The Big Picture - A Screenwriting King and the Queen of Movie Podcasts

Episode Date: June 23, 2020

We’ve got a double shot of interviews on today’s show. First up, David Koepp, the writer-director of the new horror film ‘You Should Have Left,’ which is available right now on VOD. Koepp is the screenwriter behind some of the most beloved blockbusters of the past 30 years, including ‘Jurassic Park,’ ‘Mission: Impossible,’ and ‘Spider-Man’ (1:51). Then, Sean is joined by Karina Longworth, the film critic turned podcaster extraordinaire, to talk about her show, ‘You Must Remember This,’ which is focusing on the great Polly Platt this season (36:17). Host: Sean Fennessey Guests: David Koepp and Karina Longworth Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Ringer Podcast Network. I'm Liz Kelley. Make sure to subscribe to the Ringer's YouTube channel to watch the newest episode of Slow Newsday with Kevin Clark featuring NFL MVP Lamar Jackson. And in anticipation of the NBA's return in late July, NBA Desktop with Jason Concepcion is back to posting weekly episodes. Also up on our YouTube channel are the best clips taken from this week's Bill Simmons podcast, Rewatchables, and Higher Learning with Rachel Lindsay and Van Lathan. You can find all these videos at youtube.com slash The Ringer. I'm Sean Fennessey, and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about movies. We've got a double shot of interviews on today's episode. First up, I had the chance to chat with David Koepp, the writer-director of the new horror film You Should Have Left, which is available right now on VOD.

If Koepp's name is familiar, that's because he's the screenwriter behind some of the biggest and most beloved blockbusters of the last 30 years, including Jurassic Park, Mission Impossible, and that very first Spider-Man. He's also a director in his own right, known mostly for Twilight Zone-esque brain teasers and thrillers. He's got one of the great movie brains in the game, and it's a fun conversation. Later in the show, you can hear my conversation with Karina Longworth, the film critic turned podcaster extraordinaire. Her show, You Must Remember This, is a personal favorite of mine and one of the most exceptional pods about movies that you can find right now. This season, Karina has trained her microphone on Polly Platt, the unsung production designer and producer whose work on films like The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment, and Bottle Rocket was sometimes unfortunately overshadowed by her marriage

to the filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich. Karina's series is a historical corrective and a fascinating portrait of a great movie artist. I hope you'll stick around for that one. Right now, let's go to David Koepp. Really honored to be joined by the great David Koepp. David, thank you for being on the show. My pleasure. I love your show. Thank you for having me. So David, your reputation as a screenwriter is massive. You've written some of the biggest films ever made. You've also directed seven features. You've published a novel. You're a very successful guy. How do you decide now at this stage of your career what you want to do, how you want to spend your time? Ask your mom. I don't know why I thought that would be so funny. It's not at all. It's not funny and it's not at all it's not funny and it's not in step with the times um i i just you know i i really i i probably shouldn't but i segregate work into a couple areas um i i have a great

deal of respect for carpenters who do their job well and i asked a guy one time he was working on a kitchen that we were fixing up and I was asking him to move something to a place that he didn't really recommend he thought like that doesn't really tend to work that well and I said really because I'd love to be able to just reach blah blah blah and he said okay and he said I said no I don't want to make you do it and he said I want you to enjoy your cabinets and sometimes I feel like some of the work you do you really just want people to enjoy their cabinets uh and other times it's your own house and your own cabinets and you want it to be exactly the way you want it to be and you don't

want that you don't you don't care where they keep their copy you know where the cabinets should go and um i'm trying to do more of that lately. You know, writing the novel was really, really fun in a way. I had more fun doing that than I've had at a desk in 15 years. And this movie also, you know, because it was sort of a labor of love for Kevin and I, and there wasn't a lot of money at risk, we got to do kind of whatever we wanted. And that's just really satisfying. And I think, you know, in the 90s, I worked on a lot of movies that were really big hits. And I feel like I spent time afterwards chasing that. And I don't think that's really fruitful. I don't think it makes you happy. It's not really genuine.

And so the last, I don't know, maybe five years, I feel like I've spent more time doing exactly what I want, which has been more rewarding. Although not necessarily financially, but certainly a lot more creatively rewarding. Well, I wanted to ask you about that. If you made that kind of transition consciously, and if there was a moment that made you think you should be doing that,

you should be focusing more on what you want to do. I think, I think every, you know, I've had that moment numerous times over the last 30 years. And I think every time you do something original that goes well, you feel like, God, I got to do this all the time. I should never do anything prior again. I should only do original stuff. But original stuff doesn't always work out.

And so then you'll have an experience where you work on something for six months and nobody likes it. Nobody buys it. You know, nobody even bats their eyes at it or thinks it's as cute as you do. And then you come to hate it and you think I'm never doing that again. So, you know, you go, you go in different phases and different,

different periods that as your life has different periods, your, your writing life has different periods. So I'm in an original stuff phase right now, which I'm really enjoying. I just wrote a, like a novella that is an audible original that, I'm in an original stuff phase right now, which I'm really enjoying. I just wrote a, uh, like a novella that,

um, is an audible original that is coming out in a month or so. That's another prose piece. Uh, Kevin Bacon read it. Um, and that was, that was really satisfying.

It's called yard work available from audible. Um, but you know, so like, I don't know. I just tried it. Whatever, whatever seems like a really fun day at the,

at the computer is what I should be doing. It feels like you have taken almost the inverse of what so many screenwriters, filmmakers have to do now, which is that to get in the game, you kind of have to be a part of these big franchises. And the originals seem it seems like from talking to filmmakers, it's just much harder to get those made. But you're kind of moving in the opposite direction a little bit. Well, I, I guess, I guess you, you, what you're interested in should change as you get older, you know, um, your life changes as you get older and you don't want to repeat a lot of stuff. So, you know, uh, I, I always had a hard time writing the second of anything. Um, I've only done it a couple times. We did, you know, Lost World was the second Jurassic Park movie.

