doing voodoo curses. She’s doing gypsy curses, he said.
Speaker: 0
01:48:22
Like, that’s he sai speaks in gypsy curses.
Speaker: 2
01:48:27
And he always does his show with these fucking crazy glasses on. Like, that’s his new thing. Have you ever watched his show? It’s the best because it’s literally just him ranting and a producer. And the rant the ability to rant as as a singleton operator as a fucking lone person out there without anybody to bounce ideas off of is a rare talent.
Speaker: 2
01:48:47
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:48:47
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: 2
01:48:48
And he’s the best at it I’ve ever seen. Bill Burr is really good at it as well. Yeah. But Tim Dillon 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. Uh-huh. 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 Uh-huh.
Speaker: 2
01:49:06
Where he just rants about all these different things, but it’s fucking brilliant.
Speaker: 0
01:49:11
Uh-huh. Ai like ranting. Oh, yeah. Clearly, as you know.
Speaker: 1
01:49:14
You know what? Like, well, that’s
Speaker: 2
01:49:15
the great thing about you guys doing a podcast together. Where I was gonna get to is, like, in the beginning, you were you’re talking about replacing the talk show. Well, fucking you guys replaced Sysco and Ebert. Right? Because Sysco and Ebert sana do. Thank you. Thank you. They’re gone.
Speaker: 0
01:49:27
That was actually the agenda that Quentin proposed to me.
Speaker: 2
01:49:29
Well, both those guys are gone.
Speaker: 1
01:49:31
You know
Speaker: 2
01:49:31
what I love watching is videos of, like, outtakes of those guys, like, bitching
Speaker: 0
01:49:35
at each other. At each other. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:49:36
They fucking hated each other. Oh, yeah.
Speaker: 2
01:49:37
Yeah. Yeah. They were so shitty to each other. And then they had to be smiley and what a bullshit way to live.
Speaker: 0
01:49:44
Do you remember when Vincent Gallo wished testicular cancer on Roger Ebert, and then he got it? Oh, wow.
Speaker: 1
01:49:52
Do you remember that? Okay. I do. Well, he had cancer. Now that you bring
Speaker: 2
01:49:55
it up. Yeah. Right. Like, he lost his jaw. Like, they removed his jawbone.
Speaker: 0
01:49:59
That was Vincent Gallo cursing it onto Oh, voodoo. He apologized after you. Oh meh god. I didn’t I think he Well,
Speaker: 2
01:50:06
I think it was Well, that might all, like, led him.
Speaker: 1
01:50:08
Roger Ebert said that Bryden Bunny was the worst film to ever play in the history con film.
Speaker: 0
01:50:11
That’s exactly what happened. And then he went and he he cursed him, and then the curse came true. And then he regretted it. I talked to him. He was like, Ai wish I had never done that. What?
Speaker: 2
01:50:20
It’s crazy if it really worked. That movie, Brown Bunny, I wanna talk about that because the
Speaker: 0
01:50:25
I don’t know. Ai always thought
Speaker: 1
01:50:28
it’s so strange that we
Speaker: 2
01:50:28
can show violence, but we can’t
Speaker: 1
01:50:29
show sex. And I
Speaker: 2
01:50:30
know they tried to do that with, like you ever see the lines outside the movie theater when Deep Throat came out? Meh. Yeah. Yeah. Carson was arya line. Yeah. Yeah. Johnny Carson went to see Deep Throat
Speaker: 1
01:50:42
in a public theater. Ai heard I heard stories about Bing Crosby that arrived at midnight at the
Speaker: 2
01:50:46
People didn’t know what they were seeing yet. It hadn’t been defined as a genre. There was nudie movies that people watched, the stag parties.
Speaker: 1
01:50:53
And there were there there’s that little moment in 73 where there was porno porno chic.
Speaker: 0
01:50:58
Yeah. You know? Cool. Stallone did Italian Stallion.
Speaker: 1
01:51:01
Yeah. But that wasn’t a popular thing. This was. Right. And everyone had to kinda see it. And, and, like, oh, hey. Maybe this will be a thing.
Speaker: 2
01:51:09
Right.
Speaker: 1
01:51:10
Right. Right. This will be a thing now that, like, you know you know, you know, 1 or 3 or 4 porno movies will come out every year vatsal be, like, kinda considered, like, real movies. You know, ai couples will go see. Yeah. And that was the whole thing was promoting the idea of couples going to see
Speaker: 0
01:51:30
A porn film.
Speaker: 1
01:51:31
Either porno films or just heavenly erotic movies.
Speaker: 2
01:51:34
Right.
Speaker: 1
01:51:34
You know, like, for sexy for sexy nights. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:51:37
Not like Travis Bickle. Not like how Travis Bickle does it.
Speaker: 1
01:51:39
No. No.
Speaker: 0
01:51:40
No. It’s a sexy night. Now we’re gonna go
Speaker: 1
01:51:42
we’re gonna have a sexy night. We’re gonna
Speaker: 0
01:51:43
go out
Speaker: 1
01:51:44
and see, and then we’ll go home, and we’ll take care of business.
Speaker: 2
01:51:46
Right. Yeah. But And it
Speaker: 1
01:51:47
didn’t didn’t really happen, but there was this hope in the early seventies that that could happen.
Speaker: 2
01:51:53
But it’s fascinating that it didn’t happen because what I was gonna get to is, like, violence, we don’t have any problem with. But we all agree that consensual sex is way better than someone getting shot in the face. Yeah. But people get shot in the face in movies constantly.
Speaker: 2
01:52:08
You see heads explode and arms getting lopped off and Game of Thrones. Bread and butter. It’s constant.
Speaker: 0
01:52:14
I think it it’s actually gone too far, I think. I mean, this could be for me. Well, it’s not that violence has gone too far. It’s the meaningless violence has gone violence without purpose, almost. And I started to recognize this during Walking Dead. But really Game of Thrones you mentioned Game of Thrones.
Speaker: 0
01:52:32
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, the moment I’ve fallen in love with a character, suddenly they’re vivisecting their genitals. Mhmm. You know, it’s ai, and then the cycle begins again.
Speaker: 0
01:52:51
You fall in love with a different character. But if you And then they’re killing them. And they’re just doing it, like, sadistically because there’s, like, there’s nowhere to go other than that. They’re they’re just pushing the ceiling higher and higher.
Speaker: 2
01:53:02
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. There’s they’re getting usurped.
Speaker: 0
01:53:13
They’re they’re like Thrown into a dungeon. Yeah.
Speaker: 2
01:53:15
You know? People getting stabbed the lion.
Speaker: 1
01:53:17
Out of the picture.
Speaker: 2
01:53:17
It’s just you’re getting bryden by dogs.
Speaker: 0
01:53:19
This is real.
Speaker: 1
01:53:20
And now you have to fight for the next 5 years against the rats. Yeah. They’re in the fucking dungeon with you.
Speaker: 0
01:53:24
But television, at least the television I grew up with, was all about, like, the familiarity of returning to the characters you love.
Speaker: 2
01:53:31
Yeah. But there was plenty of characters. Yeah. And you did get to return to the ones that stuck around and didn’t get their heads
Speaker: 0
01:53:37
off. Killed other characters.
Speaker: 1
01:53:38
But let
Speaker: 0
01:53:38
me go ahead
Speaker: 2
01:53:39
and anyone else than that. I love that.
Speaker: 0
01:53:41
Let me let me give
Speaker: 1
01:53:41
you another let me give you another example of my everyone talks about how great television is now, and it’s it’s pretty good, I gotta say. It’s pretty good, but it’s still television to me. And what’s the difference between what’s the difference between television and a good movie?
Speaker: 1
01:54:00
Because a lot of the tell TV now has the patina of a movie. Mhmm. Ai? It it, they’re using cinematic language, alright, to get you caught up in it. And, and and and, obviously, I’m talking about good shows. We’re talking about shows that you’re Ozark. We’re ai shows that you’re compelled to watch. Right. Okay.
Speaker: 2
01:54:21
Right.
Speaker: 1
01:54:22
Alright. And so okay. So okay. I’ll use an example of a show. I’ll use, 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’m always been a big Kevin Costner fan. He’s fucking wonderful in this. Alright?
Speaker: 1
01:54:38
And I got really caught up in the show and everything, and all of a bryden, I’m having a good time. And, you know, I’ve got a couple seasons I haven’t seen, so I’m watching it. And and in the first season, I’m kinda talking about, meh, this is like a movie. This is like a big movie. It’s like a big movie.
Speaker: 1
01:54:53
And the ai the the guy who writes that is a good ai. This is good, like, punchy monologues and stuff. So then I end up watching, like, 3 seasons of it, and then I even watched that, like, 18/83 was, oh, this is a good good western show. I like westerns. But then after I’ve watched, like, 2 or 3 seasons or 1 season of 18/83 look. Ai I’m watching it, I am compelled.
Speaker: 1
01:55:21
I’m 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. You actually kinda know all their backstories. You know everybody’s connection with everybody else.
Speaker: 1
01:55:33
And, you know, they spend some time selling that out, and then everything out then everything is just the com is the compellingness of the soap opera.
Speaker: 2
01:55:41
Right.
Speaker: 1
01:55:41
What’s happening to the character
Speaker: 2
01:55:43
between that in a in a film.
Speaker: 0
01:55:44
Well, I’ll
Speaker: 1
01:55:44
tell you I’ll tell you. Because the thing is, if you if you watch edge of ai, Monday through Friday, you get caught up in the dramas of the the family and
Speaker: 2
01:55:55
everything. Right.
Speaker: 1
01:55:56
But you don’t remember it 5 years from now. You’re caught up into the minutiae of it at the moment. Mhmm. Ai. So the the difference between is is 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 it it built it built to an emotional climax of some degree. And, you know, one, the story is good.
Speaker: 1
01:56:19
It’s not just about the interpersonal relationships. The story is good itself, but but but there’s a payoff to it. But there’s not a payoff on this stuff. It’s just more inter interconnectional drama. And while I’m watching it, that’s good enough.
Speaker: 1
01:56:33
But when it’s over, I couldn’t tell you I can remember who the bad guy was in the first season of Yellowstone because it was, Danny Huston. I remember him in it. But I don’t remember any of the the the the details of it, and I don’t remember any of the bad guys for season 2 or season 3.
Speaker: 1
01:56:49
It’s out of my head. It’s just completely out of and same thing with 1883. The when I watched the whole thing, and that was ai a that seemed like a movie, except I don’t meh. Ai Sam Elliott is about the only thing I really remember of it when it was finished. But now Red River, I remember for the rest of my life.
Speaker: 2
01:57:08
Isn’t that though because it’s a different thing? Right? Because when you go to a film, film is is designed for one sitting. You sit down in the theater. You’re gonna get the entire encapsulation of what happens to these characters in
Speaker: 1
01:57:21
the audience. An example of one that is more than a soap opera, and you’ll and and here’s the difference. Here’s the difference. Okay. Because, yeah, you could say that. Look. They’re in the soap opera business, but I’ll tell you one that’s not. Okay? 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.
Speaker: 0
01:57:40
Oh, yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:57:41
That first season of Homeland.
Speaker: 0
01:57:42
1st
Speaker: 1
01:57:43
season is incredible. Okay.
Speaker: 2
01:57:44
Yeah. Very good.
Speaker: 1
01:57:46
When he gets to that final episode of the first saloni, and he’s got the suicide vest on. Yeah. And he’s in the room. He can kill the guys that he’s been waiting for for to do it for the whole movie. And you don’t want him to die, but you’re kinda into him and you kinda want him to pull it off.
Speaker: 1
01:58:06
And then his daughter calls him on the phone Before he does it, she doesn’t know what he’s gonna do, but she gets that little sense from him that something’s weird. She daddy, you you need to tell me that you’re gonna come home right now. You need to tell me right now that I will see you later tonight.
Speaker: 1
01:58:23
And the entire series has been built to this scene, and it’s one of the most emotional scenes I’ve ever seen in in a movie, any TV show Ai ever seen dramatized.
Speaker: 0
01:58:33
Season was great.
