Imaginary Worlds - The George Lucas Talk Show

Episode Date: May 22, 2024

Did you know that in retirement, George Lucas decided to host a live talk show with his sidekick Watto? That’s the conceit of The George Lucas Talk Show starring Connor Ratliff (from the podcast Dead Eyes) as Lucas, and Griffin Newman (from The Tick) playing the alien character Watto. They’ve had famous guests on the show, including people who know Lucas in real life. The guests have to pretend that Connor is George. Over the past 10 years, the show had grown into a cult phenomenon to the point where there’s now a documentary about it called, I’m “George Lucas”: A Connor Ratliff Story. Connor and I talk about why he’s fascinated with what defines success or failure, and how it’s become a theme in his work. We also discuss his new podcast Tiny Dinos, which is like a combination of Jurassic Park and The Tonight Show on a micro-scale. This episode is sponsored by TodayTix, Incogni and Henson Shaving. Go to TodayTix.com/imaginary and use the promo code IMAGINARY to get $20 off your first Today Tix purchase. Go to incogni.com/imaginary and use the code IMAGINARY to get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan. Visit www.hensonshaving.com/imaginary to pick a razor and the use code IMAGINARY to get two years' worth of blades free with your razor – just make sure to add them to your cart. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. I recently went to a live show in Brooklyn called the George Lucas Talk Show. I didn't know much about it, but the title alone was intriguing. The crowd was buzzing with excitement. The lights went down and we heard... Please welcome to the stage, Wado! The actor Griffin Newman walked on stage and the crowd gave him a standing ovation.

As a Star Wars fan, I could tell that he was dressed like Wado. Wado was a CGI creature from the Star Wars prequels. In the movies, he looked like a big gnome who floated off the ground with flapping wings. Griffin Newman was wearing a skin-tight blue bodysuit with a fake pouch in his stomach, a leather vest, a blue snout on his nose, and on his back were fairy wings. He immediately drew attention to a wardrobe malfunction on his low-budget costume. And we seem to be running through this issue, and I need to explain this. It's very complicated CGI. Let's just say there's a technical glitch we keep running into

where it looks like my zipper broke on my skin. And that's not what it is, because this is my skin. I have no zipper. After warming up the crowd with a very funny monologue, he introduced the host of the show, George Lucas. It was the comedian and actor Connor Ratliff. His beard and hair were spray-painted white. He was wearing little spectacles. He jogged through the crowd, giving everyone high fives until he settled into his desk. Hello, I'm George Lucas, creator of Star Wars. He and Watto bantered for a little bit. Forbes reported that I am the number one celebrity billionaire.

The wealthiest celebrity. 5.5 billion. Number two is my buddy Steve with less than 5.5 billion. And eventually they introduced the guests for their talk show, Adam Scott, Britt Lauer, and Zach Cherry. They're all actors on Severance, which is a sci-fi thriller on Apple TV. Adam Scott is famously a huge Star Wars fan, and he was quick to play along, pretending that he was starstruck to meet Watto. I can't believe we're finally meeting. I'm such a big fan of yours. Oh, thank you.

This is kind of like a Pacino-De Niro heat moment. Yes! For the two of us. Britt Lauer, on the other hand, did not know Star Wars. And she asked Watto… What are you? Great question. Oh my god. Britt, you asked me this backstage. The way you do when you meet anyone. What are you? Great question. Oh my God. Britt, you asked me this backstage.

The way you do when you meet anyone in person for the first time. What are you? I had a bigger question. What is this? What am I watching? I mean, I had a blast. But I kept wondering, how did this come about? Well, there's a new documentary called I'm George Lucas, A Conor Ratliff Story. What is the George Lucas talk show? It is important.

Fundamentally, it is a talk show that George Lucas hosts. So Conor plays George Lucas. I don't know why he does it. Does it make sense to you that Connor pretends to be George Lucas every month? I wanted to talk with Connor Ratliff about why he created the show and how the show reflects the experience of being a Star Wars fan. As a lifelong fan myself, I feel like we're always trying to recapture a sense of childhood wonder. But a lot of the Star Wars which has come out in our adulthood has not lived up to our expectations. So why can't we ever let go of Star Wars? And why, after 10 years, is Connor still addicted to playing George Lucas?

