The Big Picture - ‘Spider-Man,’ ‘The Evil Dead,’ and the Sam Raimi Rankings

Episode Date: May 3, 2022

This week sees the release of ‘Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,’ which is directed by one of our favorite filmmakers, Sam Raimi. Adam Nayman talks with Sean about Raimi's expansive career and style, before ranking his 15 features (38:00). Then, Sean is joined by Tom Gormican, the director of ‘The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent,’ to discuss his Nicolas Cage meta-action vehicle (1:11:00). Host: Sean Fennessey Guests: Adam Nayman and Tom Gormican Producer: Bobby Wagner Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit Superstore.ca to get started. I'm Sean Fennessey, and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about Sam Raimi. Later in today's episode, I'll have a conversation with Tom Gormekin, the co-writer and director of The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, the Nicolas Cage meta action vehicle we discussed last week on the show. I hope you'll stick around for that. But first, this week sees the release of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, the latest MCU entrant. And that movie is directed by one of my favorite filmmakers on the planet, someone we haven't had too many opportunities to celebrate on this show because he hasn't made a movie since 2013. I'm talking about the great

Sam Raimi and joining me to discuss his expansive career and style is lowly Raptors fan Adam Naiman. Hi, Adam. You had to do that, didn't you? How about only three years removed from a non-super team championship Raptors fan? This is being recorded on a Friday and it was not a good Thursday night in the city of Toronto. I'm very sorry for you, but you're right. You can clutch tightly to that NBA championship. And I, as a New York sports fan, haven't seen happiness in many a year, except when I watch Sam Raimi movies. So let's talk about the man. I know you're a fan. I've been looking forward to talking to you about him for a long time. We've made mention of Evil Dead 2 in the past. We've talked about his oeuvre before. Who is Sam Raimi? Why is he good?

Why does it matter that he's back in the movie culture? I think that Sam Raimi, at least for a long stretch of his career, for longer than most, he's sort of just unambiguously a force for good in mainstream American moviemaking. Not to moral not to moralize and, you know, the ethics of good and bad movies. I don't really mean in that sense that his movies are inherently progressive or that they have a good ideology to them, but he's such a gifted filmmaker. He really sort of, I think, ennobled that idea of coming out of nowhere and kind of making do with what you have and parlaying that into increasing, you know, budget sizes and opportunities without losing that independent spark and without losing that sense of personality. and not just the batting average went down, but the bloat went up. And there's probably a way on this podcast to sort of discuss where that breaking point is for each of us or where critics kind of saw it happening. But there's something very honorable about a filmmaker who keeps moving up weight classes industrially

and doesn't lose themselves. And not only did he not lose himself, but I think the things he brought to the table in the first place, like inventiveness and a really physical propulsive style and a sense of humor and a playful approach to violence, these are good things for me. And I think, I don't know if you guys have used a phrase like this with other guests on this show, but he has what I would call a lifetime pass, right? He might not have made only great movies but if you make evil dead and if you make dark man i don't care if you make other stuff that's not so good that's all that's a lifetime pass yeah the phrase that we use is season tickets we are here we are here for every game that sam raimi i guess pitches given that he has made a baseball movie maybe not one of his most successful movies but we'll'll talk about that. He's an interesting cat. He's from Michigan,

and he's somebody who obviously was consumed by and obsessed with movies, particularly genre movies. And as you look through his filmography, you can see somebody who's got a lot of love for The Three Stooges and Ray Harryhausen and crime movies. And so, you know, as he makes his way into the moviemaking world independently, he does so with a cohort you're familiar with. And that's one of the great things about his origin story is he's part of this class of filmmakers who are his friends, not just Bruce Campbell, the lantern-jawed star of many of his early films, but the Coen brothers were friends and collaborators. How much of that is part of what makes you attracted to him? Is it that knowing that he was a part of that crew and that those guys kind of came up together? Because they're obviously so