Speaker: 1
01:58:34
I’ve ever seen dramatized. Now that was a movie. Right. That was not a soap opera. That’s built to this moment of him being in that fucking room with the suicide vest on. And and and there was complexity. She doesn’t know what she’s asking, but we
Speaker: 0
01:58:51
do. Right.
Speaker: 1
01:58:52
She’s stopping this major thing, and she’ll never know that,
Speaker: 0
01:58:55
but we do. Right. Right.
Speaker: 1
01:58:58
Right. And he’s still committed.
Speaker: 0
01:59:00
That’s it.
Speaker: 1
01:59:00
But he’s more committed to her, and we know that. That’s just great shit. That’s a movie.
Speaker: 2
01:59:07
Right. And you can’t can you do that every week?
Speaker: 1
01:59:10
No. I didn’t say you can do it every week, but I’m saying I’m saying, like, when the season’s over, I need to walk away with more than just the soap opera.
Speaker: 2
01:59:19
Oh, an impactful moment.
Speaker: 1
01:59:20
Exactly. Now, Ai don’t expect you to do that every speak, but at the end of the arya, if you’re telling a continuing story
Speaker: 0
01:59:27
Right.
Speaker: 1
01:59:28
At the end of that fucking season, you need to, bam, drop the
Speaker: 2
01:59:32
mic. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:59:33
You need to tell me a fucking story, not just dot.dot.dot.
Speaker: 2
01:59:38
I see what you’re saying.
Speaker: 1
01:59:39
And, look, while I’m watching it, I’m not asking for that. But the fact that it all just disappears Right. Once it’s over and it’s just sand on the beach.
Speaker: 2
01:59:48
Right. It’s a different thing, though. Right? I mean, this is what the weirdness this is the weirdness of your theater experience
Speaker: 1
01:59:55
for this call. 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. Okay. If it if it were if it were Bonanza, where it’s just a setup story, Charles Bronson, shows up.
Speaker: 1
02:00:11
He’s a half breed Indian, and he’s working at the Ponderosa for a while. And he gets involved in a in a in an adventure, and then at the end, it’s it’s it’s done. Well, on that show, you you have the the episodes shah are maybe not so good or the episodes are are are are, whatever they’re treading on.
Speaker: 2
02:00:29
One continual story.
Speaker: 1
02:00:30
But then but then you’ll have this great episode with Charles Bronson. Yeah. Or do they have a great episode with with James Luc Tyler? They’re almost stand alone. And and and and oh, that could that could have been a movie.
Speaker: 0
02:00:40
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:00:40
They could have expanded that to a movie.
Speaker: 2
02:00:42
Right. They’re stand saloni instead of just a long ongoing story.
Speaker: 0
02:00:45
The difference is is that that’s that’s episodic. Sana.
Speaker: 1
02:00:48
It’s a long on ongoing story that leads to the soap opera aspect.
Speaker: 0
02:00:52
Well, it’s it’s episodic, and television now has become completely serialized.
Speaker: 1
02:00:56
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:00:57
And so, you know, somebody’s going in and they’re pitching their shah, even a really, really good show ai Deadwood. Okay. Deadwood, I know what they they probably went in. They pitched. And what they knew that they were gonna make was the was it Wild Bill? Yeah. The Wild Bill story.
Speaker: 0
02:01:11
And they’ve got Carradine and, like, and they know that story. And that show is fantastic as long as they’re telling that story, which is, like, 6 to 8 episodes. Mhmm. Once he’s gone, I don’t think they had a plan. Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
02:01:24
They that was what they pitched, and it was like they pitched a movie spread out over a number of episodes.
Speaker: 1
02:01:30
But
Speaker: 0
02:01:30
by that point wasn’t even the full season.
Speaker: 1
02:01:32
Yeah. But by that point in time, they have now
Speaker: 0
02:01:36
now they have
Speaker: 1
02:01:36
all the town characters. Well, they’ve got
Speaker: 0
02:01:36
everybody, but I but I would maintain that for the rest of Deadwood, after Carradine’s gone, it’s just things are happening. Stuff is happening. But I don’t remember anything about that show other than the town and, you know, the the various actors that I liked and on on the shah.
Speaker: 0
02:01:51
And but, really, all they had was those first 6 to 8 episodes. I can’t remember what exactly what it was.
Speaker: 1
02:01:57
And the thing that I and the the thing about it is I’m not 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. Yeah. But it just doesn’t compare to a movie real story that it that, you know, that stays with me for the for the rest of my life in some cases.
Speaker: 2
02:02:18
Right. I know what you’re saying.
Speaker: 1
02:02:19
And, like, you know, like, we’ll 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. Yeah. You know? Or I haven’t seen it since
Speaker: 0
02:02:32
Those are actually the scariest ones to watch because if you loved something when you were young,
Speaker: 1
02:02:35
it’s almost Well, and I’m expecting not to I’m tougher on stuff now than I used to be. Alright? Yeah. Ai I, you know, was a big champion about it. So now I’m not such a champion. Now I see all the problems with it. Ai? But I will watch something that I haven’t seen since I was 22, and I ai it sai the day it opened.
Speaker: 1
02:02:49
And I, you know, and I, I watch, you know, I I watch it again. I think I just lost my train of thought. Okay.
Speaker: 0
02:02:57
Well, actually, I can jump in really quick if you want. You know, one of
Speaker: 1
02:03:00
what I’m talking like I’m stoned, and I’m not. Well, good.
Speaker: 0
02:03:04
Cigars. Meh. Strong cigars. One of the movies we saw that, we had seen a million ai, and we didn’t even think that it was gonna be anything, was, Dressed to Kill.
Speaker: 1
02:03:13
Yeah. Okay. Let me set this up a little bit, and then you take it. Yeah. Yeah. It was one of those things where we were doing a thing, a special episode with Eli Roth. We were taking, you know, the Italian giallo thrillers and saying, okay. What are the American versions of giallo thrillers? And we figured out there was, like, 4 of them. And one of them was dressed to kill.
Speaker: 2
02:03:30
Michael Caine.
Speaker: 1
02:03:31
Yeah. And so so we get together with with Eli, and we’re gonna watch these ram movies. And then it comes down to dress to kill, and it’s ai, 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, Ai seen it.
Speaker: 1
02:03:46
I mean, we’re just huge Brian De Palma fans and Nancy Allen fans and everything. So it was like, how many fucking times? And so I almost almost brought up I mean, do we even need to watch dress to kill? I mean, we we got we
Speaker: 0
02:03:59
We had a little congress about it.
Speaker: 1
02:04:00
Ai got 3 movies. No. Okay. Let’s just watch it. We’ll just watch it. That ended up being one of the greatest screenings of Dress to Kill I’ve ever seen. Ai? But in that in our living ram, in my living room watching it with
Speaker: 0
02:04:14
On VHS.
Speaker: 1
02:04:15
On VHS. On VHS. Pan and scan. Ai? The old Warner Brothers video. Because we watch them on, we we watch them on the actual video cassettes of video archives. Alright?
Speaker: 0
02:04:25
The 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
Speaker: 1
02:04:34
We’ve seen the movie a bunch of times, but something about watching it with the 3 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 and I was adding to them.
Speaker: 0
02:04:47
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:04:47
You know? And, like, we just had this, like, appreciation for the movie watching it with the 3 of us in this situation. The fact that we even considered not even watching it was just, like, sacrilege.
Speaker: 0
02:04:59
And we saw things in it that we had never seen before. That was the other thing. It’s ai, I saw things in during that screening because of because of feeling watching the movie with you guys that I had never thought about before. And so it opened up all sorts of avenues and, you know, most frequently, you watch a movie and it’s it doesn’t live up.
Speaker: 0
02:05:21
I’m afraid to watch movies again, you know, a lot of the time. That was just one of those happy incidences where the movie really lived up. It it it it stayed strong even when we’d seen it 100.
Speaker: 1
02:05:36
I know. I mean, you could not it’d be hard to pick a movie that I’ve seen as much as Jessica. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: 2
02:05:41
Sai, this is the better version of Sysco and Ebert. This is exactly what I’m talking about. The completely unproduced, uninfluenced version.
Speaker: 1
02:05:51
Well, I I told Roger that when we finished the 1st season, Ai go, you know, Roger, if we do this the right way, in 3 or 4 years ai, we could be considered like Cisco and E.
Speaker: 0
02:06:01
A 100%. Yeah.
Speaker: 2
02:06:02
It’s it’s just a matter of getting it out there.
Speaker: 1
02:06:04
Yeah. Yeah.
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02:06:05
I think there’s just a bunch of people that aren’t aware of it yet.
Speaker: 0
02:06:09
They will come. Yeah. Build it build it 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. Mhmm. And, and we had a partner with SiriusXM back then. And this season, you know Yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:06:22
They kinda went out of business within their own for their podcasting thing a little bit.
Speaker: 2
02:06:26
Oh, did they? A big big Pandora now. Right?
Speaker: 1
02:06:29
Yeah. Yeah. They kinda turned into a different thing.
Speaker: 2
02:06:30
They just changed their whole podcast deal
Speaker: 0
02:06:32
with the caller daddy chick.
Speaker: 1
02:06:34
Yeah. Yeah. I think they did. Yeah.
Speaker: 2
02:06:35
Yeah. So I guess they’re trying to get back into it.
Speaker: 0
02:06:37
And I think some other people as well.
Speaker: 1
02:06:39
They paid us a lot of money to do it. And, like, we actually did pretty good for, like, our little archaic little movie.
Speaker: 0
02:06:44
Yeah. Mhmm.
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02:06:45
Show that goes on about 30 minutes.
Speaker: 0
02:06:46
It’s a real niche niche ai,
Speaker: 1
02:06:49
Yeah. And and we we you know, can you guys do Jaws? No. We don’t wanna do Jaws.
Speaker: 2
02:06:53
But that’s the best part of it. Do whatever the fuck you wanna do.
Speaker: 1
02:06:56
That’s exactly it. But the thing is they were, ai, sai we actually had about, like, 2,000,000 listeners, which was like, hey. That was pretty good for us for us doing our little stupid movie show about VHS, and it’s all about VHS. It’s about the VHS.
Speaker: 0
02:07:12
So we’re talking about the box art of VHS tapes.
Speaker: 1
02:07:15
We watch the we talk about the trailers that are in front of the movie. Alright? We talk about the transfer.
Speaker: 2
02:07:21
By the way, the movie VHS is one of my guilty pleasures.
Speaker: 1
02:07:23
That’s a good one. Yeah. Yeah.
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02:07:24
Good movie. The one where the the the the devil lady Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. She turns into
Speaker: 0
02:07:28
a devil.
Speaker: 1
02:07:28
The 3 4 different stories or 3 different stories.
Speaker: 2
02:07:30
Yeah. But that one is worth it. Just sit through the other 3 for that one. The devil lady was fucking amazing.
Speaker: 1
02:07:35
But I think they were expecting us to to do, like,
Speaker: 0
02:07:39
Duh. Susan Cain.
Speaker: 1
02:07:40
They were thinking of, like, Dax Shepard kinda numbers.
Speaker: 0
02:07:43
Like Right. Right.
Speaker: 1
02:07:43
Right. Never gonna do without with what we’re doing. Right.
Speaker: 2
02:07:47
Right. Right. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:07:48
And, you know, and so we’re talking But
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02:07:50
you could though. People want to see it. They wanna listen to it. It’s just a matter of just it bidding they’ll they’ll realize they wanted it once they hear it.
Speaker: 1
02:07:59
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: 2
02:07:59
That’s what it is. It’s ai, oh, we want them to only talk about Citizen Kane. None of them no. No. No. It’s gotta be whatever the fuck they actually wanna talk about.
Speaker: 0
02:08:07
But what we
Speaker: 1
02:08:07
do And
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02:08:07
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: 1
02:08:13
But one of the things that was interesting when we did it, when we okay. So when we made our deal, we’re thinking, okay. Well, maybe we’ll do it here for 2 years. And we own the show, and then we wanna take it to Patreon so we don’t have to do commercials.
Speaker: 2
02:08:26
Right.
Speaker: 1
02:08:27
Okay. And then when I did commercials, I did it with a a seventies DJ announcer voice. Alright? Because I felt like such a sellout that I’m not gonna do it in my voice. Right. You know?