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That's promo code imaginary at todaytix, T-I-X, dot com slash imaginary. Todaytix.com slash imaginary. The name Connor Ratliff might be familiar to you. He's done many comedic roles in TV and film, but he's best known for a podcast called Dead Eyes. When Dead Eyes came out in 2020, it got a lot of media coverage, which was overwhelmingly positive.

And this is the backstory of Dead Eyes. In the early 2000s, Conner got a small role on the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers. It was a very ambitious TV show about World War II. Tom Hanks was an executive producer, and he directed the episode that Conner was supposed to be in. Conner thought this would be his big break, but he was fired because, he was told, Tom Hanks thought he had, quote, dead eyes. And that's the name of my new podcast, Dead Eyes. It's an investigative series, a completely true story, and a kind of show business mystery exploring a, it must be said, deeply unimportant question that has haunted me for nearly 20 years. After interviewing people connected with Banner Brothers and talking with friends about how they

handled their big show business disappointments, Conor finally got Tom Hanks on the show. Not surprisingly, Tom Hanks was very nice. He had no memory of meeting Conor, but he wasn't surprised. When he was making Banner Brothers, he was under a lot of pressure. He was very stressed out. And he may have said that in private, but it never should have gotten back to Conor. You can see, if you podcast listeners could see my face now, I'd be such a grimace. Making the podcast was cathartic for Connor. He was so devastated from that experience, he stopped trying to be a professional actor for 10 years.

During that time, he discovered improv comedy. The George Lucas talk show evolved out of his improv work. But he said the character of Lucas that he plays goes way back. When the original trilogy was re-released in 1997 with new scenes and special effects. My friends and I didn't like the new stuff. Rather than getting mad about it, oh no, we're betrayed by George Lucas, we were amused by it. And we would, my friends and I, you know, a lot of what we would do in high school is we would play characters with each other. We would sort of just invent characters and interview those characters.

And George Lucas became one of those characters where, you know, one of my friends would be like, hey, George, what new ideas do you have for, you know, new scenes to add into Star Wars? And I would say, oh, okay, well, I have an idea where we're going to do this. And, you know, I would just, you know, if we were hanging out in the mall or something like that,

we were in some store, I would just start talking about whatever was on the shelf and say, like, we're going to add some of these into Star Wars, you know, I would just, you know, if we were, you know, hanging out in the mall or something like that, we were in some store, I would just start talking about whatever was on the shelf and say, like, we're going to add some of these into Star Wars. You know, just be like, you know, it could be like a can of fruit or something like this is gonna be a new character and we're gonna sponsorship deal, you know, because we also we were also inoculating ourselves in advance because we knew if we don't like these new, you know, 30 second, two minute, you know, additions to the classic original movies, what are the odds that we're going to love the full length new movies by the same filmmaker? Because, you know, when enough time passes, you know, I don't remember that thing about how, how many years go by where all the cells in your body change you're essentially physically a new person every seven years or something you know they're coming out with these prequels and this is not from the it is from the creator of star wars but it's being made by the

person who made the young indiana jones chronicles and radio land murders you know You know, it's the person who has not delivered a really satisfying product, entertainment-wise, in a while. And so we were never mad about the prequels because I had this George character that we would play with for our amusement. The movies were almost sort of like, they were like bonus content

for this character that we played with in the same way that when i was a kid my favorite part of star wars i love the movies and i love the you know the records and the music and the books and things like that but the thing i loved the most was playing with the toys because that's when you could make up your own star wars stories and that was when really, the movies were a thing that sparked my imagination as a kid and made me interested in telling stories and coming up with characters. I liked playing with the characters

that didn't do or say a lot in the movies. Any action figure I had that didn't have any lines of dialogue was great because I could create that character's voice. I could create all of that character's behavior, what they want. And I usually would make those characters like ridiculous. I'd make them like overtly like weird comedy characters,

but I couldn't do that with like Princess Leia or Luke Skywalker because unless I would know I was not playing the characters correctly, but there was no incorrect way to play some of these like bounty hunter characters who never say a word, you know? Yeah, so George Lucas became like an action figure that you were playing with.