important to you. Yeah. I mean, just the basic backyard myth of Sam Raimi is very lovable, even before you get to college and the Coens come into it, right? Like, you know, J.J. Abrams makes Super 8 as an homage to Spielberg and that myth of the backyard movie maker. But I mean, Raimi fits that myth too. He just comes along a little later, right? He's running around with his friends, with a camera, these early movies that they make have ridiculous titles. And it does come out of a kind of movie love, which is true of the Coens as well. I mean, they made a movie, I think, in their teens called Henry Kissinger, Man on the Go, right? Which is, I mean, that's them. But I think that that love of older movies, that idea that filmmaking technology is becoming just democratized enough that you can be

a kind of youthful amateur, and even just film production is still relatively newish as a school thing. So I mean, I think Raimi is very likable even before the hookup with Joel Cohen on Evil Dead. But if you follow the rule of cause and effect by which Evil Dead and the way Raimi made it by making a proof of concept short called Within the Woods and then extrapolating on that to make Evil Dead, that inspired the Coens on how they made Blood Simple, right?

So, I mean, there is an aesthetic interplay between them and anyone who watches Blood Simple can point out the Evil Dead cam moment in that movie where for about 30 seconds, Blood Simple is like a Sam Raimi movie, you know, and that continues to the point where, you know, people say Raimi directed the Hula Hoop sequence and Hudsucker Proxy. But even before the actual collaborative thing, just the fact that he kind of showed in a lo-fi entrepreneurial way, you make a shortest proof of concept, you attract private financing, you don't wait for someone to give you notes in order to give you money. You give them the killer trailer and then they let you make your movie. I think he's directly an influence on the Coens and more generally just a

great influence for independent filmmakers in the eighties in general. Right. So that's kind of why he means something to me and the movie that he made with the Coens, which they've all disavowed and think is bad and they're wrong about that is a crime wave, which we'll get to, which I think is a really lovably insane movie,

which is part of my lifetime past parameters for Raimi because I really like it. I think the fun of this conversation is there's obviously two tentpole trilogies, for lack of a better word, in the Raimi filmography. There's the Evil Dead films, which you mentioned, Evil Dead, Evil Dead 2, and Army of Darkness. And then now some contingent spinoffs that are happening around the Evil Dead franchise. Amazing, it's become a franchise. And then, of course, the three Spider-Man movies, which are... I think there's a strong case for them as the most influential and, if not resonating,

present movies of the last 20 years. And so around that, you have this world of invention, and you have him kind of ping-ponging from genre to genre and experiment to experiment. But let's start with The Evil Dead, because it's a big deal. It's a big deal to you and I. I would say that Evil Dead 2 is perhaps the most significant gateway drug movie I've ever seen. I think getting handed this movie at 14 years old, it was a VHS copy. And it wasn't just a paper cardboard cover of VHS. It was one of those plastic, heavy duty, special edition VHS copies that a friend bought me for my birthday and was like, you need this in your life. And I was blown away. I was

taken to another planet. It was not just that I didn't know the camera could do this. It was I didn't know that the movie could have this tone. I didn't know that horror and comedy could collide in quite this way. I didn't know that world building could work this way, even though it was sort of simultaneously making fun of world building there's something very specific about the tone and performance of bruce campbell in that movie that clicked in my brain what's your relationship to the evil dead movies you see two before one like so many other people uh yeah i think i saw two before one i certainly saw it on vhs i saw it out of a desire to uh to to in my mind's eye to be like if that's what the cover art looks like what could the movie be you know i mean it's that kind of movie i mean i think that in because i'm writing something on

the site about ramey and i've written about his work before it's a bit of a thought experiment not just to go beyond your own adolescent experience of it but to just think about what a movie like evil dead would have meant to a horror audience or a cult audience in 81. It feels attainable, right? Not the feeling I could make that, but the feeling someone like me under a certain set of circumstances, maybe kind of could luck out and make something a bit like that, which is partially tied to the location,

which is just like, yeah, drive into the woods and find four walls and the slight amateurishness of the acting, which I say is a compliment, right? Cause it's not studied acting. yeah drive into the woods and find four walls and the slight amateurishness of the acting which i say is a compliment right because it's not studied acting and because there's no one famous in it you really feel like anything could happen to anyone at any time and you know you mentioned the camera and it's it's interesting that the movie comes out the year after the shining because the shining is the ultimate steadicam movie and not just the Steadicam movie in that they use it,

