The Big Picture - Oscar Bait Reborn: 'Hustlers' Cashes In, 'The Goldfinch' Flops Hard, and 'Jojo Rabbit' Hops into the Best Picture Race | The Oscars Show

Episode Date: September 17, 2019

After winning the Audience Award at TIFF, 'Jojo Rabbit' is likely to follow in the footsteps of past winners like 'Green Book' and 'Three Billboards,' straight to the Oscars. Sean and Amanda break down its chances and the post-festival discourse (0:51) before examining the box office success of 'Hustlers' and the failure of 'The Goldfinch' to reassess what we talk about when we talk about "Oscar Bait" (9:55). Then, documentary filmmaker Matt Tyrnauer joins to discuss his latest, 'Where's My Roy Cohn?,' a close look at the controversial lawyer and political operator who brokered power for everyone from Joseph McCarthy to Donald Trump (62:31). Hosts: Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins Guest: Matt Tyrnauer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today's episode of The Big Picture is brought to you by M&M's Caramel. Amanda, have you tried M&M's Caramel yet? I have consumed several bags at this point. As have I. Caramel has been square for far too long, and M&M's is doing their part by giving you that familiar flavor in a package you love, surrounding the smooth caramel in delicious milk chocolate. As always, M&M's knows how to bring spontaneous fun, just like, oh, I don't know, breaking down the Oscar race for an hour.

With M&M's Caramel, we can all agree that caramel is more fun than ever. Go grab some M&M's Caramel today and let your taste buds go for a ride. I'm Sean Fennessey. I'm Amanda Dobbins. And this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about the Oscars. But first, festival season is sort of wrapping up here. We're kind of at the end of things, Amanda. We've seen a few things come out into the world and Jojo Rabbit won the audience award. Yes! This is so hilarious. I haven't seen this movie. I don't know anything.

It's just, this is so funny. Shout out to the people of Toronto who like to go to movies and make their opinions heard. This is hysterical. For those of you who don't understand why we are yelling and laughing within three seconds, it's because once again, the Toronto International Film Festival has granted its audience award to a highly divisive film that got very suspicious reviews from all of its critics, but was widely loved by the audiences. That movie is Taika Waititi's Jojo Rabbit, which is coming out from Fox Searchlight in October. And it sure feels

a lot like some stories we've seen before out of Toronto. Primarily, last year we had Green Book, and the year before that we had Three Billboards. And, you know, we could go all the way back through the last 10 years of the Audience Award, and almost every single one of the films that has won this award has been a Best Picture nominee. And some of them have been pretty good films. Some of them have been great films. Some of them have been things we'd rather forget. But there's no denying that this is a very powerful bellwether for the Oscar race.

And we haven't seen it. We haven't seen it. So we're not going to do the takes. We're definitely going to talk about this movie when it comes out. We haven't seen it. We haven't seen it. So we're not going to do the takes. We're definitely going to talk about this movie when it comes out. We haven't seen the movie. I will say that both the people who saw it and didn't see it regarded this news with quite a bit of, I don't know, delirious, odd joy and pain at the same time. Is that possible? You're clutching yourself right now.

You're going to burst open. I just think it's so perfect. It's so perfect that we couldn't even imagine it, right? Because you and I have been talking about what would win the Toronto Audience Award. With not a lot of respect, I think, for the prior choices of the Toronto Audience Award and thinking that it would be something that reflects a vision of American values right now. Parasite or waves or something from a true artist that we haven't seen before. No, but you thought that and I thought it would be like the two popes or once we learned that

there was Mr. Rogers in Canada, something like Mr. Rogers, something to, you know, feel good or something that reflects that says this is who I am, that I like this movie, which is kind of what the audience likes to do with respect to Green Book, Three Billboards, all of these things. And it didn't even occur to me that Jojo Rabbit would be this movie because it's so, there are stylistic complications and it is like so hot button that I didn't think they would put their finger on it. But I forgot that the actual tagline of the film is an anti-hate satire. That is literally how they're marketing it.

And they went right for it. It is predictable upon reflection. And, you know, the first thought that came to mind when this news broke is we got something to talk about. You know, this is very clearly going to be a big part of the narrative for the next five months. Whether the movie actually emerges as something resembling a front runner is hard to say. I mean, just to go back and look at some of those movies that I mentioned before, Green Book and Three Billboards, also La La Land Room, The Imitation Game, 12 Years a Slave, Silver Linings Playbook. You got to go all the way back to 2011 to Nadine Labaki's Where Do We Go Now to find a movie that won this award that

didn't get nominated for Best Picture. So it's in, I guess you could say hallowed company. You know, this is a lighthearted Hitler satirical fantasia from the guy who made Thor Ragnarok. So on the one hand, it's completely ridiculous. On the other hand, Taika is a great filmmaker and has made Hunt for the Wilderpeople and boy, he's made some really great movies. I'm a huge fan of Ragnarok. it's completely ridiculous. On the other hand, Taika is a great filmmaker and has made Hunt for the Wilderpeople and Boy, he's made some really great movies. I'm a huge fan of Ragnarok. I was quite looking forward to this movie and I'm still looking forward to seeing it, but it's got a 49 score on Metacritic right now. And the only time I can think of a movie getting this pummeled and moving straight onto the Oscar conveyor belt is Bohemian Rhapsody. That said, Bohemian Rhapsody

was last year and we're in unusual times when it comes to the Oscars. We don't really know who is voting for the Oscars. Is it a reactionary group of people? Is it a young group of people that is trying to say something about the world? We kind of don't really know. It's both of those things. It's all of those things. I think what is interesting to me about this or hilarious to me, and again, I have not seen it. I have no idea whether I like it or not, is just that it seems like the Oscars are just on 11. This year already, everyone is really. And that's fun for us to talk about.

I'm sure that come November, December, you and I will be tearing our hair out at the level of discourse and venom and agendas and everyone just shouting at each other about their various issues, but- You get canceled and you get canceled and you get canceled. I am right and this is what I believe. And like, you can just see it happening in real time. And we knew that that is the environment in which we're operating in, but we still,

like I was still surprised and just really amused by the fact that it was the most controversial film that won the audience award. We're going for it. It's perfect. It lived up completely, and it continued another trend, which is that the runners-up for this year

were Marriage Story and Parasite, which are, I would say, probably the two best-reviewed films full stop out of a festival season. And I will be very surprised if those movies are also not nominated for Best Picture. Marriage Story is much more likely than Parasite, but Parasite, the wave is strong. You know, there's just a ton of positivity around this movie, which is very unusual for a movie like this. And in previous years, you know, last year,

If Beale Street Could Talk and Roma were the runners-up. They were both nominated for Best Picture. I, Tanya, and Called Me By Your Name the year before that. Obviously, both of those films received quite a few Oscar nominations. Some even won some Oscars. So, off we go. TIFF is over. Telluride is over. Cannes is over.

We have the New York Film Festival coming a little bit later this month, where we'll see The Irishman, among a couple of other movies. But just from your perspective, and you've still got a lot of movies to watch, and you've still got a lot of movies to watch and I've still got a lot of movies to watch. How do you feel about the way this has rolled out? Does it feel in any meaningful way new or does it just feel like the same story

we've been watching for years now? I think it's pretty familiar in a lot of ways. We obviously have a lot more access to all of this stuff. Like I said, it feels very heightened. We've been making fun of everybody's tweets for as long as people have been tweeting, but it does feel like everyone is dialed in and trying to get their piece of the Oscar pie just in terms of being heard. And so it feels really loud. But what this is basically is that there have been festivals since May, and critics and press have seen these movies and applied their critic brain to them.

And the Toronto Audience Award is kind of the first indicator of what normal moviegoers think. It is kind of a more mainstream sensibility, and it makes sense that it is slightly different than what all the critics think. I love critics. I often agree with them, but it is a particular type of taste. Yes. You know, I often agree with them, but it is a particular type of taste. And the Oscars definitely do not follow critics' tastes much to our chagrin these past 89, 90, 91 years. Is it the 91st Oscars? I believe so.

Yeah, 91 years. between the two. And the wrench, as you mentioned in all this, is that we don't actually know who the Academy voters are and where they fit on that spectrum between critic and regular person. And I think it's a little bit of both. It is a very large Academy. Yeah. And when I was at Telluride, I had people telling me this is also a serious bellwether for the Oscars because a lot of Academy members are here at the festival. And I regarded that with a little bit of skepticism, not because those people weren't there, but because you don't get the same boom at that festival sort of narratively as you do out of Toronto the last few years in particular. And so, you know, while some of those movies were really warmly regarded, Marriage Story in particular, I thought got a nice bump and Parasite got a nice bump, but you know, like Uncut Gems and Waves and a handful of other movies that are really strong,

kind of not just festival fare, but critical fare and are part of the streaming conversation and are interesting looks at damaged people. Those are not always the kinds of movies that succeed at the Oscars. You know, La La Land came out with the audience award for a reason. And so we'll see. Now, Moonlight did emerge at Telluride, and it is the kind of movie that can still win an Oscar. It was only a few years ago. I think we don't know if we're in the new reality of Shape of Water and Three Billboards and Green Book,

or if things are just kind of flipping back and forth right now. It could be both. I think it is too early to say whether moonlight is was the exception as opposed to the the the new order as i think you wrote like that very night but i you know things are bouncing around a lot that's all i have to say things are bouncing around let's have them go up and down and go right to stock up stock down if it goes bust you can make 10 to 1, even 20 to 1 return, and it's already slowly going bust. So Stock Up is very straightforward and very obvious, and that is for Hustlers. What a weekend for Hustlers.

