QAA Podcast - Premium Episode 168: Winter Kills (Movie Night) feat Matt Christman (Sample)

Episode Date: April 21, 2022

A deeply troubled movie production. A 1979 take on the Kennedy family that ruffled some feathers. And Matt Christman of Chapo Trap House joining Jake & Julian in the foam palace. Come take the Winter Kills pill with us. Subscribe for $5 a month to get an extra episode of QAA every week: http://www.patreon.com/QAnonAnonymous Check out Matt Christman & his content: https://twitter.com/cushbomb / https://www.chapotraphouse.com / https://soundcloud.com/grill-stream Episode music by Pontus Berghe. Editing by Corey Klotz. Merch / Join the Discord Community / Find the Lost Episodes / Etc: http://qanonanonymous.com

What's up QAA listeners? The fun games have begun. I found a way to connect to the internet. I'm sorry, boy. Welcome listener to Premium Chapter 168 of the Q&ONANONANANANANAS podcast, the Winter Kills Movie Night episode. As always, we are your host, Jake Rakatansky, Julian Fields, and today we have Matt Christman.

Hey, hey. There he is. Hello. It's not winter where we are, so I feel like we've messed up because this is clearly a Christmas movie. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, die hard and winter kills are the best Christmas movies. Yeah, I placed a call out on Twitter and I was like, what are like some like really

pilled movies that maybe we should cover? And Matt replied with Winter Kills, which I never heard before. Yeah. And I went and looked at the poster of it. And the poster in it of itself is so melted that I knew, I knew that this had been sealed in fate. It is a jewel of like conspiracy theory thought, but also it's, you know, like almost like an unserious version of JFK or something.

Well, it's because it has, I think, a fundamentally healthier relationship to the Kennedy assassination than JFK does. JFK is a much better made film, you know, Alvers Stone is a genius at making movies. But its attitude to the assassination is fundamentally juvenile, which makes sense because Oliver Stone was a kid when Kennedy was assassinated. Right. And it imprinted on him at that point. This movie is based on a novel by Richard Condon, the author of The Manchurian candidate, who was a grown-ass man when Kennedy was assassinated. And so it doesn't, it has like a adult attitude towards like the real implications of the Kennedy assassination. It's profoundly cynical, I think, about a lot of that. I mean, at every turn where where you want to kind of maybe feel that heroic thing that comes off of what's the, what's the actor in JFK. Kossner.

Yeah, it comes up. Yeah. Poster's like heroic. He is a knight-errant. He's out there. He's jousting against the deep state. And it's a meaningful, this is the important thing. JFK really, really proposes that this is a meaningful battle that like if we knew the truth, something would be different.

Whereas this one, it's like every time you take off the mask. There's another mask. Yeah. There's another mask. I love it. So usually, you know, I do a, you know, a little background on the film's production, you know, who wrote it, who directed it, how much it caused. I was like, oh, man, I can't. Wait. I can't wait until they look this stuff up. How much it made, that sort of thing. And when I went to research, Winter Kills, the 1979 dark comedy, I found that it is, without a doubt, the strangest production story we have ever covered on the podcast, period, of all time. So it's written in and directed by a guy named William Riker. I did not recognize any of his movies, but I did recognize him from some acting work he did later in life. He was in the client, the adaptation of the John

Grisham novel, did not know that, starring Brad Renfro. RIP. RIP. He was in my own private Idaho and like a handful of other TV shows. He strikes me as kind of a kook. I found a YouTube video of him from June of 2020 posted to his channel where he attempts to summon the ghost of Howard Hughes to rid the White House of Donald Trump. I swear to God. That's amazing. What is he going to strafe it in a plane? What's the plan here? Basically he's going to wash the White House his hands until they believe. I've heard. I've heard that playing The voice of Howard Hughes summons his spirit.

Ancient industrialists are gods. We should be worshipping them and trying to bring them back to life and sacrificing stuff to them. If he came back to life, he would absolutely banish Trump from the White House and installed Mitt Romney

because of his absolutely fetishistic love of Mormons. It's like, that's the thing we need. We need some Mormon blood in the White House, like in my veins. Did he manage to convert or was it just like admiration? It was admiration.

He's all of his top, once he went like Bug House, All of his top aides were Mormon. He got blood transfusions from Mormons. Well, because it's the purest. Yeah, the purest blood. Yes. So, Winter Kills has an all-star cast.

