The Big Picture - ‘Nightmare Alley’ and Our Favorite Films Noir, With Patton Oswalt!

Episode Date: April 29, 2022

Of all the movies we saw in 2021, the one we keep returning to is Guillermo del Toro’s modern noir about a mysterious carnival worker. To dig deep into the movie and how its themes connect to our time, Sean is joined by comedian, actor, and certified movie freak Patton Oswalt. Patton shares his deep knowledge of film noir, his favorites in the genre, and where ‘Nightmare Alley’ fits in its history. Host: Sean Fennessey Guest: Patton Oswalt Producer: Bobby Wagner Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Sean Fennessey. We've got something special cooking on the Prestige TV podcast. I'll be recapping one of my favorite shows, HBO's Barry, every Sunday night with the writer-director star of the show, the great Bill Hader. We'll talk about the show's wild twists and turns, its special brand of dark comedy, and how it all came together. So on Sunday nights, immediately after a new episode airs, you can hear Bill and I break it all down on the Prestige TV pod. Subscribe on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Sean Fennessy, and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about Nightmare Alley. Of all the movies I saw in 2021, the one I keep returning to is Guillermo del Toro's modern noir about a mysterious carnival worker turned professional mind reader. So this is

a special episode about that movie. Why am I making an episode about a movie that was released five months ago? Well, if you missed it back in December when it was released, I get it. The movie did light business in the face of the Spider-Man No Way Home onslaught at the box office. And despite its pedigree, its star power, and its eventual award season accolades, it's considered kind of a flop. More people caught up with it after the movie was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. And it did hit Hulu earlier this year where it could be streamed if you'd like to watch it and haven't seen it or want to revisit it while listening to this episode. I was a little lukewarm on the movie myself when I first saw it back in December. It felt like a gloss on something we'd seen before, literally and perhaps figuratively,

a very soft focus noir film, the kind of which we'd seen in the 40s and the 50s and the 60s and the 70s and the 80s and the 90s, the 2000s, the 2010s. Do we need another one of these? I thought to myself when I was first watching it, and I think we do because I watched it again. And then I watched it a third time. And then I watched this movie a fourth time. And I don first watching it, and I think we do, because I watched it again, and then I watched it a third time, and then I watched this movie a fourth time, and I don't know why, but I'm still trying to figure it out, and I feel like I'm getting closer and closer the more times I see it. Nightmare Alley is del Toro's 11th film, and it's his first since The Shape of Water won Best Picture in 2018. It's an unusual one for the writer-director. It reunites him with his partner,

Kim Morgan. They wrote the script together for this, as well as The Shape of Water, and it's based very closely on William Lindsay Grusham's depraved but fascinating 1946 novel of the same name, right down to its deliciously cynical ending. Nightmare Alley was a movie before this. It was made in 1947, shortly after the book was published,

directed by Edmund Golding, starring Tyrone Power. It's an interesting movie, a neutered version of the story, I would say, given the circumstances of moviemaking back in the 40s. This is a bigger and bolder, and in my opinion neutered version of the story, I would say, given the circumstances of moviemaking back in the 40s. This is a bigger and bolder, and in my opinion, better version of the story. It's a massive canvas for del Toro, who loves his ornate sets and lavish production design almost as much as he loves his creatures.

This movie doesn't have any monsters per se, or at least not in the typical sense. It's about a stranger who leaves home in a blaze of glory and rides a bus to a Nowheresville carnival. The stranger is named Stanton Carlisle. He's played by Bradley Cooper in an incredible performance. We learn quickly that there's something special about this guy. He's a quick study with a long and untrustworthy grin. Toni Collette's character, Xena the Seer, calls his mysterious charisma panache. When she compliments him, you can see Cooper's eyes light up like a pinball machine shortly before she satisfies him in a bathtub. In short order, Carlisle rises through the ranks of the carnival. He borrows a few tricks from his fellow carnies and eventually

makes a run at respectability as a high-end mentalist in pre-war upstate New York. So we cut to a few years later and we see Carlisle convincing God-fearing citizens that he has a second sight, the power to visualize past traumas and hidden spirits. He takes their money in ballrooms, in parlor rooms, in back rooms, mystifying them with a simple but effective system he's devised with his partner Molly, who's played by Rooney Mara. He's a charlatan, of course, a show person, and del Toro paints a sign in bold red paint over Carlisle's head that reads,

this is a bad person. Greedy, selfish, and completely in over his head. And like the primary male figure in most noir, Carlisle is doomed. As listeners of the show know, I absolutely love doom in my movies. But Guillermo del Toro doesn't necessarily love doom. Despite the grave settings of his stories,

the leaning into horror, he's a really hopeful filmmaker. Pan's Labyrinth, The Devil's Backbone, even the Hellboy movies are about forging ahead in spite of the pain. Nightmare Alley ain't that. So what drew him to the project?

On paper, there are some things about it that are obvious. It's an expensive movie with major movie stars, not just Cooper and Mara, but Cate Blanchett as the proverbial femme fatale,

Willem Dafoe in this deliriously fun performance as Clem, the carny who shows Carlisle the ropes, brilliant supporting work from Colette and David Strathairn and Ron Perlman and Mary Steenburgen and Richard Jenkins against type as a kind of vile industrialist

questing for a lost love who turns to Carlisle. But it's deeper than that too. In retrospect, it's obvious what appealed about Gresham's story because we are living in the age of the scammer, the grifter, the con artist. Carlisle is an avatar for all the hucksters we've been batting away these past 10 years or so. Deranged attention freaks on social media, African princes in our spam folder, psychotic cable news anchors spouting lies every day, former presidents. In other words, people who want your money, your time, and your dignity. Nightmare Alley uses a bygone period when traveling carnivals

could be the lodestar of your movie. And Del Toro has mounted this gorgeous old school production to say a little something about our very dumb culture right now. And like I said, I've been looking for a chance to dig into the film and my favorite films noir for a few months. So let's dig deeper now on this movie and why it works. i'm very happy to have a great fan of the genre of noir and del toro and one of my favorite stand-up comics on the show it's pat oswald pat oswald how are you patten i'm good how are you doing man i'm good man i was just telling you that um i wanted to talk to you about this because i was revisiting your book silver screen fiend which i loved which came out well how many years ago is that five or six years ago more more now yeah probably no i mean it came out in i think 2012

or 2013 maybe almost 10 years ago now that i think about almost 10 years ago amazing okay so you know this book which is kind of a memoir of a time in your life when you were spending a lot of time going to the movies and you do something in that book that I also do, which is you log all the movies you're watching. You create a kind of calendar, which I love doing that. And I know that you do too. Do you still do that? Do you still track everything you watch? I still do. I still track things. And sometimes at the end of the year, it's a sobering assessment of my life where I'm like, oh, wow, God, I was watching a lot of stuff. I'm always watching a lot of stuff too.

