Blank Check with Griffin & David - The Killing with Patton Oswalt

Episode Date: August 14, 2022

If Stanley Kubrick’s previous two films were exercises in learning on the job, THE KILLING is where we start to see him put that knowledge into action. A thrilling noir, it allowed Kubrick to connect his passion for chess to a story about the best laid plans of a too ambitious crook. We couldn’t be more thrilled to welcome dream guest Patton Oswalt as we swap insane Timothy Carey stories, debate whether or not Rodney Dangerfield appears in the background of a scene, and suggest that Sterling Hayden’s Johnny Clay should have added a “Karen” to his plan to solve his baggage check-in situation at the airport. Check out Patton in I Love My Dad from Magnolia Pictures Read his Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film Join our Patreon at patreon.com/blankcheck Follow us @blankcheckpod on Twitter and Instagram! Buy some real nerdy merch at shopblankcheckpod.myshopify.com or at teepublic.com/stores/blank-check

you'd be killing a podcast that's not first degree murder in fact it's not murder at all in fact i don't know what it is uh sure sure sure that's what you wanted to do i don't know i'm not saying it's the best line in the movie but i like the the monologue by the bald guy uh at the chess place where he's kind of like you know we are mediocrity right where he's talking about that that's really good and you could do the voice and everything uh yeah yeah you have my sympathies then you have not yet learned that in this life you have to be like everyone else the perfect podcast no better no worse uh that exactly i love that that guy's great yeah who's who's that guy that guy look i'm sure

we're gonna get into it david that guy was a a true former wrestler who kubrick met through chess circles yeah he's his name is yeah we'll talk about him he's exactly what that character is right it's just funny because then i also think of the ed Wood guy, Tor Johnson, right? Who kind of is the same vibe. A Swedish guy with a bald head. He's Tor adjacent. He's very Tor adjacent. Look, I want to get into it. This is 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 are given a series of blank checks. Make whatever crazy passion projects they want. And sometimes those checks clear. Sometimes they bounce, baby. This is a miniseries on the films of Stanley Cooper. Heard of him?

It's called Pod's Widecast. And in many ways, I think he is a guy who kind of defines the idea in most people's minds of a blank check career, right? Because there are very few films at the beginning where he's minds of a blank check career right because there are very few films at the beginning where he's sort of scrapping it out and then from then on out it is hey i set the terms i work when i want to i make exactly what i wanted the exact sides and budget and freedom i want and you can go screw yeah i think i would say the only difference is he's right he's just very unique and the control he exerted we'll talk talk about this plenty. I'm saying it's the ultimate.

It's the ultimate. Right. It's the sort of thing people would aspire to or whatever. Right. When they want a blank check career, they're going, I wish I had fucking Kubrick levels of freedom. I guess so. What a ridiculous thing to say. Only Kubrick gets that.

Of course. But many fools aspire to it. Right. Look, I want to bring our guest in. Bring him in? He is such a professional that not only has he not spoken yet,

and I don't mean to call him out for this, he's been hitting that mute button on and off whenever there's a noise that might disrupt the audio. He's trying to give us

the cleanest track possible. Because this guy, he's a comedian. He's an actor. He's a writer. I think it's very important to say he joins a very very small club in the history of blank check guest david okay who are lead roles in previously covered blank check movies that's true in a wonderful film in fact we are speaking

to the man who brought to life remy the rat and Ratatouille, one of our all-time favorite movies. And he's got a new movie coming out called I Love My Dad. Patton Oswalt, thank you for being on the podcast. Guys, thank you so much. Thanks for having me on to talk about Kubrick's The Killing. Look, there was some... There was a lot of back and forth to make this happen. And in it, there was some confusion.

And then there was a Hail Mary pass to throw the killing at you because I thought I had remembered you talking about this movie in the past. Oh, yeah. I've seen this movie many times in theaters. We watched it yesterday morning just to be fresh. theaters uh re-watched it yesterday morning just to be fresh i mean it's a it's just a fun movie to watch in terms of oh let's let's see how he's setting all of this up you know it it bears up to repeated viewings it does it's not a difficult re-watch at all i i've seen the killing like three times and anytime you put it on two minutes in you're just like oh yeah this is coming up yeah yeah yeah this is great um the killing we're talking about the killing griffin you know why is it called the killing i guess we'll talk about it but but that's my maybe my only note with the

killing i don't know if it's a great title i mean it's a it's it's arresting but like that's not really what's going on in this movie right i don right? You could call it the killing of a sacred horse. Oh, boy. Because the book had a different clean break, right? That's what it was called? Yeah, clean break. Okay. That's a pretty good title.

I guess that's not the most thrilling title in the world. Well, this is... Okay, look, we're going to crack open the dossier. J.J. Birch, our researcher, put together a lot of stuff very quickly for this movie. But one of the things, Pat, I think that might be of specific interest to you. One of the working titles for this film that he pulled up because whether you're getting a green light or not. Right. Give me a title that I can slap on a poster. Yeah. The whole noir crime genre is what are the words we can slap on a poster that'll get people to stop and come and look at it. Exactly.

It doesn't even have to have anything to do with the plot. We don't care. Right. Let's go. Right. So if you have a good title, they might green light you on that alone. Yeah. And if you have a bad title, they're going to make you change it three weeks before the

movie comes out to something. Of course they will. Whether or not it has anything to do with the movie. Clean Break was the name of the book. But one of the titles, one of the working titles that apparently was close to happening for this movie, I don't know if you know this, was Bed of Fear. Oh, my Lord. Okay. Now, Patton, one of my favorite routines of yours of all time is your extended riff on Deathbed, the bed that eats people.

Yeah. What you call at the time, I think the worst movie you'd ever seen. Well, no, at the time I had not seen it. I'd only heard of it because it had just come out on DVD. I have since did a screening of it at the Alamo Drafthouse. Like we're all going to experience it together. a screening of it at the Alamo Drafthouse. Like, we're all going to experience it together.

It was more about the idea that a guy, it was the concept for me that a guy came up with the idea for a movie about a bed that is possessed and needs people and he finished the script and he finished the movie. And all I can think of are all of the projects I've started and either given up on or they just didn't go anywhere. That one

made it all the way through. That is insane to me. At no point did he crumple it up and go, stupid. No, come on. We're doing this. Right.

Well, it's my, my two favorite parts of the bit. Are you saying, was he either just confident the entire time or was there the moment where the doubt hit him and he worked through it? Either way is bad for me. Either way is very,

it, it speaks badly of me and my follow through. If a guy either had 100 percent confidence or you like you said, had that crippling doubt, as you should have if you're working on something called Deathbed. Absolutely. No, I'm God damn it. I'm finishing this. favorite detail on that though and and not to brag but i uh have spent about 15 years working on some of the worst independent films of all time just terrible projects that never should have existed and you go into it post that guy writing that script the amount of work and time and hours and sacrifice that everyone else has to commit to make that vision of reality if you're on the crew of bed of fear and it's the stanley kubrick guy's third movie do you think you go this this thing's gonna be a piece of junk do

you think bed of fear is a title that would instill doubt in a cast and crew versus the killing where you're just like i don't know it's called the killing whatever bed of fear the problem with bed of fear is the word bed is in there yeah there's that just takes away any tension and excitement like you know i'm sleeping yeah yeah exactly like oh bed i should go home yeah like sofa of terror like well no there's a sofa i'm taking a nap taking away all the tension you can't have bed in the title. Bed of Fear also does not have much to do with this movie. It would also be somewhat misleading, more misleading than the killing.

This movie does at least have murder in it. Or death. And also the killing, there's an overall like, this is what drives all these characters. The idea of like, we're going to make a killing here. This is going to be a killing.

And that is like, it's a double meaning. The title is almost the motivation for all the characters right there you're right i'm convinced you're right it's a good title i mean also bed of fear is a terrible title so that's you know that's fine they they yeah clean clean break is fine clean break is what they want to do obviously it's it's the one last job movie they're all gonna or at least johnny clay is gonna you know he's gonna make a clean break i get it but killing works on a marquee i mean it's sort of what we talked about with the evil dead where you're just like i can't believe no one thought to put those words in that order on a poster before and the killing has been used so many

times since this movie as a title it's now just one of those titles that gets recirculated right it's just non-stop, yeah. It is striking to just put those two words. The Killing. Tell me more. Great move. Better than God. Better than Bed of Fear. I made Bed of Fear. Don't you know who I am? I directed Bed of Fear.

David, I love how much this movie comes out of Kubrick's chess life in multiple ways um you know obviously chess a bit of a recurring motif for kubrick obviously it's in lots of his movies but um but he he's a big chess nerd uh especially in his younger years so um let me see i'm looking at some of this sort of context here obviously kubrick uh worked at what look magazine that's what it called uh he was a photographer right he'd done fear and desire and killer's kiss which are

you know not features he's proud of particularly right like this is probably the first movie kubrick respects in his filmography right yeah i would say I would say. He talks pretty derisively about the first two movies. I don't know what you guys think of that. Fear and Desire, he kind of disowned as not a film for a while. And Killer's Kiss, he's sort of treated as his warm-up, and this is kind of the first real film. Killer's Kiss is kind of cool. I like that.

It's a fun time. The stuff with the mannequins and it's just great imagery I don't know what he's you know worried about it works also we've covered

far more amateurish first films than Fear and Desire I think it just speaks to Kubrick's sort of perfectionism that like Christopher Nolan

doesn't disown following even though that's a rough draft movie yeah you know sure no 100% but so this movie is produced know sure no 100 but uh but so um this movie is

produced by james b harris uh alexander singer is a guy he knows who introduces him to stanley kubrick and um they set up harris kubrick pictures on 57th street in new york harris claims he's the one who went to a bookstore around the corner and bought clean break kubrick says the opposite he but i just the thing i want to tie back in here is that uh harris and kubrick apparently really bonded over doing washington square park yes uh that was the formation of their relationship yeah um but uh kubrick i, had loved The Killer Inside Me, which is another Jim Thompson, which is a Jim Thompson book. Jim Thompson writes this movie,

although he's actually only credited for the quote-unquote dialogue. So I guess Kubrick kicks him the book and says, do you want to write a screenplay based on this? And apparently Jim Thompson had never written a screenplay before. He wrote the whole thing on legal pads, basically. And the screenplay was like, you know, you had to flip it topside rather than the usual left to right. So Kubrick, I guess, is the one who turns it into a screenplay,

which is why he gets the credit. But whatever. Him and Jim Thompson are cool. Jim Thompson writes Paths of Glory. Jim Thompson's like a big, early Kubrick guy. I've never read The Killer Inside Me. I saw the movie, you know, the whatever from 10 years ago.