Yeah, and that's something that I didn't even fully realize until I started doing it as a comedy show later that I'm like, oh, this is the thing I liked doing as a kid. But that was the thing, like the prequels came out and we'd go see the prequels and then you know we'd have fun talking to george about like why did you do this so i'd be like well because i think jar jar is a you know a grade a uh comedic character and i'd talk about all the i talk about all the scenes that were on the cutting room floor and i would just make up

these ridiculous scenes yeah i mean one of the things I was thinking about too when I was watching the show was that this was tapping into the sort of bafflement that a lot of fans have that George Lucas will talk about the Phantom Menace and the Empire Strikes Back as if it was the same creative process. The results were the same. The quality is the same. And the problem is with the fans. And I, you know, I thought thought about dead eyes but then also in

the documentary too a lot of your friends were talking about how you're fascinated by success and failure and many people think he's he's failed creatively on epic level and yet he has zero self doubt is that something that kind of fascinated with you fascinated you about embodying him as a character like that yeah well because forbes magazine just just ranked him, George Lucas, the number one celebrity billionaire. His failures are more successful than any success I will ever have in my life in terms of like global box office, even some of the things he's done that he would regard as massive flops, you know, they made millions of dollars and millions of people went to see them. And, you know, or even if they failed in one regard, you know, the innovation in the making of something like Radio Land Murders or Young Indiana Jones Chronicles paved the way for almost everything you see in film and television. This was a digital sandbox that, like, George Lucas was playing in

for the benefit of many things that are of higher quality dramatically. Well, when was your sort of aha moment where you realized, you know, this could be a talk show? I did a one-person show at UCB that it was sort of, they have these things called spank slots,

which is where you audition a new show. And I had done this show where I played a bunch of characters and I sort of threw myself into it. It was, it was, it was set at a, it was called local author's night at the mid Missouri public library. So he did this whole show and I put all this effort into it. I actually wrote and published one of the books and I had created these like twitter accounts for all the characters and I was like this show's gonna be a big thing and then it didn't get it wasn't gonna get a run at the theater it wasn't gonna play again I'd have to like rewrite it or change it and I looked at all the work that I'd done and I thought you you know what? The performance I did went over really well, but I bet 50% of the people who were ever going to come see this show probably came to that first show that we did. So I started thinking, I need a hook if I'm ever going to do my own show here.

And I was like, I should do something that's like, I don't know, like Harry Potter themed or something. What do people like? I'm like, I don't know anything about Harry Potter themed or something. What do people like? I'm like, I don't know anything about Harry Potter. That's the wrong generation for me. And then I was like, what if I just do my George character and just make a talk show? And I tried it once without really knowing what it would be. And what I realized immediately was like, I would book guests who really had no connection to George Lucas or Star Wars. And I would find in the interview, I would make it about, I would make it as if George

had only the points of reference that were from his career, his life, which is not the function of a normal talk show. A normal talk show host normally has to be like funny, but then they have to, you know, they don't just bring up their interests. I would make everything about George stuff. And that was immediately enough of a hook that I thought, yes, this works as a show. So I watched a bunch of the shows on YouTube. And one of the wildest things for me is when you interview people who actually know George Lucas in real life, like during the pandemic, you're doing the show on Zoom. You guys interviewed Ahmed Best, who played Jar Jar in the movies. Yeah. But you have to be George. He's got to talk to you like you're George. And I don't

know if you remember this and you can chime in because, you know, sometimes my memory goes off. Me too. First day of clones, the first AD kept screaming, check the gate. And as you know, there are no gates on digital cameras. I remember thinking, did they mean Bill Gates?