But one of the things I noticed in the book is there's so many noir films that you saw during that time. Why was that? Is that just a genre that speaks to you? Yeah. Well, it's a couple of things. It is a genre that really, really speaks to me. It is such a film noir, especially 40s and 50s noir, is such a great, like, psychosexual documentary portrait of the time where it is, even though it's being done as mass market, thrilling entertainment, it is a weird snapshot of what was going on kind of subconsciously in the mass

mind of the era. So even though in 1940s and 50s America, we were post-World War II, and gosh darn it, things are sunnier now, but there was still so much repressed trauma from the war, so much, you know, you couldn't speak of it, but the fact that we fought a war to defeat the Nazis and then came back to America, which was when it was so racist and so, you know, subtly and not so subtly racist, you know, those, those constant contradictions, I think, did a real number on people. So, you know, the institutions that are supposed to be there to give us a sense of safety and calm were actually, if anything, building even more tension and fear. So I think that that is what went into a lot of American film lore. So, And then the second reason, this is just aesthetic, watching film noirs in an old retro theater like the Rock Scene in San Francisco or the New Beverly, it's just fantastic. It is so perfectly of the city of the time. It just, it fits perfectly. So let's, let's talk about Nightmare Alley first, before we start getting into the history of the genre. Um, I know you're an admirer of Del Toro, you know, the movie, I think it was not a massive

box office success coming off of The Shape of Water. So I feel like it's a little bit overlooked, but it is available to be streamed now and more and more people are checking it out. So what'd you think about the movie when you saw it? I mean, I loved it. And I love the fact that, you know, unlike the Tyrone Power version from the 40s, he was able to really follow William Lindsay Gresham's original novel and that original ending. And there's a moment in the Tyrone Power film where, as you're watching it, you're like, there's the perfect ending end it right here and then you get that tacked on hollywood ending where things are really really happy um so you know that

shows you how you know truly dark the source novel was and i know that gresham later committed suicide so you know he was he was very much in touch with a lot of the darkness and hopelessness of life. And I think that Nightmare Alley is sort of his thesis statement on that. So yes, of course, del Toro is able to cleave to the novel. But then also he was able to visually show you, and the Tyrone Power movie doesn't really do this as well, possibly probably because of the great chiaroscuro photography, which just looks foreboding and creepy the whole time. But he's able to show you, del Toro is able to show you how enticing a carnival is, no matter how evil and weird and outre the kind of the set design is and the art design is, it pulls you in. There's a dark magnetism to it that he really, really embraces. I'm really interested in this choice by del Toro for a film, especially as a first film after The

Shape of Water, which was such a big success because his movies, even though they're often set in these dark worlds, they often have these supernatural qualities they have a lot of creatures vampires they can be gory at times yeah they're often pretty hopeful and they often look on very the bright side ultimately and they're often future children kind of emerging from traumatic circumstances this movie is is is fucking dark it is truly one of the darkest stories you can tell. Yeah, this is the first, I think this is really the first del Toro, except maybe Kronos, where he started,

where there is no way out. I mean, if you kind of partake of the advantages of the darkness, the darkness consumes you as part of the bargain and um you know that he really uh embraces that whereas in other movies especially the devil's backbone and pan's labyrinth and shape of water you when you butt up against if you butt up against them with i think more pure and hopeful heart they aren't monsters anymore um so uh but but however the protagonist of this movie does not have a pure and hopeful heart and if anything maybe even warps the darkness that he encounters and makes it even more dark which helps consume him um and and um you know, the, the fact that he, you know, he wrote this with Kim Morgan,

The Sunset Gun, who is one of the best contemporary writers on film noir, on classic film noir, is not just for the 40s, she's able to pick out movies that you didn't quite think of that were film noir from the 50s and 60s, and her essays in the back of Ed Brubaker's graphic novels. So obviously, this felt like a dream project for both of them. It's such a realization of Kim's worldview. And then of course, meeting the vision of Guillermo del Toro, it's absolutely perfect. So I want to talk, maybe we can psychologize a little bit why del Toro wanted to make this movie and maybe why this movie works for this time. So Stan Carlyle is the figure at the center of the story

from Gresham's story. And he's a loner, a kind of man who comes into town, a stranger comes into town with no appreciable skills, but a lot of hustle. He makes himself invaluable to the carnival pretty quickly. And then over time, he transforms himself into a mentalist. And he's a hustler. He's a con man.

He's a classic noir archetype. I don't think I'm reading too deeply into the state of the world to say we are hopefully exiting a kind of period of con mannery in our culture. Yeah. a kind of period of con manory in our culture. Yeah, we are now in the hangover stage of the epoch of grifters, the modern epoch. I mean, there's always been grifters, but we were living in a grifter kingdom for a while. And I think that that's, especially when you see a lot of the TV shows,

miniseries and documentaries are all about grifters and the Theranos and the vegetarian grifter and the, the tender swindler. It was all just, that was very much that era. And if anything, William Grisham's book was a prophecy as to here's where we're going to be going. I think he saw that a lot. And by the way, you know, there's, it's a little ironic that a lot of these so-called old fashioned carnival, cold reading and psychic techniques were used in modern times. Pretty recently, there was that one guy that who is the psychic, always dressed in black. I think he was on oprah a lot but but again

it was like old-fashioned carnival reading techniques that he just put into the modern era and then became this guy's um what was his name that south park literally did an episode about him the biggest douche in the universe who was that guy i'm trying to remember his name i can visualize him it's it's almost like nothing's new under the sun you just have to wait for a generation to die off and then there's a new generation of suckers who don't know these techniques and they can just use those it's interesting to watch uh to try to watch del toro transpose this sensation that we've had for it really felt like it preceded even say the president that we had from 2016 to 2020 even early in the early 2010s it felt like there

was an era of um false identity in in the culture it felt like maybe the rise of social media people could kind of perform as someone that they actually weren't you know there was an anonymity that allowed people to kind of move around in the world but all that stuff that you just described you know the theranos show and some things like that are about real people in modern times. Yeah, this is a throwback. Is it is it is it easier to process something like this when we feel like it's a, you know, a relic from from a lost time? Is it better somehow to use that filter? Well, yeah, I think it's a little easier to look at something from very, very far away so that you can at least have a sense initially of, oh, well, we've obviously, you know, progressed since then. And then you have a few days afterwards to go, no, those people are still, I mean, as your producer just pointed out, that psychic's name was John Edwards, who, you know, was the guy

that could contact your loved ones, and oh my god, he seems to know everything about you, even before he, and he was, you know, so many people were pointing out, these are the most ancient carny cold reading techniques that he's using. He's just using them on a new audience, and he's, and you know, the idea of, the term confidence man is, it's a man or woman who is so full of absolute confidence that they bowl over any of your suspicions or doubts. I mean, you can, there's a lot of terrible things and true terrible things you can say about Donald Trump, but you can't say that he lacks any confidence in himself. He absolutely, he is a true believer in the religion of himself. And there are so many people out there that are broken and searching and feeling less than they will glom onto that.

