Blank Check with Griffin & David - The Ward with Drew McWeeny

Episode Date: December 5, 2021

We’ve spent four months in the Mouth of Madness with the Horror Master, and we’ve reached the end point of Carpenter’s directorial career...for now. A man who has *actually collaborated with John Carpenter* - Drew McWeeny (writer of Carpenter’s installments in the Masters of Horror series) - joins us to recontextualize our journey through Carpenter’s filmography with some exclusive behind-the-scenes tidbits. The Two Friends also discuss the strange career trajectory of Amber Heard (starting with the festival-smash-that-doesn’t-exist ALL THE BOYS LOVE MANDY LANE), present their final Carpenter rankings, and reveal which Auteur they’ll cover on the podcast next. Plus - Ben learns the fun British term “video nasty” from David who grew up in England? Join our Patreon at patreon.com/blankcheck Follow us @blankcheckpod on Twitter and Instagram! Buy some real nerdy merch at shopblankcheckpod.myshopify.com

listen don't let this place get to you. You stay locked up long enough, and you start to believe that you're a podcast. Do you know what the line? You must know what the line is. I don't know. What are you replacing there? No, no, David. I don't know what the line is.

I have no idea what the line is. Yes, the line is you start to believe that you're nuts. I don't know. What lines are there in this movie? You know what? Yeah, no, that's fine. Here are some of the other lines in this movie. I don't know. What lines are there in this movie? You know what? Yeah, no, that's fine. Here are some of the other lines in this movie. I I'm a little girl.

Hmm. I'm flirty. I'm artsy and I wear glasses. I don't think you're doing lines from the movie right now. I think you're you're. I think those are verbatim. I think those are verbatim. And that's that's that character's introduction.

Iris, where she just kind of tells them, oh, I'm the crazy one. Oh, no, I'm sorry. I got Iris and Emily confused. Iris is the artsy glasses one. She's the one who says, you stay in here long enough, you start to become convinced that you're nuts. Yeah, so you got

Iris is glasses and you've got Sarah. What's she? Sarah is flirty flirty right zoe is is baby it's sort of like the spice girls right oh right yeah right you're right now that i think about it kristin is scary she's very scary uh i think sarah is ginger sarah is ginger zoe is baby the question i guess emily is posh and iris is sporty i'm sort of falling it's sort of we're losing the thread we're losing it a little bit yeah that's okay there's still you know inside of us are all there are five spices right yeah that's that's the idea. And the spice melange, I like

to call it, inside all five of us. David, David, you know, this is the end of our John Carpenter miniseries. I should say, of course, that this is a Blank Check with Griffin and David. I'm Griffin. I'm David. That's a podcast

about filmographies, directors who have massive success early on in their careers and are given a series of blank checks to make whatever crazy passion projects they want

and sometimes those checks clear and sometimes they bounce baby and for the last oh almost five months

we've been doing the films of John Carpenter Johnny C wait five months really I think we started August September

October November December I mean it's a little under five months four and a half or something right wow we started August, September, October, November, December. I mean, it's a little under five months, four and a half or something, right? Wow. We started end of August. We're finishing beginning of December. I don't know. I mean, time's an illusion. But hey, it was a good ride. It was a great ride. It was a great ride that Ben, producer Ben, you gifted to us because, of course, John Carpenter was the winner

of our March Madness series where once a year we let our listeners vote for which director we're going to cover. And we did brackets where we each picked our elite eight. And Ben's pick, John Carpenter, his top pick, ended up winning this whole thing. This has been a bit of a Ben's choice. In a very chill and ordinary competition. Definitely didn't stress me out. Absolutely. As I was on the verge of becoming a father.

Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. But the point is, we've known that this was on the books. And it's been public knowledge that this was on the books for a long time. Leading into then five months of actually doing the episodes. And I feel like the thing that's been hanging over us like the sword of damocles this entire time is we have to end on the ward the ward john carpenters i guess so you know what griffin i hinted at this you know i think i thought this

movie was way worse than it is because i guess it like never really came out and sure the the poster made it look like torture porn yeah and then i watched it and i was like oh that wasn't so bad like it's not you know it's probably it might be his worst movie but that doesn't that doesn't mean it's like it was it was i felt okay watching it this is the thing i i i think it's his worst movie sort of by default. I don't think it's like a horrible film. I don't think it's anywhere near the bottom of the barrel

of movies we've covered on this show. But I do think in its own way, it's like the most depressing end to a series we've had so far. That's sort of my thesis I'm working on.

I don't agree with you for a bunch of reasons I was saying this to Ben and our guest who can talk at any time at any time that's true yeah you can just jump in it's encouraged but uh the Burton

mini and a couple other times, I think a little bit with the Spielberg mini, the, our very long minis, they sometimes end with us being like, all right, enough of this.

Right. You know, we're just kind of like, okay, we've, we've had the conversation. We're just sort of having it over. I agree.

I agree. I don't feel that way here. I could do another month of this guy. I know the saddest one. The saddest one is roadies that is the saddest end well sure that is the saddest end that was that was tough man you guys watched that whole thing too i know in like one night it's also weird there there have not even been like whispers i feel like of another cameron crowe project since then and it's not like he's persona

non grata like he does interviews and he'll do retrospectives and he re-releases the almost famous soundtrack on an 18 disc set that I bought like an idiot. It feels like post Aloha. He just went, I'm good. I think I've done it. Well, but then roadies is like right after Aloha and you're like,

okay, Cameron scale it back with another writer, get back into the sweet spot and then Rhodey is you're right perhaps an even more depressing end wasn't he supposed to make Beautiful Boy

he was I guess that yeah he was at the time we did the miniseries that's what he was attached to do and there was a thing where he said he had written a script

that was like his small change that he wanted to make a movie that was like all kids because he wow saw a lot of kids he liked when he was casting Aloha and he started writing something just for an ensemble of children. Neither of those movies I've heard anything about for so long.

Obviously, Beautiful Boy got made by someone else. I think the difference here is, and then I'm going to make a very smooth, clean transition into introducing our guest formally, who is talking a perfect amount for not having been introduced yet, but could talk even more if he wants, is that with Burton, with Crow,

even, I mean, Spielberg, I'd say less of a thing because you're like, Spielberg's made good movies since we, you know, finished covering him. We go back and circle around to him. Burton's going to make more stuff.

I don't know how excited I am about the stuff he's going to make going forward, but he's going to make more stuff. Right. Uh, two more Dumbo, two Dumbo versus Trumbo. But I am trying to fly in the bathtub.

Um, there is just the question of whether this is the the last thing john carpenter does yes right the uh is that really he doesn't want to do one last kind of obviously he works he does music he he's out there that's what he's right that's the thing that makes it more depressing to me than the other directors uh you mentioned i mean the only other one no here's the answer there's one that's more depressing than this that we've covered it's john singleton's career ending with abduction because it's like book formally closed that's true that's worse because there's no uh and you know what griffin the witches was a pretty bad final we've had a lot of bad last episodes of miniseries of late.

Yeah, but Brooks tanks pretty hard at the end too with how did this get, or how did, uh. Yes, yes, yes. I can't even remember the damn title anymore. What do you know? How do you know? How did this get made? Drew, are you implying that that title

is nonspecific and difficult to remember? Oh, not at all. It's incredibly specific and I just can't remember it. It's my problem, I'm sure. Look, the tee up I'm doing here is that our guest today is, despite being someone who's long overdue to get on the pod, is someone who has is something of a carpenter expert and has very close connection to Carpenter in many ways. And he reached out as soon as Carpenter won and said, I'd love to do anything. He reached out as soon as Carpenter won and said, I'd love to do anything. And we kind of like I went to you, Drew, and I said, would you take the bullet for the ward?

Like, I don't want to end on a downer. I think you're such a blockbuster guest for Carpenter. Would you mind juicing up a movie we might have less to talk about with more context? It feels like a great place to come in and talk, Carpenter, because we can kind of now talk because I've listened to your whole series, except what hasn't gone up yet. And I've really enjoyed the series. I find that when I listen to Blank Check, yours is one of the few podcasts I yell at a lot. I just I want to be in the middle of the conversation frequently. I'm like, oh, I want to I want to let me interject. But of course, you can't hear me for some reason. So, yeah.

So this series has been definitely full of that. And and there's like it's a perfect moment because this was the movie he made right after I had spent several years working with him. So it's it's a perfect moment of timing. That's the other thing. It just felt like I was like, I don't think this is the movie you'd be most excited to talk about but i think in a way it could end up being the most interesting episode for you to come on just because of where it lands on everything but our guest today of course film critic drew mcweeney of voie the netflix series but also writer of john carpenter's pro and cigarette burns. Voir. Oh, right. Indeed. Voir. Voir. Voir.

Voir. Before we begin, I told you, Griffin, that I have a very special Ben story. Oh, yes. I have something to tell Ben, to share with Ben,

that I've been excited to share with you. Yes. Ben, when I first moved to Los Angeles, back in 1990, I looked around for whatever film job i could get i was

managing a theater but i was also taking whatever film side jobs i could get and my first big gig was as an extra and i did extra work in a couple of movies including clifford i am in clifford shit wait oh true wait okay when what scene hold on is it at the is it at the party when he throws oh my god i am at the party so they shot that party house out in the pacific palisades and it was this entire night and to do the dance to get everybody in sync for dancing they would play the first like 25 seconds of groove is in the heart and then stop the music and we had to keep the beat to that i still to this day cannot hear groove is in the Heart without getting a twitch like that beginning. It's

burned in, but it was about four or five hours of just watching Martin Short do schtick from about five feet away. So that's incredible evening. It was an unbelievable evening. Yeah. Are you visible in the movie from like here down? That's okay. Okay. Yeah.

Okay. There's a whole there's a whole section of the party where this is all you get of anybody basically yeah but i'd recognize that torso we should mention that uh you you are currently wearing a porkchop express uh shirt indeed right over your shoulder you're just filming in what i assume is your office but the framing of the zoom window right now directly over your shoulder is the head of of the demon from just popping in to say hi what's up it looks like he's sneaking behind you do you take zoom meetings and just not acknowledge it exactly exactly he's just back there keeping company drew i want to just start out with asking you the massive, all-consuming question.

Sure. Can you tell us about your relationship with John Carpenter? And I mean, in all senses, as a film fan and then also as you became someone who got to collaborate with him. I had a really weird series of encounters with Carpenter over the course of my life

because I met him when I was 14. I was I lived in Chattanooga in Tennessee and had no connections to the film industry. My friend's mom did extras casting. So she'd done movies like The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia and The Dollmaker and a couple of things like that. But nothing really big had come through. And then she gets this notice that this John Carpenter film is coming to town. And she reaches out to my mom and says, hey, I think I can probably get him a day on the set just to stand around in the background. Would he be interested? So I went and it ended up being a truly formative, life changing experience, because I when I got to the base camp, they were

shooting. It was the scene for starman okay so he comes into town for starman and they shot a ton of it in that area they shot the big forest fire in that area the scene that i was there for was the day um the guy pulls them over on the side of the road and they get out and uh he blows the fire or the telephone pole up with the spheroid and then the guy gets back in his truck and drives away so it's like an encounter on the side of the road. And when I got to base camp, they drove me out. The unit publicist drove me out. The whole way out, I was ranting and raving about.

So I read in Starlog that this was going to be Brian De Palma and then they changed studios. And halfway to the location, he's like, what are you? What kind of freaky little movie trivia machine are you? You mutant. So he got me out to the set and introduced me to Carpenter. And I have zero idea. Like hearing all the stories about grumpy John makes no sense to me because literally he took a 14 year old, sat me next to him in Video Village, talked to me all day and then introduced me to the movie stars and really answered questions

and told me what he was doing. And there was zero reason to. I was nobody. I it wasn't like there was some favor he was doing for somebody important. I was just some kid that came to the set and lost his mind. And yeah, he ended up giving me a copy of the scripts was the first screenplay I ever read, an actual screenplay format. And it was life changing. And then years and years go by, I moved to LA in 1990 and I start working at Dave's Video, a Laserdisc store. And he's one of our customers.

And I remember the first day he came in and we had a copy, we had just gotten in a letterbox copy of the thing. And so I asked my manager, I said, do you mind if I just pull that and get John too? And he goes, no, no, it's fine. John won't care. And so I did that. And as he was signing it,, no, no, it's fine. John, John won't care. And so I did that.

And as he was signing it, I said, listen, you won't remember this. But years ago when you were shooting Starman and I didn't even finish and he started laughing. He goes, are you the kid with the broken arm? I said, yeah, that was that was me. And he goes, oh, yeah, I remember you. Wow. You were a lot. And so I ended up getting to know him a little bit there.

And then when Ain't It Cool started and I started working there, I interviewed him a few times for that. And he just kind of invited, opened the door on the process. Was like, well, listen, I'm doing stuff. When Ghost of Mars was shooting or in post, he said, why don't you come down and hang out? I'm going to score the film. And so I went to the recording studio and just hung out while he was recording. And for that film, his entire technique was he would have a guest in, like Buckethead, and then he would have a joint going,

and he would just stand there and play guitar while he was watching stuff and go, play something. And Buckethead would play something and go, yeah, it's good. It was the craziest, like, three weeks of watching him work,

and he was so entertaining. But it was just like, I kept running into him and kept having these encounters. So when Masters of Horror got off the ground, I was connected to him i met mick garris is the one that okay so that was that was my more specific question okay interesting yeah it was it was not because of john it was mick garris who i had also met at dave's video and mick was the first guy in this town to really open doors for me and um let me on sets. And Mick was amazing.