Speaker: 0
02:08:38
And I I think the
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02:08:39
the
Speaker: 0
02:08:39
the the Datsun 7 50 is coming, and it’s coming soon.
Speaker: 1
02:08:46
You know? And I I did, like, the the real Don Steele. That was my whole thing. Right? Because I did, like, get, like, the real Don Steele.
Speaker: 0
02:08:51
I just did those readings, like, myself, and people started commenting on Twitter. They were ai, man, Roger Avery. Recruiter. Can I fill your Yeah? Fill your basement in a quick quick week.
Speaker: 1
02:09:04
And, like, every Some people even get,
Speaker: 0
02:09:06
in the 1st week, they get qualified candidates or on ziprecruiter.com. Look. I like Saloni Stoves. They’re great. But, like, I found myself doing, like, you know, stainless steel ads, basically, and talking about Solo Stoves. And suddenly, people on Twitter were saying, Roger Avery will sell you sour milk from a sick cow.
Speaker: 0
02:09:27
It’s ai, well, I don’t know if I wanna, like, be shilling stuff like that anymore.
Speaker: 2
02:09:33
You just have to only approve the ads that you wanna do. Like, I I approve ads. I don’t, like, just let them Yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:09:39
Yeah.
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02:09:39
Give me every ad. I’m like, I can’t do this one.
Speaker: 1
02:09:41
Well, we
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02:09:41
And I say it all the time.
Speaker: 1
02:09:42
Our thing our thing
Speaker: 0
02:09:43
We’re not even under that kind of pressure now.
Speaker: 1
02:09:45
Yeah. Yeah. The thing about it was I thought it but that would be kinda cool. It, you know, is ai, if we go to Patreon, we’ll lose a whole bunch of, we’ll we’ll lose a whole bunch of listeners, but, you know, we’ll put a we’ll put a 40 minute version of the show out there for free.
Speaker: 1
02:10:00
You know? If you want to get the whole show, then you’ve gotta, like, you know, you you you gotta subscribe. And if you just subscribe, you get the show. If you pay if you pay $5, you get our show. Boom. Boom. And if you pay $8, then you get an extra special show that we do.
Speaker: 1
02:10:15
And we’re gonna
Speaker: 0
02:10:15
There’s a still a truncated version of it available for everybody to listen to. You like the first part of it? You come for the rest.
Speaker: 1
02:10:21
But the thing is, though, is what I like you know, and and some people are sort of like, fuck those guys. They’re like, ai, okay. Fine. Alright. And look. Hey. I get it. I’m I’m the guy that I’m the guy that would ram my twenties would they’d go to happy hour at the bar, alright, and nurse a beer while I ate all the pizza and the chicken wings.
Speaker: 1
02:10:37
Right. And that was my dinner.
Speaker: 2
02:10:39
Yeah. Right.
Speaker: 1
02:10:40
So I get that. You know? And ai the way, you know, if you would’ve, like, 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. You can get everything you want in a month.
Speaker: 1
02:10:53
But that’s not who we’re doing it for. 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. And, like so we’re doing it for those people.
Speaker: 1
02:11:09
And as long as we can make enough to just do the show Right. We’re cool.
Speaker: 0
02:11:13
And the general feeling is, wow, this is ai 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. And then And
Speaker: 1
02:11:25
hopefully just and hopefully just genuinely compelling discussions.
Speaker: 0
02:11:29
And and using our experience as filmmakers to discuss even, you know, deeper into the movies and to to better understand them. And, you know, it’s it’s largely something has happened in culture where people they don’t know how to argue anymore ai. They don’t know how to, like, enjoy an argument with each other before.
Speaker: 0
02:11:53
And so Quentin and I, we don’t have to like the same movie just like Sysco and Ebert. Didn’t have to like ai. But, you know, we can argue about something. And then afterwards, it’s like, okay. Let’s go do karaoke now. You know?
Speaker: 1
02:12:05
It’s not it’s not a it’s it’s not a recommend show. We wanna pick 3 movies, and we wanna discuss them.
Speaker: 0
02:12:11
Yeah. And You don’t have to like it. Even if
Speaker: 1
02:12:13
you don’t like the movie, if if there’s an interesting if there’s an interesting point of discussion about it, well, that’s good. That’s all that’s all we need. We just need an inter we need an interesting, an interesting con conversation
Speaker: 2
02:12:24
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:12:25
That we have about this. It’s not about it’s not about we recommend you watch this
Speaker: 2
02:12:28
movie. Right.
Speaker: 1
02:12:29
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 enjoy enjoy our back and forth.
Speaker: 2
02:12:36
And get to understand how you appreciate movies.
Speaker: 1
02:12:38
Yeah. If you wanna go out and and check the movies out afterwards, fine. Go ahead. But I don’t care if you do or not.
Speaker: 0
02:12:44
And we have a really, like, dedicated group of people who have come and they’ve signed up, and they like like, I really what’s funny is I really care about these people now. It’s ai they’re there and they’re, like, in the club. It’s like a clubhouse. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:12:57
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:12:58
And the people who wanna be there wanna be there, and they’re talking and they’re talking they’re on a message board with Quentin and, you know, all Eli is Sai Roth is, there and Edgar Ai. And, like, everybody is like and so it’s a we wanted to create a a something that was like video archives And I ai and that people could come in and talk.
Speaker: 1
02:13:16
And I want at least one of the 3 movies, not every week, but at least Ai sana they’re not easy to find. I wanna come up with, like, well, that’s not streaming anywhere. How am I supposed to get this? Well, it’s on VHS. You know? You can get a VHS recorder and buy it on eBay. Alright. Yeah. And now all of a bryden, that little group is like, what?
Speaker: 1
02:13:35
Maybe we can buy a hey. Maybe if we buy VHS, and then we can we’ll we’ll burn it, and we can trade it with everybody else. Yeah. And now they’re all doing the work to do that. Well, good.
Speaker: 0
02:13:46
My daughter Gala is one of our producers on the show, and, and she’s on the show with us. And one of her things is, like, we get together, and we watch the movies at video ai, and then we know the films. And then she has to she doesn’t have that access.
Speaker: 1
02:14:00
She doesn’t have access to the she she’s not there with us.
Speaker: 0
02:14:03
She is, like, she represents one of our one of the people out there. She’s gotta find it. So if Ai finds something that’s, you know, pretty difficult to ai, she’s gotta track it down, and she usually has a little timetable to do it on. 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.
Speaker: 0
02:14:21
She’ll find it however
Speaker: 1
02:14:22
tracked it down. And so You can follow her her ai.
Speaker: 0
02:14:24
If it’s on YouTube, she’ll tell you it’s on YouTube. However,
Speaker: 1
02:14:27
when she goes, Quintin, I just couldn’t track this one down. Ai I’m like, yes.
Speaker: 0
02:14:32
Yeah. I think I think that’s the real reason he likes to do the show.
Speaker: 1
02:14:39
That’s ai shit. Yeah. Gotcha. Is that eating
Speaker: 2
02:14:47
is is everything on YouTube now?
Speaker: 1
02:14:49
A lot of things. A lot of things. But a lot of things. A lot of things.
Speaker: 0
02:14:51
A lot of things.
Speaker: 2
02:14:52
Yeah. There’s some certain things you can’t find on YouTube still.
Speaker: 0
02:14:55
And if it’s up there and it’s not there, it’ll be up again somewhere. It’s like whack a mole.
Speaker: 2
02:15:00
Right. Right. Right.
Speaker: 0
02:15:01
It’s like whack a mole.
Speaker: 2
02:15:02
There was the Gore Vidal film, the transsexual movie with Raquel Welch. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:15:06
Yeah. Oh, oh, oh, oh, meh, we watched that.
Speaker: 1
02:15:08
We didn’t we didn’t do an episode on it, but I ai the video of that. We watched it as a Myra Breckenridge.
Speaker: 0
02:15:12
I like that movie. It’s a crazy movie.
Speaker: 1
02:15:14
Well, the idea fucks the guy in the ass. That’s the best fucking scene. Oh, yeah. If she fucks the guy in the ass, that is the best fucking scene.
Speaker: 0
02:15:20
It’s pretty wild.
Speaker: 1
02:15:20
And the other guy that Ai like that movie so meh. I I read the book afterwards because I thought I thought it was, like, so cool. Okay.
Speaker: 0
02:15:27
I never liked Rex Reed. Mhmm. And I am not gay, but I was actually ai, wow. Rex Reed’s kinda hot in this.
Speaker: 2
02:15:35
Well, that’s what he was trying to do.
Speaker: 1
02:15:37
Yeah. That was a little
Speaker: 0
02:15:37
movie. You
Speaker: 1
02:15:38
did it.
Speaker: 2
02:15:38
Gore Vidal ai trying to turn
Speaker: 0
02:15:40
you gay. Can you give me that lighter?
Speaker: 1
02:15:42
Yeah. Sure.
Speaker: 2
02:15:42
Yes. Yeah. That that’s one of those weird ones that’s difficult to find. I had to buy a
Speaker: 1
02:15:48
DVD to get it. Oh, I like that light the light she has that keeps building up to it. She goes, would she ai gonna finally show her pussy? She goes, well, it looks like the moment of truth has finally arrived. I think Raquel Welch is fantastic in that movie.
Speaker: 0
02:16:08
Did you
Speaker: 2
02:16:08
ever see those debates that Gore Vidal did with, William f Buckner?
Speaker: 0
02:16:11
Oh, yeah. Well, those are they
Speaker: 1
02:16:12
almost Legend of Davis ai. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: 2
02:16:14
Yeah. Incredible. Yeah. But this is you know, you used to Gore
Speaker: 0
02:16:17
Vidal always won, though.
Speaker: 2
02:16:18
Oh, yeah. Well, he was just well, he was ai, and he was better. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:16:22
Yeah. He’s right, and he’s better.
Speaker: 1
02:16:23
Yeah. He was right. And he’s better. Yeah. He ai right. Gor Vidal fighting with, like, a Norman Mailer.
Speaker: 0
02:16:26
Yeah. What
Speaker: 2
02:16:26
were they fighting about?
Speaker: 1
02:16:27
Oh, no. Just they’d get on the they they get them on, like, the Dick Cavett
Speaker: 2
02:16:31
show together. You know? Yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:16:33
He would talk to him like a poncey bastard, and the other one would talk to him like a neanderthal.
Speaker: 0
02:16:38
Ai sure they had dinner afterwards. Well, it’s just you used to be able
Speaker: 2
02:16:42
to have those kind of conversations on television, which is really fascinating. Yeah. It’s ai now they exist in podcast, you know. And, like, the Syskel and Ebert thing, what I what I was talking about is like, you can’t manufacture a friendship.
Speaker: 0
02:16:54
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:16:54
And one
Speaker: 2
02:16:54
of the 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. You know what I’m saying? Yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:17:03
I know exactly what you mean.
Speaker: 2
02:17:05
It looks like this thing that you guys have is what this is the whole new media movement is based on authenticity. Right? And this is, like, the whole thing that you want people to not be able to find these movies. You want to just review movies that you wanna review, and that’s the beautiful thing about it.
Speaker: 2
02:17:22
It’s ai the perfect show in that regard, like, for a film review show or a film discussion show. It’s the perfect show.
Speaker: 0
02:17:29
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. And I was like, well, if it’s if you haven’t seen it yet, it’s new to you. Sai that takes care of 2 of those. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:17:45
And, no, we don’t have that new one, but let’s shah you something interesting. And so it was always a matter of, you know
Speaker: 1
02:17:53
Well, the thing is, one of the things that, like and there’s a lot of movie there’s a lot of movie shows out there on, podcast, and they talk about stuff. And the ai isn’t for me to just say, oh, we’re better than all those guys. We’re not coming from that 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 Sure.
Speaker: 1
02:18:16
Their film knowledge is fucking abysmal. They really don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about. And and especially when they’re trying to, like, talk about movies from, like, the seventies or something. Well, they they were usually born in the eighties. So they don’t know what something was like when it opened up, and they don’t really have any context. Right.
