Blank Check with Griffin & David - Mikey and Nicky with Olivia Craighead

Episode Date: April 18, 2021

Grab 15 cups of cream, brush up on your Meisner Technique, and listen in as The Two Friends (Griffin & David) discuss the Two Friends MIKEY & NICKY, with special guest Olivia Craighead (Iconography podcast). While we’re still discussing the films of Elaine May, this episode also serves as a celebration of “Short King With A Tall Face” John Cassavetes, and recognizes 1976 for what it was - a banner year for Ned Beatty. Join our Patreon at patreon.com/blankcheck Follow us @blankcheckpod on Twitter and Instagram! Buy some real nerdy merch at shopblankcheckpod.myshopify.com

I'm exhausted, really, Nick. Nicky, Nicky, this is foolish. Nick, please, it's just foolish. Fooly, this is foolish. Nick, please. It's just foolish. Foolish? Frankly, I think it's ridiculous. You didn't like my podcast? I loved your podcast.

I thought she was a wonderful podcast. Why is it ridiculous to visit the grave? Because it's one o'clock in the morning. That makes it nicer. How does that make it anything, Nick? A podcast is a podcast. There's no religion in the world that says a person's soul is buried with them in their podcast. It's not your podcast in there.

What a crazy scene without us replacing the words. As we're doing it, I'm just like, this is just a crazy conversation anyway. Yes. And made more confusing by me choosing to indiscriminately replace three different words with right you started just throwing podcasts in everywhere i liked it yeah i thought it was great thank you that's all that matters at the end of the day that that's really the only thing that matters um hello everybody this is a podcast that you can visit at 1 o'clock in the morning if you yeah sure absolutely

listen in a graveyard please do Nikki of course says it's very hard to talk to a dead person there's nothing in common it's very easy to listen to a podcast you might have many things in common I should have just let Ben say the graveyard thing. That was better.

Listen, it's a podcast called Blank Check with Griffin and David. I'm Griffin. I'm David. It's a podcast about filmographies. Directors who have massive success early on in their careers. Hold on. Why is this? Give me one second here.

Why is it not showing up? Hello, hello, hello. Okay. I think my mic wasn't working it's okay we got the zoom the plug was undone okay so you'll use that as the backup no you know actually let's have you guys do that scene again oh god no i'm a one i'm one take david that's it you get one take out of me and then I go to the trailer. You would have been horrible on an Elaine May set. Yeah, Elaine May would have fucking shot me in the head. Absolutely. She would have hired Ned Beatty to kill me.

Well, now all of this is in the podcast. Now I'm not taking a second take. This is all funny. I fucked up. My wire was undone. Hopefully you can't hear that much of a difference. And it's good. The chaotic energy.

It's chaotic. It's real. That's the whole energy. It's chaotic. It's real. That's the whole point. It's just people living. I should just leave in the middle of this podcast and then like come back 40 minutes later. Like that's the kind of thing we should be doing. We'll still be rolling, baby. Just in case.

That's all that matters. Listen, this is a podcast called Blank Check with Griffin and David. That's right. What if we pretended this episode was called Bl blank check with griffin and david that's right we could what what if we pretended this episode was called blank check with mikey and nicky that would accomplish nothing right yeah i don't really know what that does for anyone but it doesn't really do anything i think uh but this is a podcast about filmographies directors who have massive success early on in their careers they're given a series of blank checks to make whatever crazy passion

projects they want and sometimes those checks clear. Sometimes they bounce, baby. And this is an unfortunately short miniseries on the films of Elaine May. We've gotten to her third film, her first real bounce, the movie that almost makes her retire from filmmaking until she's coaxed out of retirement and then makes the biggest flop of a decade right the movie that people think of as being synonymous with uh ending a career i know it's not a blank check but it's kind of a blank check and how she made it yeah yeah you know are you talking about this movie or ishtar this movie ishtar is its own thing this might be more of a a stolen check

yeah but it's like when she's making it she's getting to do whatever the fuck she wants yeah and this is kind of blank checky in the way where it's like she makes like two like comedies and everyone's like she's the comedy girl and she's like right fuck you guys like yeah she's like this is going in your eye yeah yeah uh we should say it's a mini series on the films of elaine may it's called the pod break cast today we are finally discussing mikey and nicky with our friend from the iconography podcast olivia craighead hi guys i um i like told you guys i wanted to do this movie and then today or yesterday I was like oh my god this is such a big movie to talk about

and I spent the last 24 hours reading a lot about this movie just because I was like I don't want to let the people down because I just think that it's like older it feels like it's it's steeped in a lot of history so I came to play uh you're gonna be great uh better than either of us yeah absolutely we're both so burnt out uh but let's also say uh I feel like the last time we

recorded an episode with you for Flight was a month ago. Yeah, that's the other thing is that I'm back really fast, it feels like. You're back fast! This episode will come out four months later. No, I know, but like we're really doing a lot of hanging.

It feels weird. Not a bad way, but it just feels like, is time like, is it distort distorting it's also like it also like maybe wasn't it was like two months ago because i think we did the end of november okay and now it's the end of january but time is that makes me feel a little bit better it was november 24th so yes it was just a little over two months ago yeah but it could have been two weeks ago and i'd be like sure yes and in my mind it was a month ago um but yes griffin we are the two of us are squeezing time like that's what we're doing you know that's why it feels even more crazy yes we've started calling each other a cap and crunch because we're crunching as many episodes into

a week as we can that's certainly right I don't really want to talk about why, but people will probably know by this point. It will become apparent at some point. Exactly. Yes. I mean, this episode's dropping April 18th. Yeah. I'm soon to be 35.

Hey. Hey. Hey. Just want to get another look at you. Bag of Bones Sims, yeah. I'm loopy. It's very weird. I'm about to, I will be 32 by the time this episode comes out.

And 32 just feels like such a garbage age. I don't know how 32 worked out for you. It's not an exciting milestone. It's so boring. Are you guys liking your 30s though? I'm loving them. I mean, I honestly, I always, throughout my 20s, I just thought like, I can't wait to just slow down and live through a global pandemic.

And so in that sense, the 30s have really been living up to my expectations. Well, on the, okay, to counter, I'm 25. And I'm like, I'm getting my fucking prime years absolutely zapped away. That is fair. I should be out at clubs until three in the morning dancing to house music that I hate. You love to hit the clerbs. Yeah. That's all we talk about. I love to take drugs from strangers. Like that's all the shit I should be doing right now. And yet here I am. Olivia, you raise a great point because obviously that's exactly what I was doing when I was 25 as

well. and yes the best time to live through a pandemic is when you're a washed up 32 year old i think that's probably yeah i turned 20 years old and one day every day of my life went to a club and took drugs from a stranger and then you know i hit the age of 30 and i was like signing goodbye that's not doing that anymore no you don't have to stop ben's like another party heard from i'm sorry i'm confused david you said something i don't know if it was your mic cutting out if you were having a similar ko problem or what you said every day you hit a what uh club a club oh okay sorry sorry club okay i was just confused the You love to hit the clerbs. You gotta hit the clerbs. I mean, this is one of those movies

that's just about being an adult man, a sort of broken adult man. And I don't feel like these guys, but it is interesting to watch these movies as I tiptoe closer, and it stops being like, you know, watching these movies, and I was like a 15-year-old Cassavetes dork and being like, oh know watching these movies and i was like a 15 year old

cassavetes dork and being like oh this is like watching a movie about a knight in armor right you're just like i have this guy might as well be doing particle physics this is so far from my lived experience right and then i watch this and i'm like huh i'm pretty sad my jackets are pretty wrinkly how old are these guys supposed to be Because they have like 70s face in the way where it's like, I have absolutely no idea. All right. So this film came out in 1976. Is that right?

And so Cassavetes, when it comes out, is 47. Okay. And Falk is 49. Okay. They both look really good for their age then. They look really good. They look really good. They look really good. I was like, they're 40, sure.

Yeah, you could tell me late 30s, and I'd be like, right, they're old, they're grizzled late 30s, but no, they're late 40s. And like I said, 70s face. I feel like everyone in the 70s looked a little older because they were smoking all the time. Yes, right.

And everyone was eating bad food. Yeah, exactly. And Cassavetes is essentially dead within 10 years. Yeah, he dies in 89. Yeah, there you go. What did he die of? How did he die? It was a liver issue.

I believe it was drinking related. Right, cirrhosis of the liver because he drank one billion gallons of alcohol, right? Yes. Okay, yeah, that'll do, yeah. And Peter Falk, he died an old man. I mean, I remember him. He died a very old man. He died fairly last decade or something. Yeah, okay. Yeah, that'll do, yeah. And Peter Falk, he died an old man. I mean, I remember him. He died a very old man. He died fairly last decade or something.

Yeah, 2011. Yeah, there are all these stories about Cassavetes, how he just started aging really quickly. If you look at his last couple of movies, he started going really gray, and he was still kind of thin, but he had a ginormous belly because of his liver issues.

So he was just like this rail-thin man with a distended belly, and his friends talk about how he just started wearing looser shirts, and it would be very confusing. Like, they'd just be like, I can't make sense of, is he gaining weight or not? And he just sort of didn't tell anyone he was sick for a while.

Cassavetes, one of my ultimate guys, as I sit here at my desk, now the location of Blank Check Studios North, one of three satellite studios where the show is recorded.

Manhattan. But I have this, like, John Cassavetes on my desk. He's on my windowsill. Wait, wait, wait. I can't see it. Oh, there he is. Yeah. Wow. Cute. Young Cassavetes. Yeah, it's this young, sexy cassavetes on my desk he's on my windowsill wait wait wait i can't see it oh there he is yeah wow cute young cast yeah it's just young sexy cassavetes but he's one of my favorite guys uh of all time uh and i do think i should just put this out as like a disclaimer this movie has such an interesting reputation because i feel like for a lot of people who like Cassavetes more in theory than they do in practice, they're like, this is my favorite Cassavetes movie.

They're like, this is what I wish his movies were like. This is the best of him as an actor, and it's sort of a more focused, less self-indulgent version of what he was trying to do in his films. And then I'm such a slut for cassavetes that i wish this movie were messier which i know is an insane thing to say unless you've watched every cut of every cassavetes movie like i have no i think that's crazy i think you're crazy you should go to the loony bin i think i might fall into the the other group of people because i i mean i love like woman under the influence i think that's like an incredible movie but on griffin's suggestion i watched husbands for the first time before i

watched mikey and nicky and i was like this i i like this a lot i can never watch this again this is like stressing me out and this is like feels like similar where it's like, why are men like this? It's like in it as it's like thesis sort of, but in a way that is like, less about really being like horrible people and being more like confused and betraying each other. And like, I don't know. this movie is certainly also disorienting and is not really a comedy or a crowd pleaser but there's the famous story that the first cut of husbands which this episode is not about but it's worth watching if you wish to watch one of my favorite movies um they screened it for a test audience and they loved it and they laughed a bunch and cassavetes walked out irate and he's like they're not supposed to laugh we got to cut all the jokes out. Okay, John. I mean, he's right. I think that movie would be way worse if it was like a like laughy comedy because it like makes all the like horrible stuff hit harder when you're like these guys are kind of fucked up.

But I also think like, you know, the Cassavetes movies are so much about. But I also think like, you know, the Cassavetes movies are so much about, I think John Cassavetes was so obsessed with the way people speak when they are inebriated, going through a psychological break or both, right? Yeah. Like his movies are people giving these long monologues where they're sort of poetic in their own mind and it's almost gobbledygook. Right. And you're like, what are they saying yeah this is a movie where the two guys talk far more straight to each other it's still got the cast of eddie's acting energy but a lot of it is them talking around subjects you know yeah i would say at first i would say the last half you lose that a little bit in a good way like i'm not saying that sort of negative yeah i'm just saying I was sort of watching this trying to really parse

the differences because it is, this movie is an odd duck because Elaine May, this is her first film that is entirely original. Her first two movies, A New Leaf and Heartbreak Kid,

were adapted from short stories. One by her, one not by her. Adapted, I mean. Neither story was written by her. This was entirely created by her and was based on people she grew up around. I was watching, there's a special feature on the Criterion disc with, let me look up what the guy's name is, but he worked at Paramount, was the one guy who sort of took on the responsibility of

trying to distribute this movie and then became her producer for her plays for a while after that. And his name is Julian Schlossberg. But he said, without going into too much detail, that Elaine May's family was connected or at least sort of connected adjacent. And so she grew up around people like this oh yeah i think it was like there were some there were some guys who were around

her family growing up who were like like mike inicky and also in the in the same way that they're like lower tier she wasn't like hanging around with like mob bosses right whatever that was the whole conceit of this movie i think is just like can i make a movie about the guys that never end up in a mob movie these guys who are just kind of sad sacky low level sort of like slumping around they're schmucks who owe people money like is essentially what they are that's the extent to which they're really connected like they know the bad people to go to and they you know maybe do like some work or whatever you know but like they're right they're not like in the family you know but also you know if you if

one of these guys are are in a mob movie they're in it for one scene as the guy that fucking deniro intimidates and makes look like a shit worm or something you know this is only four years after the godfather like there's not a lot of good mob movies yet there's just that really yeah uh we're just getting to the sort of modern gangster movie it's really just started to happen as this is coming up that's that's how like sort of uh modern this movie this movie is so modern as much as it is also a crazily 70s movie where there's a guy who sells cream and you, everyone's got a raincoat and everyone smokes 100 million cigarettes and all that. But like it also is just it just feels like it was made yesterday. Yeah.