I could tell you stories about the hook set because when Sleepwalkers was shooting, like it's Mick was connected to all sorts of stuff and let us in a lot of doors. But he was the one that called us and said, listen, we're doing this. And if you want to pitch, you can pitch a couple of things. And he bought both of them in the room the first day. He said, we'll just do these for the two seasons. We'll do back to back. So you decide which one you want to do first. And we did Cigarette Burns first.

And it was only after we turned it in that John read it and committed to it. And that was kind of one of those moments. To interrupt you for a moment to zoom out for context for people who don't know. So this is post Ghosts of Mars and Carpenters like I'm out, right? Yes. And he was very done. He was retired. Yeah, right right he was like over it and i think a thing that we've come to realize or at least surmise uh as this has been going on uh david and i is that like there does seem to be this disconnect between the the grumpy

carpenter of uh poll quotes in interviews and who the guy kind of actually is. And there was a kind of self-protective front, you know, of just kind of acting over it to sort of protect, I think, inside himself from the industry. Yes, exactly. Right. Yeah, he definitely felt like and i i truly believe this too there should be a certain point at which you know we saw mike

lee on twitter last week and they were talking about how mike lee can't find financing for his very depressing yeah it's maddening it's mad it's mike lee just give him the goddamn money right it's mike lee there's no argument he 78 years old. Just that man should just make movies until he doesn't want to anymore. It should obviously, if Mike Lee walks in and is like, I need $90 million. I'm making a movie about a spaceship. I might have like 10 more questions,

but if Mike Lee is like, I am trying to make a Mike Lee movie. It's like, great. I love those. Those are, have a proven track record. Yes. Same with Carpenter. Yes. Right. It's like great i love those those are have a proven track record yes same with carpenter yes right it's like fucking if we're gonna live in a world in which these conglomerates and tech

companies eat us up the least they can do is sort of be like patrons of the arts for like our elder statesman where it's like netflix just give mike lee eight million dollars and shut up well the funny thing is that is kind of what these companies do at least for a little while not carpenter maybe but like and then you know now maybe they're all starting to grow beyond but like you know amazon in those early days it was like let's have a wit stillman movie in a spikely movie you know like that's that was their early strategy right first five years of amazon really seemed like let's take all the 90s auteurs of like the indie revolution who cannot get financing anymore. What's a movie you want to make?

Right. And they just come on. Jarmusch is back. Still Stillman's back. We're giving Spike a bigger budget than he's had in a while. Like they just kind of got everyone off the bench. And then, as always seems to happen, these people use kind of prestige to get their foot in the door. And then they increasingly sort of disregard it. Or if they want to do prestige, they want to do the Irishman version of prestige. They'd rather spend $200 million on that than making 15 movies from all the other guys who don't have the same clout as Scorsese.

I think he had had three really difficult experiences in a row. Right. So we're talking, what are we talking at this point? Vampires was really tough. Escape from L.A. broke his heart. Escape from L.A. Vampires, Ghosts of Mars. And Ghosts of Mars. All three really hard

and unnecessarily hard. Right. I know with Escape from L.A. he starts with a certain budget and they slash his budget almost in half as they start shooting and kind of schedule. Oh, they went from 75 million to 34 million without cutting the script. That's crazy. All the info we had was that it was 50.

That's nuts. He lost his mind. It was they cut almost half of his budget and it was a nightmare. Like it. And I love the original escape from la script to me the difference was in those screenplays was always that he never lived in new york new york to me escape from new york feels like a movie written by a guy who's never been to new york and this is what he imagines new york is like and then there's gangs and the subways are

all in and they do it like that's what it feels like whereas escape from la is a direct satire of the city he's lived in his whole life yes yeah and that he hates very much right and so there is i think there's a real blistering wit to the script of escape from la that never really gets translated to the screen because he's just playing catch-up the whole time trying to just keep that film from falling apart and that's's, it guts me. Vampires, there was a point where he left. He just quit. There was a point midway through the shoot where he was like, I'm done, and got up and left the set.

Because Vampires didn't, they also cut the budget out from Under Him. That happened again. And Nicotero, I think it was Nicotero, directed two or three days of Vampires until they could get John back. Because he just was like i what am i doing what am i doing why am i fighting you why do i have to fight you i'm making a movie for

you i'm john carpenter i know what i'm doing i it i do also feel like those three movies are the movies where he is i don't know like you know like the kind of blockbuster the Hollywood makes is changing, right? Yes. Oh, and there's there. Right. And then the approach effects wise and the approach story wise is changing and the notes he's getting are, you know, the corporate thinking is changing and all that. Right. Like we talked a lot about because it hasn't come out yet. But in the Ghost of Mars episode, no, we talk a lot about how like the next year after that is uh I think the first Resident Evil and then the Transporter is the same year the year after that and it's like between the new wave of what Screen Gems movies are post Resident Evil right and then sort of what Europa Corp formalizes with Transporter it's like those are the styles of these types of B-movies

from then on out, and he now is in a different vein. He's a step in the past. You know, he's not making MTV-stylized films. Which is why I think the pitch that Mick Garris made for Masters of Horror worked,

which was just, here's your budget. Right. I'll give you a script, and then you just go shoot that script, and there will be no interference, and you just go shoot that script and there will be no interference and you just go do what you want and it came out of these dinners he would organize

right i mean we've referenced this a lot before but sort of that whole generation of horror and genre filmmakers would get these dinners together largely organized by mick garris who we've referenced a bunch not just because he comes up in all these different ways people don't get it but mick is the glue that holds 80s genre together. Mick is, from the very beginning, when he was working at Avco, and then when he was a publicist, and when he was working with Universal.

There's the fear on film thing we reference all the time. That's Landis, Carpenter, and Cronenberg, right? Yep. He was essential in kind of shaping that narrative in the early 80s of, these are the guys worth paying attention to. And even though it didn't quite work, it's the reason the seeds got planted.

And I think it took root with a bunch of us that were paying attention and were of a certain age and who were wide open to it. Right. You and Rebecca Swan are like two prime examples of people who grew up as children of those filmmakers. Oh, my God. And now Mick Garris is seeing this whole generation of guys who cannot get their movies made anymore. And so, right. His pitch is, let me take all these guys I invite to dinner every time, essentially give them blank checks within a very limited budget, you know, shooting schedule TV, but like creative free reign.

And the smart thing was he pitched it as, well, it's how funded by Anchor Bay. It's how funded by Showtime. So if we do something that Showtime doesn't like, fine, we'll just dump it to DVD, it'll be uncensored, nobody will get to cut you. And that was really the big promise. And this is like the peak of

DVD sales, and Anchor Bay had made like a fucking fortune reissuing every 80th horror movie every other month so they knew like no matter what if we slap a disc out that has carpenter on it or dante on it or whomever on it tobe hooper don cascarelli or whatever it will work it will sell it'll move you yes yeah and so it was they gave us basically they told us you have a million dollars to do an hour and whatever you want within that go. Yeah.

And so that was it. And so just to circle back here, Mick is sort of gathering together writers, having them just pitch ideas, and then he's going to the directors and saying, do any of these jump out to you? That's the process. I know he had to some of the directors and they said i have a story some of the directors didn't and john was at a place where john was in his i'm eating fried chicken and playing xbox phase creatively just not yeah yeah and just wasn't interested tired of fighting as as we said he's just i'm tired of fucking having to fight and so i think it was when m said, I have several scripts.

Are you interested in at least reading a script? And John was like, if I see something I like, maybe. And so he didn't know it was me when he chose that script. It wasn't until we got in the room and then he connected all the dots and was like, oh, my God. On that first day, I was like, like all right fellas and uh he is as terrifying as you would think uh our first first thing he said was all right i like it every single page we got work to do i'm like okay here we go but he taught me and one of the things that he really emphasized and i think it was budget was the reason. But when you guys talk about all of his movies, whether it's big budget or small budget, he has the same mindset, which is on the page, you can write stuff like there's atmosphere, there's mood, there's things like that.

But that's not something you can shoot. He wants the script to be, what am I pointing my camera at? What is the thing I'm looking at? Don't tell me anything else. I don't need anything else. Just tell me what I'm pointing my camera at. And is the thing I'm looking at? Don't tell me anything else. I don't need anything else. Just tell me what I'm pointing my camera at. And I know how to make that scary. Yeah.

So you can put gravy on it on the page. It doesn't matter. John's going to shoot. John has his own visual plant. And you should just trust him. Get out of his way. He really taught us to strip everything down. Think about what he was shooting.

Think about what we were accomplishing. When you're getting notes from john carpenter on horror and you're just having conversations with him about what scares you and why this is scary and why this isn't scary it's awesome like that is the best creative experience you could hope for and he was 100 engaged on both he really enjoyed this process i have a couple couple logistical questions. Sure. What was the time in between the two of them being shot?

They had a two season pickup from the get go or did Mick just buy both scripts? So he had stuff in the pool that it was. He bought both treatments and then had us commissioned the first script. Then after the first season, they knew they were going to do a second. We shot the first one summer of 2005 and we started shooting the day my first son was born wow so that's how i remember the date is like it was the day that he was born and um then the second one was the next spring we shot that and um and then on the second one we kind of didn't have total freedom uh we ran into the money thing. And I think one of the reasons that I was really surprised that John did the ward was we were about to start shooting.

We had 10 days and a million dollars like we did on the first one. And then we got told at the end of our first day, we just lost two days because Landis went long. So we lost days to Landis. Yeah. So we lost days to Landis. Fucking Landis. Fucking Landis. And watching John absorb that and go, all right. And we don't really have an ending on pro-life. It's one of the craziest things about the episode is we didn't shoot our ending.

Our ending's kind of not in the movie. So we just kind of ran out of time. And John had to cut an ending around something that wasn't really done. And but it was just we literally ran out of money on that one. And to be with somebody who is this classic Titan filmmaker who has made landmark game changing genre defining movies and you're struggling to get two extra days yeah on a one hour thing it just i can see why it broke him like it it just got to him again i feel like i've invoked this before but there's this interview i i that sort of haunts me uh for maybe like 10 years ago with John Waters.

And they were asking him why he hadn't made another movie since A Low Down Dirty Shame. And they're like, you're John Waters, you're a legend, you can't get financing? And he's like, I can't get financing

for the movie I would like to make, which would cost $15 to $20 million. I meet with people and they say, if i have a script i could do in for you know five million dollars in 21 days that i could get that green lit and he's like but i'm too old and i'm too tired and i i did that so many times and you know right right when i was in my fucking 20s i was like oh shut up take the job what are you complaining about you get to make movies and then you work enough and you're like there is a point where it

sort of becomes more soul crushing to feel like you're stuck in this like you know like your Sisyphus just having to fucking push this boulder up the hill over and over and over again not that you ever need it to be easy but you're just like I should be past the

these specific battles it should be easy but you're just like i should be past the these specific battles it should be creatively difficult not financially and logistically difficult and you shouldn't be fighting over two fucking days like shit like that right where he's just like i'd rather be retired and fucking be john waters and make cameos and alvin the chipmunks four and fucking present awards at the independent spirit awards and have a ball, then make another movie for no money. We pitched him so much. We tried so hard. And there was about six months where I really thought we were going to get him back into doing a feature. Really? It really felt like it was close. In the last 10 years? Yeah. This was right after Pro-Life. We were really trying to get him to do a feature. And

we had a couple of things he liked and he was like he was like maybe maybe and so i could tell the energy was there and he said in interviews this is that's the whole thing the only reason he made the ward was he said many times that like doing the two masters of horror things kind of reinvigorated him reminded him why he liked it yeah and i think it was the fact that we had fun and part of it was that we were so um hyper about having him on set. Like it was such a big deal to us. And I think he kept being entertained by the fact that we were flipping out.

And I don't think that's something he's been around. I truly think a lot of his collaborators are somewhat blasé about him. And I think he has this, especially towards the later part of his career. Ghost of Mars was not a set where Ice Cube was like wigging out that he was working with John Carpenter. I don't think that was the feeling.

I don't think Jason Statham came to work whistling. But, you know, I do think he he had the energy for a little while. But then I think the business ground it right back out of him. And it doesn't surprise me that having worked with Cody Carpenter on the scores for both of our films, Cody was great. And that part of the process was clearly John's favorite, making the music, getting Cody to write a theme that he could listen to and play with. And it doesn't surprise me that he leaned into the live music end of things, that he's making more music. I think he's just trying to be happy during this last part of whatever his career is.

And it is really lovely to see him enjoying himself on stage and to see kind of a mellow, happy carpenter and to see like middle of the night tweets about ABBA and stuff. That's, that is, it's delightful. It's a, it's a good, good look for him. And it's definitely not where he was for a little while.