Hustlers also premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it was, I would say, rapturously received and I think was a pretty smart move by STX, the distributor, to put that movie there to build a really a white hot heat on it in the days running up to the release of the movie because there was a lot of Jennifer Lopez's amazing content in the world last week. We created some of that content and the movie opened to 33 million dollars at the box office, which is a lot for a movie like this, which is basically a mid-budget drama that does not have classical IP. And it has some movie stars. Certainly Constance Wu was the star of one of the biggest movies of the year last year. And Jennifer Lopez is a world historic icon. We've broken down her strengths and her successes over the years. But still, $33 million going up against It Chapter Two and its second weekend is a lot of money. It's a lot of money for a studio like STX, which is still only, I don't

know, five or six years old and has struggled at times to create an identity for itself. This movie was originally developed at Annapurna and they passed it off. And Annapurna probably could use a movie like this right now. And credit to them and credit to Adam McKay for identifying Lorene Scafaria. and she did an amazing job with this movie amanda what did you think of hustlers i had a fantastic time it's a fun movie it's and that is really kind of the appeal at some point i think it is expertly done and we have to talk about we already talked about jlo but we will continue to talk about her for the next six months but i do think some of it is just that

it is dynamic and there's like music and you go to the movies and you have a nice time and you don't feel too bad about anything, even though it is a technically a crime story. And I was trying to think the last time I just had a lot of fun at the movies like that. And it had been a while. Yeah, it's an interesting thing to kind of dissect because I think you can take one reading that is sophisticated and look under the surface at the themes. And the movie makes efforts to kind of talk about 2008 and the financial crisis and what Wall Street does, what Wall Street does to women, what Wall Street does to society. And most of that stuff is all valid. And some of it, I think, works well. But on a purely visceral level, it's a movie

that one a lot of women saw 65% of the people who saw this movie were women and two there are not a lot of versions of in which basically women are in charge of the film in all aspects yes and they're not making something that is I don't I don't know a quotidian or or the sort of like romantic comedy that we might assume that's like a group of people like this might make it's different it's a crime movie

and yeah but it's like a crime movie slash romantic comedy the thing about Hustlers and I it definitely does hit the 2008 crisis

I mean it like they have the Lehman Brothers shutting down I believe it's it's um Alison Williams' dad oh my god that's what that's amazing that's how i think of it now his name is brian williams but that's where he is

in the culture which is moving on anyway once disgraced now revivified msnbc news anchor brian williams but they have the clip of the crisis so they are aware of the themes. I do not think that this is ultimately a movie about the economic situation in America. I think it's about friendship. I think it's about like a bunch of ladies being in a room and to an extent that it's about the love between the Jennifer Lopez character and the Constance Wu character, that is played in a lot of ways like a rom-com, more so than it is a sociological diagnosis of the plight of strippers in New York in the late aughts to early 2000s. And that appeals to people. Yes, Destiny sees Ramona and she falls for Ramona instantly. And it does become a kind of a love story of friendship.

And, you know, what to say the music is incredible i think they have she perfectly evokes that 07 08 09 period of time which you know i very much coming of age in new york at that time yes and so it's familiar to us i think it's easy to fuck up the music cues and the style and the pacing of a a recent period piece and i was really impressed by what she did there i think she just did a lot of really smart stuff scafaria with casting lizzo casting cardi b And the pacing of a recent period piece. And I was really impressed by what she did there. I think she just did a lot of really smart stuff. Scafaria with casting Lizzo, casting Cardi B, casting Trace Lissette. Putting a lot of people in the movie who have a certain kind of emotional or artistic or cultural cachet.

That will make people go like, oh yes! When they show up on screen. Which is kind of what you want from a movie like this, which hangs together OK, pretty well as a narrative movie, but is mostly just like a series of incredible. Right. Endorphin hits. Yes. What did you think of Constance Wu? And what do you make of Constance Wu as a movie star now? Because she's now been in two big hits. Yes. You know, how about this? I think that this movie is a tremendous testament to the movie star power of Jennifer Lopez.

Right. So, the very tricky and unspoken thing I think about this movie is that people are not in love with the Constance Wu performance.

Yeah. And whether it's the difficulty of that character or writing that character, I know from almost every person I've talked to, I'm not trying to tell on anybody, but everybody's like Constance Wu's fine. Well, so I'll tell you what, I think she's excellent in the scenes with the Julia Stiles character. At the end, she seems far more comfortable in that medium of, I don't know, it just seems like she's not particularly comfortable playing as Tripper for whatever reason.

And maybe she, like, it's physically very difficult. Lord knows that I could not know it just seems like she's not particularly comfortable playing a stripper for whatever reason and maybe she like it's physically very difficult lord knows that I could not do it no I could though I could do it you could oh congratulations in fact I am in training right now for my role in Hustlers 2 right which is uh an all-male cast okay that I'm really excited about it's Hustlers 2 but it's just continuing the story of Goodfellas but we're calling it Hustlers 2 that's great is that just the story of Goodfellas, but we're calling it Hustlers 2. That's great. Isn't that just Magic Mike XXL? Yeah. Well, no. I play Henry Hill's son who becomes a male stripper. It's going to be a really, I'm really fired up about this.

Great. Congratulations to you. Picture that. I will say also that everyone you just mentioned, Lizzo, Cardi B, Jennifer Lopez, they have stage experience, which is a very different type of performing than being in front and being in a movie or on a TV show. And so it may be that Constance Wu just doesn't really have that mode, which, you know, but she doesn't she doesn't look like she's having as much fun as everybody else in this movie. And it shows because everyone else is like having a lot of fun. It's very true. And she has to be the emotional fulcrum in a way that the other characters don't always, you know, Cardi B just gets to be really funny and pop off and then she kind of disappears.

You know, the movie loses a little life when you lose that first group of women in the film, but I think it kind of comes back into shape. Should we talk about JLo in more detail here about Ramona, about whether this is actually a real thing and she's going to the Oscars for playing this woman? I think if anyone at the Oscars has like a quarter of a brain and anyone in the Academy, which is like a very big if, as we've said, then she should be there. Because it was a tremendous, tremendous performance. I can't believe how good she is. She carries this movie from the minute she is there in the fur coat swaddling Constance Wu. It's an amazing part.

It's amazing. And they have actual chemistry, which is incredible. Obviously, the criminal scene, which is when Jennifer Lopez dances to Fiona Apple. One of the all-time entrances you'll ever see in your life. I mean, that's very meaningful to me in a number of ways. If you heard me last week on the show, you know how much Jennifer Lopez means to me. If you've heard me over dinner table, you know how much Fiona Apple means to me. So quite a flex. And then, you know, she really does bring the emotional heft of the movie home. That last scene when she's showing you the picture of tiny Constance Constance Wu that is just like there is like love and regret and knowledge

it's a it's an emotional performance as well as like the amazing physical holy shit it's J-Lo J-Lo stripping so Chris Ryan said something funny to me about this movie he said that he wished that there was a little bit more of that J-Lo in the movie itself. Now, on the one hand, my immediate response to Chris, because I don't know how to have a conversation with a Chris without kind of bantering about something, was the movie doesn't work if you get too much of that person because she's too vulnerable. And what you need her to be is this impenetrable crime lord where everything is kind of rosy all the time. On the other hand, it would be nice to just be around that person and see her acting in that way too

because she is very steely throughout this movie. She's kind of unbreakable in a way. And that's the one time when we see like, oh, she did love Destiny. They did have a love affair. They did have an emotional connection, a bond that is, you know, extends beyond their thievery.

Yeah, but I mean mean that's like the that's the driving force of the movie is because it's what the constance woo character wants what destiny wants more than anything i mean she keeps calling um i keep wanting to say jessica pressler in my mind the julia saz is playing jessica pressler who wrote the new york magazine story that uh inspired this movie but she keeps calling me like, have you heard from Ramona? You know, what did Ramona say? What like Jennifer Lopez, the Ramona character really is kind of like the prize object of the movie. And you're trying, you just want to be in that coat with her. That's like, honestly, why Destiny is doing what she's doing. It's why all of the men certainly that are coming to see her strip are doing it. But so you can't give it

all away because that's kind of like that's the ultimate reveal that is that she was in, you know, she loved her all along. Yeah, it's kind of heartbreaking.

And there are a couple of good moments, I think, for J-Lo. There's a lot of conversation about like, she's obviously looks so great for 50 years old. She trained to dance

and she strips in the film. And, you know, she gives this kind of, like I said, kind of hard as nails performance. But there's a couple of moments. There's one moment in particular in one of the strip club scenes when they're in the back room. And it's much years later. You know, it's 2015, 16 at this point. And one of the guys upon whom she's dancing says, like, here's a hundred bucks, not feeling

it. Like, take five. And she's been rejected. And she's older now. and she's not in the prime of her stripping career. And there's. I think you're also meant to understand that she's not willing to do as much as perhaps some of the younger. Completely. She's not a Russian prostitute like many of the women who are stripping in the strip club at that time. And the look on her face in that moment is just great acting yeah she's a

great actor and you you understand everything she's feeling there's no dialogue and that is the kind of thing that gets people awards and that's why we're talking about this so much i think yeah i think people will recognize that i think it won't just be the physical but i think also just there is a star power element to it that it is a little unfair to Constance Wu at points because Jennifer Lopez just like blows everyone off of the screen. It is a pretty perfect marriage of actor and role. And especially given how it echoes certain like real life dynamics

in Jennifer Lopez's career, it is, this is something that would come back. We haven't seen her doing anything at this level in a long time. People really like that. And they just, the Oscars need stars. We talk about this all the time. They need stars. And I have been thinking a lot about,

we talk so much about how like movie stars are dead. They're quote dead. And they are in a way in the sense that we don't create new movie stars. And a movie star alone doesn't really open a box office in the way that it used to. I mean, because that's how you used to make movies, right? Tom Hanks will be in this. Julia Roberts in this. And $100 million of tickets will be sold.

And that's not how it works anymore. It's IP. But I think probably, what, 30 of this 33 million was because Jennifer Lopez was in a movie. We think people still do respond to movie stars. 100%. I think an uncharitable description is Jennifer Lopez is in a movie about stripper thieves, which is a good sell. It's kind of a good old-fashioned elevator pitch for a movie, and that is very powerful. And I think also just the movie is really well marketed.

You know, it's like Cardi B is in the trailer. The songs in the trailer are exciting. It looks like, as you said, a fun time at the theater, which is something that people do want. They will show up for that if you position it correctly. You know, as for whether the Academy pays attention, I don't really know if they have even any sense of respect for her because there is this kind of uncanny thing where you can be too

famous for not acting in a way that I think damages your chances. And like, if you look at the contenders in this category, we're not going to study this category yet too much, but like, you know, it's Annette Bening for The Report. It's Laura Dern for Marriage Story. It's, you know, it's Annette Bening for The Report. It's Laura Dern for Marriage Story. It was Nicole Kidman for The Goldfinch until The Goldfinch came out. It's Catriona Bell for Ford vs. Ferrari. These are all, you know, they're all good performances, but they're all a little bit formal. They're not that fun. And Laura Dern's having some fun, but it's in a movie that has kind of a classical shape.