And I think Stephen would also tell you so much harder than the first one. You know, you leave a lot of your good ideas out there on the field the first time. And the second time, you're trying to come up with more and but if you're not if you're not in subject matter that is uniquely suited to a serialized adventure or an ongoing story um then you're you've really got a hard job cut out for yourself um so i haven't really enjoyed that i did do a couple um of those robert langdon things you know the, the Tom Hanks character from the Dan Brown books. Those were really fun, but the books were already written and he was like a detective.

I always thought of him as like Sherlock Holmes. So those sort of kind of suited themselves to it. But mostly I like to try something different every time. And I like to, particularly as a director, I like to push myself to do something I haven't done before to see if I'm any good at it or to see if I can bring new ideas to it or if I'm going to fail completely. And I've had both experiences. I've had things that went well and I've had things where I failed completely and those sting, but you got to keep trying.

Yeah. I'm curious about the writing, but the directing in particular, the films that you've made, they're all pretty different in terms of genre and tone, but they all seem like they're kind of like ethical problem movies. It seems like the characters are kind of working through these dilemmas that they have or this thing that is haunting them. Do you have a sense of the kinds of choices you're making like that as a director? No, you find out. I think if you're doing your job right, you're not really thinking about what your themes are. You're thinking about what's an interesting story to you, what's an interesting character. Now what's something interesting that can happen to that character?

And if you're, you know, usually themes will arise on their own and you'll come to learn them later. And that's as it should be. If you're thinking, well, this is about man's never-ending struggle with nature, then you're probably not going to make a very good story out of it. I grew up in Wisconsin in the 60s and 70s. Born in the 60s, really grew up in the 70s in rural Wisconsin. I went to a Catholic school until I was 12 or 13. And I had some pretty specific experiences that really got in my head and rattled around. It's a slightly Gothic upbringing, lovely in many ways, but also, you know, a little heavy. And so a lot of that, I think, is reflected in the stuff I do. It's a real concern about right and wrong

and what guilt is just a major theme in a lot of stuff I write about. But I love Hollywood movies. I love popcorn movies. So I try to get that into a popcorn format. The new film is an adaptation. It's an adaptation of a book that is a novella from an author who's incredibly successful, who I was not familiar with.

Now you're talking about should have left, which is available streaming everywhere. June 18th. If I'm not, that's the film you've named it. Yeah. Daniel Kelman is a German author. I was not familiar with either.

And Kevin, the way it started was Kevin Bacon and I had not worked together on Sturbeck. I was not familiar with either. And Kevin, the way it started was Kevin Bacon and I had worked together on Stir of Echoes about 20 years ago. And we stayed friends and we're great friends ever since, but never quite found the right thing to work on again. And he asked me a couple of years ago, why don't you do something? Why don't we do something that's a horror movie that's about a marriage? And I said, oh, I'm in. Because my favorite movie of all time is Rosemary's Baby. And just the domestic setting for horror and thrillers, I think, can't be beaten.

So we started kicking around ideas. And I was interested in this idea of somebody, of a guy who's a wealthy guy pushing 60, who is married to someone who is much too young, and the tensions that arise because of that. Because you see it in Hollywood a lot, the older man with the younger actress, but Hollywood tends to not say anything about it. Going back forever, I mean, High Noon, Gary Cooper was 52 and Grace Kelly was 21, which is, you know, kind of gross. Um, and, but, but it was just ignored. Like it was, you know, you just act, everybody acted like that was appropriate for him. Um, so I wanted to, I wanted to have that dynamic, but see the pressures that lie under it and the jealousy on his part. And,

um, you know know maybe the some darkness in her that was drawn to him because he has a dark darkness in his past and that all seemed really fertile so we were kicking that around and then uh kevin read this book by uh daniel um you should have left and he said you're not gonna believe this but a lot of what we're talking about is in this book i said said, oh, great. Well, we can either sue him or buy it. What do you think he'd take? No.

So we talked to Daniel and optioned the book and they grew up from there. How do you feel about adapting at this point, especially for something that you're directing? Do you like that process? I do. It's gone let's i've done it three times now uh where i adapted someone's novel but but that felt very much like personal almost and the i've had some great authors richard matheson wrote a stir of echoes stephen king secret window and daniel King, Secret Window, and Daniel Kalman, this. I feel that you're free to adapt liberally. I think in all three cases, the authors told me they were really happy with it. And I think now having written a book myself, I understand why.

It's because Hollywood's really no threat to the author of the book. We can only help. We help sell a few copies of the book. And if you don't like what Hollywood did, it's not as though your book doesn't exist anymore. And then you get to be sort of righteous and say, well, of course, Hollywood ruined it. But I love writing and directing can be kind of lonely. And I feel like getting ideas from somebody else is really important. Because as writer and director, you lose the dynamism that often comes in struggle between a writer and a director.

But if you're working with somebody else's book, then you have the benefit of their couple of years of thinking. And if you feel moved by the spirit of the book, but free to depart, then I think you can do something really good. I'm kind of getting ahead of where I want to take this conversation. But you said something that strikes me, which is, you know, when you're writing for a filmmaker, as you have in the past, not it seems like not every screenwriter gets to build a relationship with those filmmakers. But, you know, I've heard Brian De Palma talk about you. I've heard Steven Spielberg talk about you. You know, Zemeckis, I recently rewatched Death Becomes Her and heard him talk about what you guys did you know did you feel like you were building relationships with those guys and learning how to be a filmmaker by writing for them yeah very much um I mean you

you hope you're building a relationship you know but it the writer-director relationship is always has a Democlean sword hanging over its head but over one party's head because one party has the freedom to fire the other you know and often you know uses that freedom thankfully that didn't happen to me very much

actually De Palma the other day said you know I think I was the first person to ever fire you. Brian, like you're proud of it, but you came crawling back, didn't you? You hired me again, same movie. And then we had a spirited, a frank and candid exchange of ideas about Mission Impossible. I heard him talking about his experiences with you on Carlitos and on Mission Impossible recently on a podcast. That's what I was thinking of, actually.