But he, he's clearly clearly there's a he feels liberated by not having to take on all these burdens we're talking about the the glee in these interviews where he's like i just watch halloween kills and i write the music i don't have to make any decisions about the movie like it's already been done you know like it's not just that he wants to like you know work on his side projects he he almost seems to just want to not make movies it's sort of weird because otherwise he would he could totally do one right now he walked into blumhouse tomorrow right oh they would well there was there was a thing that they were talking about right this is this thing we keep on trying to get the specifics on it yeah but but there was a thing

that almost kind of happened right yeah and and i've heard i've heard there's reasons he won't do certain things you know we we tried to pitch a western at one point thinking that would be an easy sell yeah and it's not he he actually will not make a western um he explained it finally that he doesn't ever want to direct horses he's like if you could come up with a perfect western that there were no goddamn horses in i might do it but life's too short man i'm not directing horses it's not happening you also you have to you have to just imagine that he must sort of feel like charlie brown trying to kick the football you know like how many times have they told me this time it's going to be easy you know yeah or this time we're going to respect you or let you do you want where even if you hand

him a script that seems appetizing he's just like where are they going to fuck me you know he's waiting for it at this point the horses the horses will fuck it up for me you know it's like he's looking for the thing that will make it unpleasant i mean to be fair directing horses seems annoying oh yeah yeah no horses are undirectable yeah seems like a pain in the ass right um uh no they're direct you sit on them and you right you do this you say nay i mean they say no you gotta say no you say whoa ben way in here as an expert yeah i am an expert i have ridden on a dang horse um but no they stink too like stink um hey drew how about this i've been throwing this idea out where i think carpenter should make um another assassin's creed movie see i and his video game love i it's so pure and it is so real he adores big a-list

video games and yeah we've talked about assassin's creed which i'm a big fan of that series and and it's funny because he when you get him talking it, he is every 17-year-old dude just talking about his game mechanics he likes and the vibe he likes. And I think it's I'm surprised how many directors video games are their vice. They are their secret vice. And I think if people knew who they were playing video games with half the time online, they would lose their minds because there are a lot of really terrific world class auteurs who are just fucking around, killing you in Call of Duty and yeah, in a world he loves that man and the idea of him making a movie set in one of those worlds is super appealing if they gave him the resources and if they gave him the time to do it correctly and i don't know that i don't know that they do that even for like the young hot shit directors they try to give these movies to this is the whole thing like i'd like because there's always been you know it's in our notes and he's talked about Dead Space, right? Which is a game

he's obsessed with. And when you play Dead Space, which is a great game, especially the first one, you absolutely can imagine a John Carpenter version of that. It's perfect. But I just have to assume people with something like that, it's like a property now, right?

There's so many suits in the room being like well well well the dead space movie has to be x y and z because like the way this uncharted movie has played out i'm watching this trailer and i'm just it just it looks so artless and like you can hear the focus should be surprised right like i mean it's a video game movie like it's not like i should be so precious about this but i'm just like like just let someone you know there's so much you can work with and it just feels corporate let now assassin's creed is a weirder but i do love that i mean this is our

whole appreciation of assassin's creed exactly like it sort of gets away with it right fucking knock the story all that you want it is a movie that has like vibes and has weird directing choices yeah i just wish they would turn one of these directors who loves this stuff loose like verbinski on bioshock or you know peter jackson on halo somebody who genuinely loves and plays and lives in these worlds who then actually translates one would be amazing but bioshock is another one he publicly carpenter said he wanted to do right well well he said it would make a great move uh you know but like with dead space i imagine like carpenter directly said i would love to make a dead space movie i don't think he was ever like formally attached or anything but but like i just imagine him walking in and him being like this is what i think and then being like okay, okay, well, you know, and then,

and it just, his face changing as they start their side of it. Right. Like, uh, the budget has to be this and it has to set up this and it has to include that, you know, and like just him being like,

ah, fuck you people. Like, right. Like, just from what I understand of him, like that, he would just immediately be turned off.

I assume. I don't know. Um, Johnny C. And instead he makes the ward guys he made the ward yeah and i can i can see i can see what he probably saw in the script which was stripped down worked with actors one location basically and it's just digging in and being able to build atmosphere those are all of the quotes we found from him are just, it was small, it was contained, it was actor-based, it wasn't effects-driven. He can see it in his head, corners, hallways, shadows.

It's claustrophobic. But it feels like more of a strategic choice in that sense rather than a passion choice. Like, ideally, you wish he could find a script that he may be really connected to that also checked all of those boxes. I don't really feel his part in this. Yeah, and part of the problem for me is post-Cundy, and look, my great regret is that we couldn't get Showtime to let us shoot in scope as opposed to square. Because to me, Carpenter, half of Carpenter is the visual aspect ratio, the look. And without that, it doesn't feel like a Carpenter film to me.

The Ward doesn't feel like a Carpenter film to me because it doesn't look like a Carpenter film. The Ward is the only one of his movies not to be shot in panavision other than uh dark star i believe or solemn precinct 13 even on our set he had the panavision lens he's got the lens that same panavision lens he's been using his whole career with every film's name engraved on it that he shot with it that's nuts and it's also it's shot by aaron orbach who he only worked with on this like you know it's it's not shot by what's his name gary uh kibbe yeah maybe keep you know like his his post cundy guy like you're right griffin it does not it's sort of washed out and it's flat it's it's it looks flat to me it's amazing what a difference that makes in you feeling like you're watching a carpenter film if his aesthetic isn't

there you're automatically missing part of what you love about his work part of what makes his work so singular and special he knows where to put the camera like and that's clear here like that's the thing where i did not i was sort of like okay this is you know he's setting up shots nicely the compositions are fine it's never an over edited or busy i was really expecting like uh fuck what's that movie where uh the torture porny movie directed by a somewhat famous director oh captivity captivity like this thing where it's like oh my god jaffe roland jaffe it's like oh my god here is a like you know a palm to or a palm to or winning director it was a ridiculous palm door

but he has one uh being like is this what i should do like you know like just kind of being like uh like you know the generation has shifted i guess i'll try and copy it and the ward to its credit i don't think it's pulling any of that sort of hacky stuff but it does yeah a little lifeless i i think that is uh totally fair and uh spot on i mean not to just like front load opinions here but the thing for me is uh this movie like is functional there is nothing disastrous about it but it doesn't really grab me and i don't really feel a passion in it where even in the other carpenter movies that I don't think are successful which I you know at least enjoy almost all of them I feel like there are only two that I was like a little more muted on even the ones that I think

are kind of broken objects I find fun or engaging in some way or another. This feels like if I saw this at like a horror film festival and you told me it was a first time director, I'd be like, this person might be able to make a really great movie someday. This is a pretty decent calling card first film in terms of what you're saying. Knows where to put the camera, keeps it focused, keeps it simple, what have you. To have it be what might end up being the final film of like the master of the genre, arguably, that's what makes it depressing for me. You know, it's just, it's a very undignified final film.

It's a little undignified. And it's, right, it's just, you feel like what you want to give this movie is props for promise, but it's not promise. It's the end, you know, part of part of the problem. And this is a it's a very real problem with a lot of movies that are built around a twist or a secret is you spend so much of the movie being clever or tap dancing around the thing you're hiding that you don't get to actually just be the movie. that you don't get to actually just be the movie. There's so much of this movie where they are talking around the movie

and it would be so much more interesting if he had found a visual way to show us that we were playing inside somebody's head or I wouldn't mind if you tip your hand earlier and then just make it interesting as opposed to try to hide the secret, which doesn't pack enough of a punch to then justify never really knowing

what's going on with anybody. Look, I mean, this is what made Shyamalan's entire career, right? Like this is why Shyamalan became so indestructible that he still could get financing after like five flops in a row, is that the sixth sense was this fucking magic trick, where as you're saying, Drew,

almost every twist movie, either the movie has to tangle itself into such knots to hold off on the twist that there's nothing really going on until the reveal. Or you do things that are interesting enough beforehand that the twist actually derails whatever the movie had going for it and then feels like it undoes whatever was working. Yes. It's why it was unfair that M. night was considered like a gimmick artist right or whatever like oh the six cents isn't good it just has a good twist well having a good twist might be enough to get your script noticed right it might even be enough to get your movie made but that's

not gonna make a good movie like delivering a twist well is hard our argument has always been that if if the six cents ends with hayley jill osman and tony collette in the car it is still a capital g great movie i it's one of the best scripts i've ever read on the page it's incredible it's incredible but it's like that's the thing that is almost impossible to pull off yeah uh and david you put i i mean we're gonna get in a fucking spoiler territory obviously uh we're spoiling the ward. Yeah. Right. Yeah. But spoiler alert.

Your Zoom background right now is from the movie Vacancy. Or Identity. I'm sorry. No, it's from the movie Identity. Identity. Identity. Which is arguably a movie with ostensibly the same twist that has the opposite problem, which is I think that movie is pretty fun until the twist.

And then it feels like nothing fucking matters and it's because mangle figured out a way to put you in it to put you in the way that would feel as opposed to this weird distancing thing where you never quite know what she's feeling but that means that once you pull the curtain everything feels really hollow rather than this which feels like it's killing time for an hour and 15 minutes that absolutely true about the ward uh right the twist of the ward is there you know it's five girls in a mental asylum and they're being picked up but really they're all the same it's one girl with multiple personalities and it's all sort of a dramatization of what's happening in her brain personalities right uh

and jared harris is there you know we love to see him is it also sort of the premise of a donald kaufman script in adaptation right is it called the three yes right yeah it's it's obviously it's a classic uh you know hacky hollywood twist like and it turns out like oh there was the same person all along oh fuck you know i'm just remembering i didn't finish watching it. So I missed this. It's good to know. Yeah. Yeah. It turns out.

I didn't make it to the end. But okay. It's all one girl. Cool. Alice. Played by Mika Borum. Right. The girl that they think has gone missing.

Yeah. And then they think is the killer. You know, they think it's the corpse that's stalking them. But actually, it's just the girl that they are and like the killer is a physical manifestation of the treatment trying to knock the personalities out one by one i mean it's also interesting because what this movie plays at toronto in 2010 and then gets where i saw it very limited release uh seven eight months later whatever uh it takes a while barely a year right um but this this screens in 2010 the same year as shutter island which is the other movie that this is sort of combined with right where it's like

malicious scary hospital villainous staff no, they're trying their hardest to save you. Experimental, radical treatment. They've been playing along with your game, you know? And man, that is a movie that is just drenched in style, where the whole thing is about the way it looks and feels and the getting lost in the head. It's the other thing that makes this movie look bad. Yes. But this is a movie that... Shutter Island, obviously,

Scorsese has one of the biggest movie stars in the world, and $100 million and all that sort of shit. But it's such a good evocation of the kind of Val Lewton movie he's riffing on. And here, Carpenter is not able to muster that same sense of style, which a lot of it is. we're saying it's it's flat it's cheap it's like I

I also I mean I've ragged on her before as an actress and I don't want to be mean about her especially because she's this like bizarre figure outside of like her acting but I don't like Amber Heard I don't either with a more compelling lead maybe I'm a little more interested

in the mystery. She has never really worked for me and she is the human equivalent of cuties in that you're not, you cannot talk about her without the internet going insane on you. If you're going to cast her, cast her in something like Scarface

in the Michelle Pfeiffer role where she's that kind of a person, where there's ways to cast her where you can cast that energy and cast but her as the sympathetic figure who's supposed to be pulling us through the I think Lindsay Fonseca would have been a better choice for the central character this is my thing I like yeah every other I like everyone else in this movie I love Danielle Panabaker I'm a huge fan of hers really good mamie gummer obviously very talented like uh not her best performance but that more has to do with i think how this character is written she must be

interested in this mr robot she certainly has oh yeah this this uh sandbox a few times this kind of thing so right uh lindsey fonseca who i definitely like she's of course on the couch and how i met your mother i grew sort of obsessed with that one shot they had of the two kids. That they had to reuse. Because Lindsay Fonseca then like grew up. And I was like, but still, sometimes you see like whatever, you know, 17 year old Lindsay Fonseca on the couch or however old she's supposed to be. Is that, was that, let's say, the cushiest job in the history of television where they like. They have to get paid

right every time right it was her and david henry is that who the other right that's right and they like shoot stuff proprietarily for i think seasons one and two and then they were like oh this show's a hit and they're getting older we just need to get a bunch of b-roll and we'll reuse it and they reuse it for what nine seasons every episode yes well not every episode they would but but no no you're forgetting right then they they're like okay we're we're gonna have to stop using these kids as they're growing up let's shoot the conversation in the finale now right let's do it now this this show is probably gonna end soon like you know or god knows and then the show runs for so and that's why the show has an ending that makes people so angry because it's the end they planned years before yeah yes anyway it's still i said think

about it all the time it's incredible the two of them just got to check for every single episode i assume when when it was made when it aired and then residuals i mean i did because i did my little tiny thing on on supergirl a seasons ago, whatever that was, 15 years ago. And they wanted to do a different scene in the same bar without having to go there as like an establishing shot. So they reused a shot

that I was like vaguely in the background of two seasons later and I got paid like the same amount. Hell yeah. They had to reach out and go like, do we have your clearance to reuse this footage? And I looked at the footage. It's like,

I'm out of focus in the back because they had paid me guest star money or whatever. So she just must've gotten like paid a proper episode salary for every single episode. And then they all go into syndication streaming. What a gig. I know. Unbelievable.