And, you know, it's, it's, it's hard to explain to people who, who can see through Trump, why do his adherents cling to him, even when there's just evidence in their face that he's conning them. But in a way, he's not conning them or robbing them. He is giving them something for their money, which is justification in their hatred and disgust with a lot of the world. He hates for them. He hates the people that they want to be hated. And so there is something like a confidence man doesn't rip someone off and then show and point out what a fool they are. A confident, a good confidence man has their, the mark walks away thinking that they've won or feeling really

good. Like I participated in something. Um, that's what the true confidence man does. And you know, that's what Trump and that's what Bradley true confidence man does. And that's what Trump and that's what Bradley Cooper's character does. People walk away feeling like, I got something out of that. That guy gave something to me. I am elevated because of my encounter with that person. It's a fascinating through line because whether you're talking about John Edward or you're talking about Yuri Geller or Donald Trump or all of these people who we feel like are kind of performing falsity for us in an effort to get one over on us to, you know,

to gain more power, to gain more popularity, to gain more money, whatever it may be is a really interesting idea. The Stan Carlisle character, what is it that he wants? Does he want to be an important person in the world? Does he want to be rich?

What do you think it is that that character wants he what he wants in a way he's also a victim of his own con because what he he is empty and needing and i think there's a lot of people out there who are like if i could just get a lot of money and if i could just get really really famous and have important people depend on me then all these problems will go away. But it doesn't change that there are still them. So, you know, Carlisle never works on what is damaged about him. And I think you see a lot of these people who rise up to these levels and then they start going crazy. And we see it over and over again in sports in entertainment in music and politics um if i

could get this amount of money if i could get this amount of fame then all these things that i hate about myself i won't hate anymore and then they get all those things and then nothing changes and they go insane i mean donald trump is also a very tormented individual because he keeps telling people how much money he has, how successful he is, but it doesn't, you can see the panic in his eyes, like, but I, why aren't everything, why aren't the truly important people that I want to like me, why don't they like me? It's, you know, it's Elon Musk basically demanding that people think that he's cool and funny. There's this whole generation of people, you can tell they grew up kind of outside of the circle or outside of just

actual real breathing life. And they resented that. They resented not, it wasn't even that they weren't invited to parties. It's that they were never comfortable at parties, but they said, well, I'm going to work three times as hard, and these chill, popular people who are actually enjoying their youth, they will worship me when I'm older. And then they get older, and that worship and drinking and laughing and being a goofball. And all these people, these right wing, especially a lot of these right wing edgelords that are just on online all the time were like, well, this is the end of her career. That's it. She's over. Because in their mind, having that kind of loose fun with your friends is, that's not how you're supposed to spend your youth.

You're supposed to spend your youth with your nose to the grindstone, resenting and just plotting your revenge. And they can't believe when they saw someone enjoy their youth. Bradley Cooper's character is not someone who was ever just loose and enjoyed their youth and was with their friends and their youth. Bradley Cooper's character is not someone who was ever just loose and enjoyed their youth and was with their friends and their friends. When you hang out with your friends, they make fun of you. And then you laugh because you're like, oh my God, you're right. I'm being such an asshole. None of that for them. It is constant battle, constant. I've got to win every encounter. There's no chill. There's nothing, no vulnerability vulnerability and so you see that in him and if that's what you're going to build on um eventually that eats you alive i love how we

can see almost like the stations of the cross of that no vulnerability in the early stages of the movie too like i think specifically of that willem dafoe after they dropped the geek off outside the hospital and he explains to him how someone becomes a geek or you can make someone a geek. And it kind of is like a little bit like learning how to be awful on the internet or something. You know what I mean? It's like a training course for him.

Oh yeah. And there's people, I mean that, and that Dafoe monologue is taken. I think it's unchanged from the novel, the whole heel geek, you know, it's,

oh God. Yeah. I mean mean in a way oh my god yeah that is that's the that's the handbook for being a shit posting edgelord of if you don't care anymore if you're so beyond um any kind of social acceptance you just want clicks and nothing else matters to you, then you can carve out a very comfortable, and when I say comfortable, I mean, you never have to be vulnerable. You never have to look foolish, you know, in your life. Whereas other people are like, I mean, look, I fuck up all the time. I do shit that's stupid. And then I go, oh yeah, that was dumb. And then I own it and I just roll forward. And you see these people online that are like, no, you fucked up. I screenshotted this tweet.

I'm like, yeah, I know it. I fucked up. I already, I fuck up all like in their mind, there can never be. It just drives them crazy that that's that you can fuck up and roll on because they've been taught that you can never ever show weakness well conversely let me ask you about this because as i was rereading your book you know the part big part of that book is about ambition is about figuring out what you want your life's work to be how do i get more status how do i get more exposure to my ideas in the world is there any part of you when you look at a movie like this and it's like,

well, actually, I kind of get it. And maybe, unfortunately, I get myself in front of an Ezra Grindle and I'm kind of screwed here. But there is something about the kind of American ceaseless need to succeed that spoke to you. Oh, I was absolutely infected with that in my 20s when I was starting off as a stand-up. I was very ambitious, very competitive, and I had been fooled into believing in that finite, finite amount of success where there's only one area that you can succeed in, whereas it's actually a massive world. You don't need to entertain every breathing person on the planet. You can find your people and make a good enough

life that way and be happy that other people are doing well. I think when you're in your 20s, it's okay to be that ambitious because you don't know enough about the world yet. What's sad is if you still have that outlook in your 40s and 50s, which means you never grew, you never actually, you never failed and recovered from it and then learned to kind of laugh at that and then build from there. And it kind of you poisoned yourself. And yeah, there is that there there is unfortunately that that philosophy of constant growth in America. grow. There's an, and especially when you see that mentality in show business, which show business by its very nature has success, failure, time when you don't feel relevant, time when you're lost, then success again, like it naturally goes up and down. The only, the only thing on the planet that actually has constant growth is cancer. That's the only thing that has constant growth and constant growth is deadly. You need time. That's why like these companies have to keep engulfing everything

because they can't like we made $8 billion last quarter. We have to make $8 billion.1. Whereas you're like, but if you made half of that this quarter you'd still be fine let it go up but it's okay so that whole idea of there must be constant growth constant victory constant conquest and and conquering um is so deadly and it's what i think has led to a lot of the mental distress that people are feeling these days, a lot of the environmental stress that's happening is that we believe there must be constant growth. There's going to be a really scary reckoning with this country because all empires fall. It doesn't mean they get destroyed. They just fall from being number one. And eventually. America maybe not in our lifetime. Is going to become a charming tourist destination.