I should mention it was shot in 1973. So it was shot only a year after The Godfather. It took three full years to come out. Right. There you go. Fuck. Yeah. And she had been writing it forever. Yes. so it's like not like godfather inspired like no i'm not saying at all

yeah yeah yeah but like i don't know it's completely original um but uh i i was trying to get a sense of the timing of this i know she she tried it out with a bunch of different pairings of guys in the two lead roles, and she had done script readings with Grodin and Falk. I've read a lot of interviews with Cassavetes from the early 70s where he talks about how much he likes Elaine May movies and he wants to collaborate with her. So I think they already were in communication at this point at some point the idea comes to put these two guys together which then suddenly makes it such a cassavetes adjacent film you know uh because even though this is very much elaine may's script this movie is not as improvised as sort of legend has it um and it's very much got her own different filmmaking style. You have these two guys who are now taking a certain amount of authorship of the internal rhythms of each scene. And those rhythms

are very defined by the work that they had done together for decades now at this point. The way Peter Falk tells it is like he was like having lunch with Cassavetes in like the Paramount commissary and was like I got this script from Elaine May you want it do you want to read it and he was and because but he's like I'll do it and Peter Fogg was like no no you got to read it like don't just like say you're gonna do it and then apparently Cassavetes is by the end of this like argument is like standing on the table being like is she writing it and Peter Fogg was like yes yes. Is she directing it? Yes. Are you going to be in it? Yes.

And then he's like, I'll do it. Like, that is how much he, like, liked Elaine May and Peter Falk and was just like, I'm in. And also to just, like, jump on the table at lunch is very Cassavetes. That's what I was going to say. When you hear, like, show-busy old Hollywood, new Hollywood stories like that, often you're like, but come on, it's being exaggerated. It wasn't this extreme. Everyone I've ever met who worked with Cassavetes, and I, you know,

have gone out of my way to try to speak to a couple people who have worked with him in the past as such a big fan, all say, like, no, he was absolutely that fucking dramatic. He was such a goddamn showboat. If he wanted to prove a point he would actually stand up on a table and yell that in the commissary in front of everybody

like that fundamentally was who he was on a daily basis such a pain in the ass yeah must have been such a pain in the ass to hang out with my god well that's because i think i try to remember who it was it was maybe al rubin who was like his producer for most of his movies. But I was saying, like, I just think he's such a genius. And they were like, I mean, he was kind of just a pain in the ass. It's fucking annoying. It's funny to hear like you talk about him this way because he was just kind of like a clown. Do you think it's because he was short?

I was about to say we must call out that he's a short king. So is Peter Falk. They're both short falk gazzara cassavetes all short but weirdly gazzara and falk read short cassavetes yes this is what i was gonna say no cassavetes has the face of a taller man he's got a tall face yes yeah and he just sort of looks like i mean it's that he's so he's a very striking handsome guy sort of looks like, I mean, it's that he's so, he's a very striking, handsome guy, but he looks like a boxer or something. Like, he just kind of looks tough. He's got like these angles, I guess.

Yeah. There's a term. Johnny Staccato. There's a term my brother, James Newman, who was once an amateur boxer, loves that's used about boxers' faces, which is he looks like a bruised penny. Mmm, I love it. It's a real bruised penny movie. Yeah, you know, but these are bruised penny faces, these guys.

Caspface just has a fucking unbelievable mouth. Have you ever seen that show, Johnny Staccato, where he played a jazz pianist who was a private detective? It just sounds like the greatest show of all time. Yeah, guess what? It is. It rules. It sounds so good. The Sopranos can eat Johnny Staccato's ass. Johnny Soprano never

plays, does jazz sets. It's so wild. Oh, God. I should watch that. How do I watch that? I have it on DVD. I don't know if it's somewhere. I'm just saying, everyone's watching

The Sopranos in quarantine. Maybe we should be watching Johnny Staccato. But Columbo, because the first two Columbo movies are 68 and 72. So he's done two Columbo's by the time he starts shooting this movie.

By the time it comes out, he is very much Columbo. I think he is working very hard to not let that define his entire career. Right. I didn't realize before, literally today, that Columbo wasn't like hour-long episode TV shows. No, there would just be a Colombo once in a while yeah it was like i because i watched the one that cassavetes is in where he plays a uh a conductor who murders his um mistress who is uh also the piano player in his orchestra um and it's like an hour and a half and i was like oh this is like how british people

do tv like this is crazy some of them are like as long as 100 minutes some are 70 it would range like it's just a whole other world it is yeah like you could you could just be like they're like here's your here's your colombo like it'll be whatever we get yes take your colombo and enjoy it and also he did it until like 2003 like there were new colombos coming out for like 40 years his the last colombo episode was in 2003 and it's called colombo likes the nightlife and it's pretty good and matthew reese is in it jesus but colombo was just like it was like iron man for him he could just be like i'll do three quick colombos you know all right okay all right one more colombo one more one more colombo and like

what's the premise of colombo like he's kind of a bum and you you know who did the murder from the first seed like that's the only premise there's the premise of colombo is he seems like he doesn't know what he's doing and at the very end he reveals that actually he's good at his job but also you always see the crime to start the show right like that that's it's one kind of twist but that's it watching it today really felt like reading like encyclopedia brown where i was like i was like figuring out how he was gonna put it together i was like oh he left a flower on the floor like that's how you're gonna get him they call it a how catch them. That's what they call that.

How catch them. Instead of a whodunit. Right. Like, they're like, what if you do it the other way where it's like you're going to watch and put it together. But I'm even just like, I'm on the Columbo Wikipedia page right now. And the key image is, excuse me, the Columbo season one DVD set, which is even weird to call it like Columbo season one. Yeah. Right. season one dvd set which is even weird to call it like colombo season one yeah right what is ankle is it just the first colombo or is it like multiple colombos let's just keep saying colombo

i know there's 69 episodes they're saying the first season was seven episodes that aired between september and february of 72 in that season of television, right? Right. Yeah, exactly. I just tried to close my Columbo tab, and it said, just one more thing. But do you see this photo? Very funny, five comedy points. That was pretty funny. Do you see this photo where he's covering one of his eyes,

and cigarette smoke running over his shoulder, because he's got a cigar under his armpit? Yeah, he sure does fucking colombo man let's just turn this into a colombo cast yeah uh it's just it's just interesting when i feel like uh a filmmaker takes on a actor who is so much the author of their own movies you know you get this sort of interesting sort of mashup how many how many examples are there of this because of course not a lot of actors direct uh and the ones that do there's only a few that are like auteurs on the level that cassavetes

i'm like literally trying to think like what are other movies do you think like directing clint eastwood would be like kind of like i think that's an example eastwood's a good one yeah warren baity's another one of course that's what she that's the fucking problem she runs into with ishtar is if you're in if you're directing warren baity at a certain point he wants to direct the movie and he only doesn't because he's acting and he's like i'm too busy and then but then he just fucking does it anyway famously i think you guys should do a war and baby miniseries so that i can come and tell you that the rules don't apply they don't they don't and people don't understand this olivia i've been screaming about this listen i'm with you guys

the rules fuck them i'll tell you the other day i went on i went on to apple music and was so frustrated to see that still years later you cannot download the song Rules Don't Apply from Rules Don't Apply. It has never been legally released. I was scouring the internet for it. It's so good. It's such a jam. Great song. Great song.

It's about how rules don't apply. And Emily in Paris is in it. Emily in Paris. With Han Solo. Yes. Emily in Paris and Han Solo, they met. It's a movie about them trying to fuck and Howard Hughes, played by Warren Beatty, being super into that idea. It's one of those incredibly normal casts.

Han Solo, Emily in Paris, Dick Tracy, Alec Baldwin, Dabney Coleman, Matthew Broderick. Absolutely. Ed Harris, Martin Sheen. dabney coleman matthew broderick absolutely ed harris martin sheen it's just one of those movies where you're like i mean we we will do arm baby one day obviously and olivia it sounds like you want rules don't apply but it's one of those movies where you're like did nobody check on this one before they put it out yeah like did no of, he was like, he spent like a million years being like, this is my movie. And then finally they were like, fine.

I remember like, it was a, um, Fox movie just being like, when it was coming out, I'm like getting in touch with Fox and being like, guys, anything you want to do on this movie,

I want to do it. I assume Warren's not involved, but like, you know, not available, but just show it to me as soon as you can. I can't wait to see this thing. I'm so excited. And they were like, Oh, we available. But just show it to me as soon as you can. I can't wait to see this thing. I'm so excited.

And they were like, oh, we're so excited to show it to you. Never got in touch. They never showed it to anyone. They did one screening a night before it came out. They were just like, ugh, goodbye. But he did podcasts. He went on Happy, Sad, Confused and I feel like a couple other shows. And then there was that lawsuit recently where he was suing not fox but maybe uh regency or one of the yeah one of the companies rat pack

right for maybe it was suing fox for mishandling the distribution of the film and they all these emails leaked out that warren baity had written three weeks after the movie came out where he was like i still think with good word of mouth we could turn this movie's box office fortunes around. And it's like, Warren Beatty is still in Bonnie and Clyde mode, where you can have like a disastrous Radio City Music Hall premiere, and then five months later,

it can be a hit in Boise. He's like, yeah, have we opened it in the Southwest yet? Like, come on. Truly. Can I also say, it was originally set up at Paramount it was like a big brad gray thing a big announcement we're so excited to be back in the warren baity business and at that

point the cast was andrew garfield baldwin benning shia labeouf jack nicholson rachel wood rooney mara owen wilson sounds good and then almost all the people who are box office dropped out of the movie right but timberlake was considered felicity jones was considered jones right yeah uh carrie mulligan anyway this is not a rules don't apply episode not yet not yet uh i'd say uh costner is one of those guys uh in the category you're talking about uh from experience i believe he directs at least 50 of of every movie he's in. And even the stories I've heard about shit like Molly's Game and Man of Steel, where he has relatively small parts, he exerts a lot of control.

Right, right. If he's on camera, at least, he's bossing people. If he bossed me around, I'd probably let him do it, honestly. But we've talked a lot about uh you know uh someone like uh sandler who is not a director but is certainly the auteur of his movies and he chooses whether he's handing over himself to other directors and letting them use him as they want or whether uh you know he's doing his sandler thing whereas cassavetes at this point really was just doing the cassavetes at this point really was just doing

the cassavetes thing there wasn't another mode there was paycheck mode there was i hate the thing i'm in when he's in the fury right i just have utter contempt for this project i mean you read like interviews with him and he just hated almost everything he worked on he hates like rosemary's baby which is crazy to me he's like fuck that movie it's not it's not good he's good in it yeah he's really good in it but i think this is like one of the only movies where he's like i really like this movie i really like what i did in this movie and and like that makes sense because so many people are like this feels very cassavetes so you really have the sense that he was like felt like he was doing the thing he likes to do in the

fury he explodes yeah cool yeah it is cool i i think this might be his best performance ever as like a cassavetes obsessive just as an actor i think this is probably his best work and i think she gets interesting results out of him because she is one of the few directors he worked for that he did respect but yet she reigns in some of his more indulgent tendencies right and also just yeah there's less ego i in a way i mean maybe ego is not the right word but here's the question yeah does i guess do you nominate both griffin i'm looking at the spreadsheet right now. I would nominate Cassavetes. I don't know. This is a tough year. I don't have a spreadsheet like you do.

I wouldn't know whether there's room for two in the five or not. I don't have a list in front of me. Who else is in this year? De Niro in Taxi Driver, obviously. Can I say, I think he's good in that. Yeah, right. A well-known performance yeah that's a good movie actually right and then you've got and like i i think

you can't not have sylvester stallone in rocky i think that is a very important performance i and i think he's wonderful in that movie but But beyond that, just like everything that meant. And then you have the Oscar winner, who's Peter Finch in Network. Which is another one of those like, fuck, you know. I'm not even the biggest Network fan. Like I like Network, but not as much as some people like Network. But you know. Network is my absolute favorite movie, I think, of all time. There you go.

Speaking of Ned Beatty. And so I have four and five are fucking cast of eddies but that means i'm leaving out like the boys from all the president's men another movie in which guys are being dudes and ned baity is and and he is he's in all he's in every movie in 1976 he's in all the fucking movies yeah i'm just thinking those are all 76 man i was I was just... I watched... I know we're talking about a lot of other movies, but we're also talking about where these guys were at at this point in time.

They were being dudes. They were being dudes. You've also, just to be clear, you got Keith Carradine. I mean, no, John Carradine. David Carradine. Jesus, I always mix up my Carradine. David Carradine in Bound for Glory.

You've got Clint Eastwood in The Outlaw, Josie Wales got you got a lot of good movies out i mean william holden and network obviously obviously he's great hoffman is great in presence men too so he's good in marathon man uh go on anyway carry on uh no i i just uh i watched uh superman the movie the other night i watched the the three hour cut that is the cut that they charged TV networks more for so they could play it like two, two hour blocks over two nights. And it's just every single scene they shot put into the movie, which means there's a lot more Ned Beatty going like. but I was just sort of like, huh, like where, let me get my Ned Beatty timeline,

right? Like, where was he in his career when he's playing dipshit with a pork pie hat who like gets Lex Luthor's mail. And it's like, right. This is after his dominant decade. His first movie is deliverance. Yeah.