but it's such a stable, graceful, balletic use of the Steadicam. I mean, this is what a master filmmaker does with the technology. And then depending on who you believe, you have Raimi like nailing the camera to slats of wood or hockey sticks, and then this crew alternating with just running around with it. And it's the same aesthetic impulse that Kubrick had, which is these traveling shots, these subjective shots are dreamlike and visionary and are hurtling towards this vanishing point at all times. I mean, the tracking shots in the two

movies could not be more different, but it's the same idea. And I love the idea that Kubrick in the most imperious form of studio movie making and sam ramey as basically like a little shitheel financing this with his friends hit upon the same innovation but also i love the idea that for ramey the tracking shot is an obstacle course like kubrick gets everything out of the way of the camera and ramey's just like let's put things in the way how many things can i stick in the path of my camera operator to almost kill them in trying to get these shots and they're just they're brilliant yeah i think with kubrick in the shining everything feels sudden and with sam ramey everything feels fast and there's a difference between those two things you know like

seeing the camera hurtling through the woods that way and in so many of the the movies these made and you see this all the time i feel like what was the um what was the amazon prime small uh independent film that had that long extraordinary tracking shot in the texas town in the 1950s that you and i both liked i can't remember the name of that movie the vast of night i mean even the vast of night you look at a movie like that that's made 40 years later you can feel the sam raimi that movie. The Vast of Night. The Vast of Night. I mean, even The Vast of Night, you look at a movie like that that's made 40 years later, you can feel the Sam Raimi invention in it and him kind of using some of that.

I guess he used a drone to recreate that, but this is well before drones were making movies that Raimi was incorporating these styles. Well, again, I love the idea of like flexing, flexing your muscles on a small budget. It wins you fans and fanboys pretty quickly. But I also like that The Evil Dead is also really scrappy and fighting the good fight in a period where Hollywood special effects are so swollen. It also predates by a year The Thing. And I'm not going to say a bad

thing about John Carpenter's The Thing. We've talked about it on this podcast I love it to death but I also love that Raimi working with a fraction of the budget is able to generate comparable level of gross outs right and a comparable level of like horror comedy tension because the thing and Evil Dead have the same basic mechanism which is just people isolated in a place and they tear each other and themselves apart. And it's a compliment to Rami as a kid making that movie that it's like kind of comparable to the thing as a viewing experience. They're not miles apart. They're both pretty good. I'm always so fascinated by filmmakers who launch their careers with films that are

accomplishable and then are almost kind of bound to them for the rest of eternity. I think of Tobey Hooper as someone like this, or George Romero as someone like this. And it's often in the world of horror, or even Wes Craven, people who are using low-budget genre pictures to get their careers off the ground with aspirations to do other kinds of things, but inevitably, their reputations are surrounded by this originating film or this originating series, so much so that it can subsume them. I love that you mentioned those three, though, because one other distinguishing feature of Evil Dead.

So with Texas Chainsaw Massacre for Hooper and Night of the Living Dead for Romero, and I would say for Last House on the Left even more than either of those for Craven, those are bad vibe movies. They are genuinely unpleasant. I think Texas Chainsaw is scary and I think Night of the Living Dead is scary. And if Last House on the Left isn't scary,

it's like, it's really kind of awful. That's a compliment, right? It's awful. Evil Dead's very lighthearted. And I think that he doubled down on that lightheartedness when he made the sequel. I don't think he really unleashed this idea of playful horror or mock horror or horror satire as fulsomely until Evil Dead 2. But Raimi also has a lightness i do not think sam ramey is interested in the evil within you know like uh tobey hooper is he's not interested in satirizing consumerism like romero you know he didn't he wasn't possessed in the way craven was when he made last house on the left by like

what is the worst time i can show an audience he's an entertainer and even if there's something mildly sadistic about the way Evil Dead was made, because he really put everybody through the ringer. Bruce Campbell's given these interviews for years about how basically Raimi kicked the shit out of the whole crew. It's fundamentally all in good fun. You're not supposed to have any residue from the Evil Dead movies. You're not supposed to go home and be like, oh man, that was fucked up. You're just watching it. You're like, that was fun. And it's closer to Peter Jackson in that way. The backyard movies Peter Jackson used to make where it's just like, they're fun. They're disgusting, but they're fun. So that raises an interesting question, which is what is it that Sam Raimi is interested in