And we'll end up like Denmark or Germany. Or wherever. Where we're like hey we're number five. Number five is still pretty great. We're fine. But there's going to be a lot of people that are like. If I'm not number one. Then I don't want to do this.

And that's a terrible way. To live your life. I feel like um it's possible for the movie to contain all of those ideas too which seem like pretty sweeping concepts but it seems all very intentional i mean this movie and um a face in the crowd would be an amazing double feature for for nailing exactly what's wrong well not i hate to use the term what's wrong with us now. There's always been a version of this sickness in America. You know, we, we showed up in this country, um, after

a plague had devastated the Native Americans, which is how we were able to get a foothold in here. Because before that plague, the Native Americans were fighting off Vikings. We wouldn't have made it, but we somehow took advantage of the other side getting weakened. And we were like, well, we're obviously the best and the strongest, you know, and we just kind of kept feeding that myth as we rolled westward. And now we're, we've rolled far enough westward that that is now come around the other side and hitting the East and China, which is now taking our philosophy to a mutant level. And now we're butting up against that. And it's freaking us out that we were supposed to be the be all end all.

It's like, no one is ever the be all end all. It just keeps going. There's new people coming. Do you feel like you are still kind of participating in the in like the growth you know that because the carlisle character is somebody who wants to get more and more famous as time goes by he wants to play them bigger and bigger crowds wants to do more and more shows but also isn't satisfied with that wants private clients wants to hustle on a small level you you

actually work in an industry where there are multiple different ways to accrue success. There's public success and private success. How do you divide those two things? With me, private success means that I never have to work for someone that I don't want to work with because I'm not living in a house that I'm trying to... I'm going to quote George Carlin here. I didn't buy a house to scare people with. I didn't purchase a wardrobe or a fleet of cars that I now have to go do these nine things that I hate in order to maintain my thing. And I learned very early, I've actually downscaled what I need in my life so that now my work and my leisure time are the same thing. And it feels like a much more complete life. Whereas I think a lot of people, because they build it up to a certain level and I,

and there's nothing wrong with like, if you're popular and good enough to pack a stadium, absolutely do it. It's amazing. But, um, I I've, I've done stand up in one stadium. I did a guest set on a friend show who can pack stadiums and he's amazing at it. And I knew immediately, this is not for me. This does not work for me. And I don't resent the people that it works for a two to 3000 feet seat theater is perfect for me.

That's all. You know what I mean? Like it's just, I have a very John Waters view of success and work and art that's all i want um let's talk before we get into noir a little bit more widely about a couple things that i really like from the movie i think it's just a great movie of images you know you mentioned the set the set design you mentioned the photography before you even say images it's guillermo del toro so you know even

before you go in you could you could switch the sound off and just absorb the video wallpaper aspect to it didn't mean to cut you off anyway go ahead no no just just that it's it's it is gorgeous to look at i think that some of the criticism the movie has gotten that is that it is a little bit too gorgeous and maybe not propulsive enough. I would say the more I've seen it, the more I've, I sort of feel the opposite. I sort of feel like it is, it is,

it needs that artifice to explain the ideas, you know, it's the whole point. It's not, it can't be too propulsive because part of the idea of the movie, part of the movie's atmosphere is the slow, seductive aspect of this world. The world makes you feel like, hey, you can slow down, actually take a break.

The world needs you to slow down a little bit so that it can absorb the nutrients of your soul. If it's too breakneck, then it defeats its own purpose. So, I mean, unlike a movie like Goodfellas, which is the definition of propulsive, because it's more about the guy's ambition itself doesn't even have any rhyme or reason to it, because this guy is about building an empire. He needs the slow absorption. That is what is, that's what is killing him, basically. So, you know, again, I i that was not a criticism that i had

with this movie no it's very strange i mean i think part of it is that obviously it's a period piece too and i think people see something like that and they assume a fussiness but you know you do get pretty typical del toro stuff you get incredible long dolly shots camera is kind of always moving very carefully very gently around characters looking at them from different angles you get these great like iris edits you, you get the small stuff that show you like this is a 40 story. This is a meaningful, you know, an appreciation of this kind of a movie making. But more so than anything for me, it's like it's the it's the house being engulfed in

flames. It's the spider woman's head. It's the tin cling in the wood alcohol. It's the lighted Ferris wheel in the storm sky, like so many images that he makes in the movie. Obviously, he's one of the best in the world at doing this, but I feel like it's the lighted ferris wheel in the storm sky like so many images that he makes in the movie obviously he's one of the best in the world at doing this but i feel like it's kind of underrated you know when someone can have a career and there are 10 movies in and they're able to make something amazing but people are just like oh well that's what he does he makes amazing stuff it's okay i yeah i think that happens to a lot of people on a lot of levels i mean i think someone

like gene hackman didn't get the amount of oscar nominations that he deserved only because he because he was always amazing it wasn't after a while it wasn't a surprise when he was amazing yeah well yeah that's gene hackman i mean he was even great in horrible movies it didn't matter he was just he is it's gene hackman he was almost like hey gene maybe turn in a couple of shitty performances so that we can appreciate the good ones but he never did they were always perfect yeah so um yeah that happens to people sometimes you you get to be so good that people it takes i mean now like it's amazing after the amazement of a movie like purple rain now people are reassessing Sign of the Times and realizing,

oh, that was even better. But because Prince was always on this other level, a lot of his other movies just kind of got, yeah, well, of course, it's whatever. They didn't realize how truly amazing an achievement it was. And I think the same thing goes for

Guillermo del Toro. I still can't get over the fact that in Hellboy 2, there's that huge plant monster that's like a living forest monster, and then he has to fight it. And the way the monster dies is one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen on screen. It is a ferocious, mindless, rampaging beast that dies so beautifully that you're almost crying and that's and that is that's a one set piece in the middle of a movie full of insane set pieces like that's the level that del toro just operates at yeah he does it over and over again it's pretty

amazing um yeah on the performances you know one thing I thought was fascinating was that this was originally supposed to be Leonardo DiCaprio. Really? Yeah. And it's unclear if he passed on it or if he ultimately decided it wasn't for him. I've heard through the grapevine that because of that very dark ending that you cited and the kind of irredeemable nature of the Carlisle character that he opted not to do it. I don't know if that's true or not, but Cooper coming off of A Star is Born at a critical juncture in his career

as a leading man. This is a cool risk. I would say it feels more like a 70s movie star move than a 2020s movie star move. You know what? It feels like it reminded me of what Roy Scheider did in Sorcerer, which is another movie that came out.