Because I remember thinking, this is all, this is digital. And the expression on your face, you looked almost giddy. What was it like talking with him? It's one of my favorite things. Like my preference always is the less the guest has a connection to Star Wars, the better. Like I, people always are trying to be like, oh, you should get this person, that person.

You know, there's a handful that I'd be really excited to get. But I would rather get a guest that you would not expect to see on a George Lucas talk show. I would rather get someone who's a million miles away from it and figure a way to like loop them into that world. Well, when I sat with a cast of Severance, Britt Lauer did not know it at all. And it was actually really funny, like how much she didn't know Star Wars. And the fact that she had auditioned for a Star Wars movie. And couldn't even remember which Star Wars movie it was. Yeah.

Britt, do you remember if you had to hold Babu Frick? Are you saying English words? I mean, galactic basic. But I do really enjoy whenever it's someone who has met George,

has interacted with George, because then I'm on my heels in a way that's exciting to me as an improviser because I always tell them backstage, don't tell me anything. Save it all for when we're in front of the audience. Surprise me. Because, you know, for one thing george is you know about to turn 80 actually yeah i think today as we're recording this and you know i'm 48 years old and lord knows there's plenty of stuff that i don't have a great memory about things that i've

forgotten i always have the excuse of oh oh, refresh my memory. But what I love to do is just to bluff along and be like, yes, I remember this. Why don't you tell it? For instance, we had Amy Irving on the show, who was Stephen Spielberg, was married to Stephen Spielberg at one point. And at a point when, you know, George and Stephen were making the, you know, original Indiana Jones movies. So I knew she had a lot of personal experience being around George. And when we were doing the show, this was last year, she told us a story about going on what she said was a very awkward plane ride to Hawaii, I think it was, when one of the Indiana Jones movies came out. plane ride to Hawaii, I think it was, when one of the Indiana Jones movies came out.

And it was Stephen and Amy and George and Linda Ronstadt, who were a couple at the time. And she said that George and Linda spent the entire plane ride, this was her phrase for it, sucking face. They were making out the whole time. And that is extremely uncomfortable remember yeah and yeah and you remember who else was on that plane oh no i was focused

no you remember who else was on that plane amanda your daughter right yeah my daughter daughter who was like very confused. Oh, no. Kids have to learn these things. Kissing is part of life. George. So immediately we have this new piece of character lore, which is that George loves kissing.

Then Amy Irving gets up and stands up, walks over to me and kisses me on the stage. Is that okay, honey? And I'm just like, this is not what I thought was going to happen during this show. It was completely unexpected, and the audience went crazy for it. And it's exciting to find out something new about a character that you've played for hundreds and hundreds of hours. We all want to protect our data as much as Princess Leia had to protect the Death Star plans.

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slash imaginary is also in the episode description. slash imaginary is also in the episode description. Let's get back to my interview with Connor Ratliff. So what were some of the, what were some of the, maybe some of the most awkward moments in the show where you kind of sort of like, wow, this is kind of going sideways. How do we come back from this?

We did a show in London also last year, and we had booked someone who had done multiple voice characters in the prequels, been in a lot of Star Wars movies. He showed up backstage, and he was like, I don't want to say drunken, but he had this very kind of like actor-y energy. He had a big scarf, and he was like twirling it, and he was just like oh everything was very

how's this you know just like oh my we're gonna do this we're gonna do that oh what do we do oh very good very good and we just tell this guy is either going to be amazing or it's going to be a disaster and it turned out it was a disaster because every time we would try to do the delightful thing of me talking about working with him. Like I would say, like I remember when we cast you in this part, we thought this, and he'd say, no, you didn't. You're not George Lucas. You're an actor pretending to be George Lucas. Let's be real. And you could tell that he thought this was going to go over really well with the audience, not accounting for the fact that the audience was made up of people who had bought tickets

to see the George Lucas talk show. They knew what they were coming to see. They were fans of what this was. His subversive breaking of the reality just made the audience instantly hate him. In addition to that, every opportunity he got to turn anything into a double entendre, he would. And they were not clever. They were just exhausting. And at a certain point, you know, you have an obligation to your guests to, you know, welcome them into the show and make sure they have a good time. But at a certain point, when a guest has really taken a turn like that, you don't owe them anything because they're