Yeah. He's in a movie until 1970. He's like 40 at that point. He's just a guy who's a respected theater actor, but not even necessarily like a Broadway actor. He's not like a huge deal. And then it's just like, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. Like the 70s, he just gets his one Oscar nomination,

which is a crime that he only got one. He also, I would argue, should have won that year. He's very good in that scene, obviously. It's a great scene. Who won that year he's very good in that scene obviously it's a good scene who wins that year though that's robards but it's robards first of two consecutive wins so in hindsight you're like give it to baity in 76 give it to robards but he is so abominably good in in all the presidents men he's outrageously good in that movie god and they nominated both burgess Meredith and Burt Young correctly. God, what a good time.

I know. This is like, not to be like, you know, like my freshman year of film school and I just read like Easy Rider's Raging Bulls. But like, this is just such an incredible time for a movie. 76 is like the year. I feel like that's always cited as like the best picture lineup ever, right? This best picture lineup is like the year I feel like that's always cited as like the best Best picture lineup ever Right? This best picture lineup is like phenomenal Yeah it's a very good

Rocky, All the Presidents of Man Bound for Glory Network, Taxi Driver And then you also carry You know the movies that they don't Get in the five but you know You have huge movies outside of the five It's a great year It's a great year Face to Face is that year face to face is that year

um seven beauties is that year and and this same year marathon man mikey and nicky essentially uh escapes into theaters through contractual obligations is dumped with a poster where the tag christmas christmas i was just gonna say they make it a christmas movie which is like a horrible insane do you know what the tagline was for this movie? Don't expect to like them, right? Yeah. Yes. Which is like helpful, I guess. But like. was a deliberate strategy because she was so known as a comedian and a heartbreak kid and knew leaf had been hits that they were like oh put on the poster that you're not going to enjoy this and

that will teach people that it's not a comedy which i don't know if that's really effective messaging i'm curious olivia because you said you did a lot of research leading up into this. Is there anything you dug up in terms of sort of the development, the incubation of this movie before we start talking about like plot proper? Well, I think it's like kind of obvious on the screen that she started writing it like as a play. Like it's originally a one act play. she started writing it like as a play like it's originally a one-act play like very it feels very two-hander in a way that like comes alive on the screen like you could see this all taking place in like three places if she had to and i also like i don't know i think i think she is so interesting in her career because like she is the only she's like the third woman they let

into the dga yeah which is crazy like it's insane and i think like it's i think it's incredibly cool that she got to make this movie at all and i know that it became hell on earth for her to like make it the way she wanted to but like the fact that someone gave her originally a million dollars and then eventually five million dollars to make this movie is just it's like the numbers are almost exactly the same as a new leaf which was like supposed to be one and ended up being 4.8 or whatever i mean she it was the same thing with her every time it's also just fascinating of like she's such a big star. She's so acclaimed.

People want her to make a new leaf, right? She doesn't want to direct her star in it. She sort of talked into it. And she has this awful experience making it and like tries to sue to take her name off the movie and stop it from being released. And then she's just like, cool. So also I'm not going to be in my movies anymore. Like she immediately removes from the equation arguably one of her greatest selling points as a director, you know, which is like, well, I'm a big star. I can put myself in it.

Right. And I think also like this is I'm sure you guys have talked about this, but like and it's kind of almost like, I don't know, like well trodden to discuss. But like if she were a man, she would have made more than four movies. Like you can be like this difficult and like be a guy, especially in the 70s. Like I think that like

that was the time where directors were like, fuck it. We're terrible people. I'm going to be the worst man alive. And maybe beat you up. Yeah, I'm going to be the worst man alive, make several masterpieces, and you guys are all going to like wash my feet. Like that's what's going to be the worst man alive. And maybe beat you up. Yeah, I'm going to be the worst man alive, make several masterpieces, and you guys are all going to wash my feet.

That's what's going to happen. It's a thing I've been working hard to make sure I balance in how we tell these stories in this mini series, because it is like, she was incredibly antagonistic. She was certainly someone who turned everything

into an all-out war in the process of making her movies. That having been said, the men who did the same thing in the 70s were completely canonized and bowed to and their feet were washed, as you said. A hundred percent. I mean, even like, I think I like, I like watched some video and the cinematographer was like, I quit. I fully quit in the middle of the shoot. And then I had to come back because they like couldn't light a scene properly. And so I had to like come back. But people were like quitting

and being like confused by her. Like no one got it, which is like when a woman does it, it's like, who's this? Like who's this bitch demanding all these things? But like- I'll also say I work with a lot of female directors, especially in TV as I've mostly done. You know, there are a lot of female directors, especially in TV as I've mostly done.

You know, there are a lot of great like female directors who made one feature and can't get another feature made and now are just great episodic directors who I've gotten to work with. And I've worked on a lot of like independent films where it's like a first time female filmmaker. And there just is absolutely a fundamental difference in how so much of the crew treats them. Right. When a female director comes out with like, I want to do this, I want the shot this way, and people just assume that she doesn't know what she's talking about. You know, there's this attitude of like, that doesn't really make sense. And I've also just seen like first ADs negate what the director said and instruct the camera

crew to set up something different because they're like well she just like doesn't know and i think it's interesting that it's like it happens on like this movie but it also happens on like women's pictures like it happens to nancy myers all the time where it's like she knows what she wants to do and people are like why is she why is she so picky like why is she so whatever i mean, why is she so whatever? Yeah, I mean, once again, like, not that we need to reopen this wound, but David and I were texting each other when the whole Nancy Meyers vulture, like, Hallie Shire thing was- Let's not, oh boy.

You wanna, go ahead, go ahead. This is all I'm gonna say. I'm choosing my words very carefully here, but we were texting while it was going on saying like, hey, isn't it fun to not engage in this discourse whatsoever? You and I both know what we think about this and the entire discourse around it is becoming insufferable.

But the one thing we both said to each other, which I feel comfortable saying on mic now, is just like, this should all be framed as a positive. There should not be this discussion of, is it a backhanded compliment to say that she's picky about details? That's like one of the things that she should wear as a badge of honor that she has that level control over everything in front of her camera when fucking david fincher does that people lose their minds yeah uh as a as a woman

i'll go on the record and say it's not sexist to have like an oeuvre of which you can make a taxonomy that's a cool thing to have it's it's an achievement you have a visual right yes you're well to be able to like look at something and immediately see a beautiful kitchen and a stunning white turtleneck and be like that's a nancy myers movie is like great that's the thing i was just reading every piece of the of the myers thing and going why are are people arguing about this it also it's like were people arguing about it or was holly holly myers shire being a little that's the thing with the internet right everyone is suddenly yelling and you're like i'm not even everyone seems to be just sort of yelling up, but like, I don't know at who and whatever. It doesn't matter.

Yeah. God knows. But it does feel like, you know, in how much Elaine May actively resisted the sort of easier paths she could have had as a filmmaker, right? Making movies for herself as a star. You know, even after all the difficulty on A New Leaf, you imagine that would have been a much easier path for her. If she just said, I make Elaine May comedies. I'm also the star of them. They're romantic comedies.

They're weird. They're acerbic. They're dark. What have you. She takes herself out of the equation on the next one. And then her two final movies are very much boys movies. You know, they're movies about guys being dudes, as you said. And these sad broken

men like i think also and this is kind of like my big thing about this movie is like i think one of the reasons that this feels like less messy than a cassavetes movie because because he's also very good at being like what are men's relationships relationships to each other when they've known each other for a long time? But there's something about when a woman makes a movie about men that is slightly more concise almost. It's like Catherine Bigelow does this in... I was going to say, Hurt Locker. In Hurt Locker. like all of that is like she's so smart about how these two guys like relate to each other in a way that feels very feminine well that's also like as as i was sort of saying at the beginning

uh cassavetes movies are usually about women having mental breakdowns and or men getting incredibly drunk right and and being self-destructive engaging in self-destructive behaviors and i think his his male driven movies and his male relationships in his movies are about male intimacy. But it says something about him that he kind of only knows how to get there if the guys are so drunk that their filter is removed. And what's interesting about this movie is this is two guys who kind of can't say the right thing to each other. They are still closed off. But as an audience observing them, it speaks volumes, right?

Yeah. And you see that there's like 30 years there. Like in the first scene where like Mikey comes and Nikki like starts sobbing into him. Like that is a very intimate scene and they aren't even like wasted. Right. And that's just like a very tender moment. To Elaine May's credit, I don't think Cassavetes was very capable or skilled at doing that.

I don't think he was capable of showing two men not saying much, but saying everything and depicting intimacy. He needs to have guys falling apart, you know, like literally collapsing on each other in the street screaming uh at four o'clock in the morning yes i should watch some more uh it's been a while since i did re-watch husbands recently it was on um criterion and i re-watched gloria for some reason which is just a great time like you know gloria is kind of like the one where you're like oh he like made a half commercial movie and then fuck he's incredible at it like

you know like but it's also that thing that thing i love of just like a filmmaker who is so fundamentally themselves that they kind of can't make a normal movie and it's halfway in between their thing and like i love it oh i love it i love it i love it that's right i like i haven't seen like killing of a chinese book here opening night like or or woman under influence since i their thing and like i love it oh i love it i love it i love it that's right i like i haven't seen like killing of a chinese book here opening night like or or women under an influence since i was in college like a long time oh my god you should re-watch women under the influence it's like yeah so incredible jenna rollins is just like she's incredible also crazy that they were married for so you just see it seems like casavetes would not be the kind of person who can like stay married for decades and yeah there he was crazy that she's she's still

alive she's fucking kicking around she's like 90 years old she rolls she's probably my favorite actor actress of all time i mean she's like top five period for me are you notebook hive griffin i am i was you know i was honestly very resistant to it for a while because I was such a fucking snotty little Cassavetes snob kid that I was like, why is Cassavetes' son making these rom-coms and why is that only the best, uh, rom-droms and why is that the best part that she can get? And then I came around to it. It was fucking good.

That movie's good. I haven't seen it in a while. And she's really great in it. Yeah, she's really great. She's really good in it. I haven't seen it in a while. And she's really great in it. Yeah, she's really great. She's really good in it.

It is kind of unique, the dynamic of putting these two guys who have done so much stuff together, and especially Cassavetes with his stock company of Falk and Gazer and Rowlands and everyone had sort of created this entirely different tempo for screen acting, you know? And not many other people were running with that. So to sort

of like adopt that into the cloth of your film, to take a movie that that is very tightly written, that could have been a stage play that almost was a stage play, and let two guys sort of like control the temperature in between, you know, action and cut is is just an interesting, uh you know action and cut is is just an interesting there aren't very many movies like this no no uh yeah and the only thing right we should you know as we've sort of discussed griffin like it's absolutely true that the industry had no interest in helping elaine may make good movies but it is also it's also true as you're saying like she herself was was not sure she wanted to do it a lot of the time like she she would struggle with like do i want and of course part of it is like do i want to run

the gauntlet again of you know all the bullshit that will await me right but like she you said when you you saw her talking about ishtar like she was kind of like look i could have done what you're saying like i could have done the the wo Woody Allen thing where I do a light comedy every other year, basically. Right. And I didn't want to do that. And she also said, I could have made a lot of movies after Ishtar. Like, it certainly knocked me back on my heels. But I've gotten offers and I could have sold something.

And I just didn't have, I didn't care enough to go through this bullshit again. I mean, that was very much her attitude of just like, it was just so miserable. I didn't care enough to go through this bullshit again. I mean, that was very much her attitude of just like, it was just so miserable. I didn't care enough. Well, did you guys hear that thing maybe a couple years ago where Dakota Johnson was allegedly doing an Elaine May movie? Which would be so good.

I feel like Dakota Johnson is like a perfect person for Elaine May who is like... We live in hope. I want it so bad. Because I think she's funny in that way that's underrated where it's like

Elaine May could really do it up for her. Dakota Johnson is the best. I said this in our Her Very Kid episode, but Ellen, that's not true, is kind of like a perfect Elaineaine macy oh my god ellen that's not what happened also her recently revealing that she was lying about loving limes in her architectural digest like that is so funny she's got that energy that was what i

said that that was like a joker moment that was like wait a second. You're not aware of what you're doing here now? But back to Mikey and Nikki, the only other thing I'll say about Elaine May's chaotic filmmaking nature is that she did shoot a million and a half feet of film. Yes. Which is, I mean, that's crazy. Normal two-hour movies are 11,000 feet. So that's so. Normal two-hour movies are 11,000 feet. So...

That's so much. Yes. This was 1,400,000, which is, I think, three times more than Gone with the Wind. And Gone with the Wind is a day long, right? I mean, the final cut of that movie is one day, I think. It's a long movie.

It's four hours. I mean, conservatively. It's four hours. It's four hours i mean conservatively it is four hours it's four hours long mikey and nicky is 140 and she shot three times more than gone with the wind yeah and now i know that like judd apatow shoots like a million feet of film it's like there are people who take her approach now where it's just like just keep it rolling we're gonna do everything we can think of like but it is just still it must have been astonishing for them for her to be like yeah you know my little two-hander gangster movie where like the fourth lead probably has one scene yeah i shot a million and a half feet of film i'm gonna need a year to cut it like i'll talk to you guys

later like i mean i can only imagine how mind-blowing that all how that all went over but so much of it was i think her knowing how cast of eddies and fuck like to work at this point so in a way that that predated apatow by decades she wanted to have multiple cameras cross shooting at the same time so that if there was a beautiful discovered moment she had multiple angles of it she had editing options she didn't have to recreate it she also would just not call cut she would just let the camera keep rolling even when the scenes were done to see if anything happened and there's the famous story that we have to tell the we have to relate the

famous i love this it's the best story of all all time. It's one of the scenes where they're out in the street and both guys walk off camera and the camera keeps running for three minutes. And the first AD yells out, cut. And she comes out screaming and says, what are you doing? I'm the director. You don't get to call cut. He said, the guys walked out. But what if they come back? But he said, the guys walked out.