Speaker: 2
02:18:38
They
Speaker: 1
02:18:38
don’t they 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 and just and and and say stuff that’s just wrong a lot. They just misinformation a lot. Mhmm. We actually fact check our shit. Alright. You know? We we rerecord it. Alright?
Speaker: 1
02:18:56
To make sure that we just don’t yank shit out of it. And we there is a little bit of yanking stuff out of your your ass. But when I’m not sure about it, we look it up. And then if it’s if I’m wrong, then we change it.
Speaker: 0
02:19:06
Well, then also there’s the fact that
Speaker: 1
02:19:08
You can count on what we’re saying, that we’re telling you the true fucking shit. We’re giving you I I consider it as I consider it as a film expert that that that I would be Sai Ai, my shit ai show wouldn’t be worth listening to if I don’t give if I don’t tell you the truth.
Speaker: 1
02:19:22
Right. But I don’t give you factual information that you can count on.
Speaker: 0
02:19:25
Well, so because you were there during the opening of the film and, you know, we’re
Speaker: 1
02:19:29
I’m describing the context.
Speaker: 0
02:19:30
Yeah. Yeah. We we have the context to talk about. A lot of these people, they maybe didn’t see these movies And the and the in theaters.
Speaker: 1
02:19:38
And the thing is, you know, it it’s ai, you know, my my writing guru as far as, like, film writing, but I think writing in general was, the New Yorker film critic, Pauline Kael. And she had one one rule, and I one rule for, for film criticism. And I think this could apply to all writing.
Speaker: 1
02:20:00
You have to give the reader a compelling reason to read your writing. Yeah. It’s it’s that fucking simple. It’s that there has to be a compelling reason for you to engage in reading analysis. And the same thing about talking about cinema.
Speaker: 1
02:20:18
You have to give a compelling reason. Now, yeah, I like the guys. That’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s a good start. I like their personality. I think they’re kind of funny. That’s a that’s a good start, but there has to be something more than that.
Speaker: 0
02:20:32
Well, that’s what’s more
Speaker: 2
02:20:33
than that, what you just did. Mhmm. This passion for it. Right? That’s what’s more than that. It’s just this, like, severe commitment to it. That’s that’s what’s exciting.
Speaker: 1
02:20:42
And then when we talk about the movies, you know, we talk about everything that’s good about them. We talk about the things that that aren’t good. Right. Honest. Yeah. Very honest. Yeah. That’s And and and and Ai can be wrong. I Ai can I I don’t have to be right about it? It is You might
Speaker: 2
02:20:53
be wrong about the Joker. I’m
Speaker: 1
02:20:54
not sure. Yeah. See, you
Speaker: 0
02:20:57
It’s audacious. It’s audacious.
Speaker: 1
02:20:59
Because you haven’t even seen it, have you? You know?
Speaker: 0
02:21:01
You’re you’re just jumping on a fucking
Speaker: 1
02:21:02
van ai. I’m just talking shit. I’m talking shit.
Speaker: 0
02:21:04
I’m just trying to wind you up.
Speaker: 1
02:21:06
Talking shit.
Speaker: 2
02:21:06
I’m just trying to wind you up. Sorry. What what’s, like, an example of a film that you love that other people hate other than the Joker?
Speaker: 1
02:21:18
I don’t know if I loved it, but okay. I liked it a lot. Well, there’s a well, I have a ton of those. As a matter of fact but this I have I have I have sai I have so many. But but when I was younger, particularly, I was the champion of, like, the movie that everyone that all the critics put down and said was the fiasco. No.
Speaker: 1
02:21:40
And I wanted to
Speaker: 2
02:21:41
Oh, is it because you’re contrarian?
Speaker: 0
02:21:42
Can I can I guess?
Speaker: 1
02:21:43
Yeah. Yeah. Is it Ishtar? Well You like Ishtar? Ishtar, I did ai 1944.
Speaker: 0
02:21:49
He was like ai of the champions of Ishtar. Ai.
Speaker: 1
02:21:52
Ishtar, Sai champion in ai.
Speaker: 0
02:21:54
Tape on so many customers. Yeah.
Speaker: 2
02:21:57
How many of them came back angry?
Speaker: 1
02:21:58
No. Ishtar is a funny movie. It’s a funny movie.
Speaker: 2
02:22:02
Is it really?
Speaker: 0
02:22:03
Well, the problem with Ishtar and we were talking about this a little bit, earlier. The problem with Ishtar is that it suddenly became not about the movie, but about the production.
Speaker: 1
02:22:13
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:22:13
And so people had informed an opinion about whether they liked it or not. Because it was expensive. It’s like is the it doesn’t change your ticket price.
Speaker: 2
02:22:20
No. But that is the kiss of death. If you feel like a a film is over budgeted. Especially comedies.
Speaker: 0
02:22:26
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:22:27
It’s like it’s like critics critics have a this have a thing about, like, you know, spending a lot of money on comedies. It seems obscene to them. Meh.
Speaker: 2
02:22:34
What happened with this film? Like, what where’d the budget go south?
Speaker: 1
02:22:37
Well, where the where the budget kind of went south for the most part was the fact that, ai, Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman kind of, like, had their full freight on the movie. So So Dustin Hoffman got his high big salary. Warren Beatty got his high big salary. And so now
Speaker: 0
02:22:55
all the accoutrements that go with it.
Speaker: 1
02:22:56
And everything that goes with it. Ai. Yeah. If if
Speaker: 0
02:22:58
I need a plane to fly me back from Morocco to New York every weekend. If
Speaker: 1
02:23:02
Okay. If we’re no. No. He’s just making that up.
Speaker: 0
02:23:04
I’m making that up, but that’s not unrealistic.
Speaker: 1
02:23:06
That’s not unrealistic. It it would be ai if when they did, during the time when they did Shah, Tom Hanks was famous, but he wasn’t the superstar that he is now. Right. Alright. So if that had starred Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari Mhmm. Like, the 2 guys from Bosom Buddies Yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:23:21
Well, then then that movie would have it would have been it would have cost a lot less and would have been just as funny.
Speaker: 2
02:23:26
Right.
Speaker: 1
02:23:26
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. Yeah.
Speaker: 2
02:23:34
When when a film does get labeled as a bloated film, though, that that’s that is the kiss of death.
Speaker: 1
02:23:39
It kinda is.
Speaker: 2
02:23:40
Because the general public will turn on it then. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:23:42
They sana it to fail. You know what? You generally, you give those movies a couple of years, and suddenly they’re, like, these amazing movies. Waterworld. They’re, like, ai, my well, Waterworld’s a pretty fun film.
Speaker: 2
02:23:51
Shut the fuck up.
Speaker: 0
02:23:52
I kind of have a great time watching. But Waterworld was the first laserdisc I ever bought. That endays his wonder. Right? Here’s what I’m saying. You can’t defend.
Speaker: 2
02:24:01
Kevin Costner’s The Postman.
Speaker: 1
02:24:02
I never saw The Postman.
Speaker: 0
02:24:03
I like the idea of The Postman. I remember the screenplay for The Postman was great. The idea that I
Speaker: 1
02:24:08
never saw The Postman, but I’ve I’ve I actually like Kevin Costner. I I actually think Kevin Costner I think that’s what was was one of the best movies
Speaker: 0
02:24:13
I made. Kevin Costner
Speaker: 1
02:24:14
is fucking awesome.
Speaker: 2
02:24:15
I love that dude. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:24:16
But you’re right about the Postman.
Speaker: 1
02:24:17
It’s hard to defend. I love saying he’s right about it because I’ve never seen it. But now that says something that I’ve never seen it. But Yeah. But I wouldn’t mind seeing it. I’ll bet ai like it. Yeah. But
Speaker: 2
02:24:27
then there’s films that are so bad, they’re great. Like Showgirls.
Speaker: 0
02:24:30
Ai love Showgirls.
Speaker: 2
02:24:31
Showgirls is fucking great.
Speaker: 0
02:24:32
Oh, Showgirls, there’s nothing wrong with Showgirls.
Speaker: 1
02:24:34
I can I can absolutely defend it?
Speaker: 2
02:24:35
I can do that as an entertainment, piece.
Speaker: 0
02:24:37
No. I but I thought I
Speaker: 1
02:24:38
am look. I am not a so bad as good guy. Okay. This I’m not a so baddest good guy. You are a so baddest
Speaker: 0
02:24:43
good guy.
Speaker: 1
02:24:43
I’m not a so baddest good guy.
Speaker: 2
02:24:44
Sai scene in the pool?
Speaker: 1
02:24:45
Because that’s a little ridiculous. But, yes,
Speaker: 0
02:24:48
the sex scene in
Speaker: 1
02:24:49
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 it’s going there was actually interesting to me. But what I really like what? I really liked her in it, but when she beats the shit out of that guy, that’s so fucking cool.
Speaker: 1
02:25:04
When she beats the shit out of the guy at the end and and, ai guy who fucked over her girl 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. I was like, yeah. Elizabeth Berkley, go.
Speaker: 1
02:25:20
What what
Speaker: 0
02:25:21
I love about Showgirls is normally a movie like Showgirls will be made for under a1000000, go straight to video, star Robert Davy, and just be this little exploitation movie. And here was an example of that being made for $60,000,000 with Paul Verhoeven directing
Speaker: 1
02:25:37
Doing whatever the fuck he wants.
Speaker: 0
02:25:38
Doing whatever he wants, making it as big as possible.
Speaker: 1
02:25:41
Releasing it. NC 17.
Speaker: 0
02:25:42
Fuck you all. The same as one of those sub $1,000,000 exploitation films. It still has Robert Davy in it. He’s still playing the same part he would normally play. 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
02:26:03
It’s just ai. Has doesn’t sit on a special shelf in my in my heart. Alright. Alright. But I really ai it when I saw it. I saw it at the theaters. I enjoyed it.
Speaker: 0
02:26:14
Alicia Burtley, like, pushes Gina Gerson down this is it Gina Gerson? She pushes down the stairs. Yeah. Like like, everything about that movie is awesome. Yeah. I I I think it’s great. I I love the film. I love the film. I I brought it up to all the I had a dinner once with, like, Verhoeven and a bunch of the producers that film ai.
Speaker: 0
02:26:31
I started going off on it. They all sat there at the dinner watching me go crazy over their film. And then at the end of it, somebody the 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. That’s exactly what I was just gonna say.
Speaker: 2
02:26:47
I’m so glad you just said that because I I always describe that movie as a cocaine movie, and I was just casting aspersions It was. With no evidence. But it seems like Cocaine everywhere. Yeah. Because it seems like they thought it was great while they’re doing it, but it’s ai, what are you doing?
Speaker: 2
02:27:01
You know, it’s one of those things where you think it’s great because you’re on coke.
Speaker: 0
02:27:05
I have a place in my heart for those big movies like that. I meh,
Speaker: 1
02:27:08
ai certainly the one that I would that’s not the one I would make my case on, but I still don’t like it. That’s not my case. That’s not my that’s not my ai case.
Speaker: 2
02:27:16
Well, isn’t that sort of an example of what happened in when the eighties were a cocaine culture? The the the world kinda shifted from a psychedelic thing from the sixties seventies to a cocaine thing in the eighties, and you get movies like that.
Speaker: 0
02:27:30
Yeah. You get a little bit more edgy, a little less trippy.
Speaker: 2
02:27:33
Well, also, ai, a little more ridiculous.
Speaker: 0
02:27:35
But look at how’s it going?
Speaker: 2
02:27:36
In the beginning, it’s pretty good.
Speaker: 0
02:27:37
That’s what I ai an actress dedicated to her role.
Speaker: 2
02:27:40
No. This is where this is where you’re losing me. This is where you’re losing me. Yeah. Because how are you keeping a hard on?
Speaker: 0
02:27:45
Yeah. And and then it’s Keep on the flopping of old people. The whole thing is
Speaker: 1
02:27:49
But just watching a loose with Berkeley’s tits, alright, in a big studio movie like this flopping up and down. Ai, I’m I’m getting my money’s worth.