essentially sabotaging or attempting to sabotage your show. So you kind of have to deal with them like you deal with a heckler. How did you handle that as a performer, though? I'm really curious when he's trying to break the reality of the scene and you are trying to stay in the reality of the scene. How do you handle that? You you have to dominate them you have to be better than them funnier than them and it's not hard to do that like basically i just started lecturing him that like part of being an actor is learning how to commit the and i would deny his reality harder than he would deny mine okay jerome jerome I want you to look me in the eye. I want you to look me in the eye, Jerome.

I want to see if you can commit, because I know I'm George Lucas. Do you want to try? I want you to commit. I know you can do this. You can do this. The weird thing about it was I don't think he realized how badly he was being received. I think he thought he was being like a wrestling villain

where people were like loving to hate him. So, you know, you're talking about we, and we haven't talked about Watto yet because that is such a huge and fascinating part of the show. Yeah. It wasn't your original sidekick. It was Sean Diston as Jar Jar. How did this evolve your relationship with Watto?

Yeah. I mean, as I said, it started the show with Sean Diston as Jar Jar. How did this evolve your relationship with Watto? Yeah. I mean, as I said, this started the show with Sean Diston as Jar Jar, and that was a character that evolved. He started off doing like a really broad, like imitation of the character. And then I just gave him free reign. I said,

do whatever you want with it. What he did basically was show by show. He started stripping away the imitation aspect of it and talking more in his own voice. So he still uses the language of Jar Jar Binks, but by the time we were half a year into it, he was no longer doing the accent or the voice, but he'd come out and say,

hey, I'm Misa Jar Jar Binks. He would just like, and he'd still say Misa, yeah, Misa like that, Misa like that a lot. Mooey, mooey, I love it. What ended up happening was he booked work out in Hollywood and had to move. And then for a moment I was like, am I going to replace him? I wasn't sure if I could. And Griffin was a fan of the show and had been a guest as himself on the show.

He had this Watto impression and he sort of volunteered it. I kind of wasn't too enthusiastic at first, I think because I thought it would only be a short term. It would be another, it would just be like kicking the can down the road a little until Griffin got too busy. But then Griffin booked the lead role on The Tick pretty quickly into his run as Watto. I thought, well, this is the end of it. He's going to miss a ton of shows.

He's not going to want to do this anymore. I thought, well, this is the end of it. He's going to miss a ton of shows. He's not going to want to do this anymore. But very often what would happen is, you know, we would do the show once a month on a Friday at midnight. And very often he was filming on that Friday. And if he was wrapped in time to get to the East Village by midnight, he would show up even if he'd been up since like 4 a.m. filming.iffin and i really became just like a double act in the sense of in the same way that i'd been with with sean we he fit in right away in terms of the characters are different but they're both george's like beloved cgi creations they're both the two fully digital characters from that first prequel.

And I think they hold a special place in my version of George's heart. Watto turns 25. We're celebrating. Hashtag Watto 25. Let's get it trending. We want everyone to spend the next month celebrating the 25th birthday of Watto. People don't think of me as Gen Z, but clearly...

Yeah. It's true. Anytime anyone does a profile about what Gen Z's up to, they have a little collage of public figures that are Gen Z. You are never included in the photo collage. But I was making hit movies before I turned one. You know what I'm saying? Like, I hit

the ground running. Yeah. But also kind of gets to the heart. I feel like by having both those characters, you're continually focused on the Phantom Menace, which kind of gets to the heart of like, it's the ultimate example of the movie that so many Star Wars fans over a certain age despise that he has to be the most offensive about.