as a storyteller? Because I would not say that he's somebody who is necessarily huge on character or even archetypes. And even though he is interested in hero figures and has long wanted to make a version of the shadow, instead made Darkman. Of course, he made the Spider-Man movies. He made an L. Frank Baum Oz film. There are these sort of, I guess, mythologies that compel him. but I never think of him as a guy who's really good on individual characters. So what kind of a storyteller is Raimi? I mean, it's an interesting question. I think he's interested, as you say, to some extent in heroic archetypes and how can he disfigure them a little bit.

I mean, like quite literally disfigurement in Darkman is kind of the superpower, right? And he managed to find an interestingly non-gritty way into Spider-Man where the heroic aspect of Spider-Man is about exuberance, a kind of teenage exuberance, which timed against the sort of glumness of the Christopher Nolan movies I always preferred. You know, all respect to all the listeners of the podcast who think the dark night's the best movie ever made or something but i i like the raimi spider-man movies a lot more um but in terms of what kind of storyteller he is i think he's also a bit of a shapeshifter he has a gothic side and you see that in the gift and you see that in a simple plan which is both one of his best movies but also one of the more suspect ones, because it's like he influenced the Coens, and then he tries to make a Coen movie himself. It comes close-ish, right? But I think that he's also, as his career goes on, I think the variability of the movies and the difference of the movies says something else about him, which is he kind of just likes

working. And he's not tied to a program. He's not tied to, this is the kind of movie I make. I don't know what you would say to this, but I think he's also a filmmaker where you can tell he might think this is wrong and this isn't how movies are made. You can tell if his heart's in something or not. Yes. Which is part of what, and I don't want to start talking about the movie.

We haven't seen the new Dr. Strange movie, but there's been a lot of conversation about that. You know, like whether or not we haven't seen, the new Doctor Strange movie, but there's been a lot of conversation about that, you know, like whether or not we will have his thumbprint on this movie or not, whether or not we'll have his style, his verve, his interest in the character, because if it's just a paycheck job for a 62-year-old man who hasn't made a movie in nine years, I'm sure it'll be a really good paycheck job, but it won't be what I think a lot of people want it to be, which is,

you know, the guy who made Spider-Man, the guy who made Darkman, the guy who made Army of Darkness returning to genre mastery. And instead, if it's just something to kind of get back in the game to prove that he is a willing soldier so that he can make another drag me to hell, I would,

I think that's fine. I mean, it's certainly he's well within his rights to do that, but what we want is to see him invade these Marvel movies and change them in a way. Well, the thing about the lifetime pass is you then, when you actually have to take it out, it's kind of bittersweet because, you know, you shouldn't have to be like, well, it doesn't matter if this isn't good because you made these things. No one, no run lives forever or very few do. This is why the Coens are such incredible outliers. You don't have to play the lifetime pass card with them because it's self-evident you know whereas with ramey in the

last sometimes in the last few years i found myself having to reach for it when he comes up and it's like no he's really great like i don't care about spider-man 3 or or oz or whatever he's he's he's really great but i mean crime wave which i'm not meaning to jump ahead and you haven't you haven't played your own cards on that one. I don't know if you like it as much as I do, because they hate it. I mean, they don't like it. What I like about Crime Wave is you can read everything about how the making of it got ruined and believe it, right? That they fought with the producers and the financiers and that it's written in an undisciplined way and that they kind of don't want to talk about it.

But the heart is in it. It's like, we want to make an insane, uncategorizable genre parody that's weirdly retro fifties-ish in the way the Coens have been in some of their other later work. You don't make that movie to get paid. You don't make that movie for any reason other than that something comes to you and i admire that it's made by people that movie it is it's an interesting relic of geniuses who don't yet know where they want to go for sure and and i think one of the i would say that i don't hate it but i i see it as like deeply flawed and occasionally annoying when i'm watching it and the thing is is that and i've been thinking about this a lot because i just did an episode about film noir and I've been watching a lot of noir this year.