Speaker: 2
02:27:55
Well, that was huge because it was from Saved by the Bell. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:27:58
But I’m you know? Okay. I’m not actually, that’s I’m not thinking about it from his point of view. I’m thinking about it from the water hitting her face. Sai mean, that’s that’s ai that’s the unrealistic part. The The the that true. True.
Speaker: 2
02:28:13
Cocaine movies are fun, though. There’s there’s a ai a few of those that were just ai, what is this? Yeah. Like, how much Coke was going around in the eighties?
Speaker: 0
02:28:21
A lot. A lot.
Speaker: 2
02:28:23
But when you it was actually Coke too.
Speaker: 0
02:28:25
It was actually real cocaine. It was ai proper cocaine.
Speaker: 1
02:28:27
I mean, there’s I mean, there was, you know, there was this I mean, it’s actually really interesting because it’s ai one of those things where,
Speaker: 0
02:28:35
Remember that customer who used to come in, and he would bring in, like, a rock of cocaine? Oh, yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:28:39
Yeah. Yeah. Drop it on
Speaker: 0
02:28:40
the counter ai a rock of cocaine. We and you get boys, here.
Speaker: 1
02:28:44
The guy whose name was Tuttle.
Speaker: 0
02:28:45
The size of yeah. Tuttle. Tuttle. The size of a coffee mug. And he would bring us these things that could we It
Speaker: 1
02:28:51
was a it was a cocaine tyler, and the thing is he would rent you know, we’d let him take the movies out and come back whenever he wanted.
Speaker: 0
02:28:58
Yeah. Whatever you want. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:29:00
And he would come in, and, he’d he’d get his films, and then he would, like, either open up a little, like, a a a skull can skull can. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:29:10
Alright. With a bunch of Coke cans.
Speaker: 1
02:29:12
I remember
Speaker: 0
02:29:12
that skull can. It
Speaker: 1
02:29:13
boop. Alright. There you
Speaker: 2
02:29:14
go, boys.
Speaker: 1
02:29:14
Counter. There you go, boys.
Speaker: 0
02:29:16
Have fun. Jeez.
Speaker: 1
02:29:16
Already kicked out
Speaker: 0
02:29:17
Coke Rock. And he’s like,
Speaker: 1
02:29:19
bam. I throw it on the counter and it bounce off me. And I go,
Speaker: 0
02:29:22
there you go, boy.
Speaker: 1
02:29:23
See you later. See you in 2 weeks.
Speaker: 0
02:29:25
Like a baseball. Like a baseball, and you take a colander and Yeah. Yeah. Like, just grind it up. Like, do
Speaker: 1
02:29:31
you want
Speaker: 0
02:29:32
some? Sure.
Speaker: 1
02:29:33
For the first time because we’re minimum wage kids. For the first time, we actually had fuck you Coke. Alright? We had access to Coke in a way that we could never afford, like, for about a few months because that those relationships don’t last that long. No. No. No. Okay. Relationships never last. But for a few months, we’re like, holy shit.
Speaker: 0
02:29:53
We’re in the we’re in
Speaker: 1
02:29:54
the fucking you know, we’re we’re in the powder.
Speaker: 0
02:29:56
Well, he there was a party once that he came to, and he brought a, again, a rock of cocaine and a live hand grenade.
Speaker: 2
02:30:04
He put them both down.
Speaker: 0
02:30:05
They usually go together. Yeah. And it was ai, okay. It’s a dangerous combination.
Speaker: 2
02:30:10
Person who does a lot
Speaker: 0
02:30:11
of coke usually would bite a lot of coke. That was a fun party.
Speaker: 1
02:30:13
And his name was Tuttle. And we always ai excess as Okay. We’re getting, like, we’re getting we’re getting a we’re getting a Tuttle situation.
Speaker: 0
02:30:19
Dude, I’m so tuttled.
Speaker: 2
02:30:21
Oh, that’s hilarious. It became like your fugazi. Yeah. Oh, that’s so funny. When I worked at, in Bryden, Nick’s Comedy Stop, they would offer to pay you in cocaine or cash. There’s guys who just took the cocaine. Yeah. The certain comics, they just wanted to get paid in Coke. Yeah. Wild times. You know? That’s the eighties.
Speaker: 0
02:30:43
It was the eighties. It was the eighties.
Speaker: 1
02:30:45
Well, yeah, that was actually even kind of an interesting situation because, like, it was also one of those things where, like, I was actually really ai of proud of us because we all ai, like, woo. We all kinda went nutty for, like, a little bit Mhmm. With this kind of, like, more access to Coke than we normally have would have.
Speaker: 0
02:31:02
More access to more access to Coke than we ever had.
Speaker: 1
02:31:04
Ever had. Ever had. Yeah. You know, and, ai, I would because we can’t afford that shit. Ai? And, so we all ai went nuts for, like, a little bit about it. And then we all kinda ai, okay. Let’s
Speaker: 0
02:31:15
Yeah. Enough of that. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:31:17
Let’s bring it together.
Speaker: 2
02:31:18
Well, that’s great.
Speaker: 1
02:31:18
Let’s bring it together.
Speaker: 2
02:31:19
That out.
Speaker: 1
02:31:20
And we and we’d also saw some other people who were, like who let it get meh it get the best of them. Yes. And they got really kind of
Speaker: 2
02:31:28
your friend with the story about being bitter.
Speaker: 1
02:31:30
Same sort of thing.
Speaker: 2
02:31:31
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. The same sort of thing. You go, oh, I know where this is going.
Speaker: 1
02:31:34
And so we all like, okay. Let’s let’s pull back. Let’s get let’s let’s let’s let’s get control of this. And then and we all did. And we Yeah. All it was all collectively. We all kinda just got our shit together and and put it in the rearview mirror. Ai.
Speaker: 2
02:31:46
Right.
Speaker: 1
02:31:47
Ai mean we didn’t do it, but we we we we just it was we we we controlled it. Contrary
Speaker: 0
02:31:53
to your goals.
Speaker: 1
02:31:53
We’ll say what pop. We’ll stay with pop. Yeah. Yeah. Well Yeah.
Speaker: 2
02:32:01
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: 0
02:32:06
I what stopped? I mean, I had children. And suddenly, it was ai, oh, my god. Like, I have to be on call 247. Right.
Speaker: 1
02:32:14
You can’t
Speaker: 2
02:32:14
be out coked up.
Speaker: 0
02:32:15
Yeah. Ai like, that that’s not gonna last anymore.
Speaker: 2
02:32:19
That gets in the way of Ai
Speaker: 0
02:32:20
gets in the way. Mushroom trips. And pretty soon, my Saturday mornings became more important than my Friday nights.
Speaker: 2
02:32:25
Mhmm. This is
Speaker: 0
02:32:26
pretty simple.
Speaker: 1
02:32:27
Yeah. My ai thing about priorities was was I wanted to have access, so I didn’t oh, I wasn’t that interested in it.
Speaker: 0
02:32:33
Yeah. You wanna take it to 12. No.
Speaker: 1
02:32:34
I wanted to have a big pile of it, and we’re doing it all fucking night
Speaker: 0
02:32:38
until Until this is gone.
Speaker: 1
02:32:39
Until until this until the straw is bloody. Yeah. You know? Okay. Now I’m stopping now because the straw got bloody. Sai think it’s like
Speaker: 2
02:32:48
some people don’t have the ability to only do that once. Like, for whatever reason, some people they have that thing and they do coke a little bit, then they just wanna keep doing coke.
Speaker: 0
02:32:58
Yeah. That’s scary when that happens.
Speaker: 2
02:32:59
It is scary.
Speaker: 0
02:33:00
That’s scary when that happens.
Speaker: 2
02:33:01
Because you’re captured by a demon. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:33:03
You know? And you And it’s literally and I think it’s literally a demon. Yeah. No. I think In the classic Jin sense of the word where it’s whispering into your ear.
Speaker: 2
02:33:11
Well, in a sense, it does all things a demon would do. Mhmm. You know? You you could say that demons aren’t real. Okay. But they they they are. They might be real.
Speaker: 0
02:33:18
Right. Ai, they’ve been around forever. Sai think there’s pretty good evidence?
Speaker: 2
02:33:22
There’s a lot of We live amongst legitimate evil in the world.
Speaker: 0
02:33:25
I know. You know?
Speaker: 2
02:33:25
And where is that coming from? What’s that energy? Like, what what begets that? What what is the what is the reason why people are willing to, you know, mass murder? Like, what is it? What is it? People willing to launch missiles in the cities. What is that? Where where is that coming from?
Speaker: 2
02:33:39
There’s got to be like, that would be evil if you did ai it in the classic sense of the word. You know, when a invading army comes into a village and hacks people, that’s not demonic. That’s not evil. You’re lighting children on fire and throwing them on thatched roofs. That’s not demonic. Seems pretty demonic. Like, a demon would do that. Whether the the physical demon exists is almost, like, not even important.
Speaker: 1
02:34:02
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: 2
02:34:03
Yeah. It’s ai demonic behavior is 100% documented.
Speaker: 0
02:34:07
What would Jesus do?
Speaker: 2
02:34:08
Yeah. Ai. Right.
Speaker: 0
02:34:09
Just ask yourself that.
Speaker: 1
02:34:10
But it’s
Speaker: 0
02:34:10
the thing It’s ai it’s unlikely he’s gonna raise a fist.
Speaker: 2
02:34:13
Everybody wants to be smart and you wanna be secular. And you never wanna say that you believe in something that’s superstitious or ridiculous. So you don’t believe religion, you’re either agnostic or you’re atheist, that’s how you get respect. And it’s ai this weird thing where you’re not willing to consider, like, okay, but what are the actions? What are the actions of good and the actions of evil?
Speaker: 2
02:34:32
There’s there’s though the actions are real. Right? And we all know in our heart, in our soul, when you do a good thing, how you feel versus how you when you do how do a bad thing, how you feel. Like, so what is Well,
Speaker: 1
02:34:44
there there there were there were some speech in Apocalypse Now when, Brando’s Kurt tyler the story of, going into the village and and inoculating Mhmm. Ai, all of the children in the village, shooting their arms with, you know, flu shots or something like that, inoculating them.
Speaker: 1
02:35:06
And then the, the soldiers came in and then hacked off all the kids’ arya, and then there’s, like, a little pile of arms. And Kurt says, you know, so we did all that, then we came back in the village, and next thing we saw the little pile of all the little arms in there where they hacked them off.
Speaker: 1
02:35:22
And I cried like a baby. Then I started thinking, the genius of that. The genius of that. Because these are not monsters. They’re not demons.
Speaker: 1
02:35:39
These are men doing a job. And, and they had the force of will to take the job and and take it to its logical conclusion of what they had to do. Alright. You know, I’m not Condoning. I’m not condoning what Kurt is saying. Kurt is a fucking crazy person. Right. Ai know? Uh-uh. But I’m interested in his perspective.
Speaker: 1
02:36:04
I but, of course, that of course, that would be Kurt’s perspective.
Speaker: 0
02:36:07
Speak about true power.
Speaker: 1
02:36:08
Where he’s a god. He’s a god, you know, worshiped ai natives. Yeah.
Speaker: 2
02:36:14
Clearly lost his fucking
Speaker: 0
02:36:15
mind Yeah.
Speaker: 2
02:36:16
Yeah. In the fog of war.
Speaker: 1
02:36:17
He’s completely lost his mind in the fog of war. But he’s talking like Genghis Khan.
Speaker: 2
02:36:21
Yes. Exactly. Like, they all talk. Yeah. But this is the thing where you’re suspicious of power. Right? Like, why you’re suspicious? Well, you should be because you see where it ultimately leads. It ultimately leads to a curse or it ultimately leads to the way to really be in control of
Speaker: 0
02:36:37
people, like, you have to
Speaker: 2
02:36:38
use violence. You can only use words for so long.
Speaker: 0
02:36:40
Strong men hold civilizations together. That’s just a fact of things. I I I both of us have become friends over the years with John Milius
Speaker: 1
02:36:48
Yeah. Yeah. Who wrote Who wrote who wrote Apocalypse Now.
Speaker: 0
02:36:51
Who wrote Apocalypse Now. And, you know, John is the kind of guy who’s like, you know, conquerors. Conquerors. You know, the Yeah. Yeah. And and he wrote a script about, Genghis Khan. And Like, you you worked on it? Yeah. That I worked on with him to help turn it into a series.