And I feel like that's kind of the comedy keeps coming. It just keeps renewing every time you keep coming back to that. Well, it's also one of the things I like about The Phantom Menace is that there are so many versions of a kind of Star Wars movie that George Lucas could have made as episode one. And he, as episode one and he george chooses that moment to for the first time ever in a star wars movie really center stage put like the main new character who doesn't fit the mold of a traditional star wars character is this overtly comedic slapstick character that just never stops like even in the final fight it's a slapstick comedy all of the things that. Like even in the final fight, it's a slapstick comedy. All of the things that Jar Jar does

in the final battle are mistakes, like a Roger Rabbit cartoon, you know? He's winning by mistake because he's so, he's clumsy and he's knocking things over. And the confidence of George Lucas centering comedy, that particular strain of comedy

at the heart of that movie, it's as if he had booked 10 stadiums to do stand-up in. You know what I mean? It is just like, what are you doing, George? Like, this isn't your thing. This kind of thing is not really, you've never had,

you've had success with doses of comedy sprinkles of comedy here and there and this is like closer to like who framed roger rabbit or something the way jar jar is and so to have george hosting a talk show as a comedian it does feel like phantom menace is the is the heart of which is like, it's one of his big comedy moves, you know? That's really interesting. Yeah. Yeah. In the documentary, you were sort of, you know, you're asking yourself, you know, why am I doing this? You know, there are times you've thought about stopping doing it and then you kept going.

I mean, where are you at with that right now, that question? stopping doing it and then you kept going? I mean, where are you at with that right now, that question? Well, last year I wrote a play for George and Watto to be in called The Baron and the Junk Dealer. And it was basically like a Samuel Beckett play. It was an existential drama. It doesn't mention George Lucas or Watto in the text of the script at all. They play these two characters who are stranded and a spaceship, crashes on a desolate planet, and we're waiting to be rescued. We're sending off a rescue signal, but we're two characters who are both on the run,

so we don't know if our signal is going to be received by people who are hunting us or people who are coming to save us, and we each have our own different reasons for... We have our secrets we did this show at the edinburgh festival fringe and then there were some shows at the end where griffin had to leave early and we still had these slots and i did this um i did george prob this one one person improvised show as george lucas or as a it was actually like a digital recreate i told

the audience that i was a digital avatar of ge Lucas and that I was interactive. I had already done all the improv in a motion capture studio. And now the algorithm was just going to interact with the audience and that would decide which parts of this improv you would see. And it went over really well. And then it hit me. I don't need a, another show where I have to buy cans of white spray paint and spray my hair and get dressed up in my silly George Lucas costume. Like what am I doing designing another show where I have to do this? So there is a part of me that's like learned enough to know that like everything I like about doing the George Lucas talk show, I also want to be a little bit sparing with it not do it too much to the point

where I get sick of it you know you mentioned the digital avatar and this is kind of an uncomfortable question but you know we mentioned that Lucas is turning 80 have you thought about like one day you're reading the news oh my god he's passed away

is it conceivable that you would be like well yes I motion captured myself and here I am as a hologram? I've thought about this. When you're a little bit younger, you have a little more hubris about certain things. It used to be that I thought if it happened, I would just keep doing the show. And we would just acknowledge that I had passed away, but I'm not going to stop hosting the talk show. But, I mean, I hope he lives to be 115, to be honest. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I don't know whether I would feel like going on

because I think if and when such a thing would happen, I think it would probably depress me too much to feel like making jokes. I think the one thing that I would say is that any world in which we would continue with it, it would definitely change the show in a lot of ways. It would probably become a show about exploring legacy and mortality

and the meaning of life. It would probably deepen the show if we continued doing it. And that would be the only reason to keep doing it is because it would open up a larger idea. Because I do think that like George Lucas is someone who has some element of, he's building this museum in LA, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, definitely has an eye towards creating, you know, a legacy that will live on and a notion that these stories and these worlds that he's building and the things that he's done for film preservation, that he is someone who's building a world that his children can continue to live in and that their children can live in.