Well, there's two versions. There's the Stacey Keach version. Yeah. And there's the one that came out with... With Casey Affleck right oh yeah yeah which was you know it was like one of those sort of uh you can't you can't believe how you know intense this movie is movies right you know like oh it's so horrifying and chilling i never saw the stacy keach version and i've never read the book i know the book is sort of a

a sort of crime classic like it's because it's just so blistering. Have you guys read The Killer Inside Me? I read it in high school and I don't remember a lot of it. I just do remember it feels immediately claustrophobic. I am slammed inside of this shell of a person and now I have to walk around with this psychopath basically for a whole novel.

That is an incredible way of describing, I think, the magic juice of most great noir of this period is just like these quick and dirty. You're just immediately slammed into an incredibly claustrophobic and bleak worldview. And it's just like a fucking kettle boiling of when is this going to pop and how do I stay in here? Yeah, exactly. But this book, they call up to pop and how do i stay in here yeah exactly but this book they call up to try and get the rights this is the one thing i forgot and they were like well frank sinatra is like negotiating with us right now and they were like we'll give you ten thousand dollars right away so this was almost a sinatra picture sinatra wanted to do this which i mean it would probably be pretty cool I mean it's sort of a Dirty Harry was almost a

Sinatra picture and and wasn't Die Hard as well wasn't isn't that a thing well no he plays the same it's the same character from The Detective that's what's his Die Hard but they never offered Die Hard to Sinatra they did offer Dirty Harry to Sinatra when it was called Dead Right. And it was going to be Sinatra as Harry Callahan. I just I need to film nerd correct you. Oh, he was obviously never going to do it. But something in the deal for when Sinatra had bought the rights of the detective gave him right of first refusal on any of the follow ups. Wow. of first refusal on any of the follow-ups wow so even when they set up die hard at fox and had mctiernan and everything they had to go to sinatra and go like obviously no right and he was like

yeah no but they did have to before they could offer it to anyone else say like you don't want to play 80 year old john mclean do you let me tell you something baby these knees don't these knees don't work like they used to. I just like imagining whoever the Fox exec was who was like, hey, Frank, I'm just calling so you can tell me to fuck off. Do you want to do a movie called Die Hard? Fuck off. Okay, thank you. My job's done.

So Kubrick, they write the screenplay with Jim Thompson. They go to United Artists and United Artists is like, give us an actor. Jack Palance is someone they ask. And then Sterling Hayden gets into the mix. He likes the script. They bring him aboard.

Apparently, United Artists wanted Victor Mature. They were mad about Sterling Hayden. They were like, you know. Yeah, I agree. Oh, no. No, no. No, no. Not a positive. You made a icky poo-poo smell face to Victor Mature.

I can think of no better way to describe it. I mean, look, I don't hate Victor Mature. He's in one of my favorite noirs of all time. I wake up screaming, but he's not the best part of it. There's just something about Victor Mature, just for me as an actor, that weird little like that weird little smile of his and it just he has like the widow's peak kind of thing

he's he looks like an entertainer you know right i don't know exactly yeah he looks like he should be like who's got a birthday tonight who's doing it who's got a wedding and like he should be bringing on the acts i just don't i don't buy him as a lead actor, even though he's, you know, great. He's in Kiss of Death. He's in I Wake Up Screaming. Right. Yeah, that's the line.

But I just, ugh. David Thompson called him an uninhibited creature of the naive. That's a pretty good line. Sterling Hayden has that sort of poetry and that pathos to him. I mean, Sterling Hayden, he's a wonderful choice, but I can see him being an unsexy one, I guess. I don't know that he was the kind of star that United Artists is really. I mean, he had just been in Johnny Guitarny guitar a couple years ago he's in crime wave obviously that's where he plays detective sims you know oh hell yeah to me god

he's so good in that uh apparently he was in a movie in 1955 called top gun well it was a western um but so so they they they convinced united artists know, let us have Sterling Hayden. United Artists puts up about 200 grand. The budget went over to about 330. So Harris had to kick in some of his own money at the end of the day. Because that was the thing, was like United Artists said, if you can get us a star, we'll give you the budget for this. And when they come back with Sterling Hayden, they're like, we'll give you half the budget for this. Right. That's exactly how much we'll give you.

There's a quote here. I like two quotes. James Harris said, I give Stanley a free hand to create and he leaves the money problems to me. Right. Which I think this relationship defines Kubrick's approach to filmmaking from here on out. Yeah. Like Harris for this movie in the next two creates the dynamic that Kubrick then extends to the studios with every other picture he makes, which is just like, you got to back the fuck off. Yeah.

And Harris sort of saw in this guy the ability if he was given that sort of freedom and got him used to that. The funny quote that accompanies this is Kubrick at the time saying, we want to make good movies and make them cheap. The two are not incompatible. So Kubrick's idea at this point is oh i know what i do i'm the guy who can make a movie with complete freedom as long as the budget is low and then by the end of his relationship with harris he's like but what if the budget isn't low right uh i actually could do a lot more with more budget i mean yeah this

movie is compared united artists sort of compares it to Marty, which is around the same time, where they're like, we can make low-budget pictures that are A pictures, that have like an A picture quality, I guess is what they're trying to say. Kubrick wanted to shoot this movie himself, but Union Rules didn't let him do that, so he brings in Lucy and Ballard,

but they fought all the time, and one of the biggest things was the those race track uh images that you know right at the start of the movie and they're you know uh kubrick was like i want to go to like the horses and i want to get some like sort of verite footage i want to get some like documentary stuff and lucy and ballard is like no i work in like studio sets with like lights i don't know what i like i don't know how that works basically like you know it's it's he's he's trying to sort of solve a problem that the hollywood studio system doesn't really understand i guess yeah but there's like but there is a documentary field of some of the early scenes it reminds me of yeah you know

a lot of kubrick stuff like day of the fight and a lot of his Look magazine stuff where he got, I mean, it looks like he either convinced Lucian or went behind Lucian's back and went down and got stuff. He went behind his back. That is what he gets. Alexander Singer, who's the associate producer on this movie, is one of Harris's guys who had worked shooting documentary stuff during the korean war when he was like in the service and he gives him a little amo camera imo camera imo i think uh and says just like go to the tracks and shoot me some stuff and that stuff is in the movie uh which kubrick just kind of so that's you know right you know that's a sign of him kind of like you know making making something out of nothing yep it is funny is funny to me that like, yes, he's got this background as a photojournalist.

Right. Fear and Desire feels very documentary esque. And then this movie has elements of it. And you look at the variety review from the time and they almost lead with like this movie has the striking documentary style. Like that was pretty radical at the time. has this striking documentary style like that was pretty radical at the time and then from here on out every successive movie kubrick's going to become more controlled more creating his own ecosystem right you know like by the time you get to eyes wide shut and he has no interest in capturing reality as it exists on the street and is building his own fake new york it is weird how yeah this guy that one of his early strengths was that was the documentary

feel to his stuff even in stuff like it's something as big as strange love that feels very documentary style and then you're right he just goes into artifice and never looks back yeah he just right you don't think of him as like a sort of verite guy um the other thing was that kubrick wanted to use a really wide lens and ballard was like that's gonna distort the image that's gonna give it this kind of fisheye thing which kubrick was like yeah that's what i want to do like yeah dipshit that's a cool idea like right sounds fucking good this is a crime story i want to get into that and you know they so much of the the stuff from the set of this movie is him fighting with lucy

and ballard over lens sizes and things like that you know um lucy and ballard apparently at the time was married to merle oberon wow so like this is a you know a a hollywood guy like this is who looks you look him up he's a hottie lucy and bauer he's a good looking guy he's got a strong brow he worked with joseph von sternberg and sam peckinpah and all these guys and uh as a singer puts it like kubrick looked like a bronx kid who was wiping his nose on his sleeve like i mean it's sort of hard to imagine baby kubrick because you i feel like the image you have of the guy is more the sort of like the spectacle bearded older guy. Right. You know, but.

Well, the bearded film wizard. Right now, he's yeah, he's a nasally kid from the Bronx. That's just like, I want to make movies. The dark eyed intensity. It doesn't get there until later. He just looks like a fucking dork at this. But he looks. Yeah.

They're fighting about putting a dang you know a camera on a dolly track for a shot and stanley says lucian you either move that camera and put it where it has to be to use a 25 millimeter or you get off the set and you never come back and lucian there's just silence and then lucian like goes and does you know goes and puts the camera where it's supposed to be so whatever he wins the big battle with the like big shot cameraman all the other stories are just like that he's this like weird little introvert you know kubrick like he does not strike you as a bossy guy in any other way um when you're but obviously the sort of perfectionist master craftsman stuff is coming

up right yeah but kubrick could you know you've seen that footage on the shining where he's just bullying shelly duvall i i don't i don't think he was a very ultimately i don't think he was a really good guy i don't think he's nice no and i think he i think he might have been like i don't know about misanthropic but i just don't think he i i i there's an unspoken god i could make these movies exactly the way I want if there wasn't all these dumb people doing stuff. These actors who need to go to the bathroom and eat food. It just gets in the way of what I'm trying to do. It makes perfect sense that AI was the thing he was working towards in his mind.