She went, but what if they come back? I learned some crazy like preamble to that story, which is that they were like supposed to shoot that scene on a Friday. They spent the whole day rigging lights on lighting poles so that they could like shoot at night on this like long strip of street. And then she arrives on set at night and she's like, no, I want them to walk the other way. The lights are set up this way. And so they're like, just have them walk that way. and she's like no i want them to walk the other way the lights are set up this way and so they're like just have them walk that way and she's like no and so they have to do it shoot it the next day re-set up all the lights and on the night before she had been like there's like a cobblestone part of the street and she's like well that has to get paved she wouldn't let them have like a cobblestone street and then

that same night after they had like gone through hell getting it all set up she was like what if what if they come back just like a crazy 24 hours it's just another thing about her is that she was incredibly particular and a lot of times that she was particular about was creating the circumstances for something she didn't know she wanted. Yeah. I think also she like just liked watching Peter Falk and John Cassavetes work together. She would just like sit there. And even if the camera like ran out of film, she would say, don't don't don't yell cut. Just let them keep going. I want to see where this goes.

I want to see you guys in the scene. And like they would have to be like elaine what are we doing here like the camera's definitely out of film at this point like which i i can't blame her i mean apatow says a lot that like he loves cassavetes movies and would watch them and go can you make a movie like this that just has more jokes in it like can you make a movie like this his whole idea for the king of staten island and as you can tell it totally worked but even back to 40 year old virgin i mean he even says like that was i mean at that point he was more concerned with trying to fit into the expectations of a commercial comedy but he's always said like these movies are just kind of actors behaving you get people who like each other off camera as well, are natural.

You set up a bunch of cameras. You give them a lot of time. And you don't make it very plot or conflict heavy. You just kind of create a central set of circumstances and let scenes flow. And every movie he's made since then has gone further and further, it feels like, in the direction of, can I go full Cassavetes? But in a way, what he's doing is closer to this movie than it is to cassavetes right uh yeah i mean this feels like the midpoint between the two yeah i think like funny people and this is 40 definitely have those vibes of just being like we're just putting

some people in some places and seeing seeing how it happens this is 40 especially where there's no plot and then at the end it's kind of like oh there's oh dad's in the hospital like where it just feels like they suddenly were like oh fuck something should like happen and we should we got to do apatow griffin yeah i haven't seen that movie since theaters and i always think about it i haven't either but i i think about it with a lot of confusion yeah but you know maybe it's incredible or maybe i don't know i mean we both stand funny people and funny people for me is the one where he got the balance totally right in terms of what he's trying to do uh and king of stan island i watch and i'm like this either needs to be a lot more dramatic or have 40 more

jokes olivia what do you think of those movies um i mean i like judd apatow i was also like a teenager when judd apatow was really like cranking him out like i was in middle school i think when knocked up came out and was like sweeping the nation so i think i was like really primed to like love judd apatow movies and i've kind of just like seen all of them i haven't seen king of staten island though because i'm kind of averse to watching people haven't seen a lot of pete davidson at once i mean it really feels like this right it's i i just kept thinking because it's a lot of people just hanging out and talking shit and it doesn't have anything to do with anything and then occasionally his occasionally his Hollywood instincts kick in

and he's like, okay, but anyway, here's what's up with the story. And it feels a little jarring anytime he does that. Yeah, but it also doesn't have the Apatow line-a-rama thing. Like, King's Down Island feels like the first one where he's not pointedly trying to make sure there are jokes in scenes. The thing that also, I i think differentiates this from the

cassavetes movies which is closer to the model the appetite tried to follow is that like the plot does the movie does kind of have a plot it has a motor behind it you know it's not just a set of circumstances it's like here's this guy he's worried he's gonna die tonight right he calls up his friend to help him out and meanwhile he's being hunted you know there's a clock on this movie but that's it yes that's the entire plot and i think like that is kind of the theatrical thing where it's less like he like has a goal which i feel like is a very cinematic thing and like a very theatrical thing is to like have a question is like is he

gonna die and it's like that is gonna be answered by the time the curtain falls like it like i don't know if you guys have ever read or seen night mother do you know that play yeah yeah where it's just like at the beginning of act one the daughter comes out and she's like i'm gonna kill myself and the whole play is her mother being like don't kill yourself and then at the end of the play spoiler she does and it's just like the whole time you're like is she gonna do it and the whole time you're watching this movie you're like is ned baity gonna get him is peter fault gonna like step in and like cut it off because you kind of know where it's going but you want it to like maybe end differently but the movie is also over the course of this like 100 minutes, trying to parse what

their relationship is, getting these little drips and drabs that come out in conversations, where you start to be able to build a map in your mind of who these guys are exactly and who they are to each other, because it just starts so abruptly. Yeah. And I also think this movie makes a really smart choice of having them at like a very interesting point in their friendship where they have like kind of fallen off. But he is still they are still like each other's oldest friends. But Mikey is like, you don't answer my phone calls anymore. Like, you're only calling me because you're in trouble. Like, it's that kind of like low point in their friendship that this movie catches them at i wouldn't be friends with nicky just to be just just he seems like a bad friend yeah nicky's a real shithead i also i kind of love any movie where you don't know if a character is telling the truth at any point or not oh you know i just think like a lesser movie would have you like kind of know what's going on yeah the whole time and the fact that like in that first like time when uh mikey

is like on the phone or like like ned baity is like go to the bar do whatever and then you cut to them in the diner and peter falk is on the phone and you can't tell if he was with ned baity or not because he's like there's no flights from twa so you're like oh he was just talking maybe to the airport but like maybe to ned baity and like by the time you figure it out like i don't know it's really i mean it's just such a smart screenplay. It's just so good. David, you said this is one of the most weirdly disorienting movies ever made, and all of that factors

into it, where you just kind of in every scene can't figure out what you're supposed to know or not, which I also think is kind of replicating the energy of these two guys sitting across from each other, not knowing whether or not they can trust each other. Also, but it's also like they'll go to a new location a restaurant a bus a bar right and you're like okay they're gonna sit here and they're like by the end of the scene they've like physically threatened someone they're like i'm gonna kill you you know they're grabbing people

and like pushing them across the table like and sometimes and sometimes Peter Fox doing it, the, the supposedly, you know, you're, you're sort of like, Oh, well this guy's the moderate one, you know, like every,

every scene. And then occasionally he's the one who's just like when he like jumps over the counter for the cream, just like kind of out of nowhere. Like he conveys after a long exchange, what he wants and gets the guy on board with giving him 15 cups of cream and charging him for 15 coffees the guy's about to do it and fox like all right i gotta go nuclear but it's also like this is the moment uh if you look there's the two women in the background of

the shot who are like at the counter and they are have that thing where they're kind of like uncomfortably laughing right right it's kind of like have you guys ever been to a waffle house i certainly have it's it's it's kind of like when something is happening in a waffle house and you're like this actually isn't my business right right but they're not like threatened and they're not shocked they're kind of just going like, oh, this is weird. Yeah, it's like late at night. You're at a diner. You're like, any freak could walk in right now. And part of me felt like I wonder if these two background actors, this is the only take where he did this.

That they're reacting that way because it almost looks like they're looking off camera. They're like, this isn't in the movie, right? Right, right. They're giving these looks like that. What's the story? I was at a coffee shop it was crazy and colombo came in and got the guy to agree to sell him 15 cups of cream and then beat the shit out of him right he he had agreed to the terms that he would pay for 15 cups of coffee in exchange for just the cream and then he strangled the guy and said he would kill him in six seconds unless he got the cream. Was his plan to carry like 15 cups of cream?

Or do you guys think that there was some like divvying situation? You can't actually depict Peter. I think maybe Peter Falk like figured that out and was like, I actually have to get violent because there's no way I can carry that much cream in a dignified manner. It's just such a bizarre scene. I mean, what, the opening of the movie is like Cassavetes looking at the newspaper, right? And calling Mikey in a panic. And he sees that his bookie partner has been killed.

But it's just such an effective opening because it's like, here's the sad sack guy. He looks like shit. He wakes up. Right. He rolls out of bed. It's the middle of the night. You know, he looks at the newspaper and then you just see it on his's like one of those things where it's just like kind of not relevant to the situation but it's like fun to remember from time to time it's like oh right he also has an ulcer he he looks like he hasn't slept in years he looks like he hasn't slept since like the mid 60s yes but then he calls up mikey and like one of the first things he tells him is that he's at a payphone right like one of the first things he tells him is that he's at a pay phone right like one of the first things he does is lie to his friend on the phone true and then uh of course when mikey shows up he starts throwing shit out his window to signal that that's where he is

i love that yeah what what does mikey say like i got your got your brick? I'm trying to remember how he puts it. Instead of, I got your message. But then, right, when Mikey goes upstairs, Falk, Cassavetes doesn't want to let him in. He's convinced he's got cops with him. Won't open the door more than a sliver. There's just such an insane amount of paranoia from the beginning.

And also just dishonesty between the two of them but like but then peter falk like gives him the the medicine because he's like i've known you for 30 years you call me in the middle of the night i'm gonna bring what is essentially tums i guess right for his ulcer but i think that is the moment where you're like that's like one of those lines where you're like oh yeah these guys have like been around the block these guys have like a deep relationship where he knows that like this guy's ulcer is probably acting up right now or like this guy's got a tummy ache he also feeds him the pills as if he's a toddler yes because he thinks it's poison right open up open up you know i mean he's going like here comes the choo choo train with painkillers yes yes i mean because nikki is essentially like any if i walk on the

street everyone wants to kill me right if you're knocking on the door it's because you have a gun you're gonna murder me if you're giving me food it's because he poisoned it like that's just his approach to every single thing that's happening to him and the the again the great thing about the movie is that he's kind of right like he ends up being right the whole time he's marked for death it's true he's like he shouldn't have maybe let mikey into the room but i mean like it doesn't explain how he like goes after mm at walsh he's like you're in on this there's that great line when he's like trying to kill mm at walsh. And Mikey's just like, Mickey, this guy's enormous. Where it's like, come on, man.

Not everyone is involved in the international conspiracy to make you exit the front of the bus because that's the only place they can shoot you. But that's whatever. That's how it's built up for him at this point. That that's whatever. That's how it's built up for him at this point. That, you know, there's the the Roger Ebert, like the M. Emmett Walsh rule that like no movie with M. Emmett Walsh and it can be entirely bad by virtue of having M. Emmett Walsh in it for even one scene. The movie has at least one redeeming quality. And I always like when I would read that would go like, I mean, I love M.M. Walsh, but that's a weird guy to make that rule for. But then anytime he shows up in a movie, I'm like, no, it does feel right. The best.

He's the best. There is just an immediate jolt anytime he shows up for one scene. 100%. With the last example being Knives Out. Yeah. He's still going. Yeah. And when he was in Knives Out for one scene, I was like, oh, look, it's M.M. at Walsh.

Oh, this is a good scene. I like what he's doing here. Now, is that true for the Scorpion King 4, the quest for power? Look, I was looking through his career to see if there's something that disproves the rule. And that's the only one that has potential, I think, to ruin it.

I haven't seen it. I don't, I haven't either. Gosh, this is like a Schrodinger's mms walsh at the moment we just don't know it could be could go either way might be great um okay wait so what happens next they go to the restaurant next yeah they go to the restaurant yeah they drink milk and beer and soda they have a lot of beverages it's a big beverage night for them there's something about the way that guys in the 70s talk about beer it makes it seem like beer was maybe better or like i yeah i think beer was inarguably worse like i think beer has improved i beer has

definitely improved but like maybe it's because it was worse and it was just more like water that you could just really just like i don't know but there's a there's something holy about the way guys in 70s movies and tv show casually talk about like all i'm looking for is a cold glass of beer right it sounds so refreshing it like, oh, let's go get drinks. You know? No, they want beer. Right. I want a beer. I don't know. There was less to do back then. A beer was probably one of the top five most exciting things you could do that day. Without question.

I think also in those days you weren't expected to function like... You could just be drunk. That is true. Yes. Get away with it. Yes. People would just go to lunch and get blasted yeah and everyone was kind of fat everyone was kind of everyone was just kind of chubbier you know like everyone just kind of ate badly and and like you know well i think more more specifically no one was fit no one was in shape no one on earth was in shape right like when you see sean connery as james bond or whatever you're like this guy looks like me practically i mean

obviously he's a good looking guy but like he's just got a regular ass body it is wild when you read like newspaper stories about him getting cast as bond and they're like rather than casting an actor they cast some bodybuilder, Sean Connery. Because he like has shoulders. He was the most ripped guy on the planet. That same thing kind of extends to like the women of the 70s, where it's like they all look like normal people like every woman in this every woman in this movie like in the face and the body and the dress like it's like the carol grace role would be like margot robbie today and i'd be like what like that's not really computing for me but when it's just like a normal woman i'm like oh yes of course she's so fucking goodness i didn't realize that she was incredible married to walter mathau yeah

she's basically only in one other movie yeah like ever right yeah like yeah yeah and she was married to walter mathau for like 40 years she has four credits total this is her last she was in an episode of alfred hitchcock presents she was in gangster story which is the only movie mathau ever directed and she's in one other movie uncredited. Did she do theater? Because it just seems like crazy that you could just like pop out and do this incredible performance. They had one kid and the only line on Wikipedia, but I do like this line and I wish this line was on my Wikipedia. She had a wide social circle and was known for her wit and good company.