You got a very young Jeff Bridges. He looks almost like Val Kilmer in this movie. Yeah, that's good. How old is he? Like, how old is he in this film? He's like in his early 20s. Gotta be. Yeah.

Smooth. A little baby. Smooth. I mean, did he have to shave to achieve that? I got a wonder. Very smooth. Yeah, he was very smooth throughout the film. He was the smoothest boy.

And the curtains are always open. Always open to expose the smoothness. That's not CGI. That's real bridges. That's a real chest and stomach of a real man. Back when they used to use squibs in the sex scene, you'd bust and they'd have a little explosion at Cumb go off. You've also got Anthony Perkins from Psycho.

You've got John Houston, who is a prolific writer and director. He did Maltese Falcon, African Queen, Misfits, you know, Hollywood Classics. He's also the father of Angelica Houston. You even have a cameo from Elizabeth Taylor. I have zero idea how they got all these people for this movie, especially when you hear about the production. Weren't you saying that she's like the only one who got paid? She was basically the only person, only cast member who got paid because she wasn't,

she wasn't going to step on the set unless it was already in her bank account. Yeah, so Bridges was not like a name. A lot of these people got, I don't know, I mean, or was he already kind of big? He was, he was like, he'd been in some stuff. He'd been like a star. So do you think he just was like, we got to do this. We got to expose the deep set. A lot of the people cast specifically were like they thought it was important.

They thought it was an important movie and it was worth sacrificing to get out. As Matt said earlier, the movie's based on a Richard Condon book who wrote Manchurian candidate and cost six and a half million dollars to make. It was produced by Robert Sterling and Leonard Goldberg who had amassed a fortune as marijuana dealers. Nice. Their previous producing endeavor was bringing the softcore porn series, a manual. from France to the United States. Oh my God, are you hitting me, dude? Sylvia Cristal.

There's another incredible French connection then because Maurice Jacques made the soundtrack to this and he's the dad of like the legend of how or like electronic music and kind of early dance music. No way. Jean-Michel Jacques, who did like oxygen and all that shit. But apparently his dad got pissed at him and cut him off. And I have to say the soundtrack was fun.

And also, going back to the cast, a absolutely baffling and out of this world cameo up by Toshiro Mufumi. I know. The cast has said that they got paid for their acting work by going to a hotel room where they would receive envelopes stuffed with small worn bills. One of the producers, Leonard Goldberg, was murdered during the production of the movie. He was murdered, they think, maybe by the mafia. Yeah, yeah, because he was probably indebt to some people. Yeah, they found him like tied to a chair, execution style shot to the head on his birthday.

This was during the production of the movie, if Wikipedia is. to be believed. Yeah, and if you haven't watched it, like, there's a lot of mafia stuff in the movie. Yeah, the cash envelopes started drying up. But for some reason, the cast agreed that they would continue working on the movie for free.

Eventually, someone snitched to the actors' union and they shut down the entire production, forcing it to declare bankruptcy. The only movie at that point to ever do so. Like, a movie declaring bankruptcy. Really? And not in, like, the Uwe-I-Bole, like, you're making money?

No, no. As in, like, this is a bankrupt production. Because usually the funding model kind of precludes that from occurring. Right. Wow. Shortly thereafter, the other producer, Robert Sterling, was sentenced to 40 years in prison for marijuana smuggling. Forty years for weed.

Yeah, but he was moving weight. I mean, yeah, these guys were kingpins. Flying planes. Yeah, yeah. They did, they, they became drug lords. They moved Emmanuel from France to the United States. And then they were like, let's do this weird fucking pilled, like, conspiracy satire about the JFK assassination. The only reason Winter Kills ever saw the light of day was that Jeff Bridges and Riker, the director, made another movie together called the American Success Company, which is ironic, and the distribution rights for that film were enough for them to finish Winter Kills.

It was released in 1979 by Embassy Pictures and made just over a million bucks at the box office. Less than one-sixth of its budget, a bomb. Gene Siskel of his Chicago Tribune gave Winter Kills one star, writing, Winter Kills, rapes. the memory of President John F. Kennedy while giving his late father a few dozen kicks in the head, too. It revels in its every degrading scene. One feels a little

less clean just having seen this picture. Hell yeah. That's a freaking review. You have been listening to a sample of a premium episode of QAnon Anonymous. We don't run any advertising on the show and we'd like to keep it that way. For five bucks a month, you'll get access to this

episode, a new one each week and our entire library. premium episodes. So head on over to Patreon.com slash QAnonanonymous and subscribe. Thank you. Thanks. I love you. Jake loves you.