But what, what, what did she get paid for the ward though? Uh, I, nothing. I mean, what the budget. I have to assume. gig i know unbelievable what what what did she get paid for the ward though uh i did nothing i mean what the budget i have to assume i mean what they say the budget this movie is 10 but i suppose that's questionable yeah uh i don't know i mean 10's not a lot i guess you can you can spend 10 million dollars drew i have to imagine you were a person who saw All the Boys Love Mandy Lane in that movie's weird seven years

between being like a festival sensation and getting quietly released and never talked about it again. Yeah. Because that was at TIFF in 06 and released in 2013, right? And that's the thing that like puts Amber Heard on the map.

And I have to imagine is the main reason she's cast in this because that sort of presented her as maybe being a new scream queen. It might, that might be the longest

between something doing its festival debut and coming out in theaters commercially. Like that's got to be one of the big gaps. I mean, Margaret is seven years, but it never played a festival.

But there's seven years between production and release. Unreal. Which is insane. Yeah, anyway. All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, I just think is an interesting counterpoint to this, just because that was sort of seen as like, here's a throwback-y thing. You got a filmmaker who's moving away from the current trends of torture porn

and overly slick remakes and doing something more like the 80s, 70s, like genre auteurs. I always thought, I thought All the Boys Love Mandy Lane was a decent little style exercise. And I think that she is visually striking in it. And they use in that movie, they pretty much use Amber as a object, as an image rather than as a performance. And I think that's that's one of the reasons that it was such a great calling card for her. I think performance wise, she is difficult to warm up to.

I'll put it that way. And there's just some actors who are like that centrally, like you don't cast them as the center of something because of that. And it's it's weird in this movie to to be asked to sympathize with her. She doesn't give you much interiority. She doesn't give you access to anything inside her. She's very guarded and so then of course the twist is that she's not really a person

and you're like yeah okay so you can kind of get away with it but it does make it a tough movie to care about for most of the running time it's just really hard to figure out who you're holding on to and yeah and it's like when you watch the um the star trek into darkness and they do everything they can not to say the character's name

you're like just just say the character's name 10 minutes into the movie just say it and then just have a movie happen instead of all of this shoe leather that is that you ideally movies work the second time as well as the first time and i feel like this is a movie that only works one time. There's very little rewatch value because when you go back and watch it, it's not like then that pays off and you're watching all the behavior of the girls. And you go, oh, wow, look at all the cool ways he's showing us that they are all one person. There's none of that. There's no synchronicity in performances. There's nothing that ties them together.

I mean, this is once again why Six six cents made over 300 million dollars is everyone walked out of it and went is there any way that works and then you watch it a second time and the fact that it works the second time you know how is he not giving it away how is he not telegraph but he doesn't but it lines up it checks out the math yeah right it's why the usual suspects works like there are lots of good twist movies that play great on rewatch where you're like, let me now see how everyone's behaving. Exactly. With knowing what I know. And it'll be totally interesting.

But I do think that Amber's casting is very much a reaction to her being an it girl. And I think that that's kind of that moment where he's she's as important to the bankroll to this movie getting financed as he was because her name and the young cast is that's what 90s horror and early 2000s horror looks like. And I think he is at this point kind of surrendering to, well, I guess this is what horror is. Whereas I think the majority of John's career, John would just say, I don't know what anybody else thinks. This is what a horror film is to me. Right. Big Trouble in Little China. He's not looking around and taking everybody else's temperature before he goes all right i guess

we're all making big trouble little china this year no he's the only one on the planet making a movie like that at that point and i i really wish the ward did not feel so reactive feel just like like i think i mean i think i'm a filmmaker again what are people making right now and and that's what this is. Yeah. I mean, the reason I'm bringing the all the the boys love Mandy Lane thing into this even is it's like it is just odd her status removing. The incredibly fucking complicated persona around her today. Right. right but like in this moment she is an it girl and i think is seen not exclusively but perhaps even more of an it girl in the genre space despite the fact that her calling card movie has not come out it's not despite it's because of because then that movie became people were like

you know there's this horror movie that fucking looks like a Malick movie and it's so slick and it's not even out. It played at a fest and it becomes this kind of like cool mystery movie. And the posters and the production stills come out and you're like, ooh, she looks, this looks great. And look at her, very blonde in the middle of it all.

But it's like everyone is like taking out advance loans on her fame. 100%. that never cash out. It's not even like the we're going to put a fucking Sam Worthington and three other movies because James Cameron's picked him. And we know that's going to like eventually land. It's just odd that like Mandy Lane comes out three or four years after this. Three years after comes out radius you know dumped it

and yeah made like 400 grand and this movie of course was basically not released in America which is crazy like I think it got a slightly bigger release overseas but you know it debuted on like

I'm gonna find it here like 11 screens and there's only one week of box office data for it like oh it just you know doesn't really exist you can't rent this movie on itunes yeah you can only rent it on youtube that is the only platform it's like there's certainly not i don't think there's a physical uh release of it right is there there was it might be out of print there was a blu-ray okay that's what that's one of the real dangers of tax shelter theater whenever you're working in that sphere is stuff just vanishes like is if you're not making it for a company that has some sort of foundation it could very easily vanish into somebody's tax settlement and just you don't see it again.

Absolutely. It's a weird movie that you feel like could, you know, just as soon tomorrow disappear and be like unwatchable. I mean, it's also like the Blu-ray was released by a company called Ark Entertainment that seems to have gone out of business eight years ago. It's maybe not still in print, but there are still copies in circulation. Yeah.

And it's like only like, this might be a movie where just no one even knows where the rights are anymore. Film nation produced it also. And this was in like the first year of film nation. That is like not that glamorous. Let me just pull this up. Cause this list was kind of blowing my mind.

Give me one second here. Well, where did you guys see Masters? Because I'm always curious where that pops up. It moves. It never lands anywhere for very long. I just rented it on iTunes. Oh, okay, good. Yeah, that's where I found it.

Yeah. Both seasons are currently streaming on Vudu. Okay, I don't fuck with voodoo yeah to be might have them i watched it on to be okay there you go to be all right i got i got a lot of car shield commercials rick flair is in one and he looks bad it's really rough. Oh, no. It's rough. Film Nation has now become this major, major independent film production company. And at the beginning of the 2010s was also attempting to be a distributor, which they eventually got out of the game doing. And has had a lot of success making both big movies and a lot of big Oscar movies. But like they start in 2009.

Their first two films are The Joneses with Demi Moore, David Duchovny and Amber Heard, which doesn't exist. And they do The Road, which obviously is this highly anticipated movie that kind of just disappears. So all of those are Toronto. Yep. Right. And then the following year at toronto they have three movies premiere uh they have adam green's frozen premieres that year at sundance which is a horror movie that unfortunately shares the title with a disney movie that will fuck up its seo for the rest of time but they are adam green you, big culty par guy. Yes, but that movie will never, ever be picked on.

Yeah, no, I understand. Get the joke I'm making, whatever. They do an Australian romantic comedy called I Love You Too, and then they have three movies go to Toronto that year. One is Ceremony, the Max Winkler movie. Yeah. Kind of doesn't exist. With, well, it's the...

Michael and Irana, Uma Thurman. Right, the May-December-y kind of doesn't exist with uh well it's the um michael and urano umma thurman right he the may december-y kind of exactly uh one of them is the ward which plays at toronto people are excited carpenters back kind of lands with a thud slowly escapes into 11 theaters months later right uh the third movie they have at toronto is the king's speech 100 million dollars world domestic wins bestins Best Picture. They're set. Like, from then on out, they're like a legitimate production company. And they make other genre films. But it's like, it almost feels like there's this, like, turn of, like, this is the last moment they would have made this.

You know? Yes. It's, yeah. I don't know. Yeah, they don't. They make Mud mike they make right they still bling ring nebraska um yeah uh pain and glory i mean they did the last three of our movies right big sick uh you know um imitation game they're a big deal it's i mean

i don't know what puzzle we're trying to solve here exactly but it's just sort of like could carpenter make another movie yes of course he could like i think there's a lot of people who would open that door for him if he wanted to but it's a matter of want and it's a matter of project and i don't know if there's a project he wants to do right like there's just i don't know if there's anything you can lure him back you would it would have to be yeah just undeniable for him at this point it would have to be something that i i think you'd have to have some irresistible element either you'd have to bait it with cody gets to do the score or you get like there'd have to be some other piece of the puzzle that would make john go all right fine i'll do that so that this can happen. Like, that's the thing. Two words. Ben Hosley.

There you go. There you go. Night eggs. Producer Ben. There you go. Poet laureate. Fuck master. I got three words for you. Not Professor Crispy. i got three words for you not professor crispy here here's a genuine question for you drew yes sir do you think kirk could lure him back i do i do in a heartbeat like if kirk came to him and was like this is the elder statesman movie i want to make i want to do it with you buddy please this is like you know that was the

that was that was what we kept trying to use, the hook for the Western. We kept saying, look, a Western with you and Kurt is pretty much the dream. And I think if Kurt had the script, if Kurt had something that he developed that he was really passionate about, but here's the thing about Kurt,

and this is what unfortunately shut us down when we were trying to pitch John on that. He goes, well, that's great. I'd love to, but you better have your paycheck ready before you even talk to Kurt. Kurt's offer only. You don't even pick up the phone unless you got an offer ready to make. So there's no development with Kurt. You don't develop things with him. You have a project, you have a paycheck ready, you call him, they'll say yes or no but there's no so you can't you can't just put both of them on the hook and then build it from there and i think that's the only way that happens at this point right like in my in my mind's eye it happens if

like hurt russell finds a book that he loves right goes to him you know like something like that like i feel like it has to be hurt being the one or why it gets a script to him something yeah i don't know you know like something let's be in this together right see and there's that family hook i'm sure if wyatt russell said i have a thing i want to do with my dad and would you i bet in a heartbeat john would jump on because it's cody and john and wyatt right yeah and then that sells itself that's one of those packages where you're like oh my god there's 400 pr pieces you can do before you even write about the movie but at the same i admire carpenters being like fuck you you you don't like that i went out of the ward so what watch one of

my you know 15 great movies if you don't like the ward like whatever who cares i'm gonna make music by the way which film do you guys think is the only film that he would never discuss with us no matter what we tried no matter how we tried to talk to him about it just blanket nope no fellas fellas no memoirsoirs? Memoirs. Nothing. Zero. A vault. It's a closed safe in his heart. It's the Chetney thing. It has to be, right?

That's the X-Factor thing. Yeah. Yeah. There's no getting around. Like, he will tell stories about anybody, about anything, any film. He is an open book once you've started working with him. Except that, where it was just, nope. No, fellas. No. Not not gonna do it no those were the two things when we were dming about which episode you were gonna do that you said to me were memoirs is the one movie he will not talk about under any circumstances

and the ward is the only one that i don't believe was really a passion project for him you were saying like you know people ding him for other movies, but I truly believe he really, really deeply cared about every other thing he did. Yeah. And this is the one that he did. Right. That feels more like a strategic calculation of like, this might be a movie that's easy enough to pull up. Yeah. And I and I do think it was more or less.

Sure. One more time. Let's see what it's like right now. And I think it was more taking the temperature. That's another reason I think he wasn't terribly invested in the him credit for and i do think if he was going to do it again it would have to be something that he hadn't done in the past that wouldn't just be a repeat so yeah it's i don't know it's interesting question i mean we were talking about this in our ghost of mars episode a lot too but it's like on one hand it's a bummer if this is his final film ever on the other hand i greatly prefer that he didn't make

three more The Wards after this, you know? And there's certainly filmmakers we've covered who like don't know when to sort of get out when the getting's good. I mean, it's this thing. Or they're just, they just keep being like, well, maybe this will be a good final one.

And then it's like, well, no, not really. It's the thing that Tarantino is obsessed with trying to get ahead of, right? Like his whole insane 10 movies and I'm out thing is him just's like, well, no, not really. It's the thing that Tarantino is obsessed with trying to get ahead of. Right. Like his whole insane 10 movies and I'm out thing is him just being like, I have to leave stuff on the table rather than overstaying my welcome by one movie. I think a lot of filmmakers have that that question about when to stop. You know, the Coens quit. There was a period where they quit.

They were done. And it was because to the White Sea failed and fell apart and they didn't get to make that film. And then their mom had a stroke. And it was really, it was that close. It was like one week To the White Sea fell apart permanently. And then a week or two weeks later, their mom had a stroke and they just went, yeah, life's too short. Nevermind. And they were just script doctors for a few years. And it was really, they got dragged back in. And I think then figured out, oh, I think we're not done. And there's gas left in the tank. But no country was the drag. That's the timeline we're talking about here. They weren't really going to direct either of those. That was the same time they wrote the Gambit script.