They were both pretty wild adventures, but I always felt like we were war buddies, you know, even through Mission Impossible when it was both me and Robert Towne working on the movie at the same time in different hotels. I always felt like Brian and I were on the same side, which was nice. At the time, I was quite young, and I was just hanging on and hoping that I stuck and that my work was considered of value. Then when I went on to do a second or third or fourth movie with those guys, the relationship changes, and hopefully you grow up and become a little more confident and it's hard to get it was hard though in that period to get out of my head you know that I'm in the room with these guys whose movies were formative you know during my those vital years of like you know 14 to 24 when you're watching everything and all your

all your tastes are being shaped and all your all your tastes are being shaped and all your aesthetics are being shaped um so it was hard to it was hard to stop writing for them and start just writing and um but you know i did that with varying degrees of success sometimes well sometimes not i remember when you made stir of echoes you talked a lot about matheson and what an influence he was on you and how much you admired him. I was wondering if at this stage in your career, you feel like you're making the movies you thought you were going to make when you were in that 14 to 24 formative period and building these relationships. That's a fabulous question. God, I'm glad I don't have to stand around and be judged by my 14-year-old self.

Because we're really judgmental at that age. Yeah, that's true. And I'm sure he would be disappointed. Oh, he'd find something that would be very disappointing about me. But the truth is, in that period, I never dreamed that I would actually get to make movies. I hoped, but I don't think I had the confidence or temerity to imagine not only that I would get to make movies, but what kind I would get to like. The first movie I almost directed, I was 25 and I had this crazy job working for this guy who represented foreign film distributors and he used to we used to buy b and c horror movie titles for video distribution in other

countries that was you know like sorority house massacre three we would buy for australia and deliver the element and I kind of stumbled into this chance to direct Slaughterhouse Two. And I said, no, I'm happy. I'm happy for. But it just seemed so crazy that I could. I wasn't going to be paid anything. And I would have had like nine days to shoot it. And the important thing was just to use a lot of chainsaws. You can imagine what Slaughterhouse Two might be like. And I didn't do it. And I'm really glad i didn't do it because it just didn't seem right didn't seem true seemed like what i wanted i don't know how i got off on that i haven't thought about slaughterhouse 2 a lot in the last 30 years well it's funny though because you just made a movie for blumhouse so

it's you know there is some sort of there's's an arc there, you know? There is. Well, you, you like what you like. And I have always liked horror and I favor a more unsettling kind of horror than, you know, a more graphic kind of horror. I like, I like stuff that really gets under your skin. And that's not always the most popular kind, but it certainly is for, I think of myself not as, if Steven and Brian were of the movie brat generation,

I really think there's a generation, my generation, I'm in my mid fifties, of filmmakers, there's a substantial number of us who I'd call the Twilight Zone on TV generation. Because we lived, breathed, died Twilight Zone, even though it was 15 years before it had been on TV, 15 years before we were watching it, or 20 years before we were watching it. But it was on

TV, and you could watch it every Saturday. In my case, they would have a double episode every Saturday afternoon. I would watch them all live and breathe and die with those things because they represented what storytelling could be, which was creepy and unsettling and imaginative, but also socially conscious. And that, that is,

then I, those are my dreams. I would love to be able to make those kinds of movies. Um, so if there's, if there's a strong influence on a part of this movie I'd say it might be Little Girl Lost Matheson's Twilight Zone episode which you know famously inspired much of Poltergeist and in fact in the there's a moment in You Should Have Left

when the little girl is in the house and Kevin's watching her through the window she waves she runs across the room and room, and the camera dollies from right to left, and when it passes through a wall, she doesn't emerge on the other side. It starts an interesting and exciting sequence, but you hear the composer put a little twinkling of bells in the moment when we're dollying, which is a nod to Twilight Zone. It sounds like part of the Twilight Zone. Because I wanted to acknowledge that.

Yeah, that is the most filmmaker-y moment in the film, I feel like. It is like you're pulling a move. And I'm wondering, do you feel like you have evolved as a filmmaker over time since Trigger Effect? I certainly hope so. I think that, but I think you hit certain moments in different films, you know, at different times. I think I did some nice stuff and I think I've done some nice stuff in every movie I've done. And I've also done some stuff that didn't work.

So hopefully my percentage of stuff that works to stuff that doesn't is getting higher, but you really are a slave to the material. If the, if the stuff is any good, if the story is any good, it's much easier to direct it. And it's much easier to think of good moments of filmmaking that compliment it. If, if the story and script don't really work very well, you're flat, nothing, nothing you add will help and the harder you try the more the sweat shows i'm i'm legally obligated to ask you a coronavirus related question and i i feel like trigger effect has a

you're opposed to the question the coronavirus yeah i'm opposed to it too um but i feel like trigger effect weirdly that's a movie that felt like it made sense in that time and you were also just talking about the twilight zone and i feel like the monsters are due on maple street's a big part of that movie and i don't have you have you gotten the sense that people are rediscovering that or have seen that or talk to you about it i find it to be such a fascinating movie and it doesn't necessarily have as big a reputation as Stir of Echoes or Premium Rush or some of your other films that you've made. It pops up from time to time. People do talk about it. I think that, you know, I've always enjoyed writing those kinds of movies where something

mysterious and sort of apocalyptic happens and we watch a very small number of people deal with it i've always liked those stories and i just never really wanted to live in one um i think that the trigger effect the thing that the other piece of writing i did the trigger effect had most in common with was war of the worlds um because we in both cases it was a very large-scale world event, and I really wanted to crank down the focus and the point of view to one person or small group of people and see everything through their eyes. So if they didn't see it, we can't see it. And I think that's a really effective technique.