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02:37:07
My daughter and I helped him with it after he had a stroke. And, you know, you look at his Genghis conscript, and he’s, you know, he’s realistically talking about these horrific atrocities that just, you know, sewing people up and felt and lighting it on fire and throwing them in river.
Speaker: 0
02:37:25
Just however you can kill somebody, he figured out a way to do it better. And, but at the same time, you you know, he invented paper money and he invented the Speak Road and he, you know
Speaker: 2
02:37:37
uptrade the east.
Speaker: 0
02:37:38
Yeah. Pulled pulled, you know, that whole region of the world together under one empire. And, you know, over the course of it, you know, you start out as, you know, almost like the like Conan. Conan the Warrior, Conan the Conqueror, Conan the King. Eventually King by
Speaker: 1
02:37:57
his own hand.
Speaker: 0
02:37:57
Yeah. King by your own hand. And eventually, you you start realizing And
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02:38:02
John Melies also wrote and directed Conan the Barbarian. Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
02:38:04
And so he, you know, he rightly recognizes that it’s strong men who conquer, but also who hold together and and maintain order. And there’s a balance to be had between force and and strength and, you know, and compassion as well. Too much compassion, you know, countries fall apart. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:38:23
Too much introspection, countries fall apart.
Speaker: 2
02:38:25
Right. And when things are too good.
Speaker: 1
02:38:27
When things
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02:38:28
are too good.
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02:38:28
When things arya too
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02:38:29
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: 0
02:38:34
Yeah.
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02:38:34
Yeah. And that’s ai where we are right now.
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02:38:39
It’s weird times right now.
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02:38:41
As I we are. We’re in a Conan movie.
Speaker: 0
02:38:43
Well, it it does feel a little few ai, we’re in kind of neo feudalistic times where Yeah. You know, there’s highway meh and, that you have to contend with when you go out and everything’s a little more fragile and
Speaker: 2
02:38:56
Well, there’s also this new thing, which is the Internet and social media. And there’s this new thing that has overcome our ai, 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: 2
02:39:14
True. So you were saying about, like, being able to sit and have a conversation with someone and completely disagree, but not take it personally. Yeah. Just disagree about the points. We’ve lost that in our society.
Speaker: 0
02:39:25
Ai really important to be able to engage with other people to disagree with them. Yes. And then to know that that’s just that. I know. We can still have dinner together.
Speaker: 1
02:39:34
Oh, no. No.
Speaker: 0
02:39:34
No. We can still be friends.
Speaker: 1
02:39:35
I can okay. So I go on a a shah, and I said that I like Joker 2. Well, I say I like Joker 2. And now now now there’s a 150 articles that come out on all these cannibalized articles. One person listens to the thing and writes an article about it, and then there’s a 150 rip off articles on that.
Speaker: 1
02:39:55
And then you read the comments of something, man, who’s a fucking asshole? That movie’s fucking soaked me. He’s a fucking asshole for saying that. Yeah. Why am I a fucking asshole? That doesn’t make any sense. Yeah. Ai. That makes me a fucking asshole. It’s crazy. You either like the movie or you don’t. Alright?
Speaker: 1
02:40:10
And I’m not I’m not plugging the movie. I’m not I’m not saying I’m not doing anything. Alright? I’m just saying I like it. Who who gives a fuck what I like? Right. What do you care what the fuck I like? Right.
Speaker: 0
02:40:20
And also
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02:40:21
And also But then I’ll sai, I didn’t see something. Well, he’s a fucking asshole.
Speaker: 0
02:40:25
Alright? I didn’t see.
Speaker: 1
02:40:27
I don’t care what the fuck I see and what I don’t see. What the fuck do you fucking care?
Speaker: 2
02:40:32
But there’s no one in front of him to say that. He’s an idiot alone with his phone. If he just said it out loud amongst reasonable people, they would turn to him, what the fuck are you talking about? But he doesn’t get that check
Speaker: 0
02:40:42
Well, also which is also part
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02:40:43
of the problem with social media.
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02:40:44
One of them someone will say something like, well, I think he’s fucking missing out.
Speaker: 0
02:40:48
Well, I’m sure there’s a lot of shit
Speaker: 1
02:40:50
I can say that you you’re missing out on, and I don’t care if you miss out on that. Ai you have
Speaker: 2
02:40:55
to be missing out. Otherwise, you don’t have a life. Yeah. How much information do you think you can absorb in a day? How much things do you
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02:41:01
watch and listen to?
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02:41:03
You have to
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02:41:03
miss 4 movies a day, apparently.
Speaker: 2
02:41:05
Yeah. That’s a lot of time, man. You have to miss out. There’s gonna be shit you miss out on. Well, the other thing is, if you’re a a film fan today, you’re not just dealing with today’s films. Yeah. Yeah. You’re dealing with this insane ai.
Speaker: 0
02:41:19
But that
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02:41:20
catalog goes back to Rocky.
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02:41:21
Yeah.
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02:41:22
You know, it goes back to, you know, on the waterfront. Goes back
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02:41:25
to the twenties. Good lord. Yeah.
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02:41:27
There’s so many films to watch.
Speaker: 1
02:41:28
No. No. No. Like, you know, a film that I saw that was, like, very meaningful to me this year is Ai really like the story of Beau Geste, the, you know, the the French foreign legion story. I like French foreign legion movies any way. But that’s a really cool story, and I really like the whole story of the 3 brothers in there.
Speaker: 1
02:41:44
And, you know, I’m I was familiar with the Gary Cooper version, the 1939 version, put it on a stamp, but Ai never seen the silent version. And it was arya Ronald Coleman. 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: 1
02:42:05
And we have a little, micro cinema, in the theater I have one of the theaters I have have in Los Angeles, the Vista, and it’s ai a little 20 seat cinema that we just show VHS and 16 millimeters.
Speaker: 0
02:42:17
It’s our video archives.
Speaker: 1
02:42:18
Yeah. It’s, like, video arya the video ai cinema club, and it’s, like, literally, it’s like the brick and mortar version of video ai, which is, like but ai a little Paris back out back avenue.
Speaker: 0
02:42:27
It’s like a little clubhouse. I mean, it’s open to everybody, but Yeah. For our core fans.
Speaker: 1
02:42:32
And the thing is and we we showed, last week, we showed the the silent version of Bojeste in it. And and I wasn’t there at that screening, but I asked the guy who was our manager there, Ram. I ai I said, how did it go? He goes, Quinn, you would have really loved to have been there for that screening. And I go, well, what? Wayne goes, it was so moving.
Speaker: 1
02:42:51
The end of it and it is really moving. And it’s just ai nobody was talking. It was just it was Emotional. You could hear a pin drop and then was over and and everyone was still kind of in this collective emotional
Speaker: 2
02:43:16
That’s amazing.
Speaker: 0
02:43:17
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. So you might see a movie and not like it. And then, you know, people might see Joker 2 today and not really care for it.
Speaker: 0
02:43:33
And then 5 years from now, revisit it and watch it again. And you’re in a different place. Culture is in a different place. Everything’s in a different place. And you have a different perspective on the movie. Maybe you ai the movie. I hated Blade Runner when it first came out. Did not like the film.
Speaker: 0
02:43:46
I thought it was awful. Really? Awful. Like, boring, like, muddled, like, everything that was wrong. And suddenly, I’m seeing Kubrick shots in the end ram, The Ai.
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02:43:59
Like
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02:44:00
Roger would say, Blade Runner should have been called Bladecrawler.
Speaker: 0
02:44:05
No. I was really hard Ai was really hard on movies. I was a really angry young ai. And He was
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02:44:10
such a prick about shit. I he’s a completely different guy. Yeah. Alright. Now he’s, like, Ai sai such a prick about shit. Sai he’s a completely different guy. Yeah. Alright. Now he’s, like, bent over backwards to be nice about something. Who the fuck is this guy?
Speaker: 2
02:44:23
Humbled by life.
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02:44:24
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. Ai, I know how hard it is sometimes to get what you have up here on on the screen and doesn’t always work. And sometimes you’re faking it by the time it gets to the cut.
Speaker: 0
02:44:43
But, you know, it’s it’s not an easy, thing to it’s not so when I watch a movie now, I’m applying my life experience to it. And I’m like, okay. This movie may not be the greatest movie, but this is somebody’s, you know, vision. Yeah. And I’m gonna give that, you know, I’m gonna value that and give myself to it and try to find in it what I like about it.
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02:45:09
And so I always give every movie a shah, you know, a a good shake.
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02:45:13
What’s happened with our show that I think is really cool again for the the fans that follow it and everything is in our first season, we ended up, like, covering about 70 movies, you know, altogether. And we meh a zillion movies in the course of a shah. But, like, you know, we covered about 70 movies altogether, between the 3 movies that we we did over the course of, like, 26 episodes.
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02:45:36
And, and we kinda created new classics at least amongst the people who followed the shah. Mhmm. Because they followed it, and they liked it. And they, you know, watch some old Mexican horror movie like demonoid. Meh. That was pretty cool.
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02:45:50
Demonoid is amazing.
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02:45:51
And then everybody and everybody would put it down. If you ai to look at anything about it, it would all be shitty reviews about it and everything. But then we talked about it with passion, and then we gave the right context in which to appreciate the movie. It’s a killer hand movie.
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02:46:05
And we gave the right context in which to appreciate the movie, and then the people appreciated it under that right context.
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02:46:10
Like, because the movie is old and because maybe it they didn’t have the money to do it, like, super clean or perfect. Yeah.
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02:46:18
Actually, that actually has the most best hand effects of the ai.
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02:46:21
That movie in particular is actually a tough one to because it’s is this demon yeah.
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02:46:26
Yeah. Steven Wright. Right? So it’s
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02:46:27
a killer hand
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02:46:28
that fucks everybody up.
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02:46:29
Ai the thing Is this the best, like, hand on the loose movie?
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02:46:32
It’s a it’s a Mexploitation movie. Okay. With meh Mexican exploitation movie. But the one that’s great about one, she’s fantastic, and it’s Samantha Egger.
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02:46:40
Samantha Egger is Become one
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02:46:41
of our heroes. Alright. For the show.
Speaker: 0
02:46:43
Love Samantha Egger.
Speaker: 1
02:46:45
But this movie looks hilarious. But what’s ai but what’s really cool about of of about, the Mexican horror genre is, they take their tacky horror very seriously. Yep. It’s tacky horror, but they take it really seriously. And I and you appreciate the the seriousness that they’re that they’re delivering that they’re delivering their payload with.
Speaker: 0
02:47:10
And I know how hard it is to to do some of the things that they’re doing on there. This is, like, it’s pre computer graphics. It’s they have a limited budget. No. They’re sharing their own vision is so big, you’re watching it. You’re like, oh my god. This is if you just like, if you try not to judge it on what a movie looks like today.
Speaker: 1
02:47:27
No. But but what but not only just that. The what’s interesting is when you see some of the effects that you there’s a couple of defects. Well, how did they do that? Yeah. Because it’s all done practical. And then some of it is like, oh, well, I can see how they did that. But oh my god. That’s so fucking clever. Yeah. They figured out how to do it in such a clever way.
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02:47:44
I can see how they did it, but that’s so neat because they just figured out how to do it on camera in a way that that that sells it. Yeah.
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02:47:53
And and and it’s a crazy movie also.
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02:47:56
That is crazy.
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02:47:56
It’s like you’re inside of some sort of crazy Mexican’s head making a horror movie. It’s fantastic.
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02:48:03
Well, the horror genre is hard to do to not make ridiculous.
Speaker: 0
02:48:06
Yeah. 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, you know, makes people think, oh, I’m just watching a science fiction film or I’m just watching a horror movie.
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02:48:23
Right.
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02:48:23
Like, you watch Dawn of the Dead and, yeah, you’re watching a movie about zombies in a shopping mall. Or are you watching a movie about the vanishing middle class being drawn to the consumer temple because it’s what they meh from their lives. Mhmm. That was an important place to them.
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02:48:36
Ai, you’re literally quoting the movie.