And they were just kind of writers. They really had quit. And it's weird how often this business will drive great filmmakers just to quit because of the business. Wait, you're saying, Drew, it's almost like there's something that actually breaks people if they work long enough in this horrible, corrupt machinery. I know. It's hard to believe, Griffin, because I know you've had nothing but great experiences i love it i really feel loved and supported by the whole industry physically or mentally harmed uh david what were you gonna say i to the white sea was one of my early like when i was a little teenager reading about

movie making those projects where i would like, I knew that was coming. Like I knew that was what they wanted to do. And I was like, Oh, I can't wait for it. I, I'd, I'd, I'd love to make a list like that.

Like, you know, the sort of the 10, you know, Oh, ter projects that everyone knew were sort of on the table that never came to fruition. Like what if Joel Cohen tomorrow is like,

fuck you. I'm making to the white sea. Well, I mean, giving me $120 million. Megalopolis, Megalopolis. Like that was one of them for coppola who's like i gotta do like a kickstarter or sell my winery or whatever i'm old i might as well do it right like fuck it i god bless him man yeah if if he goes out swinging like that i'm gonna i that re that reframes coppola for

me i as much as i've always loved the maverick spirit of him i did feel like he had just gotten to the point where he really wasn't going to ever put that last big one together and it feels like he realized nope i'm gonna do it i'm gonna put it all on the table i'm gonna i don't care because i can't keep anything the vineyard doesn't matter to me once i'm gone but megalopopolis will exist. And man, whatever it is, I'm excited. I'm curious. I want to see it. Same here.

And it's also fascinating how immediately that announcement reframed him spending the last eight years re-editing like half of his movies. Sure. Where you're like, he's really winding up for like, I'm trying to put a bow on my career. What are the things I'd like to take one last crack at in my past? And then now with all of those settled, I'm ready for the final statement. And he's one of the few guys where those reassessments actually matter. The Cotton Club is a significantly better movie.

It's pretty fucking wild. It's pretty crazy how different it is. I haven't watched the Godfather one yet, but the Cotton Club one is. That one's a little less drastic, it's still interesting yeah that you know what he changed but clearly like he is he's still engaged and thinking and passionate and i i want that i want i love seeing somebody manage to figure out how to keep that flame lit at that point yeah i mean there's this quote that's both touching and a little bit sad that jj and nick are researchers pulled up here and it's talking about the period you were saying of when he just really was truly retired and feeling burnt out had no stories left in him whatever

and he said uh i guess this is when they were promoting this movie finally coming out i thought i'd come back if i fell in love it's like when you break up with your wife or girlfriend, it's just tragedy. And I broke up with Cinema for a little while, but she came back and I got back with her and it's all good now. Like he did have that attitude, I think, of just like, and I'm certainly someone who functions this way,

where like, if I feel defeated by something, it's really hard to convince me to take another crack at it, you know? In any arena, even bad slices of pizza or whatever. really hard to convince me to take another crack at it, you know, uh, in, in any arena, even bad slices of pizza or whatever. Dude,

I, I get it. It's, I, I, when I left hit fix, I took several years where I just, I didn't want to do anything online and I felt like I just gotten my ribs

kicked in. Yeah. And it took me a while to figure out like even what I wanted to write again. I, the, the one thing that I observed about him on set is he definitely, the big picture stuff gets to him. The days being lost, the money being cut, things like that.

But moment to moment, once he's actually doing it, he's one of the happiest filmmakers I've ever seen. Like when he's chugging along, shooting a scene, he is super... When we were shooting in Cigarette Burns, the scene with Udo Kier in the projection booth.

Yeah. One of the wildest things I've ever seen. Best part. Should we spoil it? I mean, do people want to... I don't know. Let's just say,

let's just say the imagery is Udo Kier has cut open his stomach, taken out his intestines, and spooled them into a projector and is going to die projecting his guts onto a screen. Yeah, which is which is batshit crazy. And that's one of those moments that I know when I pitched it to to Rebecca in the room, she started laughing and she's like, they're not going to let us do that. Cut to us on a film set. Udo Kier is standing in a film projector, pushing his intestines into it. And

John Carpenter is standing behind us, cackling the entire time. Udo, make it grosser. And just watching Udo ham it up and watching John laugh his face off. I was like, if I get nothing else out of this, this moment is one of the craziest things that I will ever experience. And he was giddy. He was having fun to me. That's that was the big gift of that whole thing. The same thing on the second one. There's a horrible sequence in the second one in pro-life where Ron Perlman gives a man an abortion. There's really no other way to describe it.

Yeah, that actually might be the single most demented thing I've ever seen on a screen. Oh, yeah. to describe it yeah that actually might be the single most demented thing i've ever seen on a screen oh yeah and the and my favorite conversation was the day we were going to shoot that and the actor playing the doctor we had walked off the soundstage and we as we walk back on we walk past him standing with john and all i heard is so i'm just let me be clear you're not going to see my balls and i fell apart laughing i was like oh, oh my God, what did we write? We're giving this poor man fits. But again, just cackling. Like he was having so much fun that day knowing, oh, this is, I'm crazy.

This is, you guys are crazy. This is ridiculous. Let's have fun. Right, you'd love the show, hate the business. And I mean, the stories you were telling at the beginning, Drew, it sounds like he almost was like this Lance Bangs figure to you, right? And I think the thing I find so touching about that whole fucking dynamic in Almost Famous, and a lot of it is Hoffman's performance too, but it's like, here's this guy who presents as being so cynical, so bitter, so jaded, right?

His introduction to the movie is, Rock's dead, it all sucks, everyone's full of shit, kid, you missed it, you know, there's nothing left, you're only here for the death rattle. And he sees this kid who has, like, the wide-eyed, infectious enthusiasm for the thing that he once had before it was, like, you you know sort of weaponized against him and and broke his heart and he cannot fucking turn that down right and he's trying to big time

him i don't have time to sit in the diner with a kid i got places to be this and that but it's like by the end of the movie he's staying up until three o'clock in the morning talking to this kid in the phone admitting i'm uncool you know incredible scene. And it's like for how much he presents as this forward grump, I don't think Carpenter was take you under that wing, letting you sit next to him on the set of Starman, letting you in on everything just out of some sense of, I don't know, sympathy, you know, or generosity. I do think for him, it probably felt a little restorative to watch someone who had a completely pure appreciation for this process was reminding him of what he loved about it and was completely unfazed by the shit that he felt encumbered with every day, you know? The crazy thing is that experience is one of the reasons that even at 51 and even as crushed by certain experiences I've been, I find it very hard to be cynical. I find it really hard to be cynical about this business because I do. I did get to live that story.

The circus came to town and I followed the circus back to where it came from and I got to actually be part of it. You know, the kindness and the interest he showed was absolutely a real recognition of up or to stand me where I could see the explosion just so that the rest of my life, like I would have that foundation of how filmmaking worked. He knew that if he never ran into me again, fine. But he given me enough basic tools to understand the nuts and bolts of filmmaking that day. That's an incredible gift, man. And not the act of somebody who is cynical or doesn't love what they do. That is somebody who clearly, deeply remembers why he loves what he does.

Yeah. I think also probably wants other people in this industry who are in it for the right reasons as well, who actually give a shit. I think that's why he likes Mick so much. I think he responds to Mick's lack of sentences. Mick Garris is Mr. Rogers with long hair. He is the single nicest human being I have ever met in my life. Like, unrelentingly sunshiny and nice and loves horror and writes crazy dark horror, but cannot help himself, is just that person. And I think it's one of the reasons that he has been that linchpin for all these guys who feel burnt out by the business because Mick loves it so much. And when he brings them together, he reminds them and he rekindles that in them.

And those dinners were designed to make sure that those guys didn't, didn't only remember the bad stuff. And I think they spur each other on. I think it's a lot of fun when they get around each other. It, you know, and then they can all make fun of John Landis. So it's the bet, the better cut. Yeah. Well well fuck john landis uh the better kind of cynic um

uh you know like it's like there's the one cynic who just wants like the other cynics around him so they can all be like yeah yeah it's all bad right and then there's the one who right who who wants to bounce off maybe be the darker you know darker mind or whatever with but yeah who likes to hear the other side or i don't know whatever like yeah john he sounds like a mensch carpenter you know what's a weird thing about this movie uh just to circle back to this thing that we're ostensibly talking about today but all this discussion is important and relevant uh so in in the research here it says that um carpenter was maybe not solely but uh involved in the decision to switch it to the 60s because it was written as present day right and this is a script he did not write

he did not develop that right it's the rasmussen brothers and they expect it. And it was just there. Yeah. It's offered to him, as you said, one location. Simple. It makes more sense that she would just be locked away. That was the thing. It was the pragmatic decision of this sort of involuntary commitment. But then it also sort of, you know, it becomes Brethren with a lot of sort of psych ward thrillers of the 50s and 60s and this sort of like mode that we're familiar with. Yeah, very much. That's very much a moment. I love the Fuller's film.

Shock Corridor is like one of the great ones of that era. I think there was asylums in general were seen as kind of a they were they had a very different place in our culture in the 50s and 60s and we were just starting to talk about them a little bit so they weren't quite the secret shame anymore but it was still i think a very fresh a horrifying idea the notion of being put away and having your agency removed i think also it's i'm surprised more horror directors don't just set everything in the sixties and seventies at this point to get around cell phones and get around all the things that rob horror films of their attention at this point. No, instead it should be that there's an app that locks your doors.

Ghost face is coming for you because he's got an app. Ghost face. He hacked into your app. Is Bluetooth enabled? Mm-hmm. No, it is just, it places it in a weird zone, though, because he's not a filmmaker

who is in any way interested in pastiche, right? So he's not going to take this and push this into, like, a fuller homage and go for that sort of heightened stylization. But putting it in the 60s does make it feel more stylized right uh but he's also not doing the modern day version of this film that is as you said really trying to adapt to what the trends are of the 2010s in horror i'm just glad it's not like a korean horror ripoff because I think so many people if they made this in that year would have done the the wet yes black hair in front of the face and that

would have been the driving filter yeah he's clearly at least still trying to just tell a classic ghost story his way like it's not him necessarily aping anybody else at the moment no no it's just it's it's in a it's in an odd zone it's in a very odd zone yeah i mean and we talk it's like i think all the other actresses are compelling but by the very design of the screenplay they all uh are incredibly uh one note as characters like everyone's got their their one spice girl like. They are less emotionally detailed than the literal emotions in Inside Out,

who somehow have a wider range of personality. Oh, you know what? What? Did you know Sydney Sweeney is playing young Alice in this movie? I did, yes. And now she's like a new Scream Queen, kind of. You know, kind of. She's in that one movie. Yeah. Yeah. she's a thing now

that's all jared harris i feel like also i mean i i fucking love jared harris loved who doesn't love him what a guy one of my absolute favorite guys and i think the scene he does he kind of nails is the reveal to her right the ben kingsley let me explain to you what we've done for you. Here's the sympathy you didn't understand I had seen. But, but it's a little damning of this movie that up until that point, I'm not even getting excited

in the Jared Harris scenes. You know, like every time he pops up, I'm like, yes, fuck a Jared Harris scene. Yeah, they don't give him much to do. That's the, that's the real shame of it. Yeah. And I'm really surprised

because I do think John is, while I would not use the word feminist for John, I think John has always done fairly well by the women in his films. I think he has a better sense, especially, you know, in the Deborah Hill days, I think he learned that you get a lot of value out of these characters, that not marginalizing the women makes his movies interesting. And I think he has, you know, he's got his manly film, certainly. But I think when he centers women, he's done a fairly decent job of it. I think this film is disappointing on that front because this is ostensibly a very female driven movie.

And if you're going to do this five faces of five manifestations of one woman, that would seem like real meat for him. I don't even feel like that opportunity necessarily got taken. And that's that's confusing. It seems like that would be meat he'd be he'd pick up on thematically. Well, that's that's the other thing is, I think, watching all these movies, the thing he's so good at is making characters in his genre films, believable behavioral people who are interesting to watch before the crazy things happen to them or despite the crazy world they're placed into or whatever and this is the one movie where like you're watching and you're like there has to be some twist to why all these characters are uninteresting which which at the end of the

day does not serve you it It doesn't serve you. If it's not compelling to watch as much as the other actresses are trying their hardest. Yeah. You know, they, they name Alice early on and they're like, yeah,

there was another patient. And you're like, okay, so the answer isn't going to be that it's her because you just gave me the answer. So what's the answer? Like, it's a lot of clock watching.

Look, we don't have to talk about the ward anymore. We don't have to. We don't. I mean, you're right. It is America. We don't have to. We can do whatever we want.

I don't think there's another thing we need to. I mean, the kills are all right. That's the, you know. Yeah. The stab to the eye, the electroshock kill. Like, you know, they're not like insane, but they're well executed. I don't want to bag on this movie too hard, but I am so sensitive to eye shit. I think I have pretty fucking high tolerance for like screen violence.