And I mean, it was on like every critics top 10 list and it bombed horribly. And it took years for people to realize what a brilliant piece of work it was. It was also because it was the summer that Saturday night fever and star wars and smoking the band that came out, which was the, the rise of concept cinema and big blockbuster stuff and he was making a difficult you know early 70s movie also a remake of a film from the 40s and

50s exactly so this is gonna be one of those movies that will be reassessed i think in the exact same way um and again like every but again um and not to fault any of these performers but everyone that's in the movie you know tony collette and um uh kate blanchett and they always turn in amazing performances so it's not as amazing as you're because you're like well kate yeah they'll of course they'll be great it's a little bit of like this isn't that incredible and down the line too like mary steenburgen willem dafoe runy mara ron perlman of course they'll be great it's a little bit of a like this isn't that incredible and down the line too like mary steenburgen willem dafoe runy mara ron perlman of course in the del toro movie david straight there and you've never said like about any of those people like oh they actually weren't that good in that like that's not they're not those kinds of actors

yeah well straight there is the guy that even when he's in something shitty you can at least go oh okay good he's here good i'll have there'll be some cool scenes with him okay we're good he's got he's so fucking good um yeah again i i still maintain that perlman should have gotten an academy award nomination for hellboy because he was emoting under the thickest latex i've ever seen him and the fact that ed that Eddie Murphy didn't get one for the clumps, nutty professor too, where he's under 90 pounds of rubber. And not only is he doing a dinner scene where he's eight different

characters interacting, he's riffing on them from stuff he did earlier in the week. It's some of the best acting I've ever seen. That's like a whole other episode of this show that I would love for you to come back for is like, what is the misunderstood and overlooked skills of acting that should be recognized that's a that's a that's a great one perlman is great at that also perlman critical to this movie because he's the person i believe who uh who put the book in del toro's hands i think in the mid 90s yeah

that's what i heard so he's the reason this movie exists pretty good i spent a long night with him in uh vancouver one year when i was doing um he was up there doing a movie and i was doing a movie and a bunch of us all got together and went to chinatown and we ate food and we talked and he's just the coolest guy and he's also a guy that realizes he knows what he looks like he's a special effect basically like he's just a guy if he had not been if he had not pursued acting, he would have ended up with his friends going, you should go, just go be in a movie. Somebody would have looked at him and went, oh, can you just get in front of the camera? Oh my God, look at him. Yeah, Del Toro

has used him amazingly over the years. Oh God. So I feel like we have a pretty good handle on the movie. The themes are pretty clear, right? This hope and desire and then the failure and the con man and what makes a man, you know, do terrible things to each other. Yep. Do you think this movie is a real noir? And how do you define it?

With me? Oh man. I have Elaine Silver's, um, giant, uh, film noir encyclopedia, uh,

which I've read and, you know, studied hard. I think the definition of noir, this is just for me. I love the idea of the institutions and the structures that either exist in society or that you built yourself have gone out of control. And you are now living without any control and nothing makes sense. And then you have to find a way to make it make sense again, even if you have to resort to violence or lying or betrayal. I mean, that is, I think basically, which is the subtle message of Phil is a lot of the institutions of law and order are built on lies and betrayal or on victimizing this amount of people so that this amount of people can live comfortably. And that's always

there. So I don't really know that this is a true noir only because the world of this movie doesn't pretend like it's anything. If anything, the carnival world is way more honest, even though it's brutal and disgusting. And it's the world, the penthouses and the corporate boardrooms where now the veneer has been placed over the evil. Whereas in the carnival, they're like, we find a drunk and then we blackmail him. If he doesn't get his booze, bite off a chicken or you don't like they're everything's very open. Yeah. It's a fascinating- get his booze bite off a chicken or you don't like they're everything's very open yeah it's it's a fast this guy this guy looks ugly and he's physically deformed so we're gonna pay people

money people are gonna pay money to look at him and we'll give him a cut of them like that's it yeah i feel like the films are usually about a seedy underbelly but you don't necessarily always see everything under the belly you know you only see like a little glimpse and this is the kind of the inversion of that. Yes. Um, to the, to the point where,

again, they show you so much of the CD underbelly that the CD underbelly becomes oddly more comforting only because you don't feel like anything's being hidden from you. Whereas once you get to the upper stratosphere, there's this weird unspoken dread of what am I not be, I know I'm not being shown something here. You know, I would rather, it goes back to the, there's this great thing that I heard

on radio lab where, and I forget what this syndrome is called, but if you have something mysteriously wrong with you, like, let's say you like this left side of your arm goes numb for no reason. Well, you fucking panic because you don't know what it is. But if you go to a doctor and he gives it a name, even if the name is horrible and with the diagnosis, like, oh, that's a rare form of cancer. It has this name. It's weirdly comforting to have something named and shown to you rather than have it be a vague feeling. So whereas the underworld of this movie is named and shown to you rather than have it be a vague feeling so whereas the underworld of this movie is named and shown to you everything is just named and mapped out and

but in the upper world it's just a vague feeling of dread that's never named yeah that is so unsettling i feel like one of the other clever kind of, I guess, metaphorical concepts of the movie is the idea that Stanton could not have become what he becomes if he had not started anywhere but the carnival, where it's obvious that everything is kind of dishonest and grotesque and an absurdity for people to gawk at. And then slowly but surely, he uses those skills to insinuate himself into another world where he doesn't belong. Well, in a weird way, you could say the same thing about Trump. He could not have become the president that he did at the time that he did if he did not come out of the world of sleazy, not even Manhattan, but like outer Manhattan real estate, just openly mob controlled and all his kickbacks and payoffs and stuff.