Yeah, of course. One of these days we're going to get this fucking robot. Robot actors. But it's also just so funny to consider at a certain point, even if he is still aggressive in how he gets there, at a certain point his reputation looms so large that people know what they're signing up for right and they understand i'm gonna totally have to defer to everything kubrick wants and at this point it's like he's never been described as someone who is uh i don't know particularly insightful in knowing how to communicate with people to get what he wants outside of just demanding it so if you're working with young twerpy kubrick it's like what are those conversations like where he's just like fucking do it yeah but

at the same time like um you know there are you're right there there was that feeling of oh i've signed up for a kubrick film it felt a lot of times it felt like people did kubrick films more to get the story than to get than to be in Like to go, oh, I've worked with, let me tell you my Kubrick story. And there were some actors that weren't enchanted by him at all. Harvey Keitel famously told him to go fuck himself on the set of Eyes Wide Shut when he made him a,

well, some people say he got fired. Some people say he just quit. But he basically, Kubrick made him walk through a door 27 times and he just went hey you're fucking crazy and just like left like like did that thing it was almost like the weird leave it to harvey kytel to like just see through all the glamour and all the legend to go oh you're just fucking crazy you're just crazy and you lucked into making people someone money and they keep throwing money at you. But you're crazy.

Well, it's like that incredible clip of Christopher Plummer talking about working with Malick on The New World. And he's like, I memorized this monologue and you're filming a fucking bird. Like, I'm never doing this ever again. I don't care. Shoot the actor. Save. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's oh, my God.

Yeah. Some of these guys. But I. Right. I'm so I'm just as a as a working actor i'm so over two things i'm over the method i hate the method and i hate the auteur theory they those are the two things that get in the way of people actually doing work and creating art because the method puts 10 times more attention on the actor. Whereas acting is you're supposed to just inhabit a role and, and not call attention to all your actorly bullshit.

And then our tourism is all about, I just want to be a dick. I just want to be a dick to people. And because I have to be a tortured artist, someone I forgot who pointed this out. I think it was Bronson Pinchot of all people. It's like, you ever noticed that whenever someone's in a method performance, they're always, and they're acting like an asshole.

Like, well, my character, I'm playing this asshole. Right, they're never method. It's like a nice man who gives people candy or whatever. Yes, what I was getting at. Yes, they never are. Sorry, pal. That's quite all right. I think, you know, Kubrick and daniel day lewis loom too large

as those two examples and daniel day lewis who is notoriously a very nice person and doesn't do that thing where he's like a fucking asshole to people on set just because he's playing an asshole sure but just stays in his his energy you know right and i i think too many people are like well i'm doing the kubrick thing or the daniel day leewis thing. And it's like, first off, you're not fucking Kubrick or Daniel Day-Lewis. And by the way, everyone who works with Daniel Day-Lewis says he's nice. And everyone who works with Kubrick says he was an asshole, even if they were happy with how the movie turned out. There's a thing you said in some random interview that I always think about, Patton, that speaks to this sort of anti-method preciousness. You were on some podcast, I think, talking speaks to this sort of anti-method preciousness. You were on some

podcast, I think, talking about movies you had seen recently, and it was when Blue Valentine came out. And you talked about how good Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling were in that film. And the way you described it was you said, they're just part of this great generation of young actors who just fucking crack open the script and take out their highlighter and do the work yeah they they just trust that the work is going to create something amazing rather than i want to create this is the ryan gosling show or this is the michelle williams biography and like no i'm here to serve the script and there's that yeah there is a generation of actors, the ones that are coming up now, I think, are really amazing in that they just, let's do the goddamn work and make it amazing. And we don't need to be precious assholes about it, you know?

Right. And that's a movie where, like, they fucking lived in a house together for a month improvising backstory and all this shit. But there was none of that sort of self-flagellation like look at how much we suffered for this important kind of press tour stuff afterwards right where it's like you know i forgot who i was or you know this you know right the whole mythos that comes around it which is the problem with the auteur stuff that you're saying patten as well it's like it becomes this mythos that just kind of makes you like get whatever gives you uh a license to act like a king or a god on set i assume right it's like i well it all flows you know the buck stops here right so whatever i do is all part of the creative

process or what i assume is sort of yeah but a lot but a lot of times it's anti-creativity because they only want everything coming from them the idea of a collaboration they're so worried that after the facts i want to go well that was my idea you know as long as the movie's good i don't care who comes up with what idea as long as it all works but there are so many people that are like no i am making a movie the rest of you are not all the ideas are coming from me you have you know no one contributes anything to this and they want it to be there so badly. And it's like, they don't, you know, it's the William Goldman thing.

Everybody gets together and everybody makes a movie. And that's sort of, again, it's kind of from the Kubrick perspective is what's interesting about the killing. It's like they shot this in 20 days. He's still fairly new to hollywood this is not the kind of thing where obviously yes he wins a fight over a lens with handsome handsome lucian ballard but like he's he's not able to you know be no and on the flip side yeah on the flip side patent and you tweeted about this but the the timothy carey performance is someone doing something he absolutely does not want that Kubrick was upset about and Carey was fucking right yeah and it also by the way it shows you how great

Timothy Carey is on screen that Kubrick worked with him again after all of the tension that came out of this movie and I remember I went to a screening of Crime Wave this is years ago and Andre de Toth the director was there and afterwards spoke. And people were, of course, asking about Tim Carey. You know, what was Tim Carey like? So first, Andre de Toth does like a joke. And he says, well, once you took a straitjacket off, he was fine. Everyone, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. And then they asked a few more questions. And then in the middle of answering another question, he just stopped and went and let me be clear Timothy Carey was

fucking crazy just in case that joke I don't want you thinking I was being right that guy was out of his fucking mind but American Klaus Kinski yes exactly but I feel like there was like a whisper network among directors going

yeah look Timothy Carey is going to want to make you jump off a fucking bridge. But the stuff that you get on film is so worth it. He is just amazing. We were talking about, obviously, how Coppola uses Sterling Hayden. He wanted Timothy Carey, too, right? He wanted Timothy Carey to play Luca Brasi in The Godfather, which makes sense. Like, he's scary looking. Well, OK, I'll tell you another story

i was at um uh i was i hosted a uh editor's award show and i got to meet martin scorsese backstage so all we did was trade timothy carey stories and he told me and this is what coble told him they brought in timothy carey for godfather um for the god, and then he didn't want to do it. And they brought him back. He didn't want to do The Godfather because he was shooting his own TV show called Tweets Ladies of Paradise. Let me look for it. Yes, yes. Tweets Ladies of Pasadena.

That's what it is. Which, by the way, one of the worst things I've ever seen in my life. He was playing a character called Tweet Twig, apparently. And he was making. He was Tweet. He wanted to make clothes for animals because he didn't think animals should be. It was his idea of what a sitcom should be. It was insane.

And so he's like, I got to make my show. I can't be in your dumb gangster movie. So then he turns it. So then for the sequel, they still want him for the sequel. So they bring him in. We want this picture. Do you want to come back? Come on.

They bring him in and he comes in with a, like a bakery box or something like, I brought cannoli for everybody. And then he opens the box and there's a gun in there that he filled with blanks and he started shooting it into the ceiling and everyone freaked out. And then he got chased off the lot by security. And he was like, I was just trying to create some tension. It was a gangster movie.

Like, just out of his fucking mind. And it was just, that's why he didn't get to be in Godfather 2 because he was a lunatic. It's also just crazy. You look at like Tim Carey's whole filmography and you have like so many huge like, and a lot of these are uncredited, too. But it's like you have East of Eden and you have Minnie and Moskowitz and Head and Shock Treatment, obviously this movie.

And then you have like Chesty Anderson, USN. You have two Francis the Talking Mule movies, like, along with his own insane vanity projects. Like, the birth of, like, the highest highs and the lowest dregs of film in every genre. Just the best. I mean, he has it. He has one of the earliest post-credit sequence in a movie in DC Cab after the credits are done. And he gets in the cab and it's a, uh, Charles Barnett,

uh, where to, he goes, I'm the angel of death. Take me to hell. And he's like, any luggage? Like just,

it was just perfect. That's all. He just sits down, says it done. What was his type? Was he just crazy? Like, was he just the weird guy?

He's huge. So he would play heavies. Yeah. He's a gigantic human being and he also has this voice that's just there's nothing like it you i can't describe it he's just such a weird present and those weird eyes yeah he's half asleep half the time right or like that he's like staring through you or whatever it It's very unsettling. Right. But Cage is a good comparison too, because even at this point in time where film acting at large is less naturalistic,

he is so expressionistic. Like he's just like, I have no interest in capturing literal human behavior. It's your tweet about it, Patton, that I found where his clenched jaw thing was sort of making him this like living corpse. Right. He was dead already. Like it was a regular mortis thing.

Exactly. He was, I'm already dead. I'm going to play this with a rictus because I'm going to die. Oh, it's so good. God. And I can imagine a director being like, what? Don't do that. No, what? You're alive in this scene. And because Kubrick is basing so many of these scenes around, like, you know, masters, deep focus masters with very limited camera movement, you know? So you're really letting the actors control the pace of these scenes. The one scene where Sterling Hayden goes to see Tim Carey for the first time and he's got the puppy in his hands. Yeah. And you're not cutting to close up.

So you really get to in real time, watch five minutes of Tim Carey stroking a puppy. And you're constantly just like, is he about to snap this thing's neck? Why does he have this dog? Oh yeah. Get that dog away from him. He just,

yeah. And also to do the cut from this brutal shotgunning, these targets. And then we cut to, he's got the gun and the puppy. Like what the hell am i looking at right now yes we'll talk look we'll talk about him again because he was crazy when they made paths of glory as well and eventually kubrick fired him with by the way fired him with very good reason yes what a friggin

nut on that movie i know the whole story what. What a friggin' psycho. Sag had no cause for rejection, but apparently he's also in his image from The Killing is on the Sgt. Pepper cover behind George Harrison. I'm trying to find it now. Oh, really? Yes, but specifically from this movie. Wow! Yeah, it's pretty cool.