And, yeah, people are mentioning trigger effect to me occasionally now because it's, you know, things are kind of like that. I think the most effective shot in trigger effect is just a simple high angle out in the, it's out in the sort of not quite desert, but it's outside Sacramento. You know, they're driving away, trying to go somewhere safe. I can't remember to her parents, I think.

And the camera's just up high at the top of a crane. And you just, cars are only going in one direction. We had 30 cars and they started out driving, you know, it was just an establishing shot. And I said, well, put them all on the same side. And they're all coming toward us because nobody's going into the city um and that that felt like uh felt like the LIE wow as a as a Long Islander a former Long Islander that's that's painful to hear um so you know I'm curious about the Blumhouse thing you said that there's maybe not as much

money on the line with this Blumhouse famously works on fairly modest budgets you and Kevin have worked on some of the biggest films ever made. What was this production like? How was this different from some other experiences you've had? Well, the budget was lower. You know going in how much there is to spend. And they're very clear about it. I always kind of wanted this to be at Blumhouse when we were working on it and I was writing the script on spec. And so I read interviews with Jason to sort of see how he thought about things and define what their approach was. And they're very, very clear up front. Once we agree on a budget, that's the budget.

Don't come ask for more. But you get to do what you want. And that's a pretty great trade-off. And I've always been frugal. I've always come in at or a little under what the budget was. So I didn't feel particularly challenged by that. It did feel challenging once we got out there and you got a lot. I have a six-year-old who can work limited hours.

And we're in Wales where the weather changes every 45 seconds. There's a lot of those kinds of constraints, but I've always enjoyed those kinds of challenges. The kinds of challenges I hate in directing are where, and unfortunately, this is a huge part of the job and possibly what limits me as a director. The challenges I hate are where you have to persuade people who have more power than you to let you do what you want. I'm not great at that. I get very frustrated. And I remember I was complimenting David Fincher on something he did in Social Network. And I wanted to know like, how did you shepherd that particular moment through or the,

or the number of takes and number of days it must've taken to get that just, just the way it is. And he just, he said, dude, belligerence. It's the only way. He's right. It sort of, for him, it really works. I, I i don't quite i'm not quite as good at that do you have a desire to take on a a more a more big scale production at any point because obviously that belligerence is kind of necessary at this stage to retain control over a bigger project is that something that you could see yourself doing especially given all the screenwriting work you've done on projects like this no i don't like that kind of directing and i'm not good at it um other people are other people are way better than me so as long as

the ones i've wanted to direct are things that feel personal or intimate in some way or it really feels like it would kind of break my heart to give this one um or i have a very particular way that i see doing this and i'd like to be the one to carry that through the bigger stuff there's there's so many moving parts and there's so many people you have to deal with and i'm a writer at heart and i really like being at home working on a story you know that's that's what i'm happiest um when I think of expanding the canvas, I think of writing a book, which is, you know, a bigger format or writing, um, a TV show where me or me and a partner write eight or 10 episodes. And so work out, you know, a great big

story that, that those to me seem like those are the bigger kinds of challenges I want. The challenge of trying to get a couple of movie stars to be in your movie and then the studio to give you another $25 million so you can do it the way you see it, those aren't appealing. Those just sound like a heart attack. Is writing hard for you? Yeah. No. Sorry. Wow. You just okey-doked me. I did. No. Writing is not hard. Writing well is hard. I can get the wheel turning and write stuff pretty easily, but sometimes it's crap. So the desire to return to it, the willingness to return to it is what again and again is what, you know, kind of makes or breaks you. Does it feel like it's significantly harder to tell original stories or the kinds of stories that you want to tell in the business at this stage?

I feel like in theory, yes. But in practice, it has been um you know it seems it's it's harder to tell it's harder to make the kinds of movies that i like to see for a major studio that's going to release for the way we used to think of a major studio that's going to release it in cinemas yes that is much much harder um But there are so many other places that will make them. If you get your head around the idea that a movie needs to be between 85 and 130 minutes and play in a movie theater, then you've got a lot more options. Unfortunately, I still like going to a movie theater and seeing a nice thriller and you just don't get very many of those.

Yeah. I feel you on that. Um, what do you think is your best work? It's hard to, well, there's, it's, it's, it's hard to separate, um, what you did from what the director did, you know? Um, there's one or two scripts I wrote that never got made that I think were, were, were probably some of my better stuff. But do I think that because they never got made and, you know, that's safe?

And then it's hard to separate it from the reaction that it got. I mean, Jurassic Park's kind of beloved, so it's hard not to say, well, that seemed to work for an audience um i know uh i'm very proud as a director of ghost town which i think is really sweet and beautiful and uh ricky gervais is very just very touching and funny in it and uh i felt like i did a nice job with that uh god i don't know that's hard What do you think is my best work? I don't think I'm qualified to answer that. I think Premium Rush is pretty underrated as films go and careers go. I think that's a really good movie.