In a weird way, he is the carnival at the beginning of this movie where the people that follow him because he's openly going, the bosses totally rip you off. I should know. I do it. You guys are getting ripped off and I know that because I do that. They're like, well, at least someone

is just... As amazing as Obama was, sometimes he was so well-spoken and so perfect that I think it made people nervous because they've had many slick, articulate, comforting people destroy their lives. Whereas Donald Trump is openly this he's a, yes, he's also destroying their lives, but he's a yes he's also destroying their lives but he's showing you the mechanism that's doing it which in a very fucked up way is comforting yeah i know that doesn't seem to make a lot of sense but it's weirdly comforting for a certain group of people they they like if you're gonna fuck me over at least make me feel like i'm part of it yeah well he was called the carnival barker many

many times during his administration. And he embraced it. The rallies operated in the same way that a carnival does. It was like you had this giant apparatus. You travel to a city. You build it up. You stay there for a day or two. You pick up. You leave.

You go to the next city. It's all very intentional. His rallies that he's doing now, are they to get him reelected? Or is he just selling merch? It doesn't even seem to have any point to them anymore. I don't know. I'm loathe to speculate, honestly. The less time spent on it for me, the better.

But this clearly feels like very intentional. Like there's a shadowing going on very specifically in this movie. And in that, what we were living through while this movie was basically going into production. Yes, exactly. Yeah. And if anything, it felt like, because I know friends of mine who, you know, I know all the writers on Veep. I know friends of mine who both write and act on The Handmaid's Tale. And they were in a, that'll be, that's going to be an interesting book someday. The people that are working on Veep and Handmaid's Tale while Trump was coming to power, having to adjust their satire and their dystopias to outdo reality. There were whole plot lines in the last season of Veep I know had to get trashed because they were like, this whole plot hinges on this event, which might ruin her career. But now we've seen that doing that doesn't ruin your career anymore.

So we have to adjust it. It's fascinating. It was nuts. Well, let's talk more about noir. Yeah. I asked you to pick out some favorites. Obviously, there are some hallmarks of the genre. There's the femme fatale.

There's the big bad. There's the MacGuffin, the bag of money, that sort of stuff. You mentioned that this really came out of the post-war 40s and 50s. But it's a genre that it's a little bit like the days the confused line about kind of every other decade like it kind of comes back into vogue you know came back into vogue in the 70s it came back into vogue in the 90s it feels like it's a little bit slowly but surely coming back into vogue now and you see a lot of young filmmakers like ryan johnson for example did this when you're starting out and you're trying to make something small you because what's because and especially there's nothing more realistic about crime than

when it's small stakes people will um you know people that are desperate and on the bottom rungs of society they will murder each other for 25 grand it doesn't need to be this we have a four million dollar haul it's a, no, no, no. 25 grand could actually fix a lot of my life and I'll kill for it. Yeah. Which makes it even more terrifying. Do you prefer the original, the 40s and 50s brand over everything else? What's your favorite era of this genre?

I mean, my favorite era is the 40s only because it was, it's people. There's that underlying desperation of we all just defeated the nazis we're all supposed to be together why am i starving why do i not have any why do i have no process what the fuck is happening like there's that panic of i thought we were all on the same side now and if anything things seem to be fracturing even more now that I'm back stateside. So, you know, um, movies and especially forties movies like the prowler and I wake up screaming, um, which are about corrupt, damaged psychological cops, which, um, it's one thing I remember James Elroy saying, he's only ever written one book about a serial killer because he's like, serial killers are

weird anomalies. They, um, you know, they pop up every now and then they kill some people they get put in jail they jerk off to porn they get fat or they find jesus they're just not what is dangerous is someone in authority that has something wrong with them that somehow managed to fool the psychological tests and get themselves a gun and a badge and license to do whatever the fuck they want. And it's rare. It's amazing to see that in 40s films, again, like The Prowler and I Wake Up Screaming, which that was all about America. Trust your authority figures. And there's just, you can't trust any of it. The cops, if anything, are the most dangerous people. Also, On Dangerous Ground is an amazing film.

Robert Ryan is the scariest thing in that movie. And he's a cop and he's the hero. And you're like frightened when he gets near anybody, like he's going to lose his mind. It's amazing. Who are your icons? You you just you just pointed out robert ryan you know uh i think ai bezirides is the writer of of on dangerous ground right i mean he's kind of a well-known figure and and yeah ida lupino obviously worked on on dangerous ground nick ray like are

there people that you that are your guys or your gals so to speak in the genre my my faves in the genre then this is just my point of view um cinematographer john alton i see his name on something yes we're in team n and um i believe he did didn't he do phantom lady anyway john alton painting with light go get his book painting with light um uh ella rains uh because he is as great as people like Lauren Bacall and Colleen Gray were, Ella Raines was the noir version of the femme fatale in her real life. She was so ahead of her time in how she comported herself that people thought, oh, she's too masculine.

This doesn't work. She was like a 90s indie film actress, but in the forties. And it's so odd seeing her in stuff like phantom lady and impact. She's just incredible. Yeah. She has a little bit of a Linda Fiorentino energy. Yeah. You know,

like, Oh God. Um, and then also, uh, Laird Crager, um, a guy who basically dieted himself to death because he wasn't happy being a character actor

even though he was one of the best actors on the planet um and then um um he played the heavy in a million movies he was al in the killers he was in um the team n uh charles mcgraw charles mcgraw T-Men. Charles McGraw. Charles McGraw is the face of noir. I think that Frank Miller based Violent Marv from Sin City on his face. Chiseled, scarred, but just amazing. Charles McGraw, incredible. Those are great. He was in T-Men. Yes. Okay. When his, in, um, not, not, um, yeah. In T-Men, when his face comes out of the shadows, when he's about to kill that guy on the docks. Oh my God. Love him. I feel like I have a much more, you're, you're in it. You're in definitional territory. You're in classic, pure B movie noir from the forties. Like's where your favorite noir is from every decade but if you wanted me to explore the 40s the 40s was the golden age and and they and giants walked the

earth in that genre during that during that decade it's so interesting when a genre that is originally starts out as disreputable becomes like the coin of the prestige realm in a way and i feel like the genre changed so much over 80 years well also i just love when you talk to um when you listen to um interviews with a lot of the early noir directors um uh like uh um uh nicholas ray and and anthony man and people talk about oh it was such a it was such an impressionistic style. Like you would have the light just falling on one desk. And they were like, you know why we did that? Because we had one desk.

We didn't have any other furniture. We had no sets. We had no fucking money. So we were like, well, we got to light the one piece of furniture we have because we don't have a set. And so it was out of necessity. That's where that came from is that been your experience working on independent movies relative to big budget stuff you've been a part of like do you feel like there's more mother of invention going on even now i've been on i've been on independent

movies where the day of they're like well we're shooting in a hospital tomorrow we don't have the hospital now they wouldn't have a house that everyone just let's all think, do you have a house? Think of your houses or your apartments. Is there a corner we can mock up to look like a hospital room? I've been, I've literally been in discussions like that. And I'm, I'm just the actor.