And so I'll be curious to see, in the same way that you don't really usually see comedies get nominated for Best Picture, you don't usually see women in crime movies get nominated for Best Actress or Best Supporting Actress, which is a challenge. I mean, it's true in a lot of ways that this is, she will be nominated for a Golden Globe like that is just a guarantee and there is a bit of there are some performances and movies that clean up at the Golden Globes because the Golden Globes for their many problems do understand that famous people still matter. She will be there. This will probably be nominated. This might whether this goes into Best Musical or Comedy will be hilarious because they might do that. Oh I'm sure it will. I mean that's's crazy yeah but you know if but i think that the supporting categories they're

together aren't they at the golden gloves so you know it's six of one for her i i have to assume she'll compete in supporting um in theory in theory i think that would be wise for her but that at least guarantees that she'll be in the conversation until January. And we were just talking about what a interesting and heightened Oscar season it's going to be in a lot of ways. That if it's just Jennifer Lopez is around as a breath of fresh air and everyone can just agree that this is a really fun thing that we'd like to reward, she'll already be around. I don't know. You know, the only other person that is in this category that I think is notable to your point about movie stars is Margot Robbie, who's one of only like four or five people who has emerged in the last 10 years

as somebody who you're like, I think I would see that movie because of her. It's not true every time she puts a movie out, but she does have that kind of classical quality that we're talking about. She's very charismatic. She commands the screen. You know, women think she's cool. Men are in love with her. All that bullshit. And it'll be interesting because they're basically playing like two sides of the same coin of fame. so quiet there's so little dialogue it's reserved it's physical ramona is a ball of flame you know she's you can't take your eyes off her the whole time she's there and she's at you the whole time so it'll be interesting to see how that shakes out i i don't think that this will be making its way towards adapted screenplay but it might be it's a pretty impressive adaptation of a piece

of magazine journalism which sometimes makes for a good movie a la Argo, but often doesn't. And there's a reason that not a lot of movies get made out of magazine journalism stories. I will say I was surprised, I don't know if you were, by how faithful the movie was to Jessica's story. I mean, it's really, there are huge chunks just right out of the piece in the film, which I thought was fascinating. I will say I was a huge fan of that story. And at some point, you understand why, because they are just kind of fully drawn. It is also, they're playing archetypes. It's a pretty contained story. And you know what you know about them in relationship to each other.

And you need that for a magazine piece and you need it for a movie. We're going to talk about a movie that is adapted from a much longer source material. A bigger text. And I realized that kind of the one-to-one lengthwise really works out for a movie, you know? Yeah. Let's make a transition. So Hustlers, the stock is up. The stock is extra up for Jennifer Lopez. The stock is extra up for Jennifer Lopez. The stock is about as down as you can possibly be for the Goldfinch.

This is an extremely tough beat for Warner Brothers, for the makers of this film, for people who like literary adaptations. The movie is adapted from a book that you love by Donna Tartt.

And what can we say? It is the biggest bomb of the year and one of the biggest bombs, frankly, in the history of movies. It made $2.5 million this year, which is not terrible if you were opening on, say, I don't know, a thousand screens, maybe 500 screens. It opened on 2,500 screens. I saw it on a Friday in Arlington, Virginia, and there were three people in the theater. It was sad. And it's already got a stink on it, had a stink on it coming out of Toronto. Yeah, I was going to say the stock is down, but it's really only down from the fact that

people still had some hope for it. I think this was written off a long time ago. It was. I mean, it's got so many talented people associated with it. And it's based on such a beloved thing that I went in hoping for, and I'm very curious to hear what you think about this. I went in hoping for something that was, like, just mediocre so that I could come in and say, much like we did with Where'd You Go, Bernadette, you know, like, good effort. They tried something different with this book, and a lot of it doesn't work, but I admire the craftsmanship. I have something of a similar opinion about this movie where there are some things in it that I can see what they were going for, but it really does not work as a movie. Yeah. Like, at all. I would like to ask you a question, which is, because you started reading the book, but you finished about 100 pages in, correct?

I did, and you know what I thought of, too? And this is a comment on the movie, is the movie is very episodic and the book is episodic. And that's one of the reasons why I put it down. Because I think I finished the chapter and I was kind of like, and I started another chapter and it was in a kind of a different space in a far off place. Right. And I was like, I don't know if I'm ready to, what happened in New York? Like, why are we not here now? Right.

And it kind of lost me. Maybe I'll pick it back up and see if i can fall back inside of it well so having not read the book but having seen the movie can you like can you tell me what you think happened like do you have a sense of what happened in the movie like what is the plot sure i will try to describe okay um a young boy's mother is killed while they are visiting a museum in a terrorist attack. The boy then sets out on what has been called many times over a Dickensian quest to find himself by way of discovery around the piece of art that he was observing when the bomb went off. And his struggles with addiction, which drive him into increasingly fraught and complicated social situations. Now, inside of that, there are journeys into the recession in Las Vegas.

There are journeys into the world of fine antiques. There are journeys into Amsterdam and a crime underworld that we hardly understand. There's friendship with a Russian immigrant. Yeah, yeah. You're describing impressionistically the scenes that you've seen. And what I'm asking you is, do you know how they connect? there's friendship with a Russian immigrant yeah this that's awful you're like describing impressionistically the scenes that you've seen and like what I'm asking you is do you know how they connect like do you know what happened do you have a sense of the timeline like do you know why they were suddenly like went from New York to Las Vegas then flash forward then flash back

I know why in a sense yeah I could you can It's the kind of movie that you can feel. I've written this before, but you can feel the razor blade cutting the film. When people used to make movies on film and they would edit, they would literally cut the film with a razor blade and tape it together. And it feels very taped together because you don't spend enough time with certain characters. You don't understand the motivations for why they do certain things that they do. Right. And the performances are so inert and there's no there's no extravagance. It's a very it seems like a very refined novel and it's attempting to be a very refined film.

But film is not a refined medium for something that has this much plot. Yes. You know, if you were making a movie that is one of your favorite movies this year that has like a weird thing in common with it, like The Souvenir, where you can sort of not, you can undershare in an effort to tell the story. A movie like this can't do that. There's so much shit goes on. Right. So I wasn't confused to your point,

but maybe you can tell me what the movie doesn't do well. Well, I mean, I kind of think it doesn't do very much well, which is unfortunate. I spent a lot of time in the movie being like, what is the goldfinch about? Which is like tough. That's tough both for the movie and for the book. And I reread the book or I just kind of picked it up last week. So I made about 400 pages in before I saw the movie. And you the book and i i reread the book or i just kind of picked it up last week so i made about 400 pages in before i saw the the movie and you're such a freak that you just reread 400 pages of a novel well i you know it's really readable and i did spend a lot of time after in the middle of the movie which is again bad sign for the movie and also afterwards being like is this a good book i don't know did i like it is it does it actually have merit it's obviously a book about um grief and also about art and what we the meaning that we

attach to art and and authenticity and what is real and what's fake and is that what you were asking me like what the themes are no no no no no no because i i was asking you if you could tell what happens because there is also a lot of plot in the book. I guess that's what it's about. I was thinking a lot about like really how shallow the book is when you think about it. It is focused on this thing happens and then another thing happens. And it's told from the perspective of a teenage boy, which Donna Tartt does a great job of creating a character, but it also, there's not a ton of depth there, or it's like a 13-year-old figuring out its stuff simultaneously. So she doesn't have to possibly do as much development as you might

expect if it were about an adult. It's like basically about like having good taste and how you can only be a good person if you have good taste is what I realized halfway through the thing and if I felt the shallowness of the book more when they were trying to adapt it because they were cramming in so many events but there wasn't a lot of like there there I do think the the movie the movie doesn't do anything about the painting or about the furniture which are like two major visual elements in the book. And there is, there are a lot of references and a lot of, there's a lot of art in a book about art. And you don't really see a lot of that in the movie, which I thought was interesting. Well, the stuff that I thought that worked the best was most of the antique stuff with

Jeffrey Wright. And that world is not a world I know very much about. And there's only a handful of moments there where you get him kind of describing like the fine grain and how you can tell if something is a knockoff or not or reproduction as it were. But it's too eager to move on to the next part of the story so you don't get a chance to really understand why the thing that is happening is actually happening in the first place. Honestly, what it felt like to me watching it without that deeper understanding that you're talking about and you saying the way, you describing it the way that you did

makes me think of this. It was kind of like the monocle version of an episode of Law & Order where, you know, when you're watching an episode of Law & Order, I don't know if you watch much Law & Order, but... I've seen Law & Order. You know, in Law & Order,

obviously the first half is the law and the second half is the order, you know, the cops and then the courts. And the cops are kind of doing their cop work and they're doing their best to investigate the case. But inevitably, they're mostly not achieving anything. And then there is some happenstance moment that happens at the end of the show where a lawyer either lucks out or gets screwed and either convicts or fails to convict. And it's always like this weird coincidence where we're like, oh yeah, it was actually, you know, the guy who was under the manhole cover in the middle of the street who popped out

because he was fixing a sewer line. And the book, like there's a moment in the book when Ansel Elgort's character, Theo, encounters his Russian friend, Boris, who he has not seen in 25, 10 years, 30 years? Like, I really don't know how much time has elapsed.

They obviously don't look anything like they did when they were children. He immediately recognizes him and they meet in New York where neither one of them knew that they would be. That's like the most extraordinary coincidence in the world.

Yeah. And they hit it off immediately and then jump into a crime caper together. Yes. And the whole time I was watching, I was like, well, this is just a load of bullshit. Like, there was no suspension of disbelief. It was absurd. Right. The acting wasn't very good.

And the crux of a movie, kind of like a turning point moment in the movie, just pulled me way out of the movie. And what had previously tried to be this, this like sensitive evocation of what it means to appreciate art and how that damages us and what it means for our relationship to family and all the things you're saying that the themes of the movie immediately become secondary to like we have to go to Amsterdam to get this painting right and then the resolution of that is all there are no stakes to it in the end is all no I I should should have said that the Goldfinch, the book, is famously, or maybe not famously, but I think it's one of the worst endings of any book I've ever read. And I thought that even before I reread it or saw this movie and before I started questioning kind of the depths of the book itself.