You can see on outtake photos. All right. Okay, so I may not have made the final cover, but anyway. Timothy Carey, he he's great but everyone in this is great not just him right like it's not really a false note here no every performance is so fantastic even um you know you know someone like uh um elijah cook who at that point i love it had almost become like he was his own genre of person and he finds different levels for his character that normally is outside of the

Elijah Cook kind of ovure that I, just amazing. God, he's so good. I feel like usually, like, right, like post-Maltese Falcon, he would play psychos, right? He would play, like, very creepy guys most of the time this is him more in like sort of sad lonely pathetic mode like yeah it's yeah it's sort of

it's sort of lateral from that but i mean i love him so much in the maltese falcon what what marie what marie windsor is the one who totally grabbed me yeah those eyes and and the face it means it's like an early iliana douglas you know this kind of yes i yeah she kind of gorgeous and also you know what this is i'm not saying this to be to be glib or uh dismissive but she and elijah cook jr in this you know what it feels like to me though that whole part of the movie feels like if the softy brothers adapted the lockhorns comic into a movie like it's so truly trying to kill each other yeah really actually trying to well there's something like she was very tall and her career was always hamstrung she was too tall sure she was like rarely having leading men really size. And mostly needing to do performances where she was like crouching, you know, where her ankles and knees were pulling like triple duty and shit.

And this movie allows her to kind of be tall because she needs to have such sort of dominance over him physically. He has to be this weak thing. But the other thing is, right, this is like a stock type at this point in this type of movie. This is like a stock type at this point in this type of movie. But all of these sort of one-liners she slings over her shoulder at his expense are said with genuine disdain. Oh, yeah. They're not just sort of like sassy lady one-liners. They're like, this woman is miserable. And she is angry at the life she's living.

Yeah. And so miserable to the point where even her dying words are a jab at her husband like the last yeah word she's gonna leave this planet with are going to be to what one last shit on this guy's head right she has to cuck him with her final breath i mean yeah i'm kind of i'm kind of rooting for her yeah were husbands always saying that you're we're gonna be rich someday in those days was that a thing i i think it's american dream coming out of like sort of great depression everyone's you know america's booming right everyone's doing great i mean you were talking about that patent before we started recording how 50s more like america is in better shape

in 50s more than it is in 40s noir. Like, yeah, but again, that makes the darkness darker because right. Yes. America is in better shape and everyone's making it. So if you're not making it something really wrong. Yeah.

You're an absolute scumbag, but it's this thing that I like about noirs at this time is that the people who are trying to pull off these sort of these crazy uh you know sort of moves are often just not quite smart enough to do it yeah a little too unsavory to be able to win people over it's what you're saying there's something fundamentally broken in them that's preventing them from achieving the american dream well yeah that's what i love about this movie is that unlike a lot of crime capers, this movie is about a guy who is aspiring to pull off a multi-leveled 4D chess thing,

but he is just a checker player. He is a thug. He should just, he should go into a liquor store, hit a guy with a sock full of quarters, take whatever's in the register and just try to live on that. This, you are so out of your wheelhouse on this dude. It is and that's what maurice is saying to him right he's like mediocrity is what you should be aspiring to here buddy you know like but but then again also i do

feel like so johnny clay he's sterling hayden is the main character and he's this is his one last job right he's gonna steal two million dollars this is gonna be it he is aspiring to mediocrity in that he's like and then i can be a normal guy right like that is supposedly the brass ring he's grabbing for right i'll be yeah i'll be mr joe schmoe anonymous i'll live off the money it'll be great he has the same dreams as like as as walter mathau and charlie varick of like i got this money i just want to go vanish and and live on on the on the low end out of sight and just live on the money quietly that's all i want just you know the difference though is in a walter mathau movie you genuinely believe all this guy wants is to take a nap right

is just to get even enough yes yeah right whereas like sterling hayden you imagine the movie where he pulls this off. 18 months from now, he's going to be so impatient. You're right. You're right. He'll ruin it down the road. He'll ruin it. He'll absolutely ruin it. To quote back to my favorite things you've ever said about movies, Patton, so many of these lines just ring in my head, whether they're bits or they're off cuff sort of things you've said in interviews.

things you've said in interviews. I think you were programming some series, a repertory theater or whatever, and you were presenting the original Taking a Pelham 1-2-3. Do you know the line I'm about to say back to you? I can't remember. No, what is it? You have quoted this line on this podcast.

I'm going to misquote it. I've said it on this podcast because it's the fundamental encapsulation of everything I love about Walter Matthau. You said, you look at the Tony Scott remake and the guy has to be Denzel Washington. And they can try to schlub up Denzel Washington as much as possible. But you know he's Denzel Washington. And in the original film, they go, there's only one guy who can handle this case. And the camera pans over and he's hung over in an ill-fitting suit eating a stale hot dog.

Yes. And the specific of Walter Matthau eating a stale hot dog has always stuck with me. Yeah. It's just, and also they introduce him being a racist idiot. That's his introduction. He's being the most racist moron on the planet. And like, and now I got to save these passengers.

Like this fucking guy. This guy looks like he can't do his own laundry what are you talking about he barely looks like he can dress himself in that movie no he does not look like he can dress himself let's be clear he's matching like red check with a yellow tie someone else should be making the decisions yes yeah at least there i mean that's what that movie is a masterpiece but just the idea of like, there's a hostage situation, Matthau's reaction is like, oh boy, what is it? You know, like he's on the phone with a guy

and he's like, come on, what are you doing this for? People are late. It's New York in the 70s. The dispatcher, the mayor, they're all like, what? Why do they want... Then let him have it! I don't... And the mayor's just trying to watch Price is Right and he misses the fight. I just want,

and Mayer's just trying to watch Price is Right and he misses the fight. He's like, I missed it. No one cares. Oh, God. But the brutal poetry of Sterling Hayden is he's not smart enough to pull off a con of this size, but he's too smart to ever be happy

if he were to pull it off. Yes. He's stuck in this weird middle zone. that's a great way to think of it he will if he pulls it off he will be miserable in some other way down the road you're right he's doomed uh and i like that we know nothing about him just that he's a vet just that you know that he's been doing this for a while right we there's no real backstory on johnny clay he the name is perfect he might as well have just been like you know smacked out of clay you know has he done time i don't know that they mention it so i know i feel like they say he just did a five-year bid and did he do the five-year

bit with marv or is he is marvin old prison buddy it's the the older gentleman who runs the hotel his son they serve time together that's how he knows like you know where to stay or whatever okay um but we're in the middle of it which is good like he's already thought the heist up it's you know he's got this oh yeah he's got the teller he's got the sharpshooter right like he's got the the wrestler's gonna do the fight everyone is whatever he has laid out the chess moves in his head but but what a chess player a chess player never considers that the pieces have lives and wants and needs of their own in his mind he's like the rook just does this the knight does yeah they'll do it well want. But in real life,

they're not going to do any of that stuff. It's actually fascinating to think about. I mean, from A, Kubrick's chess background, but B, this sort of perfectionist control

he's going to exact on all his movies going forward, that it's a movie about a guy who cannot control other people's behavior, who believes that he can just if you were able to just do everything i fucking told you to do this would work perfectly the vision of my head is immaculate and you fucking people keep on messing it up with your variables so

tragic yeah he's such a dummy he can't see it he can't get out of his own way i i think one of the most striking elements of this movie for me is the narration, which is so bizarre. The tone of it is so odd, but it does feel like so ominous from the very beginning. part of a patent but that weird thing where you're seeing very banal slices of people's lives but you understand like he wouldn't be telling me this if something very odd or about to happen bad you know he almost he has the tone of a cautionary tale like there's this undercurrent of like and here's the lesson pay attention so at this time he thinking that he would get you like okay yeah it has that something you're right something's about to go wrong it's got that newsreel quality which obviously kubrick has a background but it's like this is this sort of like impartial narrator reporting back to you the bad thing that just happened but when it's happening in a fictional narrative film, it's like this looming specter

of these guys just working towards this, like, uneasy end. Oh, it's so eerie. Right. And I forget who does the narration in Network, but he has that same sort of vibe and the same as the Ricky Jay vibe

where it's just, there's something a little too slick, a little too removed, you know? Lee Richardson is the narrative really good voice now okay i there there's we're gonna jump around uh to scenes much like the movie jumps around in time i was very intrigued and i looked this up online and there's a there's discussion about it but there's no definitive that scene right before sterling hayden um he's talking to marv and marv out of nowhere basically says you and i should run off

together when we're done with this you and i should go you don't want to be in it like basically he implies like this marriage to faye is going to be a mistake. You shouldn't do it. You should be with, like, is that a gay come on? Or is it a, you shouldn't be married. Let's just go live as bachelors. Like, is he trying to save Clay from disaster? It's a very odd scene in the middle of the movie. Like, it looks like a, is it a gay pass or not? It is interesting.

It is, especially since Fay is supposedly the motivation for all of this it's right i'm getting married i need to go straight this is gonna set us up like so you'd think that would be a positive right but is is it you wouldn't be happy with her truly or is it you would be a piece of shit to her? Don't fucking subject her to that. You're right in that most of this movie is fairly clear cut. It's an economical movie. Scenes like that and then the later scene with Maurice ruminating about mediocrity, those are scenes where you're like, there's a million different readings that I can come up with off of this.

It's interesting that that's the little sort of ambiguity that Kubrick is sprinkling in into a fairly straightforward heist gone wrong thing. Maybe he's just trying to save that poor woman from being Faye Clay. That's not a great, great name. I don't know. It's not as bad as Victoria Mature, maybe, but it's close. I am now going to rewatch this scene.