That's literally, that's all you want to be remembered's literally that's all you want to be remembered for you want to be remembered she sounds like a cool motherfucker yeah she she wrote a novella and a memoir uh she did do a lot of broadway she did a lot of yeah okay that makes sense yeah uh that makes sense but she's great in this movie jesus uh ben i just want to ben i feel like you haven't weighed in about Mikey and Nikki. I just feel like this is such a Ben movie. I want to know if it took you by surprise. You were saying pre-Mike that it kind of stressed you out. It did.

I mean, not in a bad way. Yeah. These are characters that comfort me, kind of, in a fucked up way i like that take anger expressed it where it's not like it's just like it reminds me of the people i saw growing up and people who are around me who would just like yell and scream like it was sport right like they're like they're running around the block essentially that's their version of it. It's just yelling and screaming. Yeah.

Yeah. It's also like the best time in New York, too. Like I love seeing New York in these days, the old cars. But it's also, it reminds me of all my really bad friends that I had over the years that I don't talk to anymore. So it's like, it kind of hit me in a personal way too, where it was like, oh, that's, that really reminds me of Joey Beatles. Like I haven't talked to that guy in a while.

I wonder what's going on with him. Is he on parole? Like, is he out of jail? So how's Joey Beatles dealing with the with the pandemic right i don't know i haven't kept up with any of these people i mean it's definitely it's it's a movie about uh the the type of guy that is incredibly at peace with being trash you know like these guys are very chill and comfortable being very uncomfortable and wound up well i don't think they have a choice yeah but i mean they create chaos but sometimes i mean if that's just the environment that you were reared in what you're

used to and how you express yourself you know it's just like that's how things come out it's just yeah it's also so self-destructive and i don't think you know they're in control of it unfortunately right often not in control i mean cassavetes is not a character who's remotely in control of anything in this movie whereas fuck but you know what i would have been in the mob you know if i had a choice would you guys have been in the mob no you know it seemed dangerous you know why wear a suit hang out all night smoke cigarettes you know something fell off a truck like that stuff seems fun i don't think they would have let me into the mob i think i would I would have had to be like someone's girlfriend and I would have

I think I would have been very like Kay from The Godfather which is very like, what's going on here? Like, you're doing what? Yeah, I think I wouldn't want to be in the mob and they would never let me in. I was about to say the same thing as Olivia.

Yeah. David? I'm like I'm what's his pants in The Sopranos. I'm the restaurant owner. I like to be friends with everybody. You know what I mean? Like, I don't want anyone to be mad at me. Fuck, what's his name now? How am I forgetting his name?

Is it Artie? Artie. Artie Bucco. Yes, exactly. What you're saying, David, is ultimately you want to have a wide social circle and be known for your wit and good company. Right. But then if Tony is like, hey, go on this cruise.

Like, I got you some tickets. I would start to freak out. I'd be like, oh, I don't know if I can do that, Tony. I would have to acknowledge the elephant in the room all of a sudden. And it would be awkward. I think I would be that level of friends where you like chat like i'd be that with meadow soprano and know that her dad is tony and be like oh my god meadow what's going on like how are you and like hope that you give me like some gossip yeah obviously david this is something you and i share which is that

we both just want to hear gossip all the time one of the cruelest droughts of covid is the gossip it is so just nothing that I haven't gotten to like hear about the relationship troubles of a tertiary friend in a year exactly my favorite thing is that I'm in a bar I overhear someone else talking right like at the party and I'm like, catch me up on this. What is this? Tell me all about it. How much would you pay to be like at a bar listening to the couple next to you having a fight right now? Oh, my God.

But you know what's another one I miss, which is connected to this, is you go out with like a couple of friends, right? Not a large group or in a larger group, you splinter off into a smaller group. And like you're between two people who know each other very intimately. And so because you're in the physical space, but they want to talk about something personal that happened, they just let you hear everything. You know, when someone's like, I'm sorry, I'm sure this is boring you. You're like, no, no, no, no, no, it's fine. It's fine. And then they start describing the most intimate details of their life. And it's just like they would never tell me this independently but just because we're in the same corner you're like smushed into the corner of the booth and

you're like i can't i'm not getting out right and you're like and they're like fine then i guess you just hear everything then i then i don't have any secrets i miss it too um but yeah mikey and nicky level no i think if nicky called me i would be like i'm sorry nicky i i just i'm i just got in bed i don't think i can come hang out tonight like you know i'm definitely not gonna run to his apartment and get bricks thrown at me and yeah you know and then so this is also a movie that's like oh like because if i if i were mikey and it were 2021 and i had a cell phone and i saw nicky called me at midnight i'd be like i'm asleep i can't you i can't do this but on like the landline you can't you can't screen the call on the landline it's true see i feel like you but you, even though they're your bad friends, you gotta help.

Well, that's the thing with the bad friend though, is yes, that's true. And you want to, and then, but don't you feel like Ben, sometimes with the bad friend, there is some moment where you're like, you know what? I feel like this always turns out the same way and I should probably, you know, I love you, but I don't think I can help. Right. Like you, you, you, sometimes you got to draw some kind of boundary um but yes i know what you mean there's there's sometimes there's the bad friend i mean i should have drawn boundaries i wouldn't have gotten arrested or gotten to a car accident in my life you know like yeah but i feel like that's just sometimes those are the relationships you have and i don't know it's also because you grew up and you're a kid,

you know, like since you know each other since you were a kid, you've known someone forever. I think that's like a huge part of it, which, because they keep like hammering at home in the movie. They're like, you knew my brother who died.

Like you knew my parents, like blah, blah, blah. And like, if my, my like oldest friend is still a good friend of mine. And if she called me at midnight, I'd be like, what's going on?

Like, are you good? Yeah, I think that's a huge turning point in the movie because I certainly like I watch it under the assumption like, oh, these are two guys who know each other from like the trade. They know each other from the same bad business. Right. And then when you realize like, no, they've known each other from the same bad business right and then when you realize like no they've known each other since they were children like they've grieved people together it predates all of that that's when you sort of understand the nature of their relationship but then also why it's like it's it's uh you know it's twice as cutting that Mikey is willing to sell him out, but it also makes twice as much sense because it's like this guy has been something of a burden on him for decades.

I mean, he's just been putting up with this forever. Absolutely. And of course, we should mention that on the side, Ned Beatty has been contracted to kill Nikki and is treating it like an annoying plumbing job. It's so funny that he's like, God, I got to do this thing. He's like, if I bring in a driver, I'm not going to make as much money off of it. It's fully just like, I think that's such a funny quirk in the writing. That's like, no, no, no, no. He's not like some stealth killer. He's just like i think that's such a funny quirk in the writing that's like no no no he's not like some stealth killer he's just like a dude who has a job he has the energy of an uber driver right yeah absolutely and he basically breaks even on the job like he's not

right he's not like you're gonna give me 25 000 and on you know non-sequential bills he's just like ah fuck i guess it's just about worth it for me to commit the act of murder he also like at one point says like when they're in the office of let me say sanford meisner which is hell yeah he's like he's like oh i know i i need i need a hit or something he says something like that which is like is he bad at his job too is he kind of like a funky hit man who's like this is the guy they put on nicky because they like don't care they're like just at some point make sure he's dead oh right because nicky is eminently killable like he is definitely not the cat and mouse you don't need you don't need jason bourne to get nicky you'll just like

like any of us could do it if we were like, okay with taking a life. Like it would be easy. It's that great scene at the end of the movie when Fox in the car with him and he's like doing what you said, David,

like talking about like, I mean, I had to pay my way out here at the hotel where I'm going to, I mean, I was barely going to make money. Now I'm going to lose money on this. Yes. And then Fox says like, this shouldn't have been a hard job.

And he goes like, I know. And that's why this is gonna really ruin my reputation you know nicky almost outfoxed me nicky right right and he only outboxed me i would like to watch he's so chaotic that you can't predict his movements anymore he's like a poker player who doesn't know the rules right like he's like yeah let's just go to a graveyard now sorry i love it what were you saying i know i was just gonna say i would watch the movie that is like ned baity's just like normal job career as a hitman who's just like i gotta sit in this car well he also like he has that that uber driver energy where it's just like you're making me really depressed now you won't stop talking about how much it is fucking up your day that you have picked me up you know it's like that

you're the inconvenience here it's like he had other things to do right like you made him make a second stop uh there was a thing on the blu-ray where they said that he requested that his pants be too short uh on his costume uh to show that he was not glamorous i mean it is this thing i know you were saying like i mean 72 is like godfather in this sort of modern way of mob movies being redefined and everything but i i still think there are so few movies about the crime world where people are this unglamorous this is what what I'm trying to say. When Goodfellas comes out 20 years after The Godfather, it's like, okay, finally a movie about how the mob really is. It's a bunch of assholes who commit murder for no good reason.

This is not this burnished American legend. It's really just kind of like crooks and jerks and ego. And, you know, like it's all bullshit. Like that's what's so good about the goodfellas and it's and yet at the same time you watch goodfellas and you're like i mean it looks like a pretty good time being a mobster right like that's sort of the scorsese magic that's what this movie is like 15 years earlier and like you're saying it's like dealing with the you know the scum on top of the scum that is like the american crime world and it feels like completely revolutionary

but that's your job like you clock in and you get to be a fucking asshole run around mouth off ben i just want to make i just want to say something i don't think you clock into the mafia that's the only thing i want to correct you on i think i think david no you gotta clock in or else the union gets on your ass. David, I mean, how else are they going to track billable hours? You can't be no call, no show to the mob. The mob actually has really good overtime pay. It just seems exciting.

Yeah, it does. Doesn't it seem exciting? Yeah. Yeah. No, but I mean, I remember reading some interview with Bill Hader where he was talking about like developing Barry and how HBO just so badly wanted him to do a show that they were like, whatever you want to do, anything you want to do, you create, direct it, star in it, whatever it is, we just want to be in business with you. And they like sent Alec Berg to him to help him develop it. And he was like, do you have any ideas? And Hader was like, I want to do a show about a hit man.

And Berg was like, that's stupid. Hit manater was like i want to do a show about a hitman and berg was like that's stupid hitman stuff sucks it's always so boring when it was announced i was like oh fuck off he's doing a hitman right fuck that i'm not sunglasses and like skinny ties and shit right and hater's whole approach was just like but like in real life hitman can't actually be glamorous right like it's probably just like they're just completely broken you know unsexy uh people who are just doing kind of like grunt work uh and it feels like there's very few things that treat crime that way this being another one of them you know where it's just like uh these guys it's just like it's fucking worn them down you know randomly gross Blank is kind of like that. Absolutely.

Where John Cusack is just kind of like, yeah, he's just a guy and his job happens to be that he's an assassin. And it's like he has to go back home. I think Gross Point Blank has like the internal life of it down. But Cusack is still just a little bit too innately cool. Too hot. I don't say that as a strike against the movie. I think the movie rules.

But it's like Cusack makes it feel like a movie. Because he's just too fucking hot. Well, he's just like a movie star. It's impossible to not be like, that's a hot person. Right. Peter Falk is like a hairy laundry bag with a glass eye. You know? He sure is. And I love i love him i do i want to

shout out sanford meisner uh who olivia briefly shouted out who plays the mob boss who is pretty fantastic uh in that one scene who is in i believe like three movies total obviously one of the most famous acting teachers alive right what did he do oh the other movies no what what is you're saying famous teacher acting teacher he did there's literally it's called the meisner technique and it's like one of like the formative schools of acting yeah yeah griffin have griffin have you ever done meisner exercises yeah are you a meisner i'm not a miser person i've done the exercises i assume you have as well olivia yeah i had to do them in high school because my teacher was a student of udahagen so they got like passed down but it doesn't i don't think it works on teenagers i don't think they have like the capacity to like understand the repetition or like what it's

supposed to no no i i did them when i was young and I found them kind of tedious. Right? It's just kind of like repeating yourself. You just have to keep doing the scene over and over again? Is that what it is? No, it's not even that. So it's like, Ben, just like say anything to me right now. I think it would be cool to work for the mob. I think it would be cool to work for the mob. I think it would be cool to work for the mob. I think it would be cool to work for the mob. I think it would be cool to work for the mob. You do that for two hours straight.

You do it for so long until it just like doesn't even sound like words in your brain anymore. And you're like, and that's when the acting really begins. That's when the truth comes out. When the words stop meaning anything. I have a Samford Meisner story. Can I tell it briefly? It has nothing to do with anything really but i do have one so when my grandmother what turned 80 years old in the year

2002 my grandmother is a was a an english professor who lived in utica new york uh she decides she wanted to go to the caribbean for her 80th birthday and we were simply just going to have to go to the caribbean with her on like christmas of 2002 so we were like okay she rented a big house that the whole family was gonna stay in we arrive there and there's this fucking crazy old man who runs the house who lives there he looks like dr livingston from the jungle he's got like a big long white beard and a cane and he's got like a white hat you know what i mean he's like just sort of like a weird guy uh who lives in the caribbean and his name is james carville but he's not that james carville and he's like where are you from and she's like i'm from

utica new york he's like oh me too which is absurd on the face of it already no one is from utica new york but that so then people are doing that and we're like so who are what's your deal why do you this random white guy live in beckway in the grenadines like in this house and he's like well i i'm the i was the longtime companion of sanford meisner who used to live here with me until he died and now i just you know maintain the home uh because he died like 10 years ago and I just live here. He's still alive. I just Googled him. The house was full of pictures of Sandy Meisner and I stayed in his house for a week one time.