But it essentially, it really just is plot, plot, plot, plot, plot with some feelings about art. And then they resolve the crime thing. And then she just tacks on like 20 pages of the Theo character having some personal revelations and like swearing to do better. It's a coda almost. And it makes no sense. But, you know, and for I was willing to be like, oh, whatever, it's a great book. And then she no sense but you know and i and for i was willing to be like oh whatever it's a great book and then she just didn't know how to land the plane a lot of people don't know how to end the in end movies or books or anything but it does now seem like the seams

were showing a bit in terms of she was slapping on some meaning into something that maybe actually didn't have as much meaning and depth for them to work with as I thought it did, even though it's 700 pages long. I think that's true of a lot of art that you appreciate on the first watch and also true of a lot of things you don't get on the first watch. And then you realize there's just a much deeper subtext in here. Maybe it's not as significant. You made me aware of the fact that this book won the Pulitzer when it came out in 2013. I'm like being really revisionist about it. I even enjoyed rereading the 400 pages that I did. She creates like a world and it's so immersive. You're in New York, you're in Las Vegas, which I think the movie is bouncing around too much to really establish that experience, even though

it was very cool to see the places and it's, you know, shot beautifully by Roger Deakins, which is just like mystifying. Well, you know, we mentioned this last week, but it's John Crowley who made Brooklyn, which is a wonderful film from 15. And it's a great cast. There are times in the movie where I thought Nicole Kidman was doing something very effective. And there are other times where she just looks like a mannequin. And it's kind of hard to parse. It's kind of hard to understand what the thinking here was with just not making this a miniseries. And there's something challenging about that because, unfortunately, we've spent so much time on this podcast for the last year saying, where is our middle, mid-budget, middle-brow literary adaptation? Where we love these movies and we want these movies and we got one. And the way that we got it was very complicated because Warner Brothers

bought the rights to it, but they needed Amazon to foot the bill of 30% of the budget to get it made. And there's all of this complex machinations behind the scenes in Hollywood just to get the movie on screen. Then it comes out and it's not good and no one goes to see it. And then we have this conversation and then people don't go to see it. And then they realize that they shouldn't make movies like this. So it's such a high risk proposition to try to do this. And it would make so much more sense to be like, shouldn't Netflix have bought The Goldfinch and just made it a six part series? And it could have been eight and a half hours and that would have been a better way to tell this story i guess so you know the flip side to that is that i think that probably on this project would have resulted in a better product but i

was thinking about adaptations and i was thinking about the joe wright anna karenina adaptation that you love and i am fond of even though i wish it were on location because, you know, I would like to see some of Russia if we're doing Anna Karenina. See, that's why I love it, though. Sure. But what I was about to say is that it does have a vision of how it's adapting it, and it is matching the ambition to the scale. And it takes 1,000 pages and puts it in two hours. And it works. It does work.

And it's good. It does work. So it is possible to do it. And I actually, I think the timeline and the jumping times and everyone coming together that this movie tries is actually smart. I disagree with you that it was condensed too much that you couldn't really follow things, but they had an idea about how to adapt this movie.

And I admire people who try and admire at good adaptations i just like it didn't work it just really didn't work and sometimes that happens it does it reminded me also a little bit of the it and it chapter two adaptation which i think the first film in particular works better than this movie and obviously is a much bigger box office success but that those two films try to take a bite out of an 1100 page Stephen King novel that that is also plot plot plot as all Stephen King novels are and some of the things are easy to convert and other things

are not and it does the same thing which is it flips back and forth between childhood and adulthood and the trauma incurred from childhood into adulthood and then we reflect back on the childhood it's a time-worn strategy for telling a story. It's just, it's really neither fish nor fowl. It's two hours and 20 minutes. It's not three and a half hours. You know, it could have been this massive art world crime globe-trotting epic. And it's not that.

Or it could have been a kind of a contained, you know, character study drama. And it's not that. Or it could have been a kind of a contained, you know, character study drama and it's not that. Right. And then you're left with this thing, this misshapen thing. And it's too bad. And the reason I wanted to talk about this movie in depth with you on this show

is because it looks and sounds like it should be down the middle what we would have once called Oscar bait. Yes. And when we were doing all the Oscar previews, several people wrote us. I'm like, why aren't you talking about the Goldfinch? You're supposed to be excited about the Goldfinch. And we had heard tell of what was to come.

And that's why we weren't talking about it. The buzz wasn't good on this movie like five months ago. So there has not been a huge effort to get people excited about it. Because I think everybody knew what happened when they saw the first assembly. And they were like, shit, we don't really have what we had hoped to have. Which happens, as you said. Sometimes you just don't got it.

But I wonder if whatever we think of as quote-unquote Oscar bait is, one, was that illusory in the first place? Like, did that never even exist? Because if Jojo Rabbit has emerged from Toronto

as the frontrunner and it's a movie in which Taika Waititi is dressed like a comical Hitler, maybe Oscar bait doesn't mean anything? But that's just new Oscar bait. It's changed. New Oscar bait is politically motivated in whatever version of political you want to.

And I don't mean to sound dismissive. I honestly don't because it's important to make movies about things. Your movie should have ideas. The Goldfinch actually doesn't have an idea. And that's part of the problem in addition to all of the filmmaking problems. But new Oscar bait is I'm saying something about myself when I say that I like this movie. And honestly, I think Hustlers fits into that a little because there has been a female empowerment. Wow, I want to be like J-Lo vibe to hustlers as well.

And, you know, the scammer mentality and we're getting one up on institutions or whatever, which again, this movie is not really about. It's about crime and friendship, but which are also valid subjects. But I think that the goldfinch would have been Oscar bait 10, 15 years ago you're i think you're right i don't totally know because there is obviously a long history of bad literary adaptations made

by hollywood but the thing you you've really hit on is kind of what is the new version of this which is this perilous divide between self-identity and identity politics and we think that it's moonlight and self-identity and knowing thyself and sharing who thyself is. And in fact, it is becoming increasingly identity politics, and it becomes a thunderdome of debate and conversation about whether Green Book should be canceled or not. And that is- And then a reaction of, no, you can't tell me what to cancel or what to like. Exactly. And this is an echo chamber that really ultimately only concerns somewhere between three and 10,000 people who are voting for awards, but reflects upon a TV show that airs once a year that has 20 million viewers. And then we use that as this gauntlet, this

cultural gauntlet. And it's literally the reason why I like doing this show, but it also is the problem with this podcast. Yes. No, I mean, I said it last week. We're in a prison of our own making, and we're a part of it. And I have been yelling about how I'm not going to participate in the Joker discourse, but I am participating in the Joker discourse already.

So... Can't wait. Yeah. So if we want to ask this week, are they running? The goldfinch is definitively not running. Because it cannot run because it has no legs. It can hardly fly.

Let's go to the big race. Well, mama, look at me now. I'm a star. This is a completely unsupportable, unreasonable, too early set of best picture predictions. Great. We're probably going to talk about this. We were literally just talking about how we're the problem and we are the problem. I'm content to know thyself as all great films do.

And the emergence of Jojo Rabbit, as we said, I think firmly puts it in the conversation. Yes. We know that Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is in the conversation. I'm 99.7% sure that Marriage Story is going to coast straight to the awards. You were not allowed to talk about it until I see it. I haven't said anything. Great. I haven't said anything. None of the other movies that are on my list here have been released.

Neither have, only Once Upon a Time in Hollywood has been released of everything you just said. That's a great point. Yeah. I've seen some of these movies that I've got on the list as quote unquote locks. I want to know what you make of them. But there's three different categories here. I just shared with you what I deem in. You've put those in red?

They're in red. Red means go in this case. Okay. Because there is also a section that's in green, but it means stop. Green means slow down. That's. because we don't know plane sean is on one i've just gotten off a plane that might explain the level of unique intensity i have right now here are the other movies joker parasite the irishman ford versus

ferrari and the two popes i would say all feel like they're in strong contention based on what we saw out of the festivals, with the rare exception of The Irishman, which no one has seen, which is going to a festival in two weeks, but is a Martin Scorsese movie. So there's just a lot of- Which was literally advertised during the last Oscar ceremony with the famous in theaters and on Netflix ad. Yeah. I mean, you love to see it in many ways as the creator of a podcast. Joker is probably the diciest, I think, of the movies I've got on my list here.

And I've got a bunch that I've kind of deemed doubtful that I could be way off about. It's very hard to know what to make of Joker at this point because it was... We haven't seen it. And the reception at Venice and Toronto was different. And it's already lost in the culture war, even though a very limited number of people have seen it.

And I think it's going to be a big, big, big hit. It's going to be like, it is going to be the venom of this season. And so with that, it probably means it's going to linger kind of regardless of how people feel about it. Everyone is acknowledging Joaquin Phoenix has done great work. Anything here seem a little off to you in that fivesome? I was just going to ask you, do you think Joker being a hit would go against it in terms of the Oscar? It would for winning things, but I don't think for being nominated.

Just in terms of the Academy deigning to honor a superhero movie, if it's like arty superhero, then does the box office performance take away from the artiness? I'm just talking aloud. It's a good question. I couldn't say. I mean, Venom was not up for any Oscars last year,

but Black Panther was. That's true. As we mentioned, Heath Ledger's already won for this part. So it's not out of the realm of possibility that it being a success would not affect its chances. I feel pretty strongly about Parasite and Ford versus Ferrari and the two Popes.

The Irishman will have to wait and see. And then the other two I've got down here are Little Women in 1917. Why are they green? Green means slow down a little bit, as I said. Maybe just tap the brakes. Insanity.

But no one has seen either of these movies. Right. And they operate in this bubble of buzz and anticipation. I mean, in a lot of ways,

they're like old Oscar bait. They are. That's a very good point. And they're coming out on Christmas Day, I believe, both of them,

which was also old Oscar timing. And the whole calendar has moved up, both because of the literal Oscar ceremony being moved up and also because everyone just like talks themselves to death before Christmas at this point. There are not a lot of films that can succeed being released in December anymore. You know, Vice was able to get a lot of nominations and Beale Street was able to get a lot of nominations, but those movies didn't really win very much. And these are two movies

that have a slightly, I don't know about a bigger profile, but a little bit more classical look. Obviously, a major adaptation from Greta Gerwig, who has previously been nominated for Best Picture. And Sam Mendes,

who, you know, has both directed some of the biggest movies of all time in the James Bond films that he's made and also made American Beauty. Yeah. And American Beauty problematic icon that it is of 1999, 20 years later,

is still one of those major Oscar history movies. And he's got a huge reputation in the Academy. And he's made what sounds like also with Roger Deakins, a like stunty one-take war movie. Dunkirk, but World War I. Yes, which has never been done. If you look at the history of one-take movies, and I was reading up on them this weekend, if people fell over themselves for Birdman, what will they do for a war movie that does the Birdman thing?

We'll have to wait and see about those two. Hopefully, we'll talk to Greta and Sam on the show. That would be nice. That would be wonderful. I'm an admirer of both of them. Right. Here's a long list of doubtful movies. There's so many.

Should we put these on the internet? Like, what do we do? How do we keep track of this over the next three and a half months? I mean, do you want to put your weird reverse color system like on the internet for everyone to make fun of? I might have to call David Shoemaker to help me visualize

this a little bit. Our genius art director. I've seen some of these and you've seen some of these but we've not seen most of these. Terrence Malick's A Hidden Life,

The Farewell. A lot of prognosticators including Scott Feinberg has The Farewell in the mix right now on the best picture list. I'm a little bit more dubious of it getting across the line but that probably depends on what we see in the next two list. I'm a little bit more dubious of it getting across the line,

but that probably depends on what we see in the next two months. I think I am, the farewell is being marketed so well and purely to me and I am in the mix with the farewell and everything that Lulu Wang is doing on Twitter and that I don't trust it. I'm like, this is so for Amanda that Academy voters don't care. Can we actually do a sidebar inspired by this? Yeah. So have you seen the Peanut Butter Falcon? No.