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02:48:38
I’m actually quoting my, liner notes that I wrote for the, DVD way back when. Let
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02:48:44
me stop and go to the bathroom one
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02:48:45
more time.
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02:48:46
The the coffee is making me take a piss. Ai
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02:48:48
worries. Go for it.
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02:48:50
We can keep going.
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02:48:51
Okay.
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02:48:52
So when you first got into this, like, did you have, ai, a film that you ai to create something like? Like, when you first did you sai, I got you know, like, comedians would be ai, I wanna be the next Eddie Murphy.
Speaker: 0
02:49:06
Yeah. It’s a it was a composite. It was a composite. I have, like, a kind of a top 3 filmmaker. You know, when you’re a young filmmaker, 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 you look to them and you’re like, they teach you how to be. Sure.
Speaker: 0
02:49:25
And so to at the beginning of your life, you’re copying your parents. And because that’s that’s who you love, and that’s what you’re copying. When you’re a young filmmaker, very frequently, you kind of copy your parents.
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02:49:38
Mhmm.
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02:49:38
Your cinematic parents. And, you know, sai, in my case, you know, I mean, you know, in meh 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. I I just love the the intention of his shots and how he assembles his movies. I like, I like everything about his work. Ai do too.
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02:50:05
Kubrick Huge fan.
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02:50:07
He
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02:50:08
ai, if if you love Fritz Lang, you can see that, oh, Kubrick was that’s how he felt about Fritz Lang. Like, when I watch meh can see the Kubrick shah. Is Fritz Lang Metropolis? Yeah. He did Metropolis. He did, I mean, like some of the greatest Metropolis is wild.
Speaker: 0
02:50:24
Metropolis is a super, super powerful and kind of important movie that’s exactly, talking about everything that’s going on today that people should see. The movie I was thinking about was Meh, which is his movie with Peter Lorre about the pedophile who’s and the movie is made in, just just before the Nazis took power.
Speaker: 0
02:50:46
Oh, wow. And so he’s making a movie that’s really about, like, kind of the rise of, 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 Lorre is fantastic. And it’s actually his first sound movie.
Speaker: 0
02:51:04
Like, Fritz Lang hadn’t made a sound movie. And so every single shot in the film is based on sound. So he’ll have shadows talking and the backs of people’s heads talking or even the device of the movie is, Peter Lorre whistling pure ai, you know. That becomes ai the device by which they find the killer in the movie. So the whole movie is about sound.
Speaker: 0
02:51:28
So as a young filmmaker, if you sana learn how to use sound in a movie, that’s the movie to see. Mhmm. Because every single shot ai, it used to be, you would show an empty ram, and it would just be a shot of nothing. But, you know, now Fritz Lang is able to juxtapose, like, a woman has lost her daughter. She’s calling for her daughter.
Speaker: 0
02:51:49
And so she’s looking for her daughter, and she’s looking for her and Elsa. Elsa. And they cut to an empty shot of a stairwell, and you hear her. Elsa. 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: 0
02:52:10
And it’s super, super intense. It and but all he’s doing is he’s using sound juxtaposed with images, which he couldn’t do before.
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02:52:20
Crazy that he just called it m.
Speaker: 0
02:52:22
Yeah. M for murderer. And, this is a this is an amazing, amazing movie. So Kubrick sai, that’s a Kubrickian shot. That’s this is where he’s Elsa or Elsie?
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02:52:37
Elsie.
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02:52:54
Ai seem to remember more elseies. But There’s a
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02:52:57
few. I ai I got the wrong part.
Speaker: 0
02:52:58
Oh, it’s okay. But anyhow,
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02:53:00
this is
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02:53:01
but, so so Kubrick had his forefathers who he used to who he used to watch and that he used to look to. And so those would be like my grandparents
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02:53:10
in a
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02:53:10
way. And so there’s this, like, lineage of cinematic grammar and vernacular that gets carried on from filmmaker to filmmaker. 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: 0
02:53:28
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 Martin is such a big fan of John Borman of some of his films. I think you’re a fan of his writing more than you are his films.
Speaker: 1
02:53:42
No. I I I I have nothing but respect for John.
Speaker: 0
02:53:45
Yeah. And, John Borman and then Roman Polanski. I think those three guys for me and and their work, not the guys, but mostly their work, like, I am a composite. If you watch my movies, I’m a composite of those guys and other people as well. And, those were the filmmakers who are important to me.
Speaker: 0
02:54:03
Those were my parents, so to speak. Kubrick is
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02:54:06
so was such an odd one. Like, his films are so different. And he was a weird guy too. He did, like, complex mathematics in his spare time.
Speaker: 0
02:54:15
I do complex mathematics in my spare time. Nothing wrong with that. No. Yeah. He’s a weird guy, but he was also, I think, thinking 3 steps ahead of everybody at any kind of given moment. I mean, Ai mean, to be honest, I was just thinking I just pulled my script from Eyes Wide Shut.
Speaker: 0
02:54:36
I had a script that was from sai, and I was reading it, over the weekend. And I saw that, 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. It’s missing a third person narration that was originally in in the movie. That’s because the movie was recut and and changed after his death.
Speaker: 0
02:55:01
And and they’ll and they will, deny it. But as a student of Kubrick, I’m watching the movie, and I’m like, well, Kubrick wouldn’t do that. Kubrick wouldn’t do that either. Kubrick would have trimmed this scene.
Speaker: 2
02:55:13
I didn’t know they recut it after his death. Okay. So apparently
Speaker: 1
02:55:17
They finished it.
Speaker: 0
02:55:18
Well, that’s the that’s the party line.
Speaker: 1
02:55:20
That’s a very good idea.
Speaker: 0
02:55:21
Party line, but I think that they changed the the notes, the close ups, the the inserts of the notes. I think those are changed. It’s missing a narration. It’s definitely missing a narration. You know, a third person narration. Ai that scene where he sees the the prostitute who’s died.
Speaker: 0
02:55:36
He’s at the morgue, and he’s looking at tyler, and he’s, like, leaning over her. It’s a bed for narration. 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. And so maybe they just kinda clutched it together, except there’s an entire thread that’s kind of been Squashed? Squashed in that film.
Speaker: 0
02:55:59
And that’s the the 2 men that are throughout the movie shah 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 bassinet, which is totally Kubrick saying something.
Speaker: 0
02:56:17
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 2 guys walking off with the daughter. They’re taking her away. They’ve given their daughter to the pedo cult. That’s what’s happened at the end of the movie. Oh.
Speaker: 0
02:56:36
And there’s an incident where when they first screened the movie in England, people who were outside apparent this is all secondhand,
Speaker: 1
02:56:45
by
Speaker: 0
02:56:45
the way. There There are people who are outside of the theater who could hear inside of the theater Kubrick yelling at all the executives and saying, it’s my movie. You can’t cut it. You can’t fucking cut my film. Blah blah blah blah. Big argument going on. Then he dies like 4 days later. Oh, geez.
Speaker: 0
02:56:59
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. And I would love to finish that film. I like I’m like
Speaker: 1
02:57:15
Have you
Speaker: 2
02:57:16
ever made an attempt?
Speaker: 0
02:57:17
I thought about it. And, reading the script over the weekend, I started seriously thinking about it. Well, somebody should recut this or somebody should
Speaker: 2
02:57:27
So just the amount of recutting it with narration?
Speaker: 0
02:57:30
Well, yes and no. There’s obviously missing. There would be missing footage now. There’s things have been removed and
Speaker: 2
02:57:36
And is that acceptable?
Speaker: 0
02:57:38
No. Not unless you crack it open and there’s no way in What do
Speaker: 2
02:57:41
you mean?
Speaker: 0
02:57:41
They would never.
Speaker: 2
02:57:42
But hold on. Here’s the thing. Now we have AI.
Speaker: 0
02:57:46
Well, I know. That’s yeah. You’re you’re one step ahead of me. No. No. I’m one step ahead of
Speaker: 2
02:57:50
me because
Speaker: 0
02:57:50
Ai I I’ve actually been experimenting a lot with, with AI. The newer versions are pretty stunning. I’ve been working on runway lately, which is,
Speaker: 2
02:57:59
The curve is insane. Like, the exponential curve of improvement?
Speaker: 0
02:58:03
I’m literally as I’m working on things, I’ll be talking to the guys and, you know, I’ll be saying, well, it’d be nice to be able to move the camera. Okay. We got that tool on Tuesday. We’re we’re gonna give that to you. And so it’s ai literally whatever you think you can’t do, ask us because we probably will be able to do it in a couple of days.
Speaker: 0
02:58:19
And so it’s advancing so fast and so rapidly that I without telling you, Quintin, I made a little claymation version of you. And I I have him talking and, ai of funny looking. I’m sure it’s
Speaker: 1
02:58:34
a claymation version of me. It wouldn’t be funny looking.
Speaker: 0
02:58:37
But it’s it’s a claymation version of both you and me.
Speaker: 2
02:58:41
How bizarre that something that would have cost, like, 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars. Like, if you wanted to do a film, ai, a pixel type, you know, one of those crazy movies where you have all this, like, insane animation. That shit took forever. The best
Speaker: 0
02:58:54
work that I’ve seen of it lately. It was the first time I’ve been kind of ignoring AI and, like, no. I know what it is. It’s ai form completion with vatsal, and I get it. I understand what it is. And we’ll see. We’ll see. But I like tactile. I like tactile. And I do.
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02:59:07
But I worked on Beowulf. I made Beowulf with Robert Zemeckis. Okay. And, like, that was a big, you know, video, puppeteoon ai CGI thing. Ai original movie.
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02:59:18
Motion captured.
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02:59:19
Ai. My original plan for that movie, because I was gonna direct it myself, was to make it, like, you know, in Iceland, you know, under $10,000,000, you know, just really dirty. I wanted it to be like, you know, like an early Terry Gilliam film, like Jabberwock.
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02:59:31
Like Jabberwock.
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02:59:32
That was actually the, one Neil and I were, thinking about when
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02:59:36
Neil Gaiman.
Speaker: 0
02:59:37
Yeah. Neil Gaiman, when ai cowriter on that film. And, the movie ended up getting made much bigger. It turned suddenly, it was ai whatever budget I had was probably our craft service budget. Nothing like making a $100,000,000 movie. It’s like sushi every day, you know, champagne, fly the plane to England, you know, whatever you want. It’s like, it’s crazy.
Speaker: 0
03:00:04
But that was definitely not the movie I had planned on making. However, when we made it, like and it turned into this big performance capture thing. It was ai, like, working with Zemekas. And and he’s such a like, an excitable, like, creative genius. Like, he’s and even before you were able to do stuff like what he was doing in that film, he was, like, constantly taking, you know, like, when he made contact, oh, we’ll take that eyebrow off of, Jodie Foster, and I like that eyebrow thing she does.
Speaker: 0
03:00:38
And so put that on this take. And so he was, like, messing with her face and doing all sorts of performance stuff.
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03:00:43
Woah.
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03:00:44
And even when you go back to his earliest film, I sana hold Ai wanna hold your hand. I sana hold your hand is almost a visual, trick. You know, having the Beatles there but not be there. And even though he’s not using computer graphics, he I think he’s just a really super inventive ai, and it was so much fun making the movie with him because What year was that?
Speaker: 0
03:01:03
Inventing Technologies. That was 2010 that
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03:01:07
I think maybe came up. Call up Beowulf. Let’s watch some of that. Because I ai remember what it looks like.
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03:01:12
It looks probably like a video game pre cut scene at this point.
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03:01:15
That’s what’s crazy. Right? Like, did
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03:01:17
I could make I thought about taking Beowulf, importing it into my system, and then just painting over it.
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03:01:23
Let’s fucking go. Which let’s fucking go.
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03:01:26
Which, by the way, you can do easily. Yeah. Easily. I thought about fixing Let’s
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03:01:30
see what this looks ai. With the Beowulf oh, jeez.
Speaker: 0
03:01:33
Yeah. I mean, it looks like a like a video game cutscene at this point.
Speaker: 2
03:01:37
Yeah. But it was kind of cool because everybody looked like that, not just the monster. Yeah. That’s that was kinda cool about it.