But whenever eyes are threatened, I lose my fucking shit. It's like my big trigger. And this movie has a direct shot of like a needle being stabbed through someone's eye and I didn't flinch. And it was that feeling of like, huh, that didn't even get to me like i think there's that's not great yeah right there's a little like macabre fun to some of the gore in this but i'm just like if john carpenter can make me terrified of a car although that's not a good example because i'm already terrified of cars they're the scariest things on the planet. But like John Carpenter shooting someone getting stabbed directly in the eye

and failing to get anything out of me. I've gotten freaked out by eye shit in comedies, you know? I do know. I agree with what you're saying. Nothing in this movie, you know, made me flinch or twitch or anything like that. Definitely not. Like at the best at most

i was having fun watching it but i was certainly not feeling very uh my heart race or anything like that i was just kind of like okay what's next you know it's not a very good movie you know it's not it's not it's it's not it's not a catastrophe it's not offensive but it's not. It's not a catastrophe. It's not offensive, but it's not very good. Here's a lateral line of questioning, Drew. Sure. Because you guys, you and Rebecca Swan, pitched Cigarette Burns first and then get Carpenter interested. There's a lot of overlap for me thematically between Cigarette burns and uh mouth of madness how consciously were you

guys sort of influenced by that i mean i'm sure i'm sure you and rebecca obviously like carpenter is going to hang over anything the two of you right in terms of him being a big influence and i i'm sure like a point of kinship between the two of you. Sure. Um, I, I definitely think, uh, cursed works of art in general. Like you can't, you can't not know in the mouth of madness as,

as an example of that. Ninth gate is an example of that. There's, and there's older stuff that, that deals with that. Um, I had actually not read the book flicker yet when we wrote this. And then since I've read flicker,

which if you guys have not read it, I have it, please track that novel down. It is extraordinary. It is about the secret history of movies. It's a cult that has been around since the silent days and how they have since the very beginning of film been hiding things in your movies and a young filmmaker becomes drawn in and it's wonderful. But I think inevitably, if you're around film long enough, you start to hear just crazy stories about collectors. You start to and you realize that people are nutty about this stuff. So for us, it happened pretty organically just from a number of different events. Things like we were at the Fantasia Film Festival one summer. different events, things like we were at the Fantasia Film Festival one summer and one night had a long night talking magic theory with Richard Stanley on a patio and we were drinking Le Fin

du Monde beer, which is a high, high, high alcohol content beer from Montreal. And that name just cracked me up so hard. Le Fin du Monde for a beer. I'm like, yes, the end of the world. I'm drinking the end of the world tonight. And so like that ends up in there. Le Fin du Monde for a beer. I'm like, yes, the end of the world. I'm drinking the end of the world tonight. And so like that ends up in there. And the conversation we're having with Richard about how filmmakers are essentially magicians and every cut that you do is a magic trick. All of that stuff starts to build in.

We had been talking about Joe Dante, who is a big print collector. He collects a lot of nitrate prints. Yeah. Every time they do the Film Noir Festival here at the Egyptian, they're mostly Dante's prints or Landis's prints. And they share this film vault underneath Hollywood. Fuck John Landis. But so talking to Dante, he told this crazy story about some guy had a print that he'd been looking for for like 15 years.

And when he went to go get the print from the guy the guy was like yeah here's the address dante takes this cab to the middle of the outback essentially and there's just a shack and he sat there for about 10 minutes and was like i don't need the film that badly it's okay let's just go back and just left no i don't i'm not going in the shack it's okay it's fine and i so all that stuff was kind of bouncing around in there and then once john came on um it became a matter of trying to not overlap on purpose like trying to make sure that we weren't writing bellinger as sutter kane that we weren't leaning on what he'd already done because we did want it to kind of stand on its own and and have its own identity and i think that was we were more conscious of it than he was i think he doesn't mind those thematic echoes and things sure uh yeah i mean for those who haven't watched it and

you should because it's available on to be and voodoo and itunes and the places we listed and it's a real fun uh hour of uh of of carpenter uh it's it's about a cash-strapped film programmer who is hired to find this legendary lost film that seems cursed, that drives people crazy, that has some inherent evil to it, that has long been thought completely lost, but there is evidence, perhaps, that it has to exist out there somewhere. I think also part of it was just going to film festivals.

And there was a movie that I saw at one of the Fantastic Fests. And before the movie, I remember Tim League came out to introduce it and brought with him, he invited several people to come up to the front of the theater. And he gave us a shot of tequila,

gave us the salt, gave us the lemon wedge. And he said, what I want you to do is snort the salt, squeeze the lemon in your eye, and then throw the tequila on the ground. That's a Serbian film. Buckle up. And so I think he set the stage properly. And after that movie, I had a conversation with somebody where it was like, what is it about us as film fans? Why is it if somebody says, I have the most horrifying, amoral nightmare of a movie, it will end your sanity. And you're like, great.

When can I see it? And where is it playing? And what is it about film fans that makes us want to take that challenge when we're told there's a movie that's so crazy, horrible and on the bleeding edge of extreme and and people will man people will go see anything if they're told it's crazy there or there's a certain type of film fan who's chasing yes it's it's like the people who eat the like

you know insane ghost peppers that have been bred just to destroy you and they're like yeah pretty good you know but like their palates are so like devastated that they're like yeah i still i want something that's really i'm gonna feel like you just you know you're going deeper and deeper but even look at like sallow's weird stickiness as film twitter's perpetual favorite meme yep you know this idea of making someone watch Salo or recommending it when someone's asking for a thing to watch with their kids or like.

I feel like movies. I feel like the human centipede exists simply so that when you tell somebody what human centipede is about, they've had the whole experience.

They don't ever need to see the film. The movie is fucking nothing. Oh, oh, horrible. The movie is probably not going to as true with almost all these movies not going to live up to what you've imagined right exactly and that was part of it as well was well you know it'd be really amazing if you actually went and saw one of those and it really

did make you insane and sure yes right and you actually had to gouge your eyes it was right right uh because like i was talking with uh alex ross perry about the exorcist which i guys i grew up in britain i don't know if you know this about me i'm sorry what i've heard rumors i've heard rumors on the internet i was i was an adolescent in britain uh and uh alex was asking me about how exorcist the the easiest version to buy these days if you want to buy a disc is the the version you've never seen the version with the spider walk you know the director's cut which in my opinion is not as good I don't like that cut that much but has sort of weirdly become the dominant cut right the where like Freakins put in a few extra flashes of

Pazuzu and I think it's annoying but whatever um and i was recalling when that came out in britain that was the first time that movie had been available in britain for like a long long time because that movie had been banned in britain basically taken out of circulation because it became a video nasty and so when i was a kid i thought the exorcist was like illegal a video nasty you have to unpack this for ben you must unpack this for ben ben just like a cartoon heart popped up in his eyeballs huh it's a great phrase it really is there was a whole kind of like moral panic ben and especially in the 80s in britain when like vhs's became you know widely available like it like people like little old

ladies in britain were like you could just buy a movie called the driller killer like this is you know children could see this and so lots of real you know lots of truly you know extreme type movies got banned but then a lot of like not like what you consider like fairly mainstream movies kind of got sucked into that including the exorcist and but when i was a kid i didn't get that the exorcist had been like a titanic level hit when it came out like that that was just like a mainstream film i thought that was some like illegal film that if you watched it like satan would be in your house now or whatever that's why they banned it they were like this is a cursed movie not nominated for like eight academy awards right yeah exactly like made a billion dollars

adjusted for inflation or whatever like it's just funny to think about how these things stick like you say griffin like beyond what's in the movie like their reputation has just become what is important about them right and i think i did the same thing to The Exorcist. Oh, go ahead. No, no. Just like Salo is actually a good film, but I think that's why it remains sticky is because it's like one of the movies like that that you can use as a buzzword that also has inherent value. Unlike something like Human Centipede. It's not just the shock, you know? Right. And I do think that like,

I certainly, I saw the exorcist too young. I was seven when I saw it and I saw it theatrically, a babysitter thought, Oh, the re-release is out. I will take him to see it because I would like to see it. And,

uh, and at seven, I thought it was a documentary. Like I didn't know what was happening in the movie theater. It really messed me up. So that has always been on the off-limits shelf for my kids. And we just watched it during Halloween. And I think because I had built up the story of how much it messed me up and what it was,

we put it on. And about 30 minutes in, one of them turned to me and goes, oh, it's a movie. Right. Oh, it's a movie. Like, it's a real movie. Oh, okay. And they loved it. But they were like, we just movie oh okay and they loved it but they were like you we just thought we were going to turn it on and the devil was going to beat the shit out of us for two hours like that is truly what i thought the exorcist was right they they thought it was

the tape from the ring yeah right yes exactly right it's so good it's so good when a movie works that way i mean it's the best that's's what the Blair Witch Project was, you know, to so many people. It's that's a hard phenomenon to like explain to people is just like you have to understand there were like three weeks where people thought maybe it was real. And it's just like that's not that's not possible today. You know? No, it can't be replicated. Yeah, I do wish speaking to this point that we had not shown the movie in cigarette burns it is one of the few things that i think we we really only wanted it to ever kind

of play in the background out of focus and i think but you do see snippets yeah we dropped we dropped it and i i kind of wish to this day that it had just stayed out of focus in the background i think that would have been strong i was was, I will admit, I was surprised that we saw any footage from it. I assumed it would be one of those things where you only watch someone watching it, essentially. I think it was mainly just shot so there was something playing in the theater, so

there would be the right light and the, yeah. I think it was well done, though. Like, the glimpses you see, it works, but I agree with you that probably there's nothing scarier than never knowing and having it live entirely in your mind you know it's a weird memory that just got dislodged for me um i remember being on an airplane uh and whenever i would fly i would try to get empire magazine because uh american airports are one of the only places you can find it regularly. And David, Empire Magazine is like a film magazine based out of the UK.

It was very important to me. But I remember, I guess it must have been in 2009, reading an issue of Empire Magazine where they had this article. It was like a two-page spread that was split into like a triptych, right? had this article it was like a two-page spread that was split into like a triptych right it was like three parallel column articles that was the three of the genre masters of the 80s are all coming out of retirement and have new movies next year and it was john carpenter the ward joe dante the whole and john landis burke and hair and i remember reading this with the sense of like holy shit that's what all three of them coming back and it's like fucking carpenters making low budget horror again and

landis is working with simon pegg and joe dante is doing 3d and then i wish i liked all three of those movies i wish i liked any of those movies man it's bizarre how all three sort of belly flop and then dante's the only one of the three who's done a narrative film. We almost worked with him as well. We actually did work with him for a year. On what? We had a script called Bat Out of Hell, which was a short version of the pitch. It's a red-eye flight from New York to L.A. one night and not long after takeoff, a bunch of people stand up and say, sorry, we've taken the plane. We are in control of the plane. There's six people in first class.

They're vampires. We're just going to kill them. And then you guys will land in LA and you can arrest us and do whatever you want. But if you don't let us kill them, we're taking the plane into the fucking ground. So that's the movie. And that's cool. We had Joe for about a year and just the financers were thieves and rapscallions and just a terrible experience with them. But Joe was amazing. And I truly think if anybody put Joe in the right position, Joe is good to go. Joe's ready to make another great film. Joe is on fire still.

I feel that way, too. Of those three. I mean, I really dislike burying the x uh but he is a guy who i don't doubt still has his fastball and still has his heart in the game i just i i i have fundamental issues with that script that i don't think anyone could have fixed and i think he does not have nearly the resources to be able to pull off any version of that film that is even presentable he's and he's always been the guy who had five dollars less than he needed on everything always forever and i feel like it's the reason that joe isn't considered the equal of the guys he should

be the equal of because he he is he's absolutely got the chops. Anybody that made Inner Space should have been making gigantic blockbuster hit comedy action whatever's for decades. I mean, he's one of my favorite guys of all time. I talk about him all the time on this podcast.

I constantly threaten that we're going to do him. You have exceptional taste, Griffey. We should do him. Thank you. We should. We should. My hold off is I'm waiting

for him to make another movie. I'd love to tie it into another film. And he could. And he could. Right. Whereas The Carpenter, it feels much more iffy right it's gonna happen the one i really want him to do is the um the whatchamacallit hasn't he been threatening to do the uh roger corman movie yes the man with x-ray eyes yes short sort of a like uh like his matinee like

homage right biopic yeah that's cool right that would fucking man with kaleidoscope eyes i'm Sort of like his matinee. Yeah. Homage, right. Biopic. Yeah, that's cool. Right. That would fucking... Man with kaleidoscope eyes. I'm sorry. That's what it is. That's what it is.

And his Masters of Horror is great, too. Homecoming is really fucking good. I'd love another Masters of Horror type show, like on one of these streamers. I guess these anthologies are hard, I guess, to sort of assemble. They're hard to put together at the financial stage um and i don't truly understand why because i know master's still

constantly it's always on somewhere and so is that there were there was a season three sort of that we did for nbc right and for that one i worked with larry fessenden um at the best i fucking love larry but that was a disaster because we got hired and we're told you have to, if you want your script shot for the season, you have to have it turned in before the writers strike. And we had 72 hours from when we were commenced to when we had to have our final draft turned in so that they could shoot. And we did like five drafts with Larry on the phone in that,

that time. It was crazy. Like, that was not the ideal way to work. But they, and I think if that, if the writer's strike hadn't happened, I do feel like there was a shot at fear itself becoming the next incarnation. Well, Blumhouse has their sort of what, what's it called? The Into the Dark or their Hulu series yeah right which i feel like they use connected right no and they use as like a launching pad for like newer directors but this feels like such an obvious time to like do this again on a streaming service with deeper

pockets and sort of more production comfort and there's another generation of guys you can bring in now. Absolutely. I would make sure you pepper in a few of the old guys who are still there and want to do it. But there's a whole new generation of guys who, and some of them did Masters. I know Lucky McKee did an episode of Masters, and I think Lucky's amazing. But I think there's a lot of guys now who would really do something special if you put them in that situation with these guys as their peers.