So the Peanut Butter Falcon is an independent film released by Roadside earlier this year. And it is one of the indie box office hits of the year. It crossed $15 million this weekend. It stars Shia LaBeouf, and it's produced by Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa, who produced the film that we recently did a rewatchables about, Election. And the Peanut Butter Falcon

basically has a very similar profile to The Farewell. It's a very personal story. It stars Shia LaBeouf, Dakota Johnson, John Hawks, Bruce Dern, and a man named Zach Gottsagen, who plays a character with Down syndrome, and it's a very uplifting kind of word-of-mouth hit. And it's the kind of movie that, like, with a campaign, with a quote-unquote cool campaign,

falls into the same sort of Last Black Man in San Francisco, The Farewell. There's been a handful of movies this year that have done pretty good indie business. And this movie is one of them, but it does not have the like cultural cachet. I'm going to make a tech comparison to you. Okay. So the Peanut Butter Falcon feels like the Facebook indie movie and The Farewell feels like the Instagram indie movie and the Farewell feels like the Instagram indie movie. And I am inspired by that comparison because I have just gotten the Farewell content on Instagram a lot.

It is actually meeting me where I live. Yes. Can I tell you what the TikTok movie is? Sure. It's called The Lighthouse. I can't fucking wait for The Lighthouse to come out. Have you ever used TikTok? No, but just go with me on this.

I have used TikTok. No, it's literally the TikTok movie is Hustlers, which is why it has made money and nothing else made as much money. Okay. Maybe the old Parchment and Quill movie is the lighthouse. Yes. Okay. Great. Congratulations to you. I love the lighthouse. Anyway, I just, I feel like the Instagram audience is like one audience and it's certainly Instagram sells a lot of products products across the world at this point but I don't know whether the academy is like on that aesthetic level as I am we're gonna find out it has been served up to you effectively the peanut butter falcon has been served up to a lot of audience as well beautiful Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, warm reaction, maybe. Just Mercy,

I thought that that was kind of a muted reaction to this movie. Yes. Daniel Destin Cretton's film starring Michael B. Jordan and Brie Larson, both of whom are huge stars. They emerged from the Marvel Cinematic Universe to appear in this legal drama, also starring Jamie Foxx. And people were like, it's pretty good. It seemed respectful was the response. Respectful. That's not exactly what you want out of a festival. You know, remember Us? That was a movie that came out this year.

I don't think that's going to make it to awards season. I liked Us. I think it doesn't totally make sense, but I don't care. I liked the conversations that I had about it here in the confines of this podcast and not on the internet. Yes, I'm proud of the way that we covered it here. The report, similarly, I think a very respectful reception

since it's been playing all the festivals after Sundance. The Lion King, which is, of course, a movie with a bad story, which we discussed here on this show. You know, I have Ad Astra on the doubtful list.

If you're interested in Ad Astra, I would encourage you to tune into this show later this week because Amanda and I are going to go over the moon for Brad Pitt and talk about our top fives. And I've got an interview with James Gray, who is in the ring of fame on the big picture. He is truly one of our most elite guests. And I had a great long conversation with him. I don't know,

it might be a little too meditative for the Academy, who is super excited about Jojo Rabbit, but we'll see. Certainly my version of self-identity comes in Ad Astra. I'm so excited to talk with you about this movie. Okay. Waves, I mentioned. I think there were some really strong, great reviews early on, particularly for me, among other people,

some really negative pans coming out of TIFF too, which I thought was interesting. And I think that movie has a chance to actually be a similar kind of box office hit the way that The Farewell is. Whether it's an Oscar movie, we'll see. Pain and Glory, Almodovar's film. Dolomite is my name. Netflix is, I would say, also similarly warmly received. People being very fired up about Eddie Murphy being back.

You know, to your point about J-Lo, someone also pointed out that Eddie will definitely be nominated for a Golden Globe, and he will be campaigning on SNL in December. Yes. So is that a Best Picture thing? No, but it'll be around. Other things, Uncut Gems, we'll see. It'd be amazing if Uncut Gems went to the Best Picture race. That would just be glorious. I don't see it happening, but we'll see. The Laundromat, The Aeronauts, Motherless Brooklyn, Booksmart. Remember Booksmart? Yeah, I don't. That doesn't seem like

that's happening. Not gonna happen. Rocket Man, Honey Boy, Toy Story 4, Avengers Endgame. You're just naming movies you like now.

Thanos will be nominated for Best Supporting Thanos. Thanos will be there at the ceremony. That's the thing. You can make this joke now and then he's gonna show up and then you're gonna have

another one of your corporate existential crises. I'm just being like, you are the problem joke now, and then he's going to show up, and then you're going to have another one of your corporate existential crises. I'm just being like, you are the problem. So, Thanos is running. That's all I'm saying. All right. Last Black Man in San Francisco, The Good Liar. That's a movie we haven't seen yet.

No one's seen that. That's a Warner Brothers drama starring Ian McKellen and I believe Judi Dench. Oh, right. Dame Judi Dench. Feels like an Amanda movie. Yes, but I was literally just racking my brain being like, which one is so that's that's just not good they're not on instagram no a movie that was extremely well received at tiff that was probably not an oscar movie is knives out hold your tongue no you're probably right but i'm excited we'll see we're all excited about that the lighthouse

i mentioned gemini man there's there's a will smith movie coming out in five weeks. Don't I know it. Okay. Do you? I know. It's directed by Ang Lee, for fuck's sake. I'm aware. I'm fucking aware. Crazy times. Judy, also Renee Zellweger, will certainly be nominated for Best Actress. The movie will not.

And Harriet. Now, there's six movies on this list that I've deemed unknown. The first is Dark Waters, which we've mentioned a couple of times. Todd Haynes is also a legal drama, which might threaten Just Mercy's chances of getting some acknowledgement. And then Queen and Slim, Melina Matsoukas' adaptation

of Lena Waithe and James Frey's original story. Tremendous, tremendous sentence. James Frey. I'm aware. And Lena Waithe. Yeah, no, I know. That's amazing stuff. Daniel Kaluuya, though. Love that guy. He could do no wrong. Star Wars Episode IX? You heard of it? Yeah, no, I know. It's just, that's amazing stuff. Daniel Kaluuya, though. Love Daniel Kaluuya. Love that guy. Yeah.

He could do no wrong. Star Wars Episode IX, you heard of it? Yeah, it's The Rise of Skywalker. Nailed it. That's two in a row. Wow, two weeks in a row that I got the name right. I'm very proud of you. You know who I love?

I love Adam Driver, so I'm excited. I like Rey. What's her real name? In real life, it doesn't matter. Her name's Daisy Ridley. Daisy Ridley. I like Daisy Ridley. Yeah, she's great. You know'm i'm excited to find out what what's up with the gang you know i want to know what happens i was chatting with bill simmons this weekend and we were talking about adam driver and

he said so that guy just might be pacino yeah which is just crazy to consider yeah but he just might be cats cats cats is coming i'm just one woman trying to get through award season. And I keep putting, everyone keeps making me consider cats every day. And I'm tired. And it's only September. Maybe we sing on the cats episode. We've been threatening us. Maybe we should do a full musical episode like that episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Okay. Just choose different songs from the musical songbooks of the great writers of The Great White Way. What will you do besides cats? Well, as a nod to Greta Gerwig, I would do Everybody Says No. Oh, yeah. Which I think would be perfect for Oscar season. We can put you in that dress. The lovely striped dress that Saoirse is wearing.

I will not be wearing a dress on this show. Okay. Bombshell, which is the film about Fox News starring Charlize. Talk about new Oscar bait. Yeah, it's true. True. That could be some self-identity. Yeah, I think that's the only way in.

Yeah. And then I wanted to lastly mention a movie to you called The Banker. Okay. Do you know anything about The Banker? I Googled it. Okay. What'd you learn? That Apple bought it.

Apple bought it in July. Yeah. And learn? That Apple bought it. Apple bought it in July. Yeah. And they're going to put it on their service, Apple TV Plus or whatever. Apple Plus? Apple TV Plus? Apple TV? I think it's Apple Plus? No, Apple TV Plus? Yeah, I got to tell you, there's way too much TV. Yeah. I know. I'm post-TV. I told you. Succession and movies. That's where I am in 2019. It's great. Join me. So most of what Apple TV Plus is going to be doing is series television. We saw some clips from The Morning Show and from Sea to series that they're going to be premiering,

I think, on November 1st when that service begins. We don't know the release date of this movie, The Banker, which is a true story written and directed by George Anolfi, who you may recall from The Adjustment Bureau. Do you remember that Matt Damon movie? Yeah, they wear the hats, right? They wear the hats. And in The Banker, Samuel L. Jackson and Anthony Mackie play two black businessmen in the 1950s

who want to start a real estate company, but know that they need essentially a white face to launch their business. And so they hire a local man played by Nicholas Holt to be the face of their company. That's the logline. And then craziness ensues, hijinks all over the place. We got a movie. I have no idea if Apple can platform an Oscar movie. It's interesting that this is happening. It's not even totally confirmed that it's going to come out this year. But maybe.

In which case, what you have is basically three films from Netflix that have a strong chance to be nominated for Best Picture. You have three films that are running

from Amazon. I don't think any of which are going to be nominated. You've got an Apple movie. You've got a bunch of A24 movies. And you've also got two movies from Sony,

which hasn't had a movie nominated for Best Picture in like eight years, in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. So it's a really weird collection of companies putting out these movies. It's not like the Weinstein Company. Thank the Lord.

Yeah. I mean, it's a wild time in Hollywood. It does actually reflect the current business state, which is why we are interested in these things. Now, I think it's tricky because who wins the Oscar won't actually reflect like what companies exist in one to two to five years. Definitely true.

But it is... It'll be just years. Definitely true. But it is. It'll be just TikTok. We'll all be on TikTok. Yeah. I mean, you joke, but we may well be on TikTok. I actually think it's kind of charming, TikTok. Anyway, it's a mechanism in order to talk about these issues. And it's like more fun than talking about, you know,

business reports or quarterly statements or whatever. But it's certainly, it's wild out there. Is Thanos going to win? Um, no. Well, in what sense? Is he going to win the Oscar? Or is he going to win, like, the ultimate universal galactic battle? Well, he lost that.

Well, he won and then he lost. But I actually don't know. Are you going to tell me now that the timeline proves that actually he lost because they went and changed the time? I don't know. Are you going to tell me now that the timeline proves that actually he lost because they went and changed the time? I don't know. You know what's one crazy thing about this fall is that there are no Marvel movies. It's the first fall in years in which there's no Marvel movie. And so we have kind of an interesting opening.