That's it. Wow. That's a good story. Tell the story again, David. Okay. Yeah, I'm going to repeat it back to you actually. I just Googled him. He's 90 years old.

He's still fucking kicking james carville lives in beckway his his big thing too i mean i feel like cassavetes in particular was really trying to evolve a lot of the meisner stuff but it was like he'd give you a line of dialogue was another exercise and he'd give one line to each actor on stage and you didn't say it until something compelled you to say the line. Like he was all about like trying to shake acting out of feeling like people saying cues, you know. And wouldn't it be like someone would touch you and that's when you say the line, right?

Well, it would be like that might happen. If that happens and that inspires you to say the line, then you do it, you know. But it was also like, I'll sit here for 45 minutes in silence rather than let you say the line because you think it's this all sounds so exhausting it's a thing it's like it's like that very cassavetes thing of being like it has to be truthful it can't be like showy or you can't be like capital a acting it has to come from like trying to get you out of your head right like trying yeah exactly

it's that thing like that fincher thing of being like if you do 50 takes you're gonna break and eventually you'll just become like a person that that was the whole thing was just like trying to like get people to unlearn the artifice of all acting styles up until that point you know um but a lot of it you know i i don't know i feel especially in today's day and age where we're decades past naturalism being the most uh you know in vogue thing and acting and i feel a lot of times people it's more about this saying you've done it right it's like i got my degree but right you don't actually you know use it every day yeah yeah yeah i mean i fuck i don't know any of this it's all sounds so complicated to me i'm like lawrence olivier i'm like have you tried acting that's what i would be like i'm just like

say the words really loud that'll probably do something well that's like like when i went to i went to nyu and there's like i knew so many actors and there's like a billion, like if you go to NYU to be an actor, they put you, you're all in a different studio. And so they're all learning a different way to act. And I was just like, how are there so many different ways to do this? I just always have felt it's not super practical to go pot committed for one school of acting. I don't think it often serves you very well to be like, this is always how I act. This is always my process because the circumstances of the project you're working on might not be conducive to that process. I've always sort of tried to just like pick and choose shit for whatever works.

But then sometimes when I look at work that I think is sloppy of mine, I'm like, oh, that's because I don't have like a fundamental like classical thing to fall back on but i also think some people like will uh like look at like a daniel day lewis or like a christian bale yeah like these guys do go like method every time and so like that's what works and it's like that you can't make that like broad statement of like this one thing will work for everyone or like committing to one style will like work for everyone that also gets you fucking like suicide squad joker and also it's just like jared leto is like the offender right most most material cannot uh uh sustain that level of commitment to a performance right Like most characters are not deeply written enough for you to be able to pack that much fucking methody shit into the performance. And also, uh, it's just like, you know, most things these days, they don't give you any fucking time to rehearse.

You know, you have to shoot like 20 pages in a day. It's just, they're changing everything on the fly. They're rewriting stuff constantly, constantly especially in tv it's just very hard to have that sort of uh preciousness about your work they're not shooting a million feet of film as they did in the movie mikey and nicky right million and a half right everything feels a little more on rails than it was in the 70s yeah they gotta they gotta save their money or whatever i don't know what they gotta do but guys Mikey and Nikki is a very difficult movie to pin down I'm trying to think like what we need to talk about

they go to the graveyard they go to the bar they fight in the street they go visit Carol Grace Nikki goes to see his wife which is a really good scene I was gonna to say, we should,

those are the two things we should really talk about. I mean, the two scenes with the women. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and the grave scene.

And, and when, when Mikey goes to his wife at the end, I think that scene, like, I think all the women are really like,

yes, really great in this movie. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Joyce Van Patten plays Cassavetes wife yes and then Rose

Auric is Annie also William Hickey is like the mild bright hand man who just has one of the best voices ever yeah the voice of Dr. Finkelstein voice of Dr. Finkelstein yeah Uncle Lewis and Christmas Vacation just the voice of dr finkelstein voice of dr finkelstein yeah uncle lewis and christmas vacation

um uh just uh rules do you know that she wanted the president of paramount to play i i think the meisner role yeah possibly the meisner role but a gangster pretty funny right and then the chairman of gulf and western wouldn't let it happen you can't do that how dare you that's an immoral role for our president to be playing like as if anyone would fucking know who that was it's not like audience is gonna be like jesus the president of paramount right it was just uh elaine may saying fuck you no one else was gonna get it yeah exactly just yeah he's a gangster it's a joke the nelly scenes are just so uh brutal uh i mean because it's like cassavetes keeps on pitch i just keep on calling them by their actor names

but it's also because uh it's easy to get mikey and nicky confused as names but um uh he keeps on throwing out all these different ideas of what he wants to do i mean this movie it's it's uh i was realizing it's like kind of similar to to 25th in a way, where it's like to some degree this guy knowing, I'm probably not going to make it to tomorrow. What are the things I want to do on my last night? Right. He's kind of acting like you need to help me get out free. But really, I think he knows there's no real shot of that happening. Another thing, just I love the way people in the 70s talk about going to the movies.

I think it just, it's much like the beer thing, but I think it speaks to how different movie going culture was in the 70s, where they just never talk about a particular movie. It's just the idea of like, I love the movies. Let's go see a movie. What time is it? 11.45 on a Tuesday? Did you see the poster on the box office? An adult was 150. You could just go. Right. It's just like, oh you see the poster on the box office? An adult was $1.50.

You could just go. Right. It's just like, oh, let's just go. Why not? We get a beer and then go see a movie and they both cost a dollar. He's even like, there's 15 minutes of coming attractions. A cartoon, a newsreel. Yeah, you get it all.

He sounds unbelievable. But he's like, they got a 24-hour candy stand. I love how much this guy loves candy i yeah i would love to just like a 24-hour movie theater sounds incredible it's just like it's 3 a.m might as well go see a picture right now a movie theater sounds don't get me started like don't get me the idea of it's sort of like look all right like once it hits midnight we only run two screens in this here multiplex but like they're going if you want to just pop in yeah what's also the way that like even like people like scorsese will talk about movie going when they were growing up where

it's just like you just show up you just show up at whatever time you feel like it and you come in and maybe you're like 30 minutes before the end of one movie but then you'll get to see like a cartoon and like a one reeler and then they'll play another movie and then maybe you're like 30 minutes before the end of one movie. But then you'll get to see like a cartoon and like a one-reeler. And then they'll play another movie. And then maybe you wait long enough that you see the first movie you came into late start up again. So then you catch up with it. Right. It was just kind of like, what's playing?

I used to work at a movie theater. And every so often you'd get a person who'd come in and say, what's playing soonest? What's playing next? And just buy a ticket for literally whatever. A hero. And I was always like, who are you? Like, what's your deal? I like this energy.

I agree with David. Heroic. The music, that song, you know, the real human, that starts playing. I know it's about Sully, but when you saw that man, it was about him. Yes. He's a real hero. Joe Biden comese biden comes out gives him a a kennedy center honor he pins something to his

chest he goes like you're what makes america work my friend you're great at seeing movies come on man come on dude come on guy you know who's low-key kind of funny? Biden. Joe Biden. I'll say this. I mean, just now I had more fun saying two sentences in a bad Joe Biden impression than I've had four years of doing fucking bad Trump impressions. We were all so stressed out. We were like, Joe Biden has to save the democracy.

And I feel like we're just about to get to the point where it's like, you remember who's kind of like a funny old guy is Joe Biden. I saw like a tweet today that was like joe biden's team is looking into something and i had a moment where i was like oh yeah he's the president he's the president he's president of the united states when he says goes he's got the energy of a guy who's trying to break up a fight at a margaritaville you know come on come on come on guys i mean i think i can't remember if it was alex perrine or jamal booey or someone tweeted like remember when corn pop was real like that like he told that story and everyone was like well he's just having an episode and then they

like called people in delaware in the 60s and like yeah we knew corn pop he's this guy he walked around with a razor blade you had to look out for him yeah he was a bad customer do you think joe biden's in this movie do you think joe biden has ever that's the sequel is is joey and corn pop yeah that's elaine may's follow-up i think almost definitely yeah i just i think i don't know the last time Joe Biden saw a movie this challenging but I think in the 70s he saw all of this shit also he was kind of hot when he was a younger man he was sort of normie hot

he was very hot did Joe Biden see Mikey and Nikki? it's a huge question I don't think so because his movie was kind of a flop he was already a u.s senator when this film came out i just want to point out yeah this movie was a flop it was under seen uh it was not seen i think is the best way to put it they put it out in december it's what people say the movie wasn't released it was it escaped i mean it was like a

contractual obligation that they had to put it in a theater. But it had been years at this point. There was a whole calamity where a lot of the footage didn't sync up with the sound. Yes. She wouldn't stop filming. They tried to take the cut away from her. She hid reels in someone else's garage. She and Peter Falk.

Yes. Peter Falk was also like stealing reels with her because at this point he had like put money into the movie. Yeah. It was like it has to be hers. I think right. I think the version we all know is the version that she screened later in the 80s. It's the third during some tribute. There are three versions. There's the one that came out that she didn't really like. She did a cut in 1986 that then got screened and released on home video and everything became the known version and then the criterion version now is even a little bit different i could not get a comprehensive explanation of what the differences are but this is like the 2019 final

cut as it were this is also really interesting to me because it's interesting to think of the web that like she and kenneth lonergan have like spun together because it's like, because it's like, he had all that shit with Margaret. Jeannie Berlin is in Margaret. Like they both have like troubled release schedules. And then she's in the Waverly gallery two years ago, like wins a Tony. Lonergan's my favorite and watching all these movies and reading about Elaine May, I just keep thinking like, oh, see, her career was essentially just four Margarets in a row.

Yeah, exactly. Every time she made it a movie, it got caught up in a lawsuit. You guys should do a Margaret bonus up. That should be Elaine's bonus up. I want to do Lonergan. Does he have a movie? Am I crazy that he's working on a movie right now? Did I make that up?

I've been waiting for something. I hope so. Because, you know, he did that miniseries. He did Howard's End. I feel like that consumed him for a bit. Obviously, he does theater. I guess, no. I guess I'm just sort of waiting on four movies is enough.

That's the thing. I think four is just like the minimum for us. Richard Kelly and Kenneth Lonergan make a fourth movie challenge. Right. Absolutely make a fourth movie challenge. Wait. Absolutely make a fourth movie challenge. Wait, Griff, I want to bring you back to the women. I want to bring the Carol Gray scene especially. Yes.

So she has two scenes. Yeah. He's talking her up, right? He's sort of running through all the different things he's thinking about doing with Peter Falk. He wants to go visit his mother's grave. They have the scene on the bus where he gets in the fight. I mean, all that shit's so good.

But yes, then they show up to her house and it's this scene that has a huge griffin energy of uh cassavetes introduces peter falk to the woman he's been sleeping with and then proceeds to just uh sleep with her in front of peter falk and say over and over again pretend that no one else is here uh which was a lot of high school for me you should clarify which guy you are peter you're the foxster in that in that i'm the foxster yeah yeah i'm one guy's fucking and one guy's fucking and i was definitely fucking um i think like her like her role in this movie is like so like wrapped up in like kind of what like being a woman is where it's like oh he like casavetes is like oh you can fuck her too and then like but then he gets mad at her for like sleeping with other people so it's like

what are you gonna get mad at her about for like not sleeping with people or for sleeping with other people so it's like what are you gonna get mad at her about for like not sleeping with people or for sleeping with people right like and and falk is so cruel to her you know yeah yeah they get violent with her but also this i mean like cassavetes is like pushing him to be cruel like telling him that she likes it yes that's a great point olivia it does get into this sort of like sort of emotionally incurious underdeveloped abusive man who blames the woman for why do you make me so upset yeah you know it's like it's not her buddy like and also what's happening to Falk is the longer he's next to Cassavetes, the worse he's getting too. Like he is kind of infected by him the more time they're spending together. And he knows it, I think. Yes, which is probably why he's, you know, created some distance from this guy.

I mean, they both have young children, but Cassavetes doesn't even see his kid who's much younger. And Falk actually like knows who his son is, you know? But yes, it's this horrible scene where like as Cassavetes and Nellie are sleeping together, you just stay on a closeup of Peter Falk just squirming there uncomfortably. It's the closeup, but it's also the wide shot where it's like they are on the left and you can see him in the kitchen just like kind of sitting there.

Yes. Like uncomfortably. But once like the actual like, you know, super physical shit is happening, then it's just on his face. You're just hearing them and you're hearing them deny that he's in the room. just hearing them and you're hearing them deny that he's in the room and then once they're done they go back to that shot you're talking about where cassavetes meets him in the kitchen and is trying to tell him that like no you should have sex with her too she sleeps with everybody just go over there do this do that and you're watching her in the foreground listen to them speak as if she can't hear them and it's so brutal you just like this pit in your stomach

is growing just in dread about what's going to happen when Falk walks up to her and then it's like as bad as you imagine yeah there's nothing gets like you're not nothing is like subverted or anything it's like you see it the way it's going to go and it just feels awful the whole time. Right. And then when they leave there, you know, I mean, he slaps her. She screams. They leave. And then Fox starts acting like, was this some prank on me?