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subscriptions and yes to a razor that will last you a lifetime. Visit hensonshaving.com slash imaginary to pick the razor for you and use the code imaginary to get two years worth of blades free with your razor. Just make sure to add them to your cart. That's 100 free blades when you head to h-e-n-s-o-n-s-h-a-v-i-n-g.com slash imaginary and use the code imaginary. Connor's latest project is not connected to George Lucas, but it does relate to Steven Spielberg. His new podcast is called Tiny Dinos. It's a talk show, but it's also an improvised sitcom. His co-host is an actor named James III. They met a long time ago doing improv in New York. And he was one of my favorite performers. And I was sort of thinking like,

ah, I'd love to, James and I should come up with a show to do together. At about the same moment that I thought that, he moved to L.A. And I thought, oh, well, okay. And James is a big fan of the Jurassic Park movies in a way that I really like because he's sort of unashamedly just enthusiastic about not just the original by Spielberg, but he really, I think his second favorite one

is Jurassic World, which is, that's not, it's not like a film snobs opinion. There are a lot of people who really don't like the post, the second era of Jurassic Park movies after the third one. I always just really liked how into it James was. And we were talking about, we should make a dinosaur comedy, like a Jurassic Park comedy. It would be like Jurassic Park where you didn't know what had happened, but just dinosaurs were suddenly appearing and you just had to deal with it. And we thought that was funny, but we thought,

eh, it would basically be as expensive as making a Jurassic Park movie. And then I kept thinking about it. I thought, what if we did a thing with dinosaurs where we brought dinosaurs back, but we brought them back really small. And that way, originally I was thinking of it as like an adult swim show where they could just be tiny little stop motion animated things that you'd see. And I thought, well, that would take care of the expensive part because we could just have them be small and kind of fake looking. And then my friend Harry Nelson, who's one of the producers on Dead Eyes, he called me and said, hey, listen, I've got this,

I've got a little budget at Hyper Object, which is Adam McKay's company, to make some comedy podcasts. Do you have any ideas? And I thought, you know, we could probably do that Tiny Dinos idea and it'd be even better as a podcast because you don't even have to do

the stop motion animation. You can just do it with sounds and it's funny that my in my brain i'd already kind of fallen in love with the idea of bringing back dinosaurs small as a as a way of as a comedic device that it didn't occur to me that we could have just made the big dinosaur thing because it's an audio format that's true the idea was basically that we're two best friends who are scientists. I surprise him that I've taken some of my research and some of James's research and I have brought back dinosaurs.

But don't worry about it because the real problem with Jurassic Park was that the dinosaurs were too big. If you make them really small and keep them in a self-contained thing, it's a secret, then they won't cause any problems. And we won't have any of the Jurassic Park type issues. That thing's full of dinosaurs. It is a vast world of prehistoric beauty. And it's, oh. How big are the dinos?

The dinos aren't big at all. They're tiny. These are tiny. These are tiny dinos. And now we've done it. We've made tiny dinos. And look, there at all. They're tiny. These are tiny dinos. And now we've done it. We've made tiny dinos, and look, there they are. They're beautiful. So the first episode of the podcast is the episode where James finds out about the tiny dinos,

and he also finds out that in addition to me doing this experiment as a secret surprise behind his back, me doing this experiment as a secret surprise behind his back, I'm also making a podcast about it and using the podcast to help fund the research and the maintenance of the tiny dinos, which is counterintuitive if you're also trying to keep it a secret. But part of the conceit of our show is that podcasting is such a niche operation that you actually can reveal a secret on a podcast and it doesn't get out to the wider world. It only escapes to the people who are your listeners of your podcast.

We thought that would be a great frame for an ongoing series where we would both have guests who would come on the podcast as themselves and also characters that we're interacting with in our lives in the world of the show who drop by or who in some way interact with us. But what if they what if they multiply? I mean, even they'd have to multiply a lot. It'd just be like little bugs, you know? What's your game plan? So you're just going to keep these in

your apartment like little dinosaurs? Yes. Yes. That's what's been happening and there have been no problems at all. And I just told James about it and I probably should have spaced out you coming over. I should have done it on a different day. You shouldn't have people come over. I'm not perfect. When I was growing up, my dad used to play me

old time radio shows like the Jack Benny Show and things like that from the 1940s. And as a kid, I remember thinking like, Jack Benny show and things like that from the 1940s. And as a kid, I remember thinking like, oh, it kind of sucks that this is like vaudeville. It's like a dead medium. There's no radio stations that play like comedy sketches really. Podcasting has really brought that back and in actually an improved way. It's weird because the technology of what you can do in a narrative podcast now, just in terms of like sound effects and stuff even, and editing. As an improviser, it's very thrilling to be able to say something and know that it's going to happen in post.