You know, I've gotten so used to every fall looking at the Guardians of the galaxy movie or dr strange or any of these movies that come out in this time nothing nothing till till till next year with black widow is that just because of a production i think that they want i think they wanted endgame to be representative of the finality of this phase of the storytelling but it does change the dynamics of hollywood in a lot of ways because you've got you know you've got Joker and that's going to make a lot of money, but it's unique that we're going to be spending more time talking about Oscars than talking about Marvel for a change. You know, there's going to be a long time

before we talk about Marvel. Great. Except for Thanos. We love Thanos. Amanda, thank you so much. Thank you, Sean. We'll see you next Friday on The Big Picture talking about our boy Brad Pitt.

It's Brad Pitt season. Thanks to Amanda. Let's go to my conversation now with the documentarian Matt Turnour, who's got a great new film called Where Is My Roy Cohn? We had a long and deep conversation about the complexities of that historic and quite controversial American figure. And we talked a little bit about his other movies, like Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood. So check that out. Delighted to be joined by Matt Turnour. Matt, thanks for being here. Thank you. Matt, I'm so fascinated by your documentaries, especially your new one, but I'm curious how you decide to train your eye on a subject Because you've had some very unique choices, especially

in the last few years. Well, I think you kind of know it when you come upon it. I don't know, an idea just sort of settles in. And I just have this feeling. I began as a journalist, mostly for Vanity Fair, writing something that almost doesn't exist anymore, the 10,000 word magazine article, which is akin to a documentary in a certain way. That's sort of almost like a documentary treatment. It's a nonfiction story. So when you start to get an idea and then you live with it for a little bit, anyone who makes movies or writes anything knows when you realize, oh, I could live with this for a year. And that's what you want. If you feel like you can't live with it for a year or two,

sometimes with a documentary or a book, of course, it can drag on. Then you probably should drop it and move on to something else. So that's how I get started. Do most of your films, Studio 54, Roy Cohn, do they come, do they originate with you and something you undo? Or does someone come to you and say, you should think about this? Both really. For the most part, they originate with me. In the case of Studio 54, that was an idea that wasn't mine. It was really the notion of Ian Schrager, who was the surviving co-founder of Studio 54, and he's someone I'd written about. But I didn't write about him in the context of Studio 54. I

wrote about him in a totally different context. That's hoteliering. Yeah, and really through the prism of architecture, design, creativity, and being an impresario, but in a different way. And we never talked about studio. And I wasn't innately interested in, well, let's put it this way. I didn't have a lurid fascination with the subject for whatever reason. Some people are just obsessed with Studio 54, and I wasn't one of those people. The period of Studio 54 and the New York of that time and all the elements are interesting to me. And I think that's one reason

that he called me because I imagine the first question anyone asks him is, what was Studio 54 really like? I always wanted to go there. And I never asked him that. Then I spent a year with him asking him that every day. So that was one that wasn't my own, but it was adjacent to everything that I'm fascinated with. And it was that kind of deep cultural dive and telling in a way a counter narrative. A lot of my films I would classify as counter narratives or a definitive story. I think they all fit into that category as well. At least I hope they do. The other ones are mostly my idea, I would say. They're a little bit of a, I don't know,

a parallel track with Roy Cohn and Studio 54 in some respects. We do see Roy kind of in the lap of luxury in the 70s in New York at some point, but obviously the film spans decades. Sure. Where does your interest in him come from? And then how do you embark on making a movie about someone like this who's, of course, not alive anymore?

Yeah, well, there are two kinds of yarns. One with the subjects alive and one with the subjects dead. People frequently ask me which I prefer. I actually have an answer for that. I prefer it when the subject's alive because you can have a cinema verite documentary then, which I love making. And I think that's a really wonderful form. Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood is like that. Scotty is mostly cinema verite. It's got a little bit of archival in there. My first film, Valentino, The Last Emperor,

is the same. It's mostly verite film. One of my big influences is Grey Gardens and all the work of the Maisels, who were the directors of that film, and all of the legends of cinema verite. In America, we call it direct cinema. And Penny Baker and Wiseman, and I'm leaving people out, but those, I think, are the great heroes of the form. But that's not the question you asked me, actually. The question was, if I'm recalling, was about how do I tackle Roy Cohn, where did it come from? Well, actually, the idea originated while I was cutting Studio 54, because Roy Cohn, for those of you who don't know, was the lawyer for Studio 54.

So if you see this movie, which is called Studio 54, which is widely available on Netflix, Cohn is a character in it because he was this picaresque man about New York, the ultimate power broker at the time, but he was also an attorney you could hire to protect you and fix things and get you out of scrapes. And Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell had him on retainer, but he was also a denizen of Studio 54. So he was living this decadent kind of closety life

at Studio, which was the ultimate place to do that at the time. I was making that movie in 2016, an election year, if you recall. And with the election going to the background, I'm watching all this archival footage of Roy Cohn. I'm thinking to myself, this is the greatest character I've ever seen in archival footage. I mean, he just explodes out of it. He's so assertive and crazed and articulate, but also bizarre and flamboyant, I suppose would be the accurate term for this. So I keep thinking to myself, knowing his connection to Donald Trump, by the way, at the time, wow, that would be a great movie. No one's done it. But then I would put it out of my mind

thinking, well, Hillary Clinton's going to be president. And who would want to really go there um you because the trump connection was a refreshing uh uh purpose for a roy cone film made him relevant again yes so uh needless to say um things went awry electorally in my humble opinion and that night after i was in a hotel and after I opened my room wine, which I never open, I drank the entire bottle of moderately good red wine and also some ice cream. And I thought, I've got to write this idea down and I wrote a treatment for this film because it's not an exaggeration to say that Roy Cohn invented Donald Trump. He certainly invented the businessman Trump and the political Trump. And I would go so far as to say that he, uh, created a president from beyond the grave. Now that's a good story. So what do you do then?

Because as you say, you like to use the Verite style, but you can't really use it for a film like this. So do you begin contacting people or do you leap into archival? What's your first move? case I knew a bit. And then I just start reading to satisfy my notion of it. And then I obviously your point of view changes the more research you do. With a film, you know, you need money. So fundraising's the key thing. So I pursued this. I just decided I wanted to do this. This was the film I needed to make. I thought it was urgent because of Trumpism. And it was a response in a lot of ways. Challenging to raise money for a this. People always want to know, well, why now? I mean, that's really the main question and distributors and financiers ask. And you really couldn't give a good answer to that question if Trump had lost. Unfortunately, we were in a position where he won. So, it wasn't an obvious idea when I started calling around to studios. It was kind of, well, what's your equity. And really, that's a great way to make a movie because you have a lot of creative freedom. And with this film, because it's so political, I thought, oh, okay, a real culture of mostly left-wing people,

and some of them have deep pockets, and asked around. And there was a kind of reticence that surprised me, actually. It seemed to come from fear, which made me want to do the movie even more because it seemed to be an unnamed sort of McCarthyite fear of, well, who is this guy going to be as president? Will there be witch hunts? Will the IRS be focusing on me? Do I really want to have my name on a project like this? Well, that actually made me even want to do it more. It's not that anyone said it aloud, but you could sense it, which I think is a real problem in the current political climate. And really, it's the whole point of the project. So there was a kind of meta issue with raising the money for this. We got some seed money from

some amazing people that gave us early dollars to get started. And I started right away and I'll tell you what I did, but, uh, ultimately, um, we took it to a program called Sundance Catalyst, uh, which is, um, a wonderful way to get an indie film financed. And there were some amazing, uh, people there who became patrons of the film. And I'll single out Lynn Lear and her husband, Norman Lear, who are so committed to great political causes. And they were very early in on this film. So you get a little bit of seed money and you're starting to make the film. Are you imagining that it's going to be driven by interviews with people that knew Cone? Oh, well, yeah. I mean, that was something that I really wanted. There are a couple genres of interviewee here. People that knew him, people who were

related to him. Here's a guy whose sexuality is very much at issue for reasons that I'm sure we'll discuss in the next few moments. So lovers, he's gay. Were there any people with whom he had relationships who were willing to talk about this kind of really central issue with him because he was not only gay but he was in the closet and probably the leading hypocrite about the closet. Yeah, exactly. Which I think we should talk about in great depth because it's really one of the very relevant points. You capture an amazing interview with him that is the most direct conversation you can have with a person in which he is just denying. Yeah. So, well, let's leap right to it then. Well, okay, let's go back. He's a gay man. He's in the closet. He was born in 1927. So he comes of age really, you know, in the 30s and 40s. And then he's very,

he's famous by the time he's in his mid-20s in the 1950s. And he is in a position of extraordinary power for someone that young. He's the chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy. So we think of McCarthy as pursuing communists or alleged communists. And for the most part, they were not alleged communists. They were not communists. They were simply said to be, and he was persecuting them and doing what we know as witch hunts. But he also persecuted gay people who were suspected as being disloyal or vulnerable to blackmail or whatever else you could think of to smear the reputation of a gay person. I think that's a less known aspect of his work in the 50s too. That part of it that you tell in the film yes and i wanted to highlight it for that reason it has names it was called the lavender scare uh and he was cone was a real fomentor of it as was mccarthy mccarthy you know was really an empty vessel he didn't care about much really had no real uh ideology he was just wanted to be a demagogue and i mean like i think he was a right

winger and cone was as as well, but Cohn really is kind of the puppeteer. And there we get parallels to the president with Trump, who's empty vessel and a demagogue and can be manipulated. And Cohn indeed was the one who sort of set him on this course. But all through the McCarthy era, Cohen is hiding his sexuality. And then a very bizarre event occurs that everyone knows the name of. It's called the Army McCarthy hearings. But no one really knows the fine the center of it. And it's a very personal kind of almost explosive-er reality TV moment because they're televised at the dawn of television. And Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cone areohn wanting to get special favors for a very handsome Army private who's a friend of his and maybe a crush or a love interest. No one really knows. And this man's name is G. David Shine. He was almost a household name in the period, but he's been forgotten virtually. So, Cohn convinces McCarthy to go after the Army because Cohn wants a special favor from the Army, which is a promotion for his boy crush, David Shine, from private to general. Now, this sounds absurd and made up, but it's not. He had called the Secretary of the Army trying to flex his muscle as an aid to the terrifying Senator McCarthy and said,

Schein's promoted to a general and he's going to be based out of the penthouse of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. And you do that or I will destroy you. I will ruin the army. That was the literal threat. We know that because the secretary of the army testified on live television during these Army McCarthy hearings. So Cohen's response to that no from the army was, I will wreck you. And then he gets McCarthy to accuse the army of being infiltrated by communists and homosexuals, which should remind you of something because this sort of accusing your accuser of what you're so-called guilty of is a tactic we're all living through and Trump deploys a lot.