Speaker: 0
03:01:43
I meh, the difference is is that this was vatsal, like, its 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
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03:02:03
Cuts his own Cuts his own arm off.
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03:02:05
Vatsal my arm off. Cut my own arm off. It’s funny because ai our original script was much more modest than this, but then Zimikos was like, okay, boys. It costs $1,000,000 a minute. Do whatever you want.
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03:02:18
He stabs a dragon in the heart.
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03:02:21
Oh, no. This movie is kind of a, I mean, it’s a little it’s an interesting experience what happened to me on this film, if you don’t mind. Yeah.
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03:02:32
Go
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03:02:32
ahead. So I so I was gonna make this movie myself. I had I had set it up initially at Image Movers with Zemekus producing, and then it fell out and the rights kind of reverted back to me. I had to cover the turnaround on it, but the rights reverted back to me and I was sana go make the movie myself for nothing and I was trying to set it up.
Speaker: 0
03:02:55
And it was really I was broke at the time and, I was not gonna make money. And I had to cover the turnaround expenses myself on the on the film which were considerable. But I wanted to make the movie really bryden. And I was working on Silent Hill, this other movie I wrote, and, I suddenly started getting calls.
Speaker: 0
03:03:12
And it was ai the producer of, Polar Express, this guy Speak Bing, wanted wanted to buy the script. He’s like, I sana buy it for his Emicus. And I said, too little too late. I’m making it now. And I kept saying no.
Speaker: 0
03:03:28
And every 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 Ai
Speaker: 1
03:03:36
Ram. Right?
Speaker: 0
03:03:37
Yeah. It was Jack actually, yeah. It was Jack. How did you know it was Jack? Did I tell you that?
Speaker: 1
03:03:41
Well, no. Because he well, he was he he was Zemeckis’ agent and became Zemeckis’ That’s right. Verizon partner.
Speaker: 0
03:03:46
And, and so I was getting And he’s
Speaker: 1
03:03:48
a guy who gets shit bryden.
Speaker: 0
03:03:49
Yeah. He is a guy who gets shit done. Well, I was like, you know, no. No. No. And, you know, no. I won’t. I’m doing it myself. No. No. And Speak Bing and I said, if another agent calls me, I’m firing the agency. And they’re like, will you will you at least meet with the producer?
Speaker: 0
03:04:04
And so I went ahead and I meet with them. And he says, listen. If I don’t make this film with Samikos, with with Bob, I’m gonna miss the moment. I’m gonna lose the movie. It’s it’s gonna be over. Just what’s your price? Just tell meh. What’s your price? And I said, I don’t have a price.
Speaker: 0
03:04:19
I don’t work like that. He said, listen. Everybody’s got a price. I said, well, I may have one, but I’m not gonna tell you. And sai, look.
Speaker: 0
03:04:27
Why don’t you just tell meh? Just discourage me. So I said, okay. You want me to discourage you? And so I started, like, making shit up. I need this.
Speaker: 0
03:04:35
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, and let’s add some money to that. I went over the top.
Speaker: 0
03:04:44
Well, Roger, that is 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, etcetera, 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. And I was like and I was like, well, okay.
Speaker: 0
03:05:07
And I I arya driving home, and I started like, I’d 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. And this is the first time in my life that Ai ever made a choice based on money. This titanic amount of money, and I was understand bryden.
Speaker: 0
03:05:28
And I went home and I cried, and then the check came, and nothing dries tears like money. And then Zenikas invited me into the process, which was really great of him. He really wanted me meh and Neil to to be at his side and collaborate with him, and it was a fabulous experience.
Speaker: 0
03:05:42
But to be honest, I was like, who am I now? 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. I think it’s one of the most beautiful movies ever made about the Arthurian legends.
Speaker: 0
03:05:56
And and if you watch Beowulf and Excalibur, they’re very similar actually, thematically. And sai, I was like, who am I now? What does it all mean? You know, what I don’t even care I don’t even know if I wanna make a movie anymore. You know?
Speaker: 0
03:06:11
Like, what do I have to tell now now that I’ve just completely sold out? Then I was at a dinner and, big dinner, and I was driving home that night. And I was giving somebody who was at the dinner a a lift. My wife was in the back speak of the arya, and we were, I tyler my daughter I was gonna be home by midnight. We lived in Ojai.
Speaker: 0
03:06:40
It was dark. And Ai, so I was speeding. I have a lead foot. And, I was speeding to get there without getting into the details of what happened. There I lost control of the car. There was another vehicle, but they fled the scene. I lost control of the vehicle.
Speaker: 0
03:07:03
I, I think my tire blew, but I was going into a ditch. And I knew I was going into it into this deep ditch because it was right near my house. It’s full of rocks and stuff. Ai I knew if I go in there, we’ll die. And so I turned into the thing, and then I turned away from it to try to the car spun out, and I ended up on the other side of the street where I knew there was, like, a cow pasture.
Speaker: 0
03:07:26
And I was ai, 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, took the impact, and my wife was thrown from the car. When I came to, all I could hear was the horn.
Speaker: 0
03:07:43
You know, like, meh hearing’s gonna have glass in my mouth, and I’m I’m injured as well. I climb out of the car, and it’s dark. It’s really dark. But somebody’s already ai, the meh 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. I was right near the fire department. They showed up shortly afterwards.
Speaker: 0
03:08:06
But when I jumped out of the car, I came running around to see what happened, and I saw my wife on the on the asphalt. She’d been thrown from the vehicle. And I, I Ai threw myself onto, you know, onto my knees on the on the pavement, and I found myself in that moment asking for the one thing that mattered, which was just life.
Speaker: 0
03:08:36
She looked dead. And she and I just in that moment, I 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. And in that moment, she came back to life. It was like the the life came back into her. Okay.
Speaker: 0
03:08:59
It was a completely fucked up scene. My other my other passenger is dying in the car, or dead. Ai, the the the police are suddenly there. And next thing I know, I’m in jail. And, and suddenly, you ai, like suddenly, I found myself in jail. I found myself guilty of manslaughter.
Speaker: 0
03:09:24
And, and and something that is absolutely irreversible happening, which is, you know, someone lost their life at my hand. And, so after that, I, you know, Ai ended up I found myself in jail and doing time. And suddenly, everything that had come was gone. Like, everything that I had made, gone.
Speaker: 0
03:09:48
It all went, you know, out to
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03:09:51
And all that money you made
Speaker: 0
03:09:52
All that to the settlement. Is it Ai didn’t have time to spend it. Didn’t even have time to register that it was there, and it was gone. Because it doesn’t it was like it was not real. And and then you find yourself in jail. And, and and suddenly everything is gone. Career is gone.
Speaker: 0
03:10:15
Everybody stops calling. It’s over. Cue number 2 hit films? Doesn’t matter. It’s all over. In fact, it was right in the middle of the publicity on Beowulf.
Speaker: 0
03:10:26
It was just toward the end of it. And, it was it’s the most horrible thing that that has ever happened to me. And I and I found myself then alone in jail, incarcerated, saloni with my remorse and regret, and, and really getting existential about things. Really, like, coming to appreciate, you know, simple existence is the best thing there is. It’s people don’t appreciate what we have. You don’t appreciate it until it’s gone.
Speaker: 0
03:11:14
And it is can go ai first of all, we live in bodies of glass. My wife was horribly injured. And, you know, and it has been a decade to, you know, to not just rebuild our lives, but to, you know, for her to come back to health even. What it did though, you know, as as because I would do anything to to reverse that, to reverse what happened. I would give anything to do it.
Speaker: 0
03:11:49
And I don’t say this lightly, but having said that, I’m kind of grateful as well because I was, like, asleep walking through life. And, it wasn’t until that happened that I completely like, it changed how I see everything. It was like my 3rd eye opened up. I don’t view anything the same way.
Speaker: 0
03:12:20
I you know, once you’ve been incarcerated and you’ve been deprived of of everything and you have a lot of time to think and be existential, you come out of that at least Ai came out of that experience. And, you know, I I looked at a tree, and I was like, okay. That’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life.
Speaker: 0
03:12:42
I hope I never not feel this way. This, this appreciation for a cloud. You know, to be able like, when you’re imprisoned, to be able to pet a cat, for example. It’s so simple. It’s such a nothing thing you think. Okay.
Speaker: 0
03:12:59
To be able to pet an animal is ai a gift. 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 ai. And so you start really seeing human behavior up front.
Speaker: 0
03:13:19
I mean, when I was in jail, you know, I’m there literally during the Academy Awards. It’s on the TV in the tank. And I’m watching him win, like, for Django. Wow. The Oscar for Django.
Speaker: 0
03:13:34
So while Quentin is, like, at the height of things, I’m pretty much at the
Speaker: 1
03:13:39
bottom. Watching through bars.
Speaker: 0
03:13:42
Meh. We’re not
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03:13:42
in the bar.
Speaker: 0
03:13:43
And not only that, but Greg Shah, who produced the rules of attraction for me, my producer, who came and visited me with Robin Robin Wright in the days that followed, he won for 0 Dark 30. Yeah.
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03:13:52
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
03:13:53
Yeah. And so I’m, like, there, like like to be taken from one point where you feel like you’re at the top, and you’re like, oh, you think you’re, you think you understand things. No. I take you and put you at the bottom. But let me tell you something. In that moment, I was sitting on the asphalt.
Speaker: 0
03:14:14
My wife came back to life. I immediately knew what I had to say as a filmmaker after that. It was ai whatever had whatever cynicism Ai had, you know, about the movie and not making it, it just went away. Evaporated. Yeah. It evaporated. It evaporated.
Speaker: 0
03:14:35
And the ecstatic experiences, and they were ecstatic ai I had in jail were ai I mean, you see things ai of for real. When you see somebody, you know, get hanged by their cellie, in in a cell, or when you see when you know that, you know, oh, that El Salvadorian Meh 13 hitman guy, he’s gonna kill that that gay dude.
Speaker: 0
03:15:09
He’s gonna kill him in the yard. I’ll go lock myself in my cell. Literally, I’ll go lock myself in. You shut the door because you know shit is gonna go down. Jesus. And so, like like, that was, like, every day.
Speaker: 0
03:15:24
And so suddenly, it was, like, you know And also, you really know who stands with you after something horrible happens. And, you know, and ai John Langley, our customer from video archives ended up being ai 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: 0
03:15:47
That was our customer who did that. And so, like, I value our customers. Yeah. Ai and, and and and especially John and his family Mhmm. And Maggie, who I feel like it really ai. Sai talk about John a lot, but really Maggie, She was really my big champion, I think.
Speaker: 0
03:16:09
And so, anyhow, I, you know, what it taught meh, actually because I was a filmmaker and up my own ass most of the time. But what it kinda taught me was, you know, be compassionate to other people because you might not know it, but they might be going through shit in their lives.
Speaker: 0
03:16:32
You know? And God forbid it’d be something health related, which is almost out of your control. But, you know, people are suffering and people are struggling. And I used to be a lot more cavalier about people and kind of fuck with people and and be forceful with people and not really care as much.
Speaker: 0
03:16:51
Now I’m acutely aware of of, of people and, you know, what they may be going through. It’s just a I
Speaker: 2
03:17:00
think this is the best way to wrap this up. Perfect. Gentlemen, thank you very much. This is, awesome conversation.
Speaker: 1
03:17:07
Really, really good. Thank you for letting us come through.
Speaker: 2
03:17:09
And a half hours just flew by.
Speaker: 0
03:17:11
Thank you
Speaker: 1
03:17:11
so much. I I I Sai I actually thought, oh, I guess he’s wrapping it up quick. No. I think it’s 3 hours. I thought it was, like, 90
Speaker: 0
03:17:20
minutes. And ai minutes,
Speaker: 1
03:17:21
at least. 90 minutes. No. No.
Speaker: 0
03:17:23
There it is.
Speaker: 2
03:17:23
The video archives podcast, on On Patreon. Patreon. I love Patreon. On the right.
Speaker: 0
03:17:29
Patreon dot com slash video arc. If you just look up video archives podcast.com, it’ll Thank you, man. Beautiful. Thank you, guys. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you ai.