And I think the anthology format plays better on streaming i think it makes more sense to people i mean to just go like we're doing black mirror but it's with horror directors well it's amazing the tales from the crypt that they haven't worked those rights out like well we've talked about this but it's i know those rights are they're they're just a nightmare they're truly a nightmare right i i mean as as far as we've ever solved it it's that like you can make a show called tales from the crypt or you can do a show with the crypt keeper and you can't do both right right makes sense makes perfect sense perfect sense we we should do two things guys we need to do two things one we need to play the box office game for the war excellent we have to yeah and two we

have to do our our carpenter list what is it about sorry we gotta shout out how hot looks good looking he looks fucking good and I really love seeing the 90s vibe

too man I really love seeing the 90s vibe too man I really really enjoyed that uh Cigarette Birds especially Drew fucking ruled oh thanks man

thanks yeah Norman we got Norman at the right time he was uh he was still kind of young and uh hadn't lived the Walking Dead

uh Haggard post post yeah Boondock and uh Blade 2 right

I was gonna say right it's like boondock has disappeared so he doesn't understand that that movie is going to make him a mortal and fraternity dorm room walls forever uh oh no he was well aware he knew it was really yeah that was one of the conversations we had because i had seen overnight at that point and we had a conversation around he goes no listen man me and Troy we're gonna be making those forever man and I was like okay have fun with that all right then well they made

another but also like you're gonna become like the fucking Bruce Campbell of your generation you're gonna be the king of cons yeah yeah the king yeah the king yes can we before we do those two things, David, I'd love to just touch on pro-life a little bit more

because we gave a little bit of attention to cigarette burns. And I also need some time to compile my list because I always do everything last second. Mr. Perlman. Okay. The great Ron Perlman. Well, that's the thing I want to talk about here. And you have that effect with Udo Kier as well in the first one.

But it's like guys who just immediately are able to lend so much weight and gravitas and stakes to any any genre project yeah just from their face and voice alone oh he he's a gift you you can't ask i the two guys that i've worked with who i genuinely think are like that, Ron Perlman for that one, and then Doug Jones in the Larry Fenton piece. Because Doug is a special effect. You get, before you even put makeup on Doug, you get so much value. And then Doug makes everything come to life. And I think Ron is that same way. He is.

He's a living special effect. Just his face alone is a special effect. Yeah. And he's got this great character actor soul wrapped in Lon Chaney's body. So he's got the physical exterior that is startling, whether it's meant to be menacing or whether it's meant to be sympathetic. Like he it's really remarkable how much range you get out of Perlman looking the way Perlman looks, whether it's Hellboy or this. But you can you can both of them i think work really well with him um yeah he was he was terrific on this film and

uh when we initially wrote it his van that he's driving around and was supposed to it's supposed to be one of those vans that the anti-abortion activists have with all the photos and stuff on the outside where they have the terrible pictures sure oh they're horrible and the only reason it wasn't was john was like i don't want to look at that shit all day no no it's fine i get it ron will sell it so and uh and i think ron's the reason that that holds together we we were really rushed and it was a really frantic shoot but ron was it an eight day shoot like truly like you only had eight days yeah eight days and we've got complicated effects we have a little monster baby we have all sorts of crazy

shit that had to have a floor that had to explode it was not a uh it was not an eight-day shoot that was not the way that was supposed to work but i think ron made it work and um the last night we were in toronto uh or in vancouver for uh that that one, uh, you know, the Sutton place, um, the hotel that's up there, there's this one hotel that is the industry hotel. And for a long time in Vancouver, if you were shooting anything up there, you were probably staying at Sutton place. And that bar Ron, the way Ron put it was I could sit down here and just watch my whole life go by because of all the stuff that shoots in, vancouver and so the last night we're in the bar and it's ron and it's um john and it's myself and we're sitting around and uh bob shea walks in and i guess he's in town for something

else and this is post in the mouth of madness and so so Bob sees John Carpenter. He walks over, literally puts his hand on Ron Perlman to lean down and talk to John Carpenter and tell him, you should come over and sit with me and have drinks with me. And then walks back over. And he's about five feet away

and Ron Perlman goes, I don't think any of us are coming over there, you cocksucker. And then which Shea kind of looks looks startled and then john just starts belly laughing and she stays on the other side of the room kind of drinking over the course night all night ron's telling stories about terrible new line experiences and he's telling bob shea stories and then john starts telling bob shea stories and it was wild energy because i being who i am i'm like you know what i probably shouldn't even be

at this table i shouldn't be i should be over there so bob shay takes offense he doesn't see my face and i'm not gonna cut it's right fearless ron perlman doesn't care and john carpenter doesn't care and it was the rowdiest table i've ever been at this shit talking across a room at somebody just throwing footballs because now perlman's like i want to grind my axe so hard that oh yeah sparks are like hitting bob shay essentially right and then the very end of the night the only real interaction i had with ron that whole night you know telling stories whatever but at the end of the night finally he's going up to the elevator and he grabs us by the arm grabs rebecca by one grabs me by one. Just says, good words,

gets in the elevator and goes, wow. Like, all right, I'll take it, man. That's a good words is good enough. Uh,

the final question, uh, does it depress you to think that you made pro-life like 15 years ago? Uh, I, I think one of the more sort of successful films to throw a satirical bent on like abortion panic in america and now we're facing the full repelling of brophy wade rather than things i haven't gotten bet since then i honestly thought we were at the we were maybe a little late with ours like oh it's

right we missed the bell curve we've got this locked down no no no really not nightmare we live and it's it is really shocking to think that we are less uh that we are less stable in those rights than we were when we made that uh it's crazy right right and that's like you're making that like 10 years after uh citizen ruth which you also want to believe is at the peak of the bell curve of exactly you're like oh we're we're doing it because we know we can laugh now it's over we can relax now yeah no um that's wild let's talk about uh the words box office weekend so i assume this opened to uh number one 35 million dollars what are we looking at here number 77 000 not great so uh it's not in the top five actually no it's not okay no number one is the third film in a franchise what weekend is it oh it's july i'm sorry july 8 2001 so post july 4th

weekend um so uh yeah number one it's uh the the second weekend of a big uh threequel you know is it third entry transformers dark of the moon sure is yeah the best of the transformers in my opinion maybe or the first you and i disagree on that but yeah really i think the first is the best i think the first is the first it's the best of the sequels there's the only good sequel really yes I'd agree with that yeah but yeah darker than I love darker than when I saw it in 3d it's well the jumping sequence is really cool and yeah I don't know it's probably

stupid I went to Russia for that one you went to Russia I saw that in Moscow no like for a junket yeah they did the junk that was in the real heyday of the junkets. Right, yeah. Those, in particular, the Transformers junkets were insane, the money they spent. We did the Moscow junket for that,

and then the next one we did in Hong Kong. So, yeah. What a bizarre reason to go somewhere. Yes, I came to Moscow, and I spent three days here to watch transformers and lincoln park the junket for the fifth one was uh in medieval england right yes yes they actually transported everyone back in time inside merlin's cave where grimlock lives um sorry david number two at the box office number two the box office is new this week it's comedy. A hit comedy that gets a sequel. It's a hit comedy

in 2011 that gets a sequel. Is it Horrible Bosses? That's right. Is that what you were going to guess, Drew? Yes, it was. All right.

I'll let you take the next one. No, you're doing great. The next one, a little tougher, also new this week, also a comedy, a kid's comedy, more family oriented.

Okay. But with a comedy star of the moment. A comedy star of the moment in a kid's comedy. A kid's comedy more family oriented okay but uh with a comedy star of the moment yep he's playing a he is he has a job is he the tooth fairy no uh is the job the title or is that just the hook nope nope the job is the. The job is the title. So it's a classic. This guy doing that? Mm-hmm. Okay. Hands on hips.

Comedy star of the moment. 2011. More family oriented. It is a hit? It's a mild hit. Let's see. It's opening to 20. And it makes 80 domestic. Yeah. Not a big yeah not a big hit oh i know what it is i know what it is kevin james's zookeeper that's right james is

drop the it's cleaner it's just called zookeeper oh man a movie i saw in theaters because the character's name is Griffin That's the reason You saw it in theaters Griff's gotta look out for other Griff's Huh How do you feel he represented your name Not well Also Nick Nolte voices a gorilla who's obsessed with Applebees

The voice cast in that movie is demented They talk I think Cher plays a lion. Stallone's in it. Judd Apatow plays an elephant. Yeah. Is that the tail end of Kevin James' sort of A-list career? Here comes the boom.

Or does he have a couple more? Well, I know, but when's that? That's the next year, I want to say. Right. So it's falling off is what I'm saying here, right? It's sort of like, yeah, here comes the boom is 2012. Yeah. The wheels are getting wobbly right about here.

Right. Right. It's diminishing returns from here and else. He goes back to Blart, you know, like he's sort of like, okay, you know, anyway, number four, the box of animated film. Blart two is like his escape from LA. Back to Blart. I'm sorry, David, number four.

It's an animated film that you have some opinions on oh boy it's cars to cars to cars to is number four the box office number five is another comedy it's just crazy looking back 10 years ago too many comedies many of them

bad you know people say oh it's well it's global box office it's this is that it's also, it's global box office. It's this, it's that. It's also that they oversaturated with shitty comedies. I mean, you cannot deny it. It was post-Hangover. Exactly. This is two years after Hangover, so

we're at like the peak of everyone being all in, back in on it. And Hangover was internationally successful. That's the thing. Everyone was like, can we make these movies work overseas? And this movie, you know, it is not as bad as Zookeeper. I think it's actually probably better than Horrible Bosses. It's not good. Or I don't remember it being particularly good. It's another

ex-person-has-a-job movie. It's a female comedy star. It's a female comedy star. It a female comedy star is it it's not the heat is it no but is it a mccarthy no no because bridesmaids is this year 2011 okay right later okay okay it's a female comedian with a job you don't think it's great or comedian oh okay call her a comedian okay comedy she's, because she'll do dramas too, but she was a consistent comedy star. She made many hit comedy films,

including a couple with her co-star in this movie. Huh. Okay. So this is a reteaming. No, this is their first collaboration. This is their first, but then they do more. They do one more.

They do another bad comedy together this isn't an aniston it's not the proposal it's not aniston she's now retired from acting oh it's cameron diaz oh okay cameron diaz and she is the bad teacher she's a bad teacher some teachers are good not not this one no no real bad that's another that's like if if the podcast goes for 15 more years you'll know we're tapped out when we're doing bad blank as a patreon series yeah the bad occupations and that's just a uh you know one of those seagull performances where he's like i'm gonna show up and give 10% of my energy and it's still going to work,

but you're going to, you're going to know that I'm not exactly like all in on this. You know what I mean? He's barely trying in that movie. And you're like, this guy's still charming. Like, even though I can tell he doesn't want to be here.

It's also one of those weird things where like for years, the thing was like Apatow wants Siegel to be a leading man and no studio will let it happen. They all think he's too weird. He looks like Frankenstein's monster. They're not letting it happen. This is how he would describe it himself in interviews. And he's big on How I Met Your Mother, but he kind of resents being on a network sitcom. And even that, they won't transfer the credits over to movies and then he finally like for getting Sarah Marshall hits I love you man hits and then immediately he's like phoning in performances like doing favors for Jake Kasdan is like oh I think I don't like this either yep yep I mean Gulliver's Travels

Bad Teacher obviously the Muppets and Five Year Engagement those are his passion projects those are passion projects sex tape is kind of the end, right? And then he like disappears for like five years. Well, post that he did the End of the Tour.

Foster Wallace movie. And then, right. He's basically like, yeah, only doing little indies. Yeah, I probably could have guessed that the Muppets would end up being the passion project on the Forgetting Sarah Marshall set

when they shot the Dracula musical. I've never seen anybody more giddy just to have puppets anywhere in a building than he was that day he and bill hader both were like we have fucking muppets look at this oh my god it was amazing those were actual hinson puppets they did that and i think that may have been the moment where he was like i i should push my luck i should see if there is no fucking apatow especially not not the, and it's all Siegel as well, but he's like,

yeah, I'm going to make a comedy about a guy who wants to Dracula musical. I'm going to get my dick out twice. And the, you know, universal's like, okay. And then they're like,

wait, it's a hit. Like, wait, what? It's also just incredible how he had this machinery that worked for a long time and only stopped working when it seems like machinery. Well,

David, wait a second. He's got machinery. All right, David. I took I took my microphone out of the stand. Oh, I remember when I saw that movie at the Regal Union Square the second time he got naked. Someone in the audience said, why keep getting his dick out?