And he doubtlessly learned it from Roy Cohn and Roy Cohn practiced it in the McCarthy period. So here you have this extraordinary, um, uh, TV moment, probably the first TV moment, uh, and Cohn orchestrates it really. And he makes himself into a reality TV star before anyone knew what that was. And Trump learned all those lessons, you know? Uh, so this hypocrisy is set, uh, where he's kind of going after gay people. There are countercharges that he's gay to, but they're not overt because you really couldn't say the word gay on television or accuse anyone. It was not thought to be proper. But Cohn, meanwhile, did do it surreptitiously, he was immune because no one would would accuse him publicly of it so he he went for decades like this um as this kind of hypocrite sexual hypocrite and uh he got more famous and we can talk about how and why but um at a certain

point he was profiled by 60 minutes and mor Morley Safer, the great Morley Safer, is the correspondent on this interview. And he alludes to Cone's sexuality, but refers to him as like a permanent bachelor who's never found the right woman. That was in the early 70s. And then later on, in the late 70s, there's another 60 Minutes profile that Mike Wallace, who's the harder edged guy. Fewer illusions in that interview. And then it's later, the sexual revolution and gay liberation are in the air. And Wallace goes after him. And Cone, by the way, just to add to the picaresque nature of the story is at this time dying of aids but still not

um coming out no i want as an aside i mean all of this should be a private matter for someone but he's a public figure who traded in this hypocrisy so it's really at issue and mike wallace really does his thing and and goes after him in that mike Wallace way. And he says, people say you're homosexual. Why don't you admit it? And Cohen does this extraordinary ballet basically saying, I don't really think you can accuse me of being gay because I'm so butch, basically. I'm a tough guy. What's gay about that? And he does this whole kind of prevarication act, and it's absurd, and especially with hindsight. I don't think, again, it would be an issue except his hypocrisy about his sexuality was so epic that it's fascinating and very painful to watch from our perch here in 2019. One thing I'm interested about,

in your other films, it feels like you have an admiration or an understanding about unlocking someone's importance. And it seems like you have a connection to them. Cone, you know, it could be argued as one of the arch villains of the 20th century. And I wonder if there has to be something in someone like that to admire to spend all that time with. No, there's nothing to admire in Roy Cohn.

So what's it like to spend so much time on a villain then? Yeah, I'd never done it before. I mean, I made a movie that's a two-hander with a villain. Robert Moses is pretty villainous. True. And they have a lot in common, Cone and Moses. Yes, they were power brokers in the New York of mid-century. They do have a lot in common. Both Jewish power brokers also, by the way, who were kind of not really into embracing their Judaism. There was sort of denialism there as well.

Well, this was another moment of doubt at the origin of the project uh when i saw that it was going to happen um it had occurred to me and then it reoccurred to me oh have i just sentenced myself to a year of um being disturbed by this and kind of living in the muck of this guy's mess, his messy life. And would that depress me? And I was all, you know, we're all in this kind of Trump mass zeitgeist clinical depression of some sort or other. So what was I going to do? And I, this was a really surprising thing to me i didn't find myself feeling that way uh he is so uh strange a person that uh excavating through the research and watching all of these uh really uh like outlandish antics that were televised uh throughout his life because he was such a, I believe, press whore is the technical term, was fascinating, luridly fascinating, no doubt. But there's, I'll take

luridly fascinating. I mean, if you like film noir, for instance, you might like this movie. I made it as a film noir, really. And then I realized why I was doing that I did it I did it on two fronts I wanted it to be because a lot of it takes place in the 70s and there's a sort of color noir period that Hollywood has that I'm a big admirer of my there's a really obscure movie that called Hustle with it's a Burt Reynolds and Catherine Deneuve film directed by Robert Aldrich, who's a favorite director of mine. No one's seen this movie, but it's a color film noir.

It has this kind of like brown and Bushmills scotch sort of tonality to it. Yellows, that kind of like 70s brown and yellow period. And anyway, that was the palette for this film on a, on a formal level, but on content level film noir really is relevant because there's a nihilism to film noir. And what you realize when you're caught up in these noir stories is that the characters

and the protagonists are so empty and so nihilistic at times that there's not really a resolution to them.

They end in things like nuclear explosions sometimes and everyone dies. It's a famous Robert Aldrich movie that ends that way. Yeah, well, though, Kiss Me Deadly.

You have just gotten five gold stars from me. I'll have to go to Staples and pick them up. But, yes, so there's one. And there's another one that's... You're with a film noir lover. Oh, great. I have not seen Hustle, though, so I'll have to find that. Hustle is a treat.

And White Heat is another one. It ends with a kind of El Segundo oil refinery, if you're an L.A. person, explodes. And James Cagney is sitting on one of those round tanks and goes up in flames. And then presumably the whole city catches fire. So that sort of burned down conflagration thing really, I think, applies to Cohn. And I think we're all living that in the Trump world where he is an arsonist. He wants to burn it down.

And this movie, we haven't really gotten into this yet. This movie is no bleak movie about Donald Trump. It's really not literally about Trump until Cohn meets Trump in the 70s and we go there. But every minute of it's about now. It's funny because I didn't think that you put your thumb on it too much in the film. There's not actually not too much Trump and in part it seems like because they had a break and so there is a separation of a kind between them well they didn't meet until cohen was um an older man actually um so i didn't want to well we're all marinating in trump if you watch cable news or read the paper or do or anything or go on the twitter machine uh so why do that i mean that would be very unappealing.

So I'm telling an oblique tale, really. It connects dots. And I, I, this is something I like to do, actually. I don't really like to do the work for the audience. I'll, I'll kind of lay it all out and you can bring your conclusions or leave with your conclusions. Uh, that's, that's a more, I think, elegant way to tell the tale. beneath the surface motivating him aside from maybe a self-loathing, an ego, a desire for power? Is there anything else really that can make us understand why he lived that way? Well, probably there's some paging Dr. Freud stuff that the movie touches on that involves

mommy and a little bit of daddy. And I, I'll unpack that for you because it is interesting. However, I really think it's the latter. I think eventually if you're, um, purely transactional and you're playing for keeps, especially in an environment like New York of mid-century, which is, was his candy land. Uh, I think eventually you're playing a very nihilistic game. And I think that you end up on the sort of habit trail of oblivion. There's someone's book title. And I think he's empty. And I think Trump's empty, which is why they're so vexingly hard to drive the stake through the heart of because you're driving it through an empty corpse, really.

And I think that's the moral of the story in a lot of ways. And that's why I go to film noir because so many of those protagonists are empty. You know, film noir comes about really because of the bomb. You know, it's a form that emerges almost by surprise after the golden age of Hollywood and all of these kind of incredible Louis B. Mayer happy ending, riding off from the sunset movies. And things go dark after the Second World War for a number of reasons. But one of them is the fact that humanity figures out how to obliterate itself. What are you going to do with that? And, you know, as an L.A. native, I will plant the flag for Los Angeles. People think that Hollywood or whatever, the whole city is full of

stupid people. Far from the truth, you have to be really, really smart to write a good screenplay. So you have all these people out here who are really brainy people and they're, you know, some of them were given the freedom to write films that were, you know, their own inspiration. And Billy Wilder is a good example of that. There were many of them, and they wrote these masterpieces that were contemplating what it all meant. So Cohen's a special case. I mean, he comes out of a different paranoid style of politics that's related to the bomb because the communist wish hunts were spurred

on by a fear of the Soviets getting the A-bomb and all of us dying. But then demagogic politics, which create the military-industrial complex, which President Eisenhower so presciently warns us about. And Cohn is a leading demagogue of that period, an inventor and reinventor of paranoid style of American politics. So all of this dark paranoia that's endemic to our society finds a vessel in Roy Cohn. We thought we were done with that, which is another reason this is so surprising. I mean, the Trump presidency has knocked us all sideways. We

weren't really expecting that. We didn't think it was still lurking there. And Cohn, I think, and Trump as an extension of Roy Cohn is a symptom of that, that we haven't quite wrung this out of our system uh weirdly russia's back uh kind of you know in this strange parallax way where the the the chief executive is colluding with them whereas before they were the enemy of the um of all that was American. And Cone was using that as a demagogic tactic. So it's sort of turning in on itself in a really fascinating way. All this conversation about California and paranoia in Los Angeles also has me thinking about Scotty a lot. And I love that movie. And I'm fascinated by that movie. And this idea of truth is a fascinating thing because obviously Roy Cohn really bent it to his will and did what he felt like was

appropriate with it. In Scotty, there's this sense that we don't know what to believe. Do we just believe this lead figure who is incredibly charming and thoughtful and has this incredible recall? And you speak to all these people in his life and you present this compelling case. But also it's hard to believe, I think, for a lot of people when they watch a movie like that. Is it important for you to be a complete believer in the subjects that you're training your eyes on? Or is there a level of skepticism that you bring to every subject that you're looking at? I always bring skepticism because I'm a journalist first and last. I don't know. I'm equally a journalist and a film maker.

Let's put it that way. So I take a journalistic approach and you have to be skeptical. Scotty, this is a movie, Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood. So this was something, this was a story I had heard about for years and finally unraveled and got to the bottom of this legendary gas station

that was a brothel, which was about 5,000 feet from where we're sitting right now, by the way. Oh, no kidding. Yeah. It's just down the road. Oh, wow. I had come across this story in my other reporting on an array of other topics that had to do with old LA and old Hollywood. And people had told me about this gas station. And as a, you know, I wrote for Vanity Fair for a long time. So you, when things come up, you write them down and, you down and maybe this would be something that I could pursue as a story.

And I kept on hearing from older gay guys, some of them who were famous or very prominent in the city, that there was a gas station in Hollywood and it was a brothel and the cars were lined up there at around five o'clock every night. And, um, people would go there to get into trouble, which was the euphemism that the, these, these older gentlemen used. One of the people who told me about it was Merv Griffin, who was, uh, never out, uh, but lived apparently a double life. And then another one was Robert Wolf, who was an architect, a very prominent in the city at the time. So I thought, okay, what is this thing? I never really got very far with it. And then one day I'm sitting with Gore Vidal, the writer, and I was a close friend of his, and I was his executor and his editor for some of his writing even. And we're sitting in his house in Hollywood, and he says, I want to see Scotty.

And I'm saying, who's Scotty? He said, well, he was a pimp who had a gas station, and I really need to get in touch with him. It was almost an out-of-body moment. I was like, he's alive? Is this the same person? He's alive? He said, oh, yes, he lives in Laurel Canyon. I just misplaced his phone number.