It's an amazing scene. It's really weird. I mean, not to jump ahead but like the moment where johnny refers to faye as his wife to airport security and kubrick shows you her face reacting to that like you know they're not married yet but he's essentially like well this is my you know like he's he's presenting the sort of like you know the future that they want together like you feel for her like she she's she's still in it at that point like she still wants that to be the result that luggage scene is almost the most brutal scene in the entire film god yeah it's just it's long too it's like the manager comes in you're like oh this is going to turn

this around and it doesn't and it's well also because they did that great thing the manager is being so helpful he goes well that's no problem and she think oh wait a minute she's going to let him bring it on he's like we'll just cancel your flight we'll get you no wait no that's like it's just right they're not being jerks yeah no it's such good like tonal control too because those two actors are the only two people in this entire film who don't know they're in a noir film right yeah so their sort of friendly professionalism is so off-putting and just makes you so uncomfortable that that's a moment where a slick like say sinatra like you wouldn't buy that sinatra wouldn't be able to talk those guys into just checking the damn bag right yeah you're right exactly and like sterling hayden

you're like yeah this guy has hit his limit in terms of you know being able to work the system he has no social energy left he's got no trump yeah yeah it's not really you let me take this bag on or it's ring-a-ding-ding for the two of yous you know like there would have been something fun or hey jilly jilly tell these guys to put my bag on the plane. You like this hat? I'll give you this hat. Not only that, but Sterling Hidd would probably have an easier time if the guys were being aggressive with him. If they were like, excuse me, sir, you cannot.

He's big. He's scary. He's got a face like a tombstone. Like, you know, he's. He'd give him what for. He's not good at like, oh, Jesus Christ, can I talk to your manager or something? I just need to get the fucking bag on the plane.

Like, you know, that's... Yeah, he's not a good Karen. No. He's a bad Karen. No, no, no. And the one thing he can't deal with right now is like Edie McClurg, you know? What if that's in the film?

If he's like, all right, so I got a wrestler, I got a corrupt cop, I got a Karen, obviously, a great Karen. I'm going to need a Karen for the airport. I know a wrestler. I got a corrupt cop. I got a Karen, obviously. A great Karen. I'm going to need a Karen for the airport. I know that already. She's getting us through all the gates.

It's going to be great. Ocean's 8 was like three years too early to have a Karen. But it absolutely would have been one of the... Katherine Hahn would have played a Karen. Oh, she would have been amazing. Three years later. What do we need? Her phone is immediately open.

She's like i'm filming all of this what's your name a pickpocket a karen don't hide your badge i want to see your name uh so okay so the yeah there are other scenes we want to get into in particular like you know a lot of the early part of this movie is set up and then we are just delving into the inner lives i feel feel like, of all these characters. Briefly. I mean, this movie has one of those stories I love

where, like, they shoot it this way, they edit it this way with the sort of jumbled chronology. They test screen it or they show it to the studio. The studio's like, this is too fucking confusing. Edit this in the right order. They test screen it or they show it to the studio. The studio is like, this is too fucking confusing. Edit this in the right order.

They test screen it and the audiences hate it even more when it's in the right order. So they're like, fuck you. I guess turn it back. I mean, this must have been kind of a revolutionary thing for the time, I guess, you know, doing stuff out of order. But, you know, it also just shows you how not just how random life is, but how the most seemingly insignificant things are what cause the biggest disasters in real life. You know, the little puppy getting loose, the bad marriage that leads to, you know, the guy telling his wife what's going on like all these little elements keep going back and forth that you know i think that the messing around with time really puts you in that um mindset of i have no control over anything even though i'm trying to impose control that's why i think the narrator is so ironic he's coming back in and saying what day it is saying what

time it is it doesn't matter it doesn't matter this is all gonna end in disaster you know but that right but that's how it's in johnny clay's head right he's like this is clockwork i've done well every piece is arranged and then we're just watching slowly as we're like well no he doesn't actually like you're saying he has no control over this or he doesn't have enough control over this and he's only going to get someone like elisha cook on board because elisha cook is an unstable person like you know right that's how you're going to you know convince someone to join you in a scheme like this if they have their own hardship and jumbling it that way and having the narrator this weird impartial you know voice up in the sky uh being the one who explains it to us and dictates the order of it kind of like turns set up into punchline because you're sort of filling in the blanks in your head noir style

of like okay what's the wind-up of this and when it ends up being such a kind of banal small thing it feels even more absurd that it's escalating to this point you know or or how these things are ultimately undone yeah i mean it's also that that moment when i think even strong hidden when he sees the money on the on the tarmac blowing away when he goes what's the difference he's like i was never ever even close to having this thing succeed it was all an illusion the whole time if i could be undone by that if i could be undone by a fucking... It's so minor.

The guy doesn't even crash. He just sort of makes a slightly hard turn, and that's it. The suitcase is open. Yeah, slightly. Can I just say, Marie Windsor's character, that her boyfriend is called Val Cannon.

That is just a perfect name for a boyfriend who's cucking poor Elisha Hook. Vince Edwards is the actor. He's best known for The Devil's Brigade, I feel like. Well, also very well known for Murder by Contract, which was a huge influence on Taxi Driver. Which is such a good movie. on taxi driver like basically this movie yeah and but all of the the scenes where he's just like alone and working out in his hotel room and exercising um that's all travis pickle and like that movie i i saw that because the uh criterion did that columbia noir collection a while ago

and i remember i watched all of those yeah and that was one of them and that's like it's that's even later than this like 58 or something that's all of those. Yeah. And that was one of them. And that's like, it's, that's even later than this, like 58 or something. And that's one of those things where you're like, Jesus, this is like, this is chilling. Like this is unsettling.

Like this, this doesn't feel like a lot of earlier noirs. Like this is kind of just, yeah. Like, you know, icky, which is cool.

Like, you know, there's not, not much attempt to win us over. Right. Right. This is, and it's in a different way

for different reasons, but this is one of the noirs that feels the most modern to me, you know? And I don't say that as, you know, it doesn't make it better or worse, even though I think this is a phenomenal film. But like, you know, a lot of times when you're going to noir,

what you're going for is the evocation of that very specific feel and the style of that moment. And something about the pacing of this movie, the sort of briskness of it, but also that this sort of disorganized narrative and all of that. And there's a modernism, I think, to the performances in this, which is probably what Kubrick was trying to push towards. Yeah. But as you said, Griff, they edit the movie as we know it. Sterling Hayden's agent sees it and is furious. Bill Shiffrin says, like, you know, what's all this back and forth business? Just when you get into the robbery, you cut. You're going to irritate the audience.

I'm very disappointed in you guys. So they go back and they recut it chronologically and they were like it sucked like it had to be this way like you know it was it was no good it's just a straightforward story um because it's a very simple story oh it's very i mean again when you look back on it sterling hayden's character is not a clever man. He is a jumped up liquor store robber. It's all brutality and violence. It's point A to point B. But in his mind, because I guess he made friends with a chess player, he's like, I want to be I want to do a like a chess move kind of thing.

But he doesn't understand how this works. He doesn't get it what's so telling that the the scene with the wrestler is all about the sort of futility of this plan and like accepting the mediocrity of life here's the one guy who understands the chessboard like literally and figuratively yes and he's being recruited just as a physical muscle to create a distraction he can throw a punch though where three people will fall down from one punch he can clear whole units essentially just by swinging his arm it's just it's funny how overthought this plan is though that he's like i need two distractions going on i not only need a horse to get murdered but i need a wrestler to get into a fist fight like a fucking collection and also by the way wouldn't a horse

being shot at a race make everything that happened around that horse being shot very suspect and they would double check everything about like that you're putting so much more attention on yourself especially the odds on favorite who's like the part of his whole plan is like this horse is gonna have such a commanding lead that when you shoot it all the other horses behind are gonna trip over it and knock down yeah the the fight of the bar he's drawing too much attention to i would not do that where i'm maurice i would i would i would no i yeah but also here's my other question you're right maurice does have a head for chess and he seems to understand. But chess doesn't translate to real life. So why does he go in on this plan?

And what is the letter that he wants the cashier at the chess place to deliver? If I'm not back at 630, is that to his son? Who is that to? Or someone. I feel like it was I was under the assumption it was like an attorney i it wasn't clear to me what he he wants a letter and then if you don't hear about from me by 6 30 then deliver it but if not it was very weird he i mean that's right when he's he gives that sort of monologue about like you've heard of the siberian goatherd who stared at the sun and it made him blind. Right.

Like, I feel like his whole sort of poet lunkhead thing where he's like, look, I'm just here to clear out a bar, you know, as a distraction. But I, for, he has some sort of Zen status about being a criminal,

right? Where he's like, maybe, maybe this is my last day or maybe, you know, I'll be back tomorrow. But, you know, he's, he's like, maybe this is my last day or maybe I'll be back tomorrow. But he's free of any kind of anxieties about it, at least. I mean, he's the character I like the most.

I love that character. I love that character. The fact that he's a philosopher, but he's also basically the thing from the Fantastic Four. That's just the weirdest combination for a character. Especially since all of his lines are the things, these monologues that are so interesting. And then when he has to start a fight,

he just goes to the bar and he's like, hey, can I get some service, you Irish pig? And he swings at the bartender right away. I would punch a hole through this wall for you, but first may I quote from Tolstoy who once wrote that oh god what the hell yeah i i just also think on paper you go we got this like eastern european

wrestler and we're giving him these sort of brutal monologues like these existential monologues about like the meaningness of life and accepting it whatever you you imagine it will come off like blazing saddles with like Mongo just playing Game of Life, where it's like, you can't give this guy this much dialogue. You know, even Ed Wood knew not to give fucking Tor Johnson soliloquies. And then this guy fucking nails it. Do you know how he died? I don't.

No. How did he die? He was 76 years old and he was leaving his regular chess club where he played. And he was jumped by five teenagers, and he decided to fight back and take them on himself. Oh, my God. Nick probably could have handled one or two of them, but five were too many. Jesus Christ. This is what his widow said after his death.

Wait a minute. Hang on. Did he die from the exertion of fighting him or did the teenagers kill him? He was taken to the hospital and died in the hospital. So I guess. I'm guessing it was a combination of both.

Yeah. Yeah. They did some damage. He was, I'm sorry. He was 77. 77 years old. Born in 1903.

He was from Georgia. The, you know, the one in Europe. Not, not, not, not.

Georgia. Yes. Yes. They bumped into each other. Not our group. Yes. Yes. They bumped into each other. Words were exchanged. Nick never took any guff from anybody. And soon he was engaged with a fight with all five kids at once. Holy crap.