Well, thank you. That makes me happy because, well, John Camps and I wrote that as well as Coast Town, and those are always fun. But that movie was so difficult. I'm glad to hear that just because it was oh my god putting people on bikes in new york city and then throwing them into live traffic to make an action movie is a terrible idea there was you know how like a workplace

in workplaces they'll have a sign that says, you know, so many consecutive days without a workplace injury. Yes. We were counting, you know, emergency room visits. And we were waiting for a day when we didn't send somebody to the emergency room. We had nine days in a row where we sent somebody to the emergency room. Wow. And thankfully, no one permanently. Although if you had Joe Gordon-Levitt on on your show i'm sure he could show you the massive

scar on his arm but um it was very difficult it was people on bikes is worse than people in water because everyone's moving independently of each other right so you can't quite ever get the frame you want because all speeds are different camera cars different from bike speed which is different the other bike speed which is all the other car, but it's worse than water because if they crash, they hit very hard objects as opposed to water. Um, so, uh,

thank you for, I'm glad you noticed that one. Cause that was August in Manhattan and it was not fun. Yeah. I don't, the movie kind of seems like a dare and that's, I think part of the reason why it works so well as you, it's really propulsive and exciting. It feels anything could happen um what do you what are you doing

now what are you doing next you mentioned tv you mentioned a novel like what are you going to do um some of that some of those things i um i rewrote uh we took another shot at bride of frankenstein um which had you know geared up and shut down uh sort of notoriously a couple of years ago in the middle of the dark universe wanderings. And they, but they very, they were very nice to let me take another shot at it. Cause I said,

I think if you let me scale this down a little bit and move it to the present day, I have some ideas I really like. And so they said, sure, take a shot. So I just gave them that and they're seem happy with it. And they're talking to directors.

Um, and, uh, I have another book I'm working on and I'm rewriting. I just started my rewrite of Blackhawk, this World War II comic for Spielberg in DC. So I got a few things going. Sounds like you're, are you always busy? Did you ever have downtime in your career? I don't do that well with downtime. I like writing. And so if I'm between commitments, I just start writing something on my own. I appreciate you giving us some time. I end every episode of the show by asking filmmakers,

what's the last great thing they've seen? Have you been watching anything in quarantine? Yeah, I have. And I love The Vast've seen. Have you been watching anything in quarantine? Yeah, I have. And I love The Vast of Night. Have you seen that yet? I have. I'd love to hear you talk about it. Speaking of The Twilight Zone.

Yeah, it's just terrific. And what this guy did with, I'd love to know what he spent because he's super crafty with it. And, you know, it's a sci-fi premise it's it's set in the 1950s which is genius because you immediately get rid of cell phones and people say okay well look for me at the thing and you know i'll come see you which is so much better than you know people texting everything um so it's set in the 1950s and it's a sort of close encounters like story. There's

strange things going on. This guy here sounds on the radio. But it's told so beautifully and with such patience and restraint. And the stories that the old people in the movie, there's a guy on the radio who you never see and there's an older woman who tells the story of something that happened a long time ago. And they're just riveted. They're fantastic performances. I don't know anything about the director or how old he is, but he's got such patience. And I was just really impressed by it and thought it was absolutely worthwhile. It's on Amazon. It's a wonderful recommendation.

Thanks for talking about it. David, thanks for doing the show. Really a big admirer of yours. I appreciate the time. Thanks, me too. Peroni is the perfect drink to elevate the party the next time you see your friends for drinks. No matter where you are or who you're with, Peroni's easy drinking effervescence

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Thanks to David. Now let's go to my chat with Karina. Karina, thank you so much for joining me on the big picture. Thanks for having me. So Karina, before we get into what you're doing this season on You Must Remember This, I was hoping you could help some listeners who are not familiar with the show or want to know more about the show understand how you landed on this idea for this series and how you got it on its feet in the early stages. So I used to be a film critic. I was the critic and the film editor at the LA Weekly and The Village Voice. But before that, I had gone to graduate school to get a master's in cinema studies. And in that process, I, you know, studied the history of Hollywood. And that's really kind of where my passion always was. I mean, even when I was supposedly my job was to write about new movies, I would always take an opportunity to write about a retrospective or a DVD release or something about the past. And I just kind of burnt out on covering contemporary Hollywood because there are so many movies released and most of them I don't care about.

I think there's probably like 30 movies a year that I actually care about and, you know, 15 are released a week. So when you're a newspaper critic, you're expected to see all those movies and have opinions about them. And it was just too much. I mean, I don't care about superhero movies. I don't care about most movies that are released, you know, on a nationwide level. So that made me really want to go back to my roots of studying the history of Hollywood and talking about these, not just the movies, but also the industry and the way that it worked. And I quit my job and I tried a few things that didn't really work. And at that time in early 2014, I found that just as a consumer of media,

I wasn't really reading people's personal websites anymore. And I wasn't spending that much time actually reading things online. I was definitely spending more time listening to podcasts. And that had become the way that I like to absorb information. It was just something that I felt like there were always too many things to read and I would never get around to all of them, but there were never enough things to listen to. And so I felt like maybe I could figure out a way to make a podcast out of this passion I had. And then I just started hearing it in my head and figured out how to make it. You make that sound easy. How did you do that? How did you figure out how to make it? Because

your show doesn't sound like very many movie shows, at least. It does have some of the same style and approach that some narrative shows have. But in the movie podcasting world, it was at least once upon a time kind of singular. So how did you teach yourself how to make this show? Well, when I was an undergraduate, I went to art school and I'd learned kind of basic video and audio editing software and the theories behind soundscapes. So I kind of had a background in that anyway. So it was really just a question of like, I hear this sound in my head, like, what would the actual elements be? How do I put it together? Can I do it myself in my bedroom?

And, you know, with a lot of trial and error, I could. Thankfully, after about 50 episodes, I was able to bring in other people to help me. Were you always focusing on scholarship around films and film history, or was there a time when you wanted to be a filmmaker? Because I feel like a lot of what you do on the show is, you know, it's essentially documentary, what you're doing. Yeah. When I was in art school as an undergraduate, my focus was experimental video and nonfiction film. And so I was looking for ways in which, you know, to tell stories in a visual format. And the work that I was actually doing as an artist was ultimately, it ended up being these like video essays that involved a lot of found footage.