And they're like, do you know anyone just like that kind of feeling? And you get some really cool results out of that. That's really funny. I remember seeing a screening of crime wave, which is another great damaged cop movie with the amazing Sterling Hayden. Just the amazing, grumpy Sterling Hayden. And there's a lot of location shooting.

It's just shot on location all over L.A. Handheld, amazing. Andre de Toth. And Um, Andre to toast. And afterwards, Andre to toast was there. And they said, wow, you really,

did you have to fight to get like, go and shoot on location? He was like, no, we, we were a B movie. We were at the bottom of the bill. We didn't,

they wouldn't let us use the studio sets. They were like, go shoot wherever you can. They, and back then they didn't, no one knew from permits. They didn't give a shit. So we just went and set up anywhere and just, go shoot wherever you can. And back then, no one knew from permits. They didn't give a shit. So we just went and set up anywhere and just filmed stuff. And that movie is an accidental documentary of what LA looked like in the 40s. There's the

corner of La Brea and Wilshire. I didn't know there was a gas station there. Yeah. You've just mentioned two people who stick out to me for a very specific reason. You mentioned James Elroy, the author, someone who's a documentary you cited in your book a couple of times, The Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction. So good. And you also mentioned Sterling Hayden just now, who also there's an incredible documentary about him and his life, Pharaohs of Chaos, and about like the agony of his life. Have you never seen this? No. Oh my God, Patton. Oh, I can't wait. I know that he couldn't take the part of Quint in Jaws

because he was living outside of the country because he was avoiding all his back taxes he didn't pay. I think the film is made by a Greek filmmaker, but it really explores his testimony in front of House on American Activities and kind of like his anxiety and regrets about that. Wow. Kind of like split anxiety and regrets about that. Wow. Kind of like split against all of these characters.

And he, you know, he really is one of the true, I don't know if he's a noir heavy, but he's certainly like a American crime movie key figure. He is a, he is the avatar of a bad mood. Yes. He just always looks like he is in the worst fucking mood and he's an amazing actor. Do you,

so I bring those guys up because do you think to, to do this work, to be in these worlds, like you have to be a little bit damaged to make a really good noir. I mean, I think you have to at least understand, um, the non,

how the non glamorous aspects to greed and hunger and desperation, and you have to be willing to put that on screen. If you're too glamorous or slick, then you're not in the noir world anymore, which is why people like Laird Krieger and especially Timothy Carey, who was the Nicolas Cage of the 40s, really were able to show and especially Timothy Carey, who was the Nicolas Cage of the 40s. That's right. Really, you know,

we're able to show this is what the extreme of human experience and emotion is. You know, this is what it looks like. It ain't pretty. As time goes by, you get, you know, away from the kind of the B-movie filmmakers

and, you know, you get away from Bogart and you get away from Bogart and you get away from John Huston and Fritz Lang and the genre like expands and feels like Europe really gets its arms around it and then kind of like comes to claim it so once we get out of the 40s like what are some of your what are some of your favorites well if we're going to move into the 50s um something like Bad Day at Black Rock um which is this beautiful technicolor movie. And it takes you out to realize that the resentment and the horror that's in that.

I mean, that is very much a Trump movie. These people that are resenting the Japanese guy who actually fought in World War II for America when they didn't. Because it's just all that resentment and anger. And of course they hate, you know, just like Trump, they all talk about what he-men they are, but they hate veterans because a veteran represents what they were always too afraid to go do. So they don't want them around.

Also movies like Violent Saturday is another great on location. Bisbee, Arizona, um, noir kiss me deadly, uh, is, is fucking incredible. It's my favorite of all time.

Yep. Yeah. Weirdly enough, it noir, except for a couple of in the sixties, especially blast of silence, which is one of my all time favorite, not just noirs,

but films. A lot of the noir kind of moved over to, um, great Britain. And you got, um, you know, movies films, a lot of the noir kind of moved over to Great Britain. And you got, you know, movies like Brighton Rock and even movies like These are the Damned, which is ostensibly a science fiction film, but deals with juvenile delinquency and chaos and the Teddy Boys and crime and stuff like that. That was clearly, you know, they were, because they were a fallen empire. We were the post-World War II, new number one in the block.

They were the fallen empire. So they went through their noir in a much different, more darker way. Can you actually, before you go any further, talk a little bit about Alan Barron and Blast of Silence? Because you do a really fun thing in the book with him. What do I do in the book? Where you do like the kind of like the movies of your dreams, the heaven movie version you remember that yes i did it's uh it's the month of it's a month to new beverly with movies that either were actually going to be made and were never made or

movies i would like to have seen yeah i i wanted i think doing blast of silence really took it out of him because there was no money in that and And that end scene in the hurricane, which was an actual pretty brutal hurricane that hit New York that he went and filmed in. And it's like lying in this icy water at the end. I mean, he just puts himself through it. Yeah, it was called. What did I call it? His movie is called Blast of Silence. Whisper of. Whisper of Panic was of silence. Whisper of whisper of panic was the title whisper panic.

Yeah. About a hotel detective with a piece of shrapnel in his head. That's exactly who thinks that a, um, and he talks to it in his, um, and he's in this hotel and he thinks a woman is in danger, but you realize it's part of his delusion.

And this is going to end up in a really, really bad place. I mean, again, a tiny low stakes stakes, just overexposed black and white film that kind of I would love to do something like that. I'm fascinated by the 70s taking on and almost almost parodying, satirizing the tonality of some of these movies. You know, Altman's The Long Goodbye is probably the most cited example of this. But you know, you got Nightmove, speaking of your beloved Hackman, you got a bunch of movies like this that are so cynical,

but also a little bit weirdly pie-eyed, I would say, in a way that most noir movies are not. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of, for all of the darkness underneath Chinatown, that is a very elegant, beautifully designed film. Richard Silbert did this gorgeous looking, they couldn't help themselves, but make it look great. That's why I love, there's a little known movie called Hickey and Boggs with Robert Culp and Bill Cosby that actually leans into the a private detective in the 70s was just hanging on by his fingernails and and the only pie-eyed person in the movie is Robert Culp's character who just wants to be a

private eye so bad even though it's all collapsing at his feet. Um, uh, and also there's a movie called the nickel ride with Jason Miller from, uh, just watch this for the first time two weeks ago. So good. Good. Yeah. Um, yeah.