I would not dump him. I personally would not jump this guy. I would look at that guy. Even if there are certain people that you, and this is men and women, even when they're older, you look at them and go yeah that no i would never ever mess with that person especially because there's a certain kind of person that even if when they when they when they lose vitality physically they still have that air about them of and i'm quoting um don uh don marrera here saying if you fight me you better kill me because you like it's that kind of thing where it's like yeah this isn't worth it this guy's out of his mind well in this era we're like the most intimidating physical this is him playing

chess with holy shit david just put up the photo photo of kubrick hayden and uh nick uh quarani playing chess beautiful and he's wearing like a short sleeve white button-down shirt like he looks like an office drone. Yeah. Oh my God. It's incredible. Another thing I love about this guy. Yeah.

His name was Kola Kwarani. Kwarani? Kwariani? Kwariani. But his wrestling nickname was Nick the Wrestler. Nick the Wrestler. Right on the tin. Wow.

Man. Nick the Wrestler. Boy, the writer's room on that nickname that must have gone hours give me some work what does he do he's okay uh he's got a first name okay i'll get back to you in four hours i'll have something pretty amazing right now and there's like a whiteboard with like nick no but they came in with nicholas the wrestler and someone was like not quite right oh no you know what i know exactly what happened they wrote nick and wrestler on a chalkboard out in the hallway and then during the night this janitor who was secretly a genius came and he

put he put the word v in between nick and wrestler and they're like oh my god who is doing this what this is amazing some nickname genius walks among us. Oh boy. So, okay. Let me tell you a little more about the post-production on this. So they take their cut, the cut of the film,

the original cut, to United Artists. One person is there. Max Youngstein had a production. He watches it. He says, good job. Let's keep in touch. And they're like, well, what should we do?

They say, where do we go from here? This is Kubrick and Harris. And Max said, what about out the door? And Kubrick said, well, you have other producer filmmaker teams. Where would you rank us with all those people? And Max said, not far from the bottom. So he basically watches the movie and he's like, it appears to be a film.

Good job, guys. Thank you. I will release this. I have no further notes. And they're like, did you like it? And he's like, nah, not really. But so essentially they are, Kubrick and Harris are like, well, they're not going to market this.

Like they're just, we're doomed. This thing isn't going to get any kind of backing. And so they themselves sort of tried to market themselves as like the new ua wonder team they were in like the hollywood reporter and variety and life and things like that trying to be like uh you know uh a wunderkind sort of um pair that that hollywood should get excited, but they did all that themselves. UA kind of ignored it. And then didn't Kirk Douglas see this and went,

oh, this is paths of glory. This is the guy I want. That's the whole thing. It's right. They were like smart about positioning themselves that way, betting on a star is going to recognize us. And like there will be a studio head who recognizes what we have going on. And it was Dory Sherry

at MGM and Kirk Douglas who both were like yeah this makes out like the movie got perfectly good reviews like it was not like badly received or anything but it didn't make much money and UA didn't really care about it they you know they just they put it on a double bill with Bandito the Robert Mitchum

movie but that's that's sort of it i've never seen bandito it's uh that's me neither i think yeah richard fleischer movie wow and there's there's a time magazine review from the time where they're really amped up on it and they predict that it's quote going to make a killing at the cash booth and then the next the next line in the Wikipedia is, the film recorded a loss of $130,000. You know why? Because people hate puns.

They hate puns. They do. And it was too easy a pun to make. It was too easy. It's right. Come on, guys, please. With these sterling performances, this movie should make a killing.

Boo! The thing that speaks to, With these sterling performances, this movie should make a killing. Bull. The thing that speaks to, like, I guess, like you said, obviously Kirk Douglas and etc. Like, that helps. But I do feel like everything that Harris is saying in these recollections of them getting shat on by UA is he's saying, like, Kubrick knew he was good. Like, this was not, like, demoralizing for him. He wasn't walking out of this movie being like, I fucked it up. I should have listened to them.

He was like, no, this movie was good. I did a good job. He finally made something he felt like he could totally stand behind. Right. And also, objectively, he could look at the other movies that were out at the time and go, this is so much fucking better than all this other stuff. I mean, my God.

Yeah, exactly. what's 1950 i'm trying to think like that's sort of i think that's the year around the world in 80 days wins best picture like yeah it's sort of the the the sort of heyday of those like really overblown the ten commandments is a big movie that year the king and i these like gigantic scale uh costume drama things yeah i think danny peary talked about how like late 50s to the early 60s hollywood was in it's like i don't fucking know i don't know like just you know everything i don't know what and then people and it really like kind of it hits its wall with that the year that like um medium cool and bonnie and clyde come out like the studios are putting out like paint your wagon like the no idea what anything is going on in culture or society just out of

their fucking minds so yeah there's that we're we're entering that phase of like all the great movies from this era are these little low budget, you know, experimental shadows, little fugitive, the killing, you know, stuff like that, that people were just trying to do, you know, interesting stuff. Yeah, you look at Best Picture this year and it's like you have Friendly Persuasion in there, but the other four films are Around the World in 80 Days, Giant, King and I, Ten Commandments. Like it's four just humongous sort of epic mega productions like i'll you know the king and i is a is a pretty you know ten commandments it's got you know but like none of those movies are are good watches really like they i mean king and i is probably closest because at least they're singing and dancing in that thing but like like around the world in 80 days is a slog which weird yeah, they each have moments that would become what people wanted to see later.

But they're stuck in the middle of these giant films. So in the middle of giant, you have James Dean doing really cool, you know, experimental acting stuff in the Ten Commandments. Yeah, the movie's goddamn ridiculous. But there are some sequences that are fucking so hallucinatory and psychedelic. Before they knew what psychedelic was, when that green fog comes in, you know, and yeah,

King and I has the singing and then Around the World in 80 Days. I mean, I'm sorry. I tried watching that movie a few months ago and it's all it is, is just, hey, look at this, like the the scene with sinatra in the frontier bar where he turned he's supposed to go hey that's frank sinatra like

he's like playing the piano or whatever like yeah isn't like old buster keaton in that right he shows up or whatever yeah oh is he there i'm sure there wasn't that one of those all-star casts hey everyone's back right we're going around the world, baby. Hey, we're swinging around the world, baby. Yeah, I'm looking at sort of... This is the... La Strada wins Best Foreign Language film. There's little things in the Oscars

when you're sort of poking around. Things like Jamesames dean obviously i mean he's a he's he's already dead obviously you know at this point but you know like there's stuff like that one of the weirdest and coolest oscar wins ever happens this year what's that what the red balloon winning best screenplay the red balloon really yeah the little 30 minute you know the red balloon the classic one best original screenplay yeah right a short non-dialogue film a 35 minute short that's mostly just a boy chasing a balloon one best original screenplay yeah over like the lady killer the bold and the brave la strata the lady killers

it's insane that's oh that's the value to me of the oscars it's not what they get right it's the weird moments where they award something that you do not expect them to award. Yes. Or, and also, the huge misses they have are often so much more valuable to movies because that becomes part of the movie's lore. I mean, you know, Goodfellas is already a brilliant film,

but part of its majesty is the fact that you show that to someone today and they go, and that clearly won Best Picture. You're like, nope. And then you go, can you name what? And no one remembers that it was Dances with Wolves, which, by the way, is also a fine film, but how many times do people watch Dances with Wolves?

Like, Goodfellas is like part of our vernacular now. It's such an amazing piece of filmmaking. Yeah, and like if that had been scorsese's like coronation moment then the rest of his career is probably super different you know and yeah exactly yeah yeah you know i showed away i have a couple of friends um one of the the actress that i did this movie with um i love my dad it was claudia salewski she and her boyfriend they're in their mid-20s and they had we were having dinner with them one night my wife and i and we they'd let casually they'd never seen goodfellas i was like oh come over we'll have dinner we'll watch my screen watching two people in their mid-20s experience goodfellas for the

first time and which is a movie that was made before they were born and they're like it felt like that movie was over in 10 minutes like i couldn't believe how propulsive and there's no CGI. There's no, it's just performance and filmmaking and writing is keeping me glued to this screen. That movie could, it was just amazing to watch them experience it. Was there any moment where they were like,

Oh, I knew that. Like, you know, like it's always fun to watch a film that has fully entered the cultural lexicon with someone who doesn't know maybe that it's coming, right? Like some line or something. Yeah, the whole, the how am I funny scene,

you know, the how am I funny, the, oh, you broke your cherry, apparently because the guy is a musician and he's heard that amongst other musicians. Like, oh my God, I just signed this deal with Warner Brothers and they totally fucked me over. Oh broke your cherry like welcome to the world now you know how shitty everything is and also just the way that they used music in that film it's all um soundtrack but it tells a story at the same time and especially one thing that i hadn't um realized

was at the end when henry is driving around and he's just out of his mind on coke and seeing helicopters the way they cut the songs together is how you listen to music when you're coked out of your head you're just zipping around the dial listen to two seconds of this song eight seconds of this song a minute of this one like it's all the soundtrack design is a feat in itself that I don't think ever has been equaled ever, ever in a film. There's that thing that I feel like circulated around the internet a couple of years ago where he sent the script to Michael Powell of Powell and Pressburger to get his thoughts before they started filming the movie. And Powell had this amazing, like typed up cover letter that's essentially like this script is great but Jesus Christ how the fuck are you gonna pull this off yeah like he was just like the relentlessness and this sort of like this thing is just like a bullet train it is but like

I don't envy you trying to make this movie but if you can pull it off it's what's the last line he says dear Marty it is a stunning script and will make a wonderful film and a priceless social document. And he's right. And by the way, one of the first I'm sure you guys already know this. And this will bring us back to the killing because we're talking about that, you know, directors who really respect the documentary feel and the realism almost to a fault. The scene, the Maury's wig shop commercial. They there was there's a version of that that Scorsese shot. And he was like, there's something wrong.