I was really inspired by people like Chris Marker and like the stuff that Mark Cousins does now, you know, that was kind of along the lines of what I was trying to do. But when I was in school in the early 2000s, there was just nowhere for that kind of work to go. It was pre-YouTube. The art world didn't want it. Film festivals didn't want it. And so I figured that it would be easier to just remove the visual element and become a writer. And so that's when I went to graduate school for cinema studies. And, you know, the podcast is sort of like kind of finding a halfway point between the old video work I used to do and just, you know, quote unquote, just being a writer. So it's been almost, what, six plus years since you started working on the show how have you noticed the the landscape and the format focused on movies has changed well in 2014

you know there certainly weren't as many podcasts around as there are now um it wasn't the beginning of podcasting by any means but it was kind of the beginning of this second boom of podcasts. And, you know, now I think things have become somewhat more corporate. There are certainly more opportunities for a successful show to make money. And I think it's much harder for an independent show to get noticed. So I feel very lucky that my show got the attention that it did early on. You know, it was written about by the AV Club on like the third episode, by Entertainment Weekly on the fourth episode, because there just wasn't that much out there at the time. And so it really stood out. Nowadays, I don't know that it would. I think nowadays it would be much harder for my show to be what it is, to have the sort of

independent spirit that it has in terms of it being pretty much just me and just my vision. I don't know that it would be able to kind of find purchase in today's landscape. What do you make of the relationship between film criticism and film history and podcasting at this point? Because I feel like a lot of people that I know consume a lot more of this in this format than they do on the page at this point. And that's purely anecdotal and I don't have anything to support that. But do you get the sense that the conversation, so to speak, around films has shifted in a significant way? Well, podcasts allow for a literal conversation, right? So I think what's exciting about it for a lot of listeners and for consumers of film criticism and film media is that it's like listening in on your friends talk about something. And particularly now when a lot of us are super alienated from our

actual friend groups, I think it's really valuable. You know, I know that in terms of filmmakers, people actually make movies. It's, you know, they still want that great New York Times review. They still want the great critics to weigh in on their work. And I don't know that that's going to go away ever. I hope that it doesn't. I hope that it sticks around. Do you miss that version of writing at all? Even though you're off the grind of having to review every superhero movie, is there a part of you that misses being able to weigh in when something meaningful is coming out? Not really. I miss going to Cannes and I miss being part of this sort of exciting unveiling of the most important international cinema of the year. But I don't really miss having an opinion about those things and putting them out in the world. I think I could live the rest of my life without writing a conventional movie review and be pretty happy.

So let's talk a little bit about Polly Platt. Obviously, she's the focus of the new season on the show. I will admit to being one of those boys who is obsessed with Peter Bogdanovich's early movies and not knowing as much about her when I first discovered those movies. Can you tell me a little bit about why you decided to focus on her this season? I mean, look, I'm a girl who's also obsessed with Peter Bogdanovich's movies. I didn't come to this, you know, from a point of view of being like down with Peter, up with Polly,

except in that Peter's story has been told quite a bit. And it's been Peter's version of the story of what happened with those movies and with that relationship that's been out there and Polly's story hasn't. So I've always, you know, ever since I sort of found out about their relationship, I've always wanted to know more about her. really a book to go to. There wasn't anywhere to get that information. And then I was introduced to Polly's daughters, Sashi and Antonia Bogdanovich, and they shared with me their mom's unfinished, unpublished memoir. And they really thought that the time was right to start getting their mom's story out there. So for me, it was like being handed a pot of gold. And the memoir is unfinished and it's unpolished. And so it couldn't just be published in the form it exists. It would need fleshing out and it would need some corrections

and things like that. And so I thought about doing it as a book. My limited connections in the literary industry suggested that it would be extremely difficult to sell as a book. And so rather than trying, I, rather than trying to fight really hard to kind of get into a door that didn't want me in that door, I was like, look, I have this podcast that I can do pretty much whatever I want with. Let's tell the story in that format. Is she the sort of, she feels like, um, on the one hand, the perfect subject for the series, but also you haven't focused a ton of episodes sort of primarily around one person in this way in the past. Did you find that it was easier or more

difficult to sort of narrowly focus on one person's life as opposed to, you know, like the Hollywood Blondes approach that you've taken or the Manson era approach that you've taken in the past? Well, actually, those two seasons that you just mentioned are pretty different process-wise. With the Manson season, even though it's going off into various different directions, there's sort of one through line throughout the whole thing. With something like the Dead Blondes season, it's a different story every week. And so that approach is very difficult. You know, it's really difficult to contain everything you want to say about one person in just, you know, 45 minutes to an hour. And it's difficult to shift gears and move on to another person every week. And so the polyplot season, I guess, is a little bit more like the Manson season in that there is this through line. And I did have the memoir as kind of a backbone to always, you know, be bouncing off of. But it's also definitely the hardest season I've ever done because I had so many questions.

And it required so much archival research and so many interviews. And this is the first season where there's really been a lot of interviews. And then also there's the question of what to do with Polly's actual words. And, you know, how do you differentiate her voice from my voice? And so then the challenge became to try to find an actress who could embody Polly. And I think I got pretty lucky with Maggie Siff. I think she's pretty incredible. Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that. She's amazing and already has such an evocative voice. And so she's great as the sort of stand-in for Polly. How do you do that? How do you, kind of something to do in the core.

And so, you know, we just we connected. And I had talked to a couple of other people about, you know, doing this. And it just wasn't the right fit. And then Maggie really kind of got what Polly was all about very quickly and was really excited to do it. And we actually just recorded like the last material with her yesterday. So it's been a really great time actually. You know, I really had fun working with her. You mentioned that you did more interviews than usual than you have in the past for the season.