Said it out loud when you guys eventually do apatow please have me on for that series and give me a decent film i want to talk about good film next time okay great so we've uh put you down for uh this is 40 so what i was going to say is no i just think it's fat like apatow was like a franchise in and of himself. He could sort of sell anything both by the name brand recognition, but also like their machinery of knowing, like being the first comedies to go do comic conventions and have videos go viral and put deleted scenes on the Internet and like all this sort of shit. Like they just had it so figured out. It all slowed down, like partly because of the industry moving away from comedy. But he also just decides to pivot to tv at the exact moment and then by the time he wants to come back to movies

they don't really exist anymore but the thing that's insane that he was able to work for like six consecutive years is i make a movie with someone who isn't a movie star yet that movie makes them an a-list movie star also the person who scores laughs in the fifth or sixth lead of the movie gets to be the lead of the next that's the next one exactly i got your eye i got my eye on you it was just constant cycling of like you'd watch the movie it would mint someone to the top of the list and then tell you who the next person's gonna be yep it's a remarkable machine well it was remarkable that it worked as long as it did uh is that the end of the top five? That's the end of the top five.

Let's do our carpenter lists. I will say this. We gotta do it. We gotta go see Licorice Pizza. Yeah. We're seeing Licorice Pizza tonight. Humble brag. Nice.

Very excited. I hope I cry. I know it's not a movie that people say makes them cry. I just want to cry at the power of movies. I'm a fucking sap. So, this is maybe the hardest ranking we've ever done i feel like the top 11 i would say the the order could change based on the way the fucking wind is blowing like i i you know there's there's a clear distinction of like tier of like

perfect masterpieces movies that i think are pretty fucking great, and then movies that are dumb or wonky in some way but I enjoy. And only like two or three movies I don't care for that much.

But even so, if The Ward's your worst movie, you're not doing that poorly. Now, Griff, are you including Someone's Watching Me, Elvis,

and Body Bags in your list? I'm not. I'm leaving off TV. So, yeah, excluding those three and the two McQueen-y swan joints. Yeah. Okay, so 17

movies then. I have 18. What am I miscounting here? I think it's 18, David. What am I miscounting? You missed something. You missed something. I'll go first if you want while you figure out what you missed okay ready here's my ranking and once again don't at me

the fucking changes by the second number one the thing number two Halloween I almost consider putting Halloween number one just because it's such a perfect object this would be a fair argument for it number three in the mouth of madness

big surprise for me this series is how much I jammed on that fucking thing I think it's a masterpiece number four they live number five escape from New York number six big trouble in little China number seven the fog a movie that people thought I didn't like from

our episode I think maybe just because you love it as much as anyone loves it. I was the defender so you became the guy in the middle on that episode maybe. That's why. I don't know. I think. But like I still rank it very high. I think that movie's very good. Number eight, Starman. Number nine, Christine.

Number ten, this is where I think people are going to get angry at me, Prince of Darkness. I think most people now put that in their top five. I owe that movie another watch. I still think it's a top shelf thing, but top six films for me on a different level. Then I go 11, Assault on Precinct 13.

Okay, so then this is a delineation point, right? Yeah. Escape from L.A. 12, Dark Star 13, Ghosts of Mars 14, Memoirs of Invisible Man 15. Then there's another delineation point.

David will say I'm rude. Vampire 16, Village of the Damned 17, The Ward 18. I just know you like vampires a lot more than I do. I like it more than you. I had forgotten to put Escape from L.A. in. That's what it was.

That was the last movie I watched, basically. Yeah. Okay. Our top three is the same. The Thing, Halloween, In the Mouth of Madness is my top three.

Wow. Number four, Escape from New York, for me. Number five, Prince of Darkness. So I do have that a lot higher than you.

Number six, They Live. Number seven, Big Trouble in Little China. Number eight, The Fog. I can't believe I put The Fog higher than you number six they live number seven big trouble in little china number eight the fog i can't believe i put the fog higher than you well i have prince of darkness i don't know that's but that's just a five star sure area that we were just sitting in and then there's three more movies that i love assault on precinct 13 is number nine starman is number 10. Christina is number 11. Then I have vampires at 12. Dark Star at 13.

Escape from LA at 14. Ghosts of Mars at 15. That's all. It's still all good vibes. Yeah. And then memoirs, damned, and the ward at the bottom there. Right. So I extend a little more kindness to memoirs. I obviously put vampires much lower than you do.

My seven, eight, and nine are the ones that I think are really kind of interchangeable in terms of order. And then Prince of Darkness is still a 10 for me. Yeah. And it's just one of those things where I can't be mad at anyone saying almost, you know, any of these sort of top 10

is their fave or whatever. Like, that makes sense to me. What is your favorite, Drew? You don't have to give us a whole list. Not to put you on the spot. Do youenter or is that a yeah i i just i as you asked i kind of went and i i looked at my list and i i think for me the top five would be big trouble number one which i just big trouble is unique that's your movie it is the thing the thing uh halloween they live and prince of darkness for me yeah um and yeah i the thing is i i'm amazed at how well the thing uh there's

a lot of movies that i try to hand down to my kids that they don't necessarily love or that don't work the same way the thing is toshi's favorite movie. Wow. We just had to see. He's 16. And for his 16th birthday this year, we rented him an Alamo screen and let him invite his friends. And they showed The Thing. And none of the other kids had seen it or even knew what it was. And so that screening, sitting behind a row of 15 and 16 year olds who had no idea what was coming. Yeah. and 16 year olds who had no idea what was coming yeah and toshi who was delighted at the screams and the insane and they all loved it they had the best time with it it played like a million bucks for them um didn't play dated didn't play old they weren't bored by it it really delivered um

i find that amazing i think that movie is still just a magic trick it is almost flawlessly suspenseful yeah yeah i mean that's the it's like that's my thing of like one and two being a little interchangeable for me is that like thing is operating at a much higher level right of just like his mastery as a filmmaker but uh just ha just Halloween as an object is hard to even wrap your head around, especially after Art gave us that whole dissertation. And I don't know, as I've now dug into the sequels and everything, it does make you realize how much of a miracle that film is.

I only like a Halloween movie in this dojo. There's a Halloween movieeen movie it is that first film and i i don't really understand any of the rest of them in terms of the appeal because to me that first film is so beautifully crafted and it is such a sleek simple object of fear um yeah i i i really think you know when he was his game, he is the genre defining very best. And I think those top three or four films, whatever they are for you, man, they're just inarguable. They are just unbelievable craft in every single one. I mean, he's a guy where pretty much any five people would pick as their top.

You'd be like, yeah, all of those are masterpieces. Yep. Yep. Yep. You know, I was surprised that you guys didn't talk more about Richard Dysart's nose ring when you did the thing episode, because that is one of the craziest details in any of the movies that he's made. And it seems like you can only see it in 4k or if you see it in a theater

like at home, you never notice the Dysart's wearing a nose ring in the entire movie. I blame this on, I never saw it in theaters and the 4K disc only came out after we recorded the episode. It is just one of those crazy little details. All right, well, gentlemen, thank you so much for having me. I cannot believe I finally got to be on Blank Check. Thank you, John.

Hey, long overdue. Sorry it took this long, but it was a perfect capper on the miniseries. Yeah, good way to say bye to this guy absolutely and and hey let's say thank you to ben ben good choice man good fucking choice thanks it was so fucking great wow um but uh glad it all uh glad it all worked out i don't know. Ben, you've been reading for your giant book.

You've been reading this book, the whole miniseries and highlighting things and putting in stick-it notes and whatever. Are there any sort of final thoughts you want to leave us with at Carpenter at large? Well, I just think I'll say this. Not to quote a specific thing from the book, but just anything you've observed. Yeah.

I think this is the time where this premise of our show, it always hits me in different ways where you're sitting down, you're watching a director, like body of work start to finish. And this was the one where I really was noticing like camera work. I feel like for the first time,

or just like it was really clicking with me in a way. And there's just like, I don't know, I got really absorbed into just visual language and just like thinking a lot about what he was doing behind the camera. So I'll just share that, that, and you know, that was like something that I started to recognize like how clean and simple the stuff he was doing was one of the great voices man yeah he's

the best I was so glad to watch all his movies and spend time with him yeah we'll miss him I mean it both felt good and terrible but I guess wait shouldn't we announce yes we should David gonna tee you up for that I think you

should handle this announcement because it's kind of a david's choice this is a filmmaker that you've personally stumped for for a while she was on my bracket yeah right and uh and it for a number of reasons uh that i'll let you get into it felt like this was the right time to do it well she's got a new movie out her first in, uh, geez, uh, 12 years. Um, although she did some TV in between, uh, she's,

yeah, she's sort of a fundamental filmmaker for me, I guess, in terms of me falling in love with the movies. Um, but she rules and she, we talked about her and, you know,

people might quibble with her as a blank check director, but we're going to get into like, she really, she really got Hollywood to make to make some some very very wild stuff uh at the height of her powers and she's got and she's got kind of a big epic blank check i cannot sing her name her name is jay campion sorry i got confused for a second there you know power of the dog is probably the biggest canvas she's painted on at least in a long time you know power of the dog is probably the biggest canvas she's painted on at least in a long time you know like she she's back uh she's got this sort of powerhouse movie that's going to be uh it's it's out right now or yes it's out right now on netflix but it's

going to be part of awards season and so in march and january and february we're going to be talking camp they're doing an amazing screening series of hers right now at the Academy museum, their brand new giant theater that they just built. I think in the cut plays tomorrow. Oh, so David movie. Imagine that Ruffalo Dick at the Academy museum.

We saw it at the quad, you and I, but I know it was a little screen and we were, this might be, this might be the first miniseries well there's no question that it would be the first miniseries if this is true I have to do the numbers where there's a majority of movies with male nudity in them with the penis in them to be clear sure that you know that I think I think it's maybe at least like five out of nine

or something like that that that's definitely more than the Brad Bird film. Drew, I was going to make the exact same joke. I was rushing towards it. New Zealand queen, Jane Campion. We're going to start with two friends, her,

which was sort of a, you know, kind of a TV movie. We played some film festivals and we have to do a movie called two friends. And to be clear, it's not the two friends. That's our competitive advantage. The movie is just called Two Friends. And then Sweetie, Angel

at My Table, The Piano, Portrait of a Lady, Holy Smoke in the Cup, Bright Star, Power of the Dog. What a run it's going to be. But just to be clear, at the time you're listening to this, because there's obviously a little bit of a gap there, we have to pay off a balance of past miniseries. So the next three

episodes are going to be paul verhoeven's benedetta yeah steven spielberg's west side story yeah and lana wachowski's the matrix resurrections oh my god those will be the next three episodes and then two friends begins in january uh the j Campion series. My big problem with almost every movie right now is that it's not The Matrix Resurrections. I get so fucking amped every time I see that trailer and then so angry when it ends and I have to watch anything else. It's coming.

It's very soon. It's done. It looks ready. So fucking... Talk about a director who we thought was done. Yeah. Where it just felt like, they're done, they're burnt out, they're tired.

Might be retired. The fucking siblings split up the sisters don't want to work together anymore neither of them is going to make a movie ever again and then here comes those bananas looking fucking blockbuster in so long gonna be good

so that's the plan goodbye Johnny thank you again Drew take us out Griffin let's go see pizza yeah I can't wait to get a slice of that licorice pizza um Goodbye, Johnny. Thank you again, Drew. Take us out, Griffin. Let's go see pizza. Yeah, I can't wait to get a slice of that licorice pizza. Look, thank you all for listening. Drew, people should watch Vois on Netflix.

Yes, December 6th, it will be on Netflix, produced by David Fincher and David Pryor. And you can find my newsletters at drewmcweeney.substack.com or thelast80snewsletter.substack.com where I am reviewing every single film of the 1980s chronologically. Because I'm a crazy person. That sounds easy.

And once again, people should check out Pro-Life and Thank you. Both viewable on Tubi and Voodoo and other platforms and definitely worth your time if you've been

following us on this whole Carpenter journey. Although neither for the squeamish. They're both pretty fucking intense. They're gnarly. They're gnarly.

They're gnarly. They're fucking gnarly. You're a dang ass freak. I don't know if I'm allowed to give you that title or if that's a fan only.

No, no, no. I will happily wear it. Thank you. Yes, you are officially a dangass freak, my friend. Dangass freak shit in both of those. Folks, thank you all for listening. Please remember to rate, review and subscribe. Thank you to Marie Barty for

our social media. AJ McKeon and Alex Barron for our editing. Nick Loriano and JJ Birch for our research. Pat Reynolds, Joe Bowen for our artwork. Lane Montgomery, Great American Novel for our theme song. Their new album, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Online, is available wherever kids listen to albums.

And you can go to blankcheck. No, not no, nope, nope nope you can go to patreon.com slash blank check oh oh there we go uh to listen to of course uh watching a trilogy of films that are even uh more demented than a carpenter's two master of

horror segments uh we're of course talking about tim allen's santa claus trilogy uh watching those over on patreon got it and your soul than Carpenter's two Master of Horror segments. We're, of course, talking about Tim Allen's Santa Claus trilogy. Watching those over on Patreon. Gotta mercy on your soul. Blankiesoutright.com for some real nerdy shit. And go to our Shopify page for some new merch. We got some new merch coming for Christmas time.

Stay tuned for that. And as we said, next week, Benedetta. We're back with a gold member himself, giving us a horny non-movie. Cannot fucking wait. The movies are back. And as always, fuck John Landis. Fuck John Landis.