You can't really, it's hard to parody noir, like because noir storytelling is already so pitched up and so melodramatic that when you try to make a mockery of it, it doesn't really hold up. And obviously there are other aspects of that story. You know, it's a, it is a crime movie, not just a noir movie, but they're, they're sort of like half parodying half slapstick a sizing a certain genre that I just don't think is very susceptible to that. So that's part of the reason why it doesn't really work as well for me. But, you know, I, I have a place in my heart for movies where you can see filmmakers figuring out what they shouldn't do, you know, or what like what, you know, how to take a left turn instead of taking a right turn in your career. And for both of them, it's important.

I think so, too. And I think that also as a way of learning how important independence is, right? Because a lot of what they've all said about it, and Bruce Campbell said this a lot, because even though he's not technically a creator of the the film he's in it and he's really close to that creative group you know he's given interviews where he sort of just says you know people just we just had to fight with everything we had to we had to fight with everybody but I think that when you look at Evil Dead 2 versus the first Evil Dead if we follow the timeline not only is it better than the first movie but it's a movie where there's even I wouldn't say less of a sense of compromise because it's not like there's much compromise on the first movie, but it's a movie where there's even, I wouldn't say less of a sense of compromise because it's not like there's much compromise on the first Evil Dead, but

Raimi's got it way even more figured out, right? In terms of how to do his own thing and an audience is going to like it and how you please an audience and yourself at the same time without spending too much money. You know, it's just such a beautifully engineered little movie. It's basically a remake of the first one it doesn't break new ground narratively but it's superior that's part of what's so fun about it isn't calling your movie evil dead 2 in part i guess because dino de laurentis wanted you to leverage the the identity of the first one but it's the same it's it's more or less the same movie with you concept gags, a more incredible Bruce Campbell performance, more invention.

The Evil Dead movies are certainly among my favorite of his. Let's talk about Spider-Man. Because the first Spider-Man movie turns 20 this year. And it has a massive cultural footprint at this point. The Hollywood Reporter, I think, just published an oral history of the making of that movie, which is very back-patty and perhaps not as much about the actual making of the movie and more about how the movie came together. But the way that the movie came together is important because certainly we had seen movies like Blade and X-Men was in production when this movie was starting to come together. But for the most part, this is before

the time in which we were drowning in this is before the time in which we were drowning in superheroes and before the time in which the dominant sub-genre of American film were superheroes. And so this resonates. Or it's the interregnum period after the Batman thing died, right? Late 90s, the Schumacher aesthetic, which can now be reclaimed the way everything bad can be reclaimed. People are like, no. You go on Twitter, people are like, no, Schumacher was great. I mean- Not by me, Adam. Let me just tell you that right now. Not by me either. But the neon campy Batman thing kind of died. But we can't forget the first two

Batman Burton movies. I mean, they made superhero movies a kind of going proposition. I mean, that's why Darkman got made, for one thing, not to cross the streams of our narrative, but Darkman was a low-budget alternative to that. Even though Raimi didn't make The Shadow, that's why The Shadow got made and The Phantom got made. But mentioning these movies, many of which I think very fondly back on,

like Billy Zane as The Phantom, I watch that happily now instead of multiverse, uh, their standalone cheapo, poppy B movies. Right. And, uh, Spider-Man was,

I hate saying this. I hate turning that into an underdog story, but that was a risk to some extent, especially because the person who had been supposed to make it for a long time is the most bankable filmmaker ever james cameron and then that didn't happen so when i see ramey making spider-man i think of jackson getting handed lord of the rings around the same time and you sort of go how do these guys get the keys to these particular kingdoms how does bad taste peter jackson get lord of the rings well he got it because he came up with a brilliant template for it he worked it to every studio in hollywood i mean i don't think spider-man was the same kind of passion project for ramey

jackson was like born to make lord of the rings that's the thing that he was put on this earth to do he said that ramey it's more of like a mix of a property and a director and let's try this. But thank God they gave it to someone with a sense of humor in the first place because that goes a long way with that movie, I think. It's very funny. The strange thing about it is he's clearly a fan of Spider-Man and understands the character of Peter Parker. And in the same way that Peter Jackson made an incredibly sincere pitch about how he appreciated the core story, it seems like that's what sold Avi Arad and Matt Tolmach and all these guys who still are participating in the Spider-Man movie-making industrial complex. But at that time, no one had really cracked this nut of this thing that