So just these, I mean, I, I, I think that, um, a prestige film like save the tiger is basically a film noir. Um,

it just, it just happens to be about the garment business, but it deals with crime and you know um uh arson and psychosis and and just this guy wishing for a better world i mean how how different is jack lemon and save the tiger and elliot gould and the long goodbye they're they're people that are just kind of out of time they're in their wrong time you could argue that the long goodbye is about philip marlow's been time warped into 70s la and can't deal with it in a weird way you know same with uh that great art carney movie the late show one of the most underrated movies of the 70s

fucking brilliant but it's it's it's sam spade with a hearing aid and a bus pass. So that's Lily Tomlin, right? Oh, God. She's so good at that. Yeah, that's a great one. So as the genre moves into the 90s and the 2000s, I feel it feels like a lot of it is informed by the kind of indie film explosion and the Tarantino wave, but not all of it. And it feels like some of it is the rise of the erotic thriller

is like a factor in the noir too. But it's like the femme fatale to an extreme is often the way that that's set up. Oh yeah. With Last Seduction and Body Heat. Absolutely. Exactly.

Yeah. So I mean, what was the other one? Bound. Yes. Yeah. The Wachowskis first film. Yeah.

Do you think that those movies bring something new to the table because i was trying to i obviously like basically you get people of color you get women starting to make some of these movies you get you get lgbtq stories in the genre which for the most part you didn't have in the 40s 50s 60s or 70s well you had them you just couldn't say it out loud. But if you rewatch, like the big combo, Lee Van Cleef and his partner, that's a gay couple. I mean, it's a gay couple. They just didn't, you know, they don't say it out loud, but it's two gay hitmen. And same with Gilda. There's basically a flirtation going on between Glenn Ford and the maindie you know there's a there's a love story there so that that stuff is there that it was just couldn't be overt but yeah now they can just do it flat out like oh yeah this is i mean i think a lot of greg araki's films as as much into grindhouse as they have one foot are very much modern noirs about there was uh i think there was a lot of panic in um a lot of the gay liberation that that a lot of uh gay and lesbian people had been so had adjusted themselves to being oppressed

and dealing with that but then when that when the k it shows you what happens to oppress people when suddenly they're given all this freedom and then because you've instilled so much fear in them that can fuck them up. Yeah. And that was really interesting. I'm reminded of, uh, of crossfire,

the forties movie with Robert Ryan, which is a, I think the book was about a, a gay GI. And then they changed it in the movie to a Jewish GI to kind of, right. I guess make the movie filmable and releasable for Hollywood. But that's also a movie that you could probably shoot that book today and,

and tell it in a totally different way. Oh yeah. Easily. Yeah. So there's also maybe that you could probably shoot that book today and tell it in a totally different way. Oh yeah. Easily. Yeah. So there's a lot of like, um, again,

movies are unfortunately the record of a lot of our traumas, just like to quote Clive James history is a record of things that didn't need to be the way they were, but that's, but that's how we went. So, you know, you,

you just see a lot of that, um, in, uh, and, And noir is the best. Although now, in 2020, in the 2020s and 2010s, it feels like low-budget horror has taken over noir in terms of how do I smuggle in a commentary on a subject that we can't talk about overtly. And so there's a lot of these little low-budget horror movies that are getting made that the genre is so exciting right now. It's so funny that you say that. Why do you think that is the case? Just because they're even easier and cheaper to make than a noir? Well, that's one of the reasons. They are easier and cheaper to make than noir. And also, I think a lot of the horrors that we're facing now are so massive and so in our face.

A movie like All the President's Men feels so quaint. The idea of a government conspiracy trying to take place covertly. Now, everything's done out in the open. And it's like, I dare you to arrest us. You can't do anything. There's nothing you can do. We're just going to openly do this and you're fucked so that because the the terrors are so big you can't do it with the subtlety of a noir or a conspiracy thriller anymore it has to be a fucking horror movie the one noir the modern noir that i've been i guess trying to rescue or revive in some way is uh

is under the silver lake that that's the one that i feel like people are really trying that's a movie that has a real idea at the center of it about kind of like our modern condition not an old condition not something from the 40s and 50s but using the style and the format and all and similar to that long goodbye sort of like highly self-aware, almost self-parodying aspect, but that is really, really successful. That movie was not a big hit. So many of these movies are not big hits and then they get rediscovered. Yeah.

They get rediscovered on the line. I mean, again, right now I think, I think it's a, it's a, it's a function of, um,

I think reality is really, uh, difficult and exhausting right now and when people do also the fact that now think of the more distractions we have I I forget who I'm quoting but he's like we have the internet video games and tv movie radio books but everyone still has the same 90 minutes so like we they didn't give us more time with the with the more content so you know you really got to pick and choose. And sometimes I think people will pick and choose maximum entertainment over something brilliant.

And it does take time. Although, you know, a lot of the more brilliant movies that came out in the late 60s, yes, we revere them now. But the big money makers were still Dr. Doolittle. And, you know, like they were people just like i just because the life was so fucking turbulent that they wanted escapism and something silly yeah it makes sense patent this was amazing thank you so much for for sharing this all of your incredible wealth of film knowledge i feel like people don't really understand that you are as encyclopedic as any movie podcaster it's really fucking amazing man man um that was great and and let's wait a few months have me back on and we'll talk about um what's the thing you said we should go into well just the actors performances

like when they're wearing makeup or the unusual like the skills that you don't realize people have let's go into that like the the performances that i think people wrote off because either and by the way you can hurt yourself as a film or an actor by being too entertaining i think there's some there is such a thing roger ebert when he wrote um his great movie essay on um the good the bad me ugly he goes when this came out i gave it three stars i couldn't give it four because i was a young critic and in my mind something this entertaining cannot be an important film like important and entertaining can't be the same. And it took him, it took him while he was older to go,

oh no, it's actually really hard to make an entertaining film. That does make it important. So that kind of revelation I love. This has been an entertaining and important podcast, Patton. Patton, do you want to pitch anything? Yay!

I know you had a movie at South By. What else is going on with you right now? I'll be taping a new Netflix special on Saturday, May 14th at the Paramount Theater in Denver. Two shows. by what else is going on with you right now um i'll be taping a new netflix special on saturday may 14th at the paramount theater in denver two shows go to pat and oswalt.com get tickets my latest specials coming up i'll see you there amazing man thank you so much thank you so much to pat and oswalt. What a performance on that pod. And thank you to our producer, Bobby Wagner, for his work on this episode.

Stay tuned to The Big Picture. We got more coming soon.