And, you know, Vidal was so grand, he would say, anyone sitting there was like, why don't you do some secretarial task for me? So, I knew who to call, actually, because there had been a book about Katharine Hepburn that had come out a few months before, and a colleague of mine at Vanity Fair, Bill Mann, wrote the book. And I knew that, actually knew that he had talked to the gas station guy, but I thought maybe, oh, he must be dead. This was an interview he did years ago. And I just never pursued it. And I called Bill Mann. I said, is this Scotty the same? And he said, oh, yes, the same. I said, is it alive? Oh, yes. Sure. I'll give you, I lost his phone number. I'll give you his address. So he gave me the address. I wrote it on a post-it note. And next time I was at Vidal's house, I put the post-it note on the little table where he kept his bottle of scotch. So I knew that he would see it. And, uh, next time I was living in New York at the time, next time I was out, I walk into the house and Scotty Bowers was there. So he'd written him a letter. So 19th century, right? And Scotty

responded immediately. And they became inseparable for the last years of Vidal's life, actually. They really did get back together after this hiatus of not seeing each other. So there it was, there was the man. And he, at the time, was writing a manuscript. Someone had convinced him to write the story of his life and Vidal was encouraging him and said, I'll get it published for you. And he was true to his word. He did. He got it published immediately. So I started the movie the minute I walked into the living room and met the man. And he seemed very credible to me. Back to your original question. So first of all, Vidal was vouching for him. And I knew Gore Vidal really

well. So, people like to say, oh, he's a fabulist. He makes things up. He's outlandish. He was not. He was really into the truth. I mean, if you really know his work well, his memoir, Palimpsest, starts, I believe the first sentence is, a tissue of lies, question mark. So what he's doing is he's interrogating truth and truth in fiction and narrative truth, basically. So he's very on the table about truth-telling, and he always assailed Truman Capote for being a compulsive liar. And I really come down on Vidal's side. I think he was a truth teller. And I think I knew him well and spent a lot of time with him in conversation.

And I read everything he wrote. So I knew where all the vectors were. And I had corollaries and almost footnotes to the conversations. Anyway, that got me off on, I thought, a strong footing and a point of view about this, again, I'll use the term, picaresque narrative. It's very similar. He's there for these moments that you cannot believe he's there for. Yes, well, he's, you know, people say zealig, too. He's all those things. People call him the Forrest Gump of sex.

People call him sexual candide. All these things apply. These wonderful literary metaphors do apply to Scotty. But here I had the man. I met him when he was 89 turning 90. I started shooting on his 90th birthday at a big birthday party that his friends gave him at the Chateau Marmont. And that was a great place to start telling the story because all of these hidden figures from the underground of Hollywood who were still alive emerged and came to this party. You've never seen a 90-year-old with more friends. I mean, most 90-year-olds have a few old buddies or pals or friends, and they hang out together, maybe, maybe not. This guy had friends of all ages who showed up. Very vital person. He's still with us. He's 96 and living in Laurel Canyon and sharp as ever. So I thought it was true. I certainly prodded him and cross-checked everything I could. And the more I checked, the more

evidence I had that he wasn't lying. And it often happened that the most unbelievable things he said were proven through research. And also when I was interviewing him, I had someone next to me Googling everything he said, which of course now we can do. It's kind of a wonderful thing. And then during breaks, he would pull the evidence out. So I'll give you an example. He told a story about a closeted gay manager. He was Grace Kelly's manager, and he lived in a twin, he lived in an adjacent house with his boyfriend, and they had a friendship gate because they never could admit that they were gay. And he gave the address of where these houses were, and he said there was a flagstone path that

led to a gate and the gate was in the shrub. And then you open the gate and they would go sneak into each other's houses, et cetera. And I used to babysit Grace Kelly's children there while he was taking her out on the town. And his boyfriend was a general in World War II. So we had these facts. We looked them all up. The names were all there. The boyfriend was a general. We looked up the real estate records, and then we Google Earthed the house address because he has – Scotty has a photographic memory for street addresses. So we had the address, and you could see the path leading to the gate. So for me, this is proof really. I mean, how does one have a detail like that and all of those architectural details and and landscaping details uh i went into the addresses sometimes i saw them myself or could find evidence of them

in old architectural digest stories even and things like that so there was a lot of proof it's an extraordinary movie and it's not a it's not a movie it's a movie about um not disbelieving but just having your mind blown, I think, by what's presented to you, too. Which is true, I think, of a lot of your movies. There's a hidden history in way that you might not have thought they would. Scotty's just full of that. For me, it was because I alluded to the fact that I'm an L.A. native. I grew up in kind of like a Hollywood family, really.

I don't love that term, but my father was a writer producer for tv he wrote colombo uh and the mystery the end it was called the nbc mystery wheel oh yeah right if you know kiss me deadly uh you know the mystery wheel which was this amazing series of long-form procedural crime drama in the 70s. Columbo's the most famous. Macmillan and Wife, which was the Rock Hudson vehicle, was another. And so all of that type of Hollywood that goes from the Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, immortal Georgeukor, Hollywood, I was interested in and liked. But there are many, many other layers of the town which really make it run

and are just as fascinating, but really don't get marquee attention. And I always found that really interesting. What's the way the city works? What's really going on? And what are the lies people are telling? And so, Scott is that, really, on so many levels. I mean, he's talking, you know, people talk about Katherine Hepburn and her bisexuality and Cary Grant, and this is what sold the book, and this is what sold the movie too. But really it's about what's going on underneath all that. And that's just endlessly fascinating to me. So for instance, Charles Lawton, who it was a major, major character actor. He worked every day of his life, a closet gay man married to a woman, Elsa Lanchester, who was the bride of Frankenenstein yes indeed uh and they lived together on uh curson uh near waddles park if you know la and the house is still there lawton's sexuality uh was just never really discussed you know um and other people like uh raymond burr uh who was the star of ironside and perry mason and also another character actor who worked every day of his life, lived across the street from Charles Lawton.

So here you have this neighborhood basically with these really successful actors who were the pillars of the town. And they're living these full double lives, you know. And Scotty tells you what's going on. And there's a wonderful story about Raymond Burr and Scotty. And I should say, okay, my connection to this is my dad wrote Ironside. And he told me when I was a kid, I don't know why it came up. He said that Raymond Burr was gay. Not sure how it came into the conversation, but I always remembered that.

I was like, that doesn't seem like a gay guy at all. And that's so wonderful because I'm, you know, like, gay identity is so interesting and, you know, who's gay and who isn't and how we perceive gayness is always a fascinating topic. And the masks that you have to wear as an actor. And this was, I think, what's interesting about an actor like Raymond Burrr who's a tough guy but he's really a gay man and that's that's really relevant i'd like to tell about i'd like to tell story about that and scotty is the person who gives us the information so one of the um oh i'm going to add to that because i took my dad's dad but i took his uh producing partner out to lunch uh and told him about uh this movie and said that i had met a guy named bob benavides who was raymond burr's boyfriend uh who scotty

introduced him to and this is this wonderful story scotty introduces this guy bob to raymond burr and they lived together for the rest of uh burr's life. And my father's producing partner said, oh, Bob, I know him. He was president of the production company. Yeah, Bob, we had lots of meetings with him. And he was like, he had no idea that he was Burr's boyfriend. Wow. Amazing. And that just gutted me. I thought, I'm not in a bad way. I was just like, oh, I almost took my breath away. I was like, so this is the way it went, huh? I mean, like, this was business

and, um, you're living with these people every day when you're making, it's really intense making a series. And the boyfriend was there and he was president of the production company, but no one ever said a word. I don't think that Jay, who I was talking to really still, I kind of laid it out for him at lunch. I just don't think he had any inkling. And that was why I made the movie really. I think that, um, the secret it's called Scotty and the secret history of Hollywood. Um, I was assailed as I expected to be, uh, by people from, you know, John and Jane Q public to people I met in the street, people I met in the movie theater after I would do a Q&A, to this kind of peculiar film scholar named Janine Basinger, who's written a lot of books about Hollywood that have to do with movie stars negotiating their on and off screen identity. And she went after the movie in the New York Times and said, I really think that, you know, Cary Grant's offscreen life should be left, you know, private.

Well, I'm thinking, well, it's okay if you write about what Tracy and Hepburn are up to, but, or Betsy Drake and Cary Grant, and Drake's one of the wives who co-starred in a film or two together. But when the minute gayness or same sexuality comes into it, we're going to melt down and say that this is a zone of privacy. Well, if you take Hollywood seriously as a part of American history, world history, to bowdlerize it and to white out or straight wash wash i guess is the term uh the private lives of immortal people who are historical figures is a crime really it's a homophobic crime uh and uh this is a strong word uh it's a hate crime in a way because it homophobia is a type as a form of hate. It's not obviously violent, but it's really hateful. And Scotty is a living testament to the suppressed and repressed history of a very important place. Hollywood is important, and we need to take it seriously. I agree with you. Matt, I'm glad I asked you about Scotty because that was fascinating.

I end every episode of the show by asking filmmakers what's the last great thing they've seen. I can tell that you are a film buff of a kind. So have you seen anything recently that you've loved? I saw an obscure noir actually, a British noir called Green for Danger. Do you know that? I do know it. It was

an original Criterion collection. Did you know? I think I stumbled on a copy 10, 12 years ago. Loved it. Yeah. I've never heard of it. And it's really a wonderful, tight little, almost like a locked room mystery in a way. Yeah, who would do, I can't remember the filmmaker. Do you know who it was?

Well, let's give him credit. Yeah. Can we Google? We can edit. We'll look at the Google while we're here. Hang on. Green for Danger. Sidney Gilead?

Does that sound familiar to you? Sounds right. We have to look at all of his films because he made a really good one, Green for Danger. What is it that you responded to about it? It's shot in a very interesting way. It's a very claustrophobic film. It has a kind of Greg Tolan feeling to it, come to think of it. There are lots of low-ceilinged rooms. You know, Toland used ceilings a lot, which people didn't do in that period because the sets obviously don't have ceilings on them. Cinematographer Citizen Kane, among other things. Yeah, so it had that kind of very high contrast,

almost like a German expressionist black and white palette. And it takes place in England during the war, really beautiful performances, and then a really surprising, a little surprise ending. You're just with it all the time. I mean, so many films in our present time, they're too long and they lose you a little bit. And I love a 90-minute,

a tight 90-minute movie from that period, especially one we've never heard of. It's so great to... I mean, I'd never heard of it. I'm an idiot. Criterion fan people know it. I stumbled on it a long time ago and I probably haven't seen it since I first saw that name. Matt, thanks so much for doing the show.

Thank you. Thanks again to Amanda Dobbins and thank you to Matt Turnour. Please stay tuned to The Big Picture later this week. We have an epic conversation with the writer-director James Gray, who has made a wonderful film called Ad Astra. And Amanda and I will be breaking down the 30-year wonderful career of our greatest movie star, Brad Pitt.