everyone knew, if done right, was going to work. Peter Parker is one of the great creations of American fictional storytelling of the last 75 years. There's a reason that there's a rite of passage for so many teenagers and adolescents who get into Spider-Man and that he endures as a movie character now. But Sam Raimi, who has made extraordinarily zany movies and arch movies and also made these quite sincere films, he's coming off this period in which he's made A Simple Plan, like you said, a kind of Coen Brothers monkey, and also For Love of the Game, which is this really syrupy, traditional romantic sports drama. And then The Gift, which I think is kind of the underrated oddity of his career. And these movies were fine. They did fine. They all did okay business. And he's in this kind of holding pattern as a filmmaker. It's still kind of surprising that

they took a chance on him in this spot, and they empowered him to make this movie and then two more movies after this. The first one in particular, I think is a pretty incredible act of origin storytelling. It's hard to make these things interesting. We've now seen 200 of them. So I think everyone has origin story fatigue. But at the time, I remember watching it as somebody who grew up reading the Todd McFarlane Spider-Man run and feeling like this is pretty close to what I was hoping it would be, which is an unusual experience with these kinds of stories. Yeah. And it's the fact that we've seen 200 since that speaking for myself gives me pause and now wanting to praise it 20 years later, because it's the opening of Pandora's box to an extent. It is. Right. And it's the same way that you can look at something like the first Jon Favre iron man which is not as good but is good in some of the same ways and feels a lot like the

raimi spider-man as an origin story and whatever else you can kind of look at it and be like yes on your own terms good movie and for people associated with this franchise you've made them all incredibly rich also maybe kind of murdered american cinema forever, but that's a whole other discussion. But I think what the first Spider-Man has going for it, and you mentioned that idea of zany and slapstick, is it's a very buoyant movie. The second one, I think, leans a little more into that comic book movie gravitas

or that need people have for superhero movies to have this kind of gravitas because they want them to be all things to all people so they're escapists but they're also about how we live now and the second spider-man is does that well but i think is also guilty of kind of planting those seeds in everyone's mind that superhero movies are also about capital a america and 9-11 and whatever else first super first Spider-Man's just kind of buoyant, and it's buoyant in a slightly teenage way, and it has really cleanly drawn stakes narratively. And one of the best things about it is it is not about the end of the world. It is not apocalyptic. It's essentially just some stuff is going down one day in New York and we care about the characters as opposed to some big glowing cube.

I'm so tired of glowing cube movies. They should never be made anymore. The glowing cube that's going to end everything. Spider-Man doesn't go that way. It's kind of just about people who either love each other or hate each other. What are the odds that that's a good story do you think that ramey had any sense of the impact of not just the evil dead but more specifically spider-man when he was making it that it would be a massive hit and that it would unfurl for movie studios a kind of consistent and

boring strategy for the next 20 years that's what i mean about Pandora's box, right? And he's a weird candidate for that. I mean, I've argued in pieces on the site and with friends and stuff that the main Hollywood story of the last 30 years is Revenge of the Nerds. And it's not a nice revenge. It's not a nice revenge. And it's a revenge that now gives cover to all kinds of other things under the guise of progressiveness and diversity, Disney and Marvel. It's a superficial patina laid upon something basically very nerdy, which is like, we're going to force our culture on you now forever, and you have to like it.

I don't think Raimi was thinking that. I think he's an unpretentious guy, and I think he wanted to – this sounds like a Simpsons line. I think he just wanted to tell a good story about a Spider-Man, you know, I think that's what he was really, I think that's what he was really trying to do. And I think that to some extent, I don't think it got away from him. I just think it got bigger than he thought because it met an appetite that was ready for that kind of unambiguous heroism. I will say this about the Spider-Man movies

as opposed to the Nolan movies. Literally and figuratively, there's no gray in them, right? The Nolan palette is gray and the Nolan moral universe is gray. It's one of those movies that's like, everyone's kind of a hero and everyone's kind of a villain. Spider-Man's more like, no, this guy's a hero