This doesn't work. Because he was basing it on an actual commercial that he saw for a wig shop growing up that was made by the guy who ran the wig shop. So he tracked the guy down and had him shoot the commercial that you see in Goodfellas that is shot that footage was shot and cut by the guy who owned that wig shot that's that's because with me i'm i won't

be able to prevent myself it'll be too bright right yeah exactly i want this guy which by the way one of those one of the standout moments of the movie. It's so amazing. That sequence is incredible. But like Kubrick getting back to Kubrick, which is I will – and again, this is so weird how he got away from this. I will sacrifice something looking good and professional if I can have something more real and immediate. Getting back to that fight with Lucian Ballard. No, let's do it with a wide angle lens. Make it look weird. I know how it's going to look.

It's also fascinating when you read sometimes these anecdotes that will come out about Kubrick's favorite movies. There are those stories about him seeing, whatchamacallit, Modern Romance. I've always wanted to make a movie about jealousy. Yeah, right. Right, and he was just like like how did you do this like i need you albert brooks to give me stanley kubrick notes because you've captured a thing i failed to find a way to get on camera into in albert's to albert's credit modern romance is a genuinely brilliant film that has aged so well and is so immediate about exactly how we are now there are

moments in that movie that you just cringe watching they're so brilliant they're so brilliant incredible movies he had great taste but when you hear that kubrick was like sending letters to steve martin about the jerk which is similarly a classic and going like please give me notes how do you guys how did you pull this off you know well i will say i don't think stanley really understood humor uh and a lot of his humor is most fascinated by that right that and also because his idea of humor is very cruel it's very it's almost like and i love the coen brothers but a lot of their humor even though a lot of the movies has made me laugh but when you i just re-watched raising arizona

with our daughter and um she's like, they're really mean to these people. I'm like, yeah, like they are very cruel to their protagonists in their films. I think if you're if you're Kubrick and you're watching someone like Steve Martin or Albert Brooks who is able to like turn that criticism on themselves, make themselves the avatar of the movie. Yes. And then dissect that character that much i think he's like flummoxed by that right and that was a that was a great thing uh from the 70s and it kind of held over a little bit with gary shandling and ricky gervais which is when the true comedian when they see what's wrong with society they don't want to be the person pointing out what's wrong i want to play the thing that's wrong to show you maybe how that thing got to be the way it is.

And especially if you watch Brooks, our Brooks Martin Mull, Steve Martin, even early Richard Pryor was in Blue Collar, was so good at playing what the problem was rather than the hero. Such a fucking good performance. Oh my God, he's so good in that. That's really one of my favorite movies in that decade. That's like a heartbreaking performance. Heartbreaking. It sort of falls into like the Sandler punch-drunk love territory where you watch that movie and you're like, I wish he did one of these every four years. Yeah.

I love that he did everything else in his career, but I wish he was able to find someone like Schrader to write such a perfect dramatic role for him once every four or five years. What's so brilliant about Adam Sandler is he really, I think he recognizes, and it's hard to articulate it because he doesn't want to be the guy pointing it out. Again, a true comedian like Sandler doesn't want to be the guy pointing out. He wants to personify it that a lot of male energy, especially in the 21st century, is based on infantilism and rage. And there's a lot of that. It's funny, but it's also sad that these guys just want to stay little kids their whole lives. But at one point, you have to be dragged into adulthood, and the best you can hope for is to do it on your own terms.

And, you know, in Big Daddy, there's some really beautiful, touching moments in that film. In the middle of a lot of goof big daddy there's a there's some really beautiful touching moments in that film in the middle of a lot of goofiness there's like oh he's having to you got to be an adult now you know and and so uh punch drug love is just a more direct version of that the scene in big daddy where he takes him to mcdonald's to get breakfast and it's too late for breakfast and he kind of loses it in the mcdonald's right is not that far from like Punch Drunk Love like from his weird little freak outs where he's too embarrassed to be in public anymore or whatever you know it's that scene I the the McDonald's scene in Big Daddy is very wrenching for some reason for like I've never forgotten

that scene there's something and in Punch Drunk Love they show you kind of where he why he is the way he is because of his horrible sisters and the way he was raised right they have that scene where he throws the chair through the window because you're like oh this guy was abused um by people who thought they were just like oh we're just we're just making jokes come on okay can't you take it can't you take a joke and you know so there's a lot of that i mean he's a he I mean, he's a genius hiding under a lot of goofiness, in my opinion. And even Big Daddy has, you know, it's not as deeply characterized as the sister stuff in Punch Drunk Love. But, like, oh, he's got this dad looming over him who just constantly thinks he's a fucking idiot.

He spent his entire life being like, my son is dumb. Yeah. And his entire personality has built around son is dumb yeah and his entire personality has built around i'm a dumb guy yeah yeah which which you realize he created as a defense mechanism like if i'm right which is already if i'm already so clownish and and goofy then the other person's gonna feel stupid making fun of me like if i'm already doing it for them then then it takes away their power going back to something you brought up patten uh that this movie is coming on the threshold of like we're within five years of new hollywood starting to rear its head right and a big part of that and also a big part of like um the the calle de cinema guys Cinema guys in Paris and everything is this sort of reclaiming of B movies of genre movies of elevating them to high art.

And this movie is in this very weird position where it's like a kind of it is like a psychologically lofty B movie. It is not trying to purport itself to be anything more serious. It's not trying to turn itself into white heat, you know, into like a crime epic or anything. But it just has a little more thought, a little more resonance, a little more sort of sadness, a little more craft. And when you look at the best pictures from this year, it's like all the huge epics we cited, and then like melodramas or like tennessee williams adaptations or like you know biopics or the biggest like yeah like the lust for life is this year the van gogh movie right you know stuff like that baby doll uh friendly persuasion we said uh

you know bold and the brave one of hitchcock's most bloated movies uh Man Who Knew Too Much is this year. Really? Yeah, Written on the Wind. You know, it's like you need someone like you need someone like Kirk Douglas to recognize this guy is punching above his weight class. Right.

And I need to put him into a genre that they'll support a little more. Kirk Douglas in a war movie is an easy enough thing to sell. But that's an unending cycle, I think, in all of the arts. You always get the person who's young and scrappy

and doing something amazing, and then they turn into the bloated one that the new version of young and scrappy has to come along. So for every... I'm sure there was a time when Emerson, Lake, and Palmer and Yes were the scrappy young rebels going against whatever the rock and roll was. But by the early 70s, they were these giant bloated like, what the hell happened to us?

And then you need the Ramones to come along to go, guys, three chords. It's fun, guys. Remember fun? Remember how this was supposed to be fun? Remember when you had fun doing this? So that has to keep, that happens over and over and over again. We even just think about like kiss being like a fucking statement of opposition. And it was at the time.

It was, and then it became this massive bloated, okay. And then you had to have someone come along and go, no, it's this actually. You know, I mean, again, all the young people coming up in the 80s, people like Bruce Springsteen and Prince and stuff, by the late 80s, early 90s, they'd become these bloated stadium monsters. So then Nirvana's got to come along.

And you know, it just keeps happening over and over and over again. It's the circle of life i'm waiting for it to happen right now but i think you see a little bit of i mean the whole sort of elevated horror conversation which can get really exhausting but what comes out of it is like there's now become a commercial model for people to make weirder films that can get wide distribution and can actually become like a topic of discourse in the general conversation you know um we're like david you were even just saying we were

like looking at the box office and you were like it's kind of crazy that men has made like eight million dollars yeah that's true and it's sort of viewed as like a flop that that people aren't very happy with but you were able to release it like semi-wide and have it play at fucking malls and have people arguing about it yeah in a way that's exciting there's fucking people who saw that movie who will think about it for 10 years and that's true of any of these things right you know even if like 90 of people are walking out upset or indifferent you know there's a even a movie like men which i like but you know i thought was flawed and some people don't like whatever uh but you know there's just enough people who are going to see it and be like well there was something there that i can't stop thinking about

right you know maybe they want to make a movie one day i don't know it's also weird how like right now of all of all the streaming services and i have you know i have criterion i have canopy shutter shutter has become the place to go to see emerging filmmakers. It's ridiculous how amazing that channel, and they're financing stuff now. They're finding stuff. So some of their originals are just like, oh, that person's going to be a huge filmmaker.

I think that's a great call. It's like the Corman model. It's become an ecosystem that supports interesting developing filmmakers. Yeah, like here's a little bit of money. Do whatever you want. Right. You know, like no real restrictions. Yeah.

Yeah, there's a movie that's on Shudder now called Anything for Jackson. One of the genuinely, not just scary, but brilliantly made, like these guys are going to be amazing filmmakers. Here's a launch. You go to their IMDB. these guys are going to be amazing filmmakers. Here's the launch. You go to their IMDb, they have spent the last 10 years writing the Canadian equivalent of Hallmark movies.

All their other movies are like, A Puppy for Christmas. And, you know, Santa's. Wait, I'm looking up. Love in Harmony Valley. Yes. Baby in a manger. Anything for Jackson is so disturbing and terrifying

and I've kind of become friends with them they're like yeah we had our script for anything for Jackson we took it around and everyone's like yeah it's good I don't can't really make it right this is 10 years ago but a friend of ours was like this people they're looking for quick and dirty can someone write can someone direct like yeah we need the money

and they fell into that world very profitable they're good movie makers and then they finally it's the same george romero thing of i'm just an industrial filmmaker i've got this idea for a zombie movie um if he had never made night of the living dead he still would have been a successful filmmaker he had a very successful company yeah um he just happened to also be an artist um in the middle of being a total professional. And same with these guys who are like, we got to pay the bills. A puppy for Christmas pays off our bills.

Well, I'll do it. No one else is giving us money to make anything for Jackson. And finally, thank God they got it done. You know, it's amazing. I love stories like that. If all you're looking to do is get a screenplay produced and have that experience and that credit, I think strategically the smartest move you could make is writing a TV Christmas romance film. Yeah, why not? It's just like 60 of these are going to get greenlit per country per year.