Were you setting me up to look like a fool? Right. To get rejected from her. I think it's this really interesting thing where it's like the woman is there not even like as a person, but as a thing for them to like, like it's a it's like a lens through which their relationship is working. It's like she's not a person. She's like an object. And like Nikki is cool for sleeping with her. And then Mikey can't sleep with her so it's like affects their relationship and it has nothing to do with how she feels about like any of it she's like not even a person in the situation right and then when when he goes back to her and

she tries to be emotionally open with him his explanation is so twisted about like well i heard you had slept with them and that made me angry. So then I wanted you to sleep with other people. Yeah, after he kicks the door in. Right. Like just like so violent from the jump of that scene. But you have that scene too, where he starts like, you know, like chatting up the woman

and then her boyfriend comes in, tries to start a fight with him. Like he is just a guy who feels like he creates chaos to keep himself entertained you know and to some degree it's like he just wants everyone to be spinning he wants everyone to be spinning around him he wants himself to be the one sort of like centered force that everyone is is is revolving around absolutely yeah and then yeah he goes to see his own wife uh played by is that that's choice van patten that's choice van patten yeah uh the sister of tim van patten we know him well director of many a soprano uh formerly married to dennis dugan appears in the grown-ups movies as rob schneider's wife well okay he goes

to he goes to his wife and he's like listen they're gonna kill me he's like this is this is what's happening and then he like goes to see his kid and he just wants the kid to like put her hand around his finger and she a baby who was sleeping obviously like like, does not want to do that. And that is kind of sad that he, like, wants this one moment with his child before he gets shot. Because he knows it's over. And he can't do it. And then they have that whole exchange where they, like, have their kiss. And it's like, it's like, I don't like this, but I, like, get it. I get why you would do this. then she like asks i think she like

asks him to leave almost she's like you gotta go now or he's yeah yeah every scene in this movie is so brutal i'm having a hard time as you said like david you're saying it's hard to describe the plot of the movie but it's also like i just it's hard to like relive it it's hard to like explain the things that happen in the scene it hurts it really bums me out this movie i will say every time i've seen it i think i've seen it three times i really am in kind of a a crummy crummy mood yeah for the next hour and a half you know i just sort of feel because the just him dying and him screaming and yelling and banging on the door is just so like it's humiliating it's like you know that that we're cutting back to falk and his wife and they're like you know they're sort of living through it and she's saying oh no like it's just

so oh god it really like gives me the heebie-jeebies, which is, in my opinion, very successful of it. The naturalism is off-putting. Yeah. Yes. I mean, it's, look, it's a movie I respect greatly and it is easily my least favorite of her four movies, probably because it's the only one

that isn't funny. The other ones at least have comedy to cut the discomfort, you know? And this one just is like a torrid watch. I get it being your favorite. I mean, this is, once again, I'm in a minority on this one. I think it might be my favorite. It's also like, there are a couple funny moments,

but like, it's like a real... Yeah, there's funny moments. Like, I think one of the things this movie does really well is like sometimes they'll be fighting with each other and then one of them will like say something that's like, come on, blah, blah, blah. And it's like a funny moment and that again is just like that is what it's like when you're like fighting with a friend you've known for a while and you're like but we can still like make a joke right like i mean yeah i mean this guy's enormous is my personal favorite laugh

line but there's a lot of little bits like that i think i think nick you're making me forget the kaddish is really funny for some reason that's it's so funny but it's also like you are kind of just like oh my god nicky shut up yeah but it's also like they're in like a catholic graveyard and he's saying the kaddish it's like it's so peterfock is such a sweetie in that scene it's crazy but cassavetes is so pathetic in this. Like, it's not that he usually plays high status characters. Although, I mean, I think as a four higher actor, he was so intense. He often did.

Right. But in his own movies, he plays broken men. But he's not as sad as he is in this. You know? Yeah. He's cooler usually. Yes. He's usually a lot cooler than he is at this, you know? Yeah. He's cooler usually, honestly. He's usually a lot cooler than he is here.

And this guy is just so transparently miserable. Yeah. And destructive, you know, to everyone who comes into his orbit. Absolutely. Cassavetes. Are we going to do him one day,

Griff? He was in the bracket. I assume he got bodied that would be kind of a bummer of a miniseries you guys i mean this is this is why i i'm guessing that no one voted for him i mean it's a very it's it's a miniseries we could wrap our arms around it's not he doesn't make that many movies it's like 12 total or something you know like it's it's certainly doable yeah um he's facing off against robert altman oh he's gonna lose i don't know if he's gonna survive it will have happened at this point i it's i know i know but we're predicting the future but i think you're

right griffin i don't think he gets out of that first round matchup and also i think in real life altman would have crushed him altman was like a brick shithouse and cassavetes you know as much as we're saying he looks tall like he wasn't a big guy no i think he's like five six or something like yeah he and i could have probably like looked eye to eye do you know that my dad went drinking with both of them once huh well your dad went drinking with altman a lot my dad my dad was all my drinking buddy for like five years yeah the worst five years of altman's career my dad was the guy who had to like carry him out of bars but so cassavetes just showed up at some point or like they just had a wild night

together i mean i for reasons i i don't want to uh delve into and i haven't followed up with him he's never really disclosed a lot of details of what happened that night uh i think that's probably for my own safety did they buy 15 cups of cream mikey and nikki is there anything else you want to say before we play the box office game are we playing the box office game i mean have we done 76 before the movie very abruptly ends with him yeah Yeah, that last scene is kind of brutal. Getting moided. He tracks Mikey back to his home after Mikey and Nikki have split up. And Mikey has spent a good chunk of time with Emmett Walsh, meeting Sanford Meisner, sort of defending himself for how much Emmett Walsh has fucked it up and not him.

And it goes back to his wife. Nikki tracks him down, bangs on the door. They just grab each other and sort of like stand there in silence trying to wait him out and then just fucking out of nowhere. I mean, it's also just the fact that she doesn't cut to some reverse angle of a car pulling up, right? You're just looking at Cassavetes on one side of a door knocking and then all of a sudden a bunch of squibs go off. Yeah, and it's that very, like, I keep beating this drum, but it is that very theatrical thing of, like,

it's heightening, it's heightening, it's heightening, and then he gets shot and it's just, like, cut to black. Like, that's it. It's over. Like, done. Roll the credits. Roll the credits. He's done. What's his final line doesn't he just say like you should go in the bedroom yeah he's like you should go to sleep or something yeah right right and she is giving a really good performance there where she like keeps trying to explain to him why she can't let him in and she's like running out of things to be like uh i'm sick uh yeah like he's not home uh like and then they have to barricade the door

like they have to bear because he's kicking it down but he also is his heart is also kind of not in it in a weird way as much as he is so exposed in that like he just keeps asking her to open the door like you know he should just barrel through the door or whatever or like run or something it's like he's like very committed to like staying in front of the door or whatever or like run or something it's like he like very committed to like staying in front of the door it's like he wants to die with his friend you know and kind of hold it over him like in this kind of sad way i think it also is like if his friend isn't willing to let him in then he's done fighting you know what i'm saying it's like if his friend won't let him in anymore, then he's already lost the battle.

How's he going to survive? Right. Exactly. Because I think they, at one point, they're like, this is his only friend. This is like his last friend. And so it's like, if he loses, he's already lost his family. If he loses Mikey, it's like, what's the point? Oh, boy.

I mean, I think we've done this year, Griffin. I can't remember. Maybe Caged Heat. Well, exactly. Right mean, I think we've done this year, Griffin. I can't remember. Maybe Caged Heat. Well, exactly. Right. All those Demi movies. I mean, what was the number one movie in 1976? Case Sheet 74.

The number one movie of 1976. It's the year before Star Wars. True. Jaws is 75, correct? Yeah. Is it not Rocky? It's Rocky. It's not Jaws.

Jaws is 76. 75. 75, like you said. Yeah, no, it's Rocky. Rocky is the number one movie. Okay. It is. It's number one.

It was a big hit. Yeah. People liked it. Doesn't Rocky win a screenplay Oscar? Only nominated. Okay. I always switch it up in my head as to like what happens because Rocky wins best picture. It wins picture, director, score, right?

Editing. Editing, not score. It doesn't win score? Not even nominated for score. So maybe there was something up. That's bizarre. That doesn't make any sense that it wasn't nominated because the score is incredible. Best score goes to The Omen, which to be fair is an iconic score um but yeah I don't know why maybe

maybe they made some ruling on that and it doesn't win song either uh it loses to well the number two movie of 1976 a big movie with a big musical star Is it like The Way We Were? Close Is it a Barbara? Bright Star Streisand? It's a Barb Is it Yentl?

No, it's a bad movie It's a bad movie and it's not Is it a musical or is it a movie with a big song? It's a musical You know, not like Is it the Barbara A Star Is star is born it's a star is born that was the number two movie that's crazy barbara because that movie is not very good no it stinks it was like slammed at the time people didn't even like it yeah it was one of

those things where like even though it was a big hit, by any means, it was expected to be an even bigger hit. Movies could just be hits in the 70s. They sure could, Olivia. Number three is another famous remake bomb that still made a ton of money. It's a famous remake bomb that still made a lot of money. It's a 76 remake. What decade made a lot of money. It's a 76 remake. What decade is the original from?

30s. It's a 30s movie, remade in the 70s. And it's been remade again, my friend. And let me tell you, this fella that this movie's about, he's going to be in screens this year. He's going to be in screens this year? Is it a real person or it's a character who's been rebooted several times it's a character that's been rebooted several times and he's not human

what he's not humid uh bumblebee yeah bumblebee from the from the 30s i think george kukar's bumblebee is the best one personally yeah i agree that the one where he's a movie star not a singer yeah yeah um no come on griff uh in fact this is probably the movie that mikey and nikki was going up against because it came out christmas of 1976 come on not human in in like an animal way or in like a robot way you're sure he he says he's sure an animal he's sure an animal. He's sure an animal? He's sure an animal. Oh, it's my good friend. Yeah, what's his name? My good friend King Kong.

Oh, my God. Kingy and Kongy. I'll say this, one of my favorite actors. You like that guy? I think he's such a compelling screen presence. What does Kyle Chandler say in that trailer? He says something crazy. He's like, King Kong's out there and he's such a compelling screen presence. What does Kyle Chandler say in that trailer? He says something crazy. He's like, King Kong's out there, and he's hurting people.

Yes. No, wait. I think Rebecca Hall says King Kong bows to no one. Yes, that's true. Or is it, yes, Kong bows to no one. Kyle Chandler says Godzilla's hurting people, and we don't know why. It's funny. Did we have to know why before like was that an issue king kong bows to no one was one of the

prompts that sandy meisner would often use in his classes king kong bows to no one i love that rebecca hall this year is releasing her like directorial debut from like a really touching nella larson novella and also is in king kong my favorite thing about godzilla versus kong is it's got like all these movies it's got a bunch of actors in it and it's like rebecca hall and i'm like is she in the other ones and if you told me yes i'd be like i guess she was i just don't remember like kyle chandler's definitely in one of them right like the franchise is so bizarre in terms of which human characters they carry over and which ones they don't it also is i think someone on the blank check reddit was saying this when the trailer dropped but just like

for the three of them that have come out at this point i guess by the time this episode comes out people will have seen godzilla versus kong and we'll know who wins. But the three that we have seen at this point all under deliver on the human element. Like all three of those movies fail in a major way on the human front. And each one has just a wildly overqualified, overstuffed cast. Like each of those movies has 15 names above the title where you're like, wow, all of these people and one of them kind of makes an impression in each movie should we all guess who wins should we all guess if it's gonna be godzilla or kong i if it's not godzilla i don't know what's going on because like i think they set it up in the trailer i mean he's the underdog right yeah

because like godzilla is a walking nuclear weapon. King Kong is a tall ape. And King Kong has compassion for humans. It's a love hate relationship, but he has moments of vulnerability. I think I want to put on the record. I think they team up to go against Mechagodzilla. And I think Godzilla sacrifices himself. So I think King Kong is the final victor of the film. But who he is beating is Mechagodzilla rather than Godzilla, if that makes sense. Because the tagline says, one will fall, which is a little different from one will definitively win. Right. You know what I mean? Like, it's just because one of them is going to die. I think they both go against a common enemy and one of them will die and one of them will defeat the enemy and King Kong will be victorious. After all, it is in his name. He is the king.

Kong bows to no one. I do just want to say that the Edwards Godzilla, which I really love, I think makes the humans being little ants a strength. That's why I like that movie. Whereas the fucking King of the Monsters monsters we're spending so much time with humans on their like flying boat and they're like you know following godzilla on a map and i'm like i hate these people i don't want to i don't want to talk to these these guys are idiots i don't know there's something there's something in between the two that is my perfect american godzilla movie and no one's hit it yet i love the edwards godzilla i think that thing's freaking

incredible love it except for the human stuff which I find so annoying and a lot of that just comes down to my Aaron Taylor Johnson problems I think I like him now Oh because of Tenet? Yeah just because of what he's up to these days He executed a temporal pincer movement on your opinions Temporal pincer movement I don't think so

It's a temporal pincer movement mate He's good in that movie Objectively good He's the best he's ever been in that movie I'm glad we're all kind of Tenet stans here Ben how do you feel about Tenet? I liked it a lot It confused me I still don't get it

You don't have to I think once you relinquish the idea of Getting it It becomes much more fun. Agreed. It's about vibes. That movie is entirely about like, isn't it fun to tell a story?