Because you can literally say like, oh my God, what's that? Ah, it's fire ants. Ah, they're everywhere. say like oh my god what's that ah it's fire ants oh they're everywhere and then you suddenly now have this like musical score that could come in and the sound of all these things like crawling on the floor it's so easy to make quick thinking improv moves suddenly sound even more impressive because they're backed up by these great support moves in the post-production you can layer in. Well, I have one last question. It's kind of a big question. I assume that most people probably know you through the Dead Eyes podcast. And when I was watching the George Lucas

talk show, I kept thinking about Dead Eyes in terms of this idea of like, how do you measure someone's career in terms of successes and failures? And then the documentary, you know, a lot of your friends said that there's like a big theme that runs through your work. So I was wondering, like, have your feelings about success or failure changed since the Dead Eyes podcast became such a big hit? A little bit because the success of Dead Eyes is very satisfying. It's very fulfilling to be able to do something more or less exactly the way you wanted to do it and have it be well received at just about every metric that I could have imagined for it. At the same time, it doesn't solve any of your problems. And I think a lot of times that's a lesson that we just keep having to relearn is that success is good and it's nice to have success. And sometimes success, financial success can solve money problems and creative success can solve certain

kinds of problems. But there are some things that no matter how successful a person gets, it doesn't change any of the fundamental things that you might feel about yourself that feel wrong or off. Like those are things that you have to find the answer somewhere else. I think a lot of times people chase success because they think it's going to be the answer. If I could just get this one thing, if I just get that golden trophy and that million dollars, then I'll be happy. And there are a lot of people who've reached that million dollar mark or they've gotten that golden trophy. And it's in some cases you can see it in their

eyes, the real, the moment where they realize like this isn't going to fix me. It's not going to fix everything. It doesn't bring people back. It doesn't undo mistakes you've made. You know, it doesn't change that ache that you have. I think a lot of us have that feeling that like there's something wrong and I've got to figure out what it is. And sometimes success becomes the placeholder for like, I'll be, I'll be really successful. And then that, that feeling will go away. That empty feeling

will go away. And when you achieve success and you realize it's still there, that can be a horrifying moment for people. Thankfully, I already knew that before doing Dead Eyes. So I was able to just enjoy Dead Eyes for what it was because I knew the one thing it absolutely wasn't was an answer to my prayers and my problems. is that I thought if I can do this little part on Band of Brothers and Tom Hanks is on set and he likes me and says, hey, kid, you're good at acting, that that would mean I would get other work and my career would be on track and it would be smooth sailing from there on out. It would have solved everything for me.

When I was fired from that, part of my sort of spiraling out was not realizing that it actually was just a very small thing that had happened. I reacted at the time as if it was the end of the world. And for me, creative success, it's something I aspire to have. It makes me feel better. Doesn't solve everything. Show business success, which is to me, there's overlap, but it's a very different thing. You know, I need it for my health insurance, but I'm very aware that like,

there's no amount of show business success that I could have that would be enough. If no amount is enough and you can really process what that means, then you can kind of be like, oh, okay, this isn't the holy grail that it seems like it was. George Lucas is as successful as you can be as a person by any measure. But he's still, he's turning 80. He's not going to live 80 more years. And it's a problem that it comes to us all. You know, you have to reckon with it. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Connor Ratliff. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. If you like the show, please give us a shout out on social media or leave a review wherever you get your podcasts or tell a friend that you think would like the show. The best way to support Imaginary Worlds

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