Right. By the way, Stephen King regularly reads and recommends romance novels because he goes romance novelists know how to tell a story and keep you moving through it even hit the beat just here we go here we go and he reads them to remind himself wait a minute get rid of the bloat let's let's tell the goddamn story here yeah is there anything else you want to say about the killing before we play the box office game the one thing i wanted to mention of course is the clown mask that he puts on which you know nolan obviously pays homage to in the dark night it of course, is the clown mask that he puts on, which, you know, Nolan obviously pays homage to in The Dark Knight. It looks basically the same, the clown mask.

But I also do love that when he's putting on the, I think it's intentional. Like, he is a bit of a fool. Like, you know, it is this weird sort of double, yeah, double edged thing of him putting on this scary mask. But he also kind of looks like an idiot. The last thing I'm going to mention before I hop off, because i know this is a big controversy and i'm still not convinced i'm sure you all know the um is rodney dangerfield in this film there's that big question uh-huh uh there's a guy in the during the fight sequence you can freeze the frame he looks like rodney i don't think it's rodney i just just don't think it's Rodney Dangerfield. You can freeze frame it, and there's a guy who's got the jaw.

Yes, and he's got the eyes. I would love it to be Rodney. I don't think it's Rodney. He is currently on IMDb. I don't think it's him. And I want it to be him. It does kind of look like him. I mean, it's listed on IMDb, which is obviously like user submitted and edited, right?

As onlooker, uncredited. His first official credit isn't until 1968, which is 12 years after this. Yes, again, I don't think. I mean, look, Groucho Marx is listed as being in the candidate, and he's not in the candidate. There's a guy at a barbecue that looks like him, and it's not him. And they put him on IMDB and it's so not him. Right. Okay, box office

game. And just one final thought, I just wanted to say, I think I would have been able to pull this off. Oh yeah, of course. That's just my last thought. In and out. I think I would have been able to do it. Just a little gaffer tape on the suitcase. Yeah, you're fine. Exactly. Gotta have tape on the suitcase. Yeah, you're fine. Exactly.

Gotta have tape on ya. Pat, when we covered Sam Raimi's A Simple Plan on this movie, Ben texted us and he said, if I had been in this movie, everything would have worked out and the movie would have ended with me living on a tropical island that I own. Anytime Ben watches a heist movie in which people

fuck it up, he believes I could have done this. I could have pulled this off. I would have scored big. I'm confident. I don't know. Yeah, always. The week this came out, we're going to guess the top five, Griff, of the box office. This movie

premiered nationwide in June 1956. It premiered in New York a little earlier, but we're doing nation. Number one at the box office is probably the best movie in 1956. Maybe. It's probably the best movie It's kind of a masterpiece of the genre. The Searchers.

It's The Searchers. Bingo. Well done. You might beat me at this one, Patton. Number two at the box office, Griff, is not a movie I've seen. It's a George Cukor movie starring Ava Gardner. Okay. Based on a novel griff is a i'm not a movie i've seen it's a george cuckoo movie starring ava gardner okay um based on a novel uh big movie i think kind of a hit you're there's no way you're gonna know this uh stewart granger is it based on anything is it it's a novel so based on a novel contessa

no kind of the right territory. It's set in India. It's a big like Indian Anglo-Indian epic. Avergarner looks great. No. Does it have rains in the title? No. It's a location. It's a junction

in fact. Alright. The movie is called Bawani Junction. has anyone heard of bawani junction wow no no no absolutely not i don't know avid gardner looks good on the poster can i just circle back just for a moment it's funny to think about the searchers feels like one of those movies where you're like oh when it came out critics hated it and it flopped right later through this modern prism right to think of it playing as like this fat titty blockbuster yeah it was a big hit and like you it was a big it was a big hit and it

like had like a dell comics tie-in like kids were fucking buying wow the comic adaptation of the searchers this movie about loneliness um yeah the searchers rules uh yeah um okay number three i mentioned it already it's a hitchcock movie i really think it's one of his worst movies it's a iconic movie man who knew too much yeah man who knew too much it's a remake obviously it's got k sarah uh that whole that whole scene at the end when they're singing the song that's oh my god i oh god i hate that scene so much and like pat pat what you were saying about stripping it down it's like he's gonna do vertigo and psycho and you know like he's yeah i feel like at the apotheosis of a sort of like movie star hollywood shit that he's gonna stop doing right sometimes you have to feel the bloat a little bit to go okay wait a second

and strip all this shit down. This is ridiculous. Yeah. So yeah, not an amazing movie. Number four, if it's new this week, is a documentary film in which a guy is filming The Seven Wonders of the World. Guess what it's called? The Seven Wonders of the World? That's right.

I have never heard of this movie. Why would people do this? It's a two-hour movie. It just a guy like the pyramids i don't know like he's just going around you know what back then it was it was a fucking novelty it wasn't easy to travel so like a guy made a movie where he went and took pictures of him i'll go look at those pictures and people still couldn't get over movie cameras like the idea that it's like you're gonna watch moving pictures there was a period when they started doing the blu-ray releases of like the disney classics in the late 2000s or

whatever they also started restoring all these like disney nature documentary shorts and some of them were just like a river yeah and you'd watch it and it was just 15 minutes of river photography with like dramatic underscoring and you're like why you'd watch it and it was just 15 minutes of river photography with like dramatic underscoring and you're like why would anyone watch this and then two minutes later you are captivated just absolutely transfixed um number five of the box office is a musical i would say not a great movie is a movie that is sort of a part of what we were talking about the sort of like very very bloated hollywood big budget picture of the time and sort of the stuff that fossy was was rebelling right i mean it's a wonderful musical yeah no beef it's just it's not a particularly good movie i don't

know my musicals what is it it is oklahoma uh oh that's a great that's a great musical it's a wonderful musical and it's a wonderful musical and it's one of those things where when I was a kid I loved Oklahoma the musical so I was like can I see the movie my mom was like sure and she put it on and she was like it kind of sucks I'm sorry like it's too bad the only thing that's good in it is

Rod Steiger plays Judd plays the villain and he rules yeah that's good counseling I feel like no one ever talks about that movie no it's one of those very it's a Fred Zinnemann movie it's a very staid nice looking you know

straightforward adaptation of Oklahoma that just doesn't have a lot of life Eddie Albert yeah Gloria Graham James Whitmore it's got good people yeah obviously but Gloria Graham is like Adu Annie like the Shirley Jones and Gordon McRae are the stars. Yeah.

So that's the box office in 1956. I love an old box office game. Yeah. You've also got the lady killers in there. You got, you know, the man in the gray flannel suit. You got some good movies. Well, gentlemen, this was delightful. I do have to hop off.

No, Patton, thank you so much for doing this. But before you do that, tell us about your movie. It's available right now. At the time this episode comes out, yes, it'll be available digitally and hopefully also still playing in theaters in some places. Yes. My movie is called I Love My Dad, and it's written, directed, and co-starring a young filmmaker, took a chance on a young filmmaker, James Morissini, just an incredible, incredible talent, and basically it's about a real thing that happened to him in real life, he had kind of disowned his dad and blocked

him on all social media, so his dad created a fake Facebook profile of a hot girl to catfish him, so he could stay in touch with him but he ended up falling in love with the girl and it just it is a it is a hilarious

dark cringe fest you will absolutely love it it's streaming now on Apple TV it's still in some theaters definitely I really

really think you'll like it I'm very excited to see it thanks for coming on the show, Patton. Oh, guys, thank you so much. Thanks for having me on. Down the road, in the future,

there's some other big movie you want to do a deep dive on. I'm happy to do it again. This was great. Oh, absolutely. You got it. No, you've been a dream guest for so long. If any of our listeners have not read Silver Screen Fiend, it is clear that you're the same sort of uh

compulsive obsessive thinker about all of these movies and watcher addict yes let's just say why why don't dibble dabble addict no but that book is about you kind of finding a healthy relationship to movies after years of true crippling addiction. Crippling is the right word. Oh my god. Wow! Thanks, guys. But you've always been a dream guest because of exactly what happened, which is what I always imagine would happen if you came on the show, is all these

sudden jags of all three of us going, that reminds me of this movie. Do you remember this thing? That person's career? That's what I love the most about this kind of stuff. I love it. I love those weird yeah, the weird connections. Best shit in the world. We will bug you to come on again sometime. Let me leave you guys with one more Timothy Carey story

that someone told me. Please. Okay. Please. Timothy Carey was originally cast on Laverne and Shirley as Squiggy's dad. What? He was going to play Squiggy's dad.

Oh, boy. But he got fired. Sure. The first day, I was talking to him. I was having lunch with Michael McKean. I go, how, why did you fire Timothy Carey carey he's like we didn't want to fire him we wanted timothy carey so badly but that he would not stop farting his whole thing was like on command just no no not even he's like his whole philosophy was the minute you have to fart you should immediately fart like for your health like he was all about that never hold it really so he would sit there and goes what's the uh um what's the policy on breaking wind here and then they're like well we

too late they just kind of go like this and they're like okay and then after the first day i think like penny and david lander went to were like, we got to get rid of this guy. He's out of his fucking mind. And they wanted him so badly. But another actor came in to play Squeaky. But originally he was cast to play Squeaky's dad and he got fired for farting. That is incredible. And now a new aspiration for my own career.

That's the limit I want to test. Fart whenever, when you feel it. If you feel it when you if you feel it fart it don't don't hesitate that's gonna be my new like brando-esque test for directors i'm working with if you feel it fart it yeah uh thank you so much again for being on the show everyone check out i love my dad and thank you all for listening please remember to rate review and subscribe thank you to marie Barty for her social media, helping put the show together. Lane Montgomery,

the Great American Doll, for our theme song. AJ McKeon and Alex Barron for our editing. Joe Bowen, Pat Reynolds for our artwork. You can go to blankcheckpod.com for links to some real nerdy shit, including our Patreon page, Blank Check Special Features, where we do franchise commentaries. And I think at this point

we've finished up Batman and we're moving on to the roger moore bonds that's right yep having fun uh so look for that including what i'll just tease is i think a very exciting kubrick themed plan we have for talking the walk later this year and And as always, I still cannot believe that David jumped on Patton's telly of the Bronson Pinchot. I'm sorry. I violently refuse any apology for that.

Alright, fine. I'm proud of myself.