Great vibes. Yup. Aren't movies cool? Yeah. I look forward to like being back to normal life and smoking weed with somebody and being really high and being like trying to figure it out, man.

Trying to piece it out man trying to piece it together i think if i got super stoned and watched tenant with like a group of people we'd all really understand it you know what's a thing to really look forward to like like repertory screenings of the movies we had to watch at home like Like, I just am excited to see, like, Tenet at Nighthawk at midnight two years from now. I can't wait to see the Kaufman movie or, like, yeah. There's so many examples of that. Like, movies that I...

I mean, our Blanky Awards episode will have come out by this point, but I just watched the Kaufman movie and the entire time thought to myself, this would probably be my favorite movie of the year if I had seen it in a theater and at home i just can't handle it you should watch it again you know like i still i still like it a lot i don't say there's a negative but it's just like that that's that's a lot of movie

it's tough to take and at home when your phone is there and you can escape from the discomfort of it it is hard yeah having the phone really just like, it's hard to not just like second screen. Or just be like, I should clean that up. I should pick that thing up off the floor. Right. Like there's no third place.

It's just like, I'm going to put my phone away and like sit in the dark room. Yeah. I hate it. What's the number four movie of 1976? This is why I feel like we've done this before. It's a comedy with a famous duo. I don feel like we've done this before. It's a comedy with a famous duo.

I don't think we've done this before. Okay, fine. But this, because you talk about this movie a lot. So maybe we've just talked about it before. You talk about it. Is it Silver Streak? Yes. Yeah, I just talk about it a lot.

You just talk about it a lot. Wait, you know who's also in that movie? Ned Beatty. Ned Beatty. He sure is. Huge 76 for him. And King Kong is also like Rodan's big fucking heartbreak kid

follow-up in so many ways. Isn't Silver Streak the one where you're like, there's not actually a ton of Pryor in that, and it's like... Yeah, he has like three scenes. Right, but they just sort of are discovering the chemistry there,

and then it's the Wilder Pryor movies are really about the two of them absolutely right right it's i just think that movie's reputation is very bizarre because it is just kind of like a gentle hitchcock riff starring gene wilder and jill clayburgh where they hired richard prior to be like the colorful funny character for two scenes, and then they had such good chemistry, I think they shoehorned it back in for like a third scene. But he is barely a part of that movie.

I think he doesn't enter until like an hour and 15 minutes in. Right. Number five, Griffin. It's guys being dudes, but in a much more dramatic and serious true story kind of way. I love this movie. Guys being dudes in a much more dramatic and serious true story kind of way i love this movie guys being dudes and a much more dramatic and serious it uh it's not another best picture

nominee is that all the president's men it's all the president's men yeah that's that that is guys being dudes man the number five movie of its year outgrossing here's you know what's next the omen wow uh the bad news bears um the enforcer which i think is the second no it's the third dirty harry uh a movie called in search of noah's ark which is one of those like pseudo documentary movies it's a guy who's like i found noah's ark right right. It was the, where in the world is Osama bin Laden of its day, where everyone went to see it and they were like,

there's fucking nothing here. And then Midway, which is like one of those movies that like has an insane cast. It's a big war movie. It's like Charlton Heston, Henry Fonda, Glenn Ford,

Hal Holbrook, Toshiro Mifune. And you're like, is that movie any good? They're like, no, God, it's awful. It stinks. Garbage. But it was expensive and it was a big deal yeah uh it was in focus you know next year is star wars like you know like you said like it's it's it's all over i mean jaws has already happened or whatever but this is the last time but jaws at this point is like maybe an aberration they're

like maybe that's a once inin-a-generation phenomenon. There isn't going to be a Gone with the Wind every year. And then Star Wars comes out and they're like, there should be a Star Wars every year. I think that also is like, that makes sense. It makes sense to me that all the President's Men made that much money just because like, Watergate had kind of just happened. And so like, when you don't have like, like an MCU,

you're like, I kind of want to see how this thing that I read about happened starring Robert Redford. Yes. But also like, not that it's comparable because there's an ocean between them in quality, but it's just like the fucking Comey Showtime miniseries. Everyone was like, oh, no, thank you. I have no interest in watching this and i feel like any depiction of the trump years would have a similar response of just like i don't care how well executed it is i don't want to see any version of this story told do you think in a few years depending on how things go that could possibly shift it was wild to release it while he was still the president i don't know

if like we will ever want that but i could see maybe like our kids would be like what was that i'd be like i actually cannot go see that movie with you i'll be like i go go fucking watch the comey rule on showtime i can't talk about it right that's the other thing i just think the media being what it is we're so fucking burnt out on it like by the time though all the president's men comes out people know the story but like they couldn't kind of imagine the day-to-day of it necessarily you know whereas we've just been inundated with so much reporting and so much conflicting and it's also like all the president's men is like so much about them piecing together the story and it's also like all the president's men is like so much about them piecing together the story and it's like which fucking story would you pick like what right well you'd have to do the

whole four years and i can't actually physically i cannot do that and if you pick any one story you'd be like but why they focus on that that's a distraction from the real thing um david here's just a fun exercise i was doing in my head while you were listing those top 10 movies. Just to go like, okay, so who are the 10 stars of the biggest films of this year, right?

You're like, okay, so it's Sylvester Stallone. Stallone. He's new. Yeah. He's different. Right. A brand new movie star

is the number one, the star of the number one film of the year, right? Right. It's a phenomenon. You can't wait to meet him. That's the kind of thing, right? Like, yeah star of the number one film of the year, right? Right. It's a phenomenon. You can't wait to meet him. That's the kind of thing, right? Like, yeah.

Okay, number two. The number two, Barbra Streisand. Big star, established star, Oscar winner. And Chris Christopherson, who is a huge musician and, you know, a star in his own right. Number three. Okay, number three.

Can you tell me who's in King Kong? Grodin, Bridges, Lange. I guess Bridges is the biggest name, but arguably Kong is the guy selling the movie, right? None of them are on the poster. Only King Kong is on the poster. But their names are on there. It's just a big illustration of Kong.

I mean, their names are not on the poster at all. I think you and i my friend have been looking at different posters i don't know what to tell you it's a classic two guys looking at two different posters situation um but uh you know yeah i mean you know the most exciting original motion picture event of all time wild thing to say about a king kong remake i was gonna say because i was going down this rabbit hole looking at the King Kong posters. That is the most arrogant tagline I have ever heard. It really is. Not even of the year.

The most exciting original motion picture of all time. All time. All time. Wild. King Kong, he just climbs a different building. That's the only take they have. Also, it is funny that Jaws had just come out. They were like, this is more exciting, actually.

It's true. Jaws had already eaten his lunch even though he comes out a year later so let's say kong's the star of that picture number number five well number four is wilder clayberg prior as we said right but let's say wilder i mean if we want to like focus on one right wilder for sure yeah five is redford hoffman yeah i mean in in the iconic redford slash hoffman billing too which I love not first names yes but you also like going down that list it's like Gregory Peck who's kind of like an old school movie star at this point Matthau Matthau definitely an old school movie star at this point Eastwood

Eastwood uh Noah kind of an old school star Ark That was the billing on that one It was Noah slash Ark Yeah For sure I mean you know and then of course best picture goes to Rocky And like I don't know

I mean the palm door goes to Taxi driver like It's a pretty good year. It's a great year. It's a great year. And Ned Beatty ran the table on it. He fucking did. This is like the year.

This is the last year that John Wayne is in a movie. This is the year that she just comes out. This is the first year, the steady cam, right? The steady cam debuts. Yeah. Right.

You know, and then this is the year that rocky horror becomes a midnight movie and this is the year that george lucas starts to make star wars like it does feel like a bit of a and elaine may is about is essentially about to be run out of hollywood i was gonna say and they made mikey and nicky yeah this is the year that elaine may goes says fuck you i'm done and it takes you know one of the biggest movie stars in the world, 10 years later, begging her to make a movie for him with a guaranteed green light to pull her out of, you know,

retirement from filmmaking. But she was out at this point. She's out. She was very happy to go back to theater. Went back to theater and being a cool person. Yeah, just being a generally rad lady. Have you guys ever watched the, like, Nichols and May sketches? Yeah, been listening, watching a lot of them.

Yeah, and prep for this. They were the fucking coolest. They're just so fucking funny. I know, but I also, I just can't get over how cool they were. Yeah. In a way that comedians rarely are, you know? And hot. Right, they were cool and hot without being like, I'm a comedian and now I'm doing a GQ photo shoot.

Yeah. They're also like, it's really interesting to like think about both their careers as directors and then like watch those sketches because they are really like doing the thing that both of them like from their actors, which is just kind of like living. They're not like hyping it up for yucks. their actors which is just kind of like living they're not like hyping it up for yucks they're like there's like every heightening really makes sense is like kind of like grounded in like a real thing yeah they're just incredible yeah they're the coolest olivia you're the coolest thank you so much absolutely guys being dudes had so much fun that's good. Being dudes. Had so much fun. That's good. I'm glad you had so much fun. I'm glad you guys did Elaine May. You gotta do Nichols at some point. You gotta do

Nichols. Is he on March Madness? Is he gonna win March Madness? Not this year. We put him in last year. He would be fun though. We'll do him at some point. It's not that many movies. No. But we would have to do an angels in america bonus i would insist uh did yeah god who's gonna win though that's the real

question who is this is gonna win i think john carpenter is gonna win i think there's gonna be carpenter favoritism and ben energy like people are gonna want to support ben because olivia we've broken the brackets up. We each have a quadrant. Oh, fun. So Ben picked eight, I picked eight, David picked eight, and then we have one quadrant that we asked eight of our recurring guests to each pick one. Oh, that is so fun.

Ben's quadrant's up against my quadrant. Is that right? Or is Ben up against the... Oh, I actually don't know. Okay. I don't know. That's probably unexciting stuff to talk about because people at this point know who it is that's a great bet i'm into that carpenter fucking rules don't you think so griff i don't know for some reason i think there's a good chance

yeah i don't know and they like to pick a long one we'll see yeah we'll see we'll see we'll see. Yeah, we'll see. We'll see. We'll see. We'll see. Olivia. Griffin. Iconography. Best in the biz. I think it's funny because we haven't done iconography in a minute because I and I are both very busy people. And so now I'm kind of just like a private citizen who has nothing to promote, but just like likes coming on the pod. Olivia. I'm just hanging out.

You're the greatest private citizen i know yeah i what what how was how was carol grace described you know you have a wide social circle no go ahead no i would just add on to that that olivia is known for her wit and good company exactly yeah exactly that is like my dream my my dream my entire life has been to be like a woman about town that's all i've ever wanted i I mean, Olivia, you were tweeting about Fran Lebowitz, which is exactly the thing where it's like I do a couple books 40 years ago and then people just pay to listen to me talk. That is my dream. If someone listening would like to give me a book deal, I could crank out a book for

you and then just kind of coast on it. Go to some cool dinner parties. That's what I want for the next 60 years of my life. it go to some cool dinner parties that's what i want for the next 60 years of my life the fucking anti-fran lee witt's pushback is the most predictable and oh get out of here lame shit i've ever seen in my life you're just fucking jealous that she cracked the code yeah she got exactly she got to live her whole life just being a cranky person who complains about everything being bad you're just angry that isn't your life she's the only one who figured it out and her fundamental take on life is anyone who has sex is cool and anyone who doesn't isn't and the more

the the arc of the universe is bending towards the virgins and i hate it that's like her whole philosophy and i'm like hell yeah fran like the thing that has truly brought me the most joy in the last year has been watching pretend it's a city and watching martin scorsese think that everything that fran lebowitz says is the funniest thing a single person has ever said he laughs so hard at every one of her jokes in a way that i'm like that is that's who you need in your life it makes me want scorsese to be like someone's fucking andy richter like some talk show needs to hire scorsese for a residency he just laughs he just laughs at all your jokes and he does the full body laugh like he winces and his shoulders such a good laugher oh that's the other thing i wanted to

say is that when uh this is all over uh i would love if any New York-based theater would let me show a double screening of Mikey and Nikki in After Hours, which are two movies I think would go great back-to-back. Love like a late night in the city movie. I'm going to start a movie theater with my Reddit money. I didn't make any money on Reddit, but I'm going to pretend that I theater with my Reddit money. I didn't make any money on Reddit, but you know, I'm going to pretend that I did and we'll do that.

I do. I feel like after hours is a movie where if I tried to watch that now, I would, uh, become an uncontrollable, solid mess. Yeah. Cause just,

it's just, Oh, this is all the shit we don't have right now. Anyway, thank you all for listening. Please remember to rate, review and subscribe. I want to say thank you

to Marie Barty for our social media. Thank you to our editing team, Alex Barron and AJ McKeon. Thanks to Leigh Montgomery and the Great American Novel

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Tune in next week for Ishtar, what is tragically Elaine May's fourth and final movie, for now. Dakota Johnson. Hopefully Dakota Johnson will come through for us. But boy, am I ready to talk Ishtar. I've been waiting years to talk about Ishtar

on this podcast, David. This is the one. This is the one. I'm so excited. So excited. And you can subscribe to our Patreon. We're talking about those Trek movies. We're voyaging home or going beyond or entering the final frontier or one of those things. Beam us up.

Beam us up. Beam us up on Patreon. Absolutely. beam us up beam us up on Patreon absolutely and as always at the end of the day

this podcast is known for having a wide social circle and also known for its wit and good company