and it's kind of hard to be a hero and there's responsibility in being a hero, but it's not about the darkness within at least not to the third till the third movie which i think he kind of botches right he doesn't do that so well but those first two movies those long clean broad strokes of good and bad and and and innocent and wicked and all that they they worked for the moment that they came out in. They tapped something good. Yeah, there's definitely a post-9-11 New York City

reading of the first two Spider-Man movies that I think resonates. And the third one in which the alien symbiote comes to reckon with Peter Parker's morality is less successful. And there's something interesting about that,

because I feel like superhero films in general struggle with ambiguity. They struggle with telling complex stories oftentimes. Well, look at Evil Dead. Evil Dead is not about the darkness within. It's like it sucks to be possessed by a demon. But it's not like a David Lynch demon, where it's like the demon is probably to some extent, you know,

societal rot, you know, manifested in killer Bob or something. I mean, evil dead is just like, there's an evil force in the woods. Don't read the book. You know?

I mean, there's ways that people have talked about Ramey as a conservative, and I'm not referring to personal politics or anything, though that is there, or it's been documented and discussed, but you know, he, he, he kind of has a very good versus evil worldview in certain of his movies. politics or anything though that is there or it's been documented and discussed but you know he he

he kind of has a very good versus evil worldview in certain of his movies and in evil dead that's just not serious enough to worry about the implications anyone who worries what the implications of the evil dead movies wasting their time like go do something else but when the movies are made on such a big canvas like the spider-man, they do have to carry a certain amount of sociocultural baggage or people want them to carry it. And I guess it was also made not just before superhero movies became so popular and dominant and unbearably just present, but I think it was before they all had to be allegories for something. And I think the difference between Spider-Man and the second Spider-Man is the second Spider-Man is engineered a bit more calculatedly as an allegory. Luckily, it has lots of other good things in it to offset that, like Alfred Molina is Dr. Octo. Love him. He's great. The first Spider-Man, again, I'm being

silly, but I'm not. It's just about a Spider-Man. It's very simple. Doesn't mean banal or dumb. It's just very clear. I think of clarity when I think of that movie. Clarity of character, clarity of action. You can actually see what's going on and just a lot of fun. It's so strange because he has a ruthlessness towards certainly Bruce Campbell and the situations that he puts him in in the Evil Dead films. And also in Drag Me to Hell, which is the movie that I, you know, it sort of feels like he cashed in his chip of making three Spider-Man movies and then said, I need someone to let me make

my really mean-spirited, you know, gypsy haunting film. And it's like, how is the guy who made Spider-Man the same guy who made Drag Me to Hell? And part of it is because I think Raimi really resists these kind of critical, emotional readings about what is motivating his characters and what is his filmography representing in our culture. And certainly the political readings and the fact that we're not talking about whether or not his ideology is good or not in his movies is so fascinating. He's such an uncontemporary, unstuck-in-time kind of movie maker. He feels a little bit more like somebody who took a lot of jobs in the 40s, 50s, and 60s as opposed to someone who is the product of, I don't know, the new Hollywood or something like that.

And that's kind of fun to talk about honestly it's a little bit of a different pace of conversation than the ones we usually have where we ascribe this great intentionality to all these filmmakers in the last 30 years on the show he i mean i love that you put it that way because he would have been a good in a in a world where in a multiverse where sam ramey is just a studio director in the 30s or 40s, they're probably pretty good, right? Yeah. They're probably pretty good. The scale and the advertising and even the auteurism of them is different because it's a different period.

I mean, I don't think anyone can say with a straight face that Sam Raimi constitutes a discovery now, but someone with his skill set and way of making movies, he could have retroactively been a kind of discovery if he'd been practicing this kind of craft in a different, more anonymous period for directors. And he has lots of trademarks. He puts the same car in every movie and he has the same actors and usually Ted Raimi's in there somewhere looking like Ted Raimi and Bruce Campbell's a snooty waiter. I mean, I like all those things, but it's not self-important the way that Tarantino's stuff is. He's also not as important as Quentin Tarantino is. But when Tarantino puts Red Apple or something in his movie, it's like, oh my God, it's his universe. When Raimi does this stuff, it feels like, well, these are his friends. These are his hallmarks, and it's fun that they're in there, but it's not significant. You don't unlock the meaning of Spider-Man because Bruce Campbell's in it for two minutes. But it's nice to see Bruce Campbell there. There's only a handful of filmmakers, too, that I can think of who genre hop the way that he does so carefully.