What was that like? And how do you balance? I'm always so interested in the balance between a journalistic pursuit and documentary pursuit and where those two things meet. How did you think about these conversations and how did you go about doing them? Well, I don't know that I have, I don't know that I feel like there is that much difference between journalism and documentary in terms of what I do. I had a lot of questions. Polly's memoir is so beautifully written and it has so much of her voice in it, but it doesn't necessarily tell the whole story all the time.

And then some of the things, you know, like when she's talking about how she feels about Peter or certain other people, it's kind of good to have a second opinion to know that she's not just being clouded by her emotion, that these things really happened and that other people witnessed them. So I felt like it was important to not just talk to people for fact-checking purposes, but to include their voices as well. And then as far as who to talk to, I cast a pretty wide net. I tried to get in touch with almost anyone who was still alive who had an important role to play in her life, with the exception of Peter, because I felt like he had told his version of the story so many times.

And when I was working on this, I actually didn't know that he was gonna be doing the TCM podcast, but I feel like that's even more of a reason why he doesn't need to be part of my project. But yeah, I cast a pretty wide net. I tried to talk to a lot of people. I think I ended up getting interviews with about 75 percent of the people that I contacted I think that coronavirus in some ways made things easier because some people are just home with nothing to do and they were happy

to get on the phone for two hours and it in some cases it made it difficult because people don't want to think about you know they don't want to think because people don't want to think about, you know, they don't want to think. Some people don't want didn't want to use this time to think about sort of complicated situations from the past. Right. That makes sense. How did you feel about learning that there was going to be an audio story from Peter's perspective while you were in the middle of this work that you were doing? Well, I think ultimately it's good for both shows. One can sort of draw attention to the other, and the stories only overlap so much.

I mean, Peter's life and career encompasses so much more than Polly, and Polly's life and career encompasses so much more than Peter. She died in 2011, and they stopped working together in December 1972. She was nominated for an Oscar 10 years after they stopped working together. So there's just so much more to say about Polly that I know is not going to be included in the Peter podcast. You know, one of the things that jumped out to me just listening to the early episodes is you put your finger on something that I think is largely unexplored in all these conversations

we're always having either in print or, in print or in front of microphones, about what a producer is and what a producer does. And you pointed out that, especially on Targets, she was such a huge part of the making of that movie and the same with Directed by John Ford and the same with all of the other movies that Peter made. And I was hoping you could help us kind of understand what it is that a producer does and how she fits so clearly into the mold of how we see it now and provide a little bit of context for why she wasn't getting that credit the way that she deserved to. Well, those are two different questions. Let me first answer the producer one, and then we'll see if I can remember my train of thought and answer.

I'll circle back. I'm sorry. I'm so bad at answering two part questions. I just, you know, I forget what I'm saying. So in terms of what a producer does, she actually like there's a part in episode eight, I think it is where she's describing what she did on broadcast news. And and, you know, not every producer does the same thing on every film. And there is a reason why some people are credited as just a producer. Some people are credited as executive producers. Some people are credited as associate producer. But what Polly would do in these situations is her number one job every day making sure that everything that the director thinks needs to get done gets done and also kind of running interference so that people aren't bothering him unnecessarily. She talks about clearing the obstacles so that the director can move through the path of the day without any interference. And so in the movies where she was not credited as a producer, she was still doing those same things. She didn't understand the way that labor is supposed to break down on

a movie set because she came to filmmaking as the wife of the director. And she came out of a generation in which it was expected that if you were a woman married to a creative man, you were going to support their career. You weren't going to have an individual career of your own. And it honestly didn't occur to her to ask for more credit than she was getting on those early films with Bogdanovich. It only became an issue later on when he started denying her credit, when he started saying, you know, she wasn't a big part of my process. You know, my real muse was Sybil, then like, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, I feel like one of the complicated aspects of understanding her legacy is rectifying not just what she contributed, but like how to

properly give credit to that. Did you sense that in the people that you were talking to that they were eager to kind of do the same to kind of clarify what part she played in the making of several movies over the years? Oh, definitely. I mean, I think that, you know, the people who, I mean, you know, obviously it's self-selecting. The people who were excited to talk about me were excited to defend Polly for the most part. A lot of people who were in her talk about me were excited to defend Polly for the most part. A lot of people who were in her life who are still around felt like she kind of got a raw deal and not just from Peter, you know, from the Hollywood establishment, from other people she worked with down the road. Even when she was being credited as a producer, she was, you know, I mean, she was

doing things like there's this famous story about her on broadcast news where she was only credited as the producer of that film. She wasn't the production designer. And the story differs a little bit depending on who's telling it. But in all the stories, James L. Brooks is about to call action and she says, stop, wait, no. And she has a can of red paint in her hands. And she either paints a stair or paints a door. And she's like, okay, now you can carry on. She just like, she needed to put that visual touch in the frame before shooting happened. And it's like, I mean, most production designers wouldn't even physically paint something on set themselves. And she's not the production designer.

She's the producer, but that's how strongly she felt about the look of what was in frame that she had to intervene in that moment. What was the most surprising thing you learned about her talking to all these folks and doing all this research and reading her memoir? I think it has to do with the ways in which certain things from early in her life had reverberations later in life. And, you know, one of them is one of the issues that is with her her entire life is her alcoholism. She was raised by alcoholic parents. And, you know, some people who grew up in that environment never drink. And some people, you know, find themselves susceptible to whatever gene causes

addiction. And Polly was definitely the latter. And then, you know, also, I didn't really realize, you know, I'd always wondered why was it that she worked with Peter after they broke up? And so I was able to learn quite a bit about what why she did that why it was important to her to work on What's Up Doc and Paper Moon and then also why she couldn't continue to work with Peter after that and how that creative breakup affected her for the rest of her life even though she was able to work on incredible films like Terms of Endearment, Say Anything, Bottle Rocket. She still felt the loss of Peter as a creative collaborator until the day she died. For you personally, what is the favorite of her films that she worked on?