You know, Soderbergh in recent times is someone who I think is pretty capable of bouncing around. Howard Hawks is often cited as someone who could make a screwball comedy one year and then a hard-bitten Western the next year. And Raimi has done this. I mean, he has made not just superhero movies and horror movies. He's made Westerns. He's made noir films. He's made sports movies. He's made children's fantasies. He kind of has done it all. And so that's another reason why I think it's hard to pinpoint whatever he is and whatever he represents. I wonder, will he be remembered? Will he be canonized in a way? We're spending a lot of time talking about him in anticipation of this movie that he

basically took over after another filmmaker dropped out. Is he one of the 10 or 20 most important filmmakers the last 40 years in your mind? I think that he would fall into that category of very subjectively, maybe, right? The influence is there to an extent. There's a canonicity to the first two Evil Dead movies where you can't study horror without them, right? So you say that sentence and you sort of go how much weight does that sentence bear if you can't study horror without two movies that a guy made probably a fairly important filmmaker the the comic book movies that he's made i think suffer in a way from being i mean they don't

suffer artistically they're good I think what they brought is more ambivalent, at least to me. If you are someone who is very excited to see the multiverse, you are probably very happy Sam Raimi made them. I am less so, but I mean, they exist. So I mean, yeah, in a way he's probably on the list. He's also someone I think who benefits from, for people of our age or generation who are listening to this they benefit from re-watching and i did it over the last year not in anticipation of this podcast which i think you asked me about a week ago but i kind of was like i spent the last year and a half kind of looking at some of the ramey movies like i went out of my way to watch

darkman instead of just remembering it and i went out of my way to watch A Simple Plan without remembering it. And I watched The Gift again too. And I'm happy that I did because the general idea of him as a genre hopper or someone who makes all different kinds of movies is true. The specific ways he makes those different movies, they're worth another look. I don't know if that helps the argument of top 20 or 30 or whatever you're asking, but these are movies of real, real merits and real craftsmanship. I think I'm glad I went back through them. Adam, just, just play these games with me. Okay.

You know, make these lists, you know, do these dumb things that I ask you to do. Degrade yourself on this podcast, please. You're a man of great intellect and sincerity. You're right. He is the eighth most important American filmmaker since 1980. Number eight. Not seven. God forbid.

God forbid he's number seven. That's all I ask of you. If you want to hear more in depth about all of his movies, they're on the Blank Check podcast. They're doing every single film he's made. And so you can hear long, long conversations about not just Evil Dead, but some of his other movies. But I'm going to make you, I'm going to make you rank these movies, Adam. I'm going to make you rank them with me. I'm going to make you go through every movie

and you're going to say, this is this, the 16th best Sam Raimi movie. Are you ready for this? Can't wait. So I have to make a, an admission, which is that I've never seen it's murder. The 1977 film that he made. Have you seen this movie? I haven't. So I will substitute within the Woods, which he made a year later. Have you seen Within the Woods? It's on YouTube. I have seen Within the Woods, which is more of a short, right? Yeah, it's a short. Yeah. I mean, so are we just going through them or are we ranking them? Because this is not number one Within the Woods, but it is-

I agree. But it's a primal scene of his career so if evil dead 2 is encoded in evil dead 1 both evil deads are encoded in within the woods if they wouldn't exist without it that's his proof of concept short and so i'm glad it exists even though it's a little boring at 32 minutes we have 15 films here is it the 50 is it number 15 sure within the woods uh no the worst one is the is can i say what i think is the worst one what is what is what's our order here how are you doing this i think we should just bounce around but i think probably let's go from worst to best well i i think the worst one is the is oz i i agree with you i i revisited oz the great and

powerful and it it's uh it's a real miss and it's a real miss. And it's a strange thing, and I worry a little bit about Multiverse of Madness when I watch a movie like this, where I'm like, why is Sam Raimi interested in this? What is it about this story and this universe? And is it just the ability to shift from black and white in one aspect ratio to color in