It changes. Right now, I would say it's Broadcast News. After having gone through this whole process, you know, that is my favorite. But I was able to gain a new respect for the film Pretty Baby through this process. She wrote that film and she produced it. And, you know, I think it's a real misunderstood film. Even when it came out in the late 70s, it was accused of being child pornography. Certainly in the world we live in now, it has not been reexamined. And I think most people would just assume that it's, you know, sort of a 70s pedophilia fest. But I really found it to actually be a critique of Hollywood and sort of what was going on in Hollywood at the time in terms of fetishizing very young women and kind of putting them on a pedestal and stripping them of their humanity. I don't think I've seen that in 25 years, so I might have to revisit that movie.

Well, episode six of the season is all about it. Okay. I'll prep for it then by rewatching before that one. Have you thought about where you want to go next with the show? Do you know about another future seasons you want to do you know after i finish i'm and i'm not quite even done with this season yet but once i get to the end of the process every time i'm like i don't know if i want to do this show again because it's so hard and um you know it's very rewarding and i'm very lucky that i get to do something you know with very little interference and and that people actually listen to it. But at the end of every process, I just feel so tapped out. So what ends up happening is that either something drops in my lap the way that this did, or I just kind of get a brain flash and I start

pursuing something. So I would have to wait until that happens to know what the next thing is. I know. We all need a brain flash sometimes, I feel. I can relate to that. So if you could recommend a new listener to the show, start with a season of yours, which is the one that you like the most or feel the most proud of or you're the most excited about? Well, this one for sure. But if they want to go to the back catalog, I think a lot of people find the show through the season I did called Charles Manson's Hollywood, which is about it's about late 60s Hollywood and how Charles Manson was sort of able to infiltrate the music industry and and what was going on in the entertainment industry that made, you know, a charismatic ex-con who was trying to start a race war able to get into movie stars' houses. But I think that my two personal favorite seasons are Six Degrees of Joan Crawford, which is six episodes about the life and career of Joan Crawford, who I consider

to be kind of the ultimate early 20th century movie star. And then Jean and Jane, which is about Jane Fonda and Jean Seberg. And that season is, you know, pretty relevant to some of the stuff going on in the world right now, because both Jane Fonda and Jean Seberg were Hollywood actresses, white Hollywood actresses who were activists and both had connections and were supporters of the Black Panthers. And Jane Fonda was able to move through that and sort of have mainstream success again. And Jean Seberg was not. Jean Seberg died tragically in her car after being harassed by the FBI. So that is a good one. Yeah. A lot of reverberations on a lot of the seasons that you've done over time right now. It's kind of fascinating. I mentioned to you that this episode is about

movies, about making movies. And one of the reasons I love your show is because you do get quite a bit of insight, not just into the actual production of a film per se, but everything that happens around it, everything that happens around the star machine and celebrity and how films come to be. Is this a category of movie that you actually like? I assume it is because of the work that you've been doing. Well, my favorite film of all time is the 1954 version of A Star is Born starring Judy Garland, which is a movie about Hollywood and about making movies. You know, a lot of Hollywood movies up to that point that were about making movies kind of tried to assume this point of view of the viewer, of the cynical viewer who was like,

oh, this is a cesspool. But then, like, ultimately, the movie would turn out to be propaganda for Hollywood. And I think this version of A Star is Born, it does that, but it does it in a way where it really reveals the tragedy inherent in stardom and the kind of sickness involved in wanting to be in that spotlight and how it actually affects your humanity, while at the same time being really good propaganda for hollywood at working at its highest technical level um and you know i also there's i mean there's a few other movies about hollywood that i really like i really like the player yeah i love the player too uh i feel like somewhere along the way the relationship in the way that movies like this

about this subject were made essentially slowly just transitioned to full-time satire like there are very few movies now that are specifically um earnest portrayals of what it's like to have a career in this business and i wonder if people feel like and maybe you have a better sense of this than i do that you can't you know while biopics can do this, most films about filmmakers can't necessarily be as, as po-faced as, as they have been in the past. Yeah, I don't know. I, I guess I haven't thought about it that much. You know, I think that kind of that sort of thing has moved to television. Like I've tried to, this is very inside baseball, but I've tried to sell television adaptations of various seasons of my podcast. And I did sell one,

but generally I think that networks are a little, they're a little gun shy because of the Amazon adaptation of The Last Tycoon, which was very self-serious and nobody watched it. I've been in pitch rooms where my agent and people around me have been like, this is not The Last Tycoon. Yeah, that's all I can really say about that. Karina, I end every episode of the show by asking our guests what's the last great thing that they've seen. I end every episode of the show by asking our guests, what's the last great thing that they've seen? What is, I assume you're watching movies in quarantine.

I am. Yeah. So I'm actually about to start working on a project, not for, not for, you must remember this, but involving Spike Lee. And so I've been watching, you know, every Spike Lee movie. So I would say that the last great thing I watched was Malcolm X. But beyond that, like the thing that has really kind of blown me away as just sort of quarantine watching, it's a movie that I had never seen before

and now I think about every day and it's Vim Vendors is Until the End of the World, the five-hour cut of which is streaming on Criterion. It's a great recommendation. I did watch that also and it was added to the channel. Karina, thanks for doing this. It was nice to talk with you today. Thanks, you too. Thank you to David Koepp and Karina Longworth. I'm headed out of town this week,

so Amanda and I will be back next week on The Big Picture, finally ready to talk about the best movies about making movies, and also the best movies of 2020 at the halfway point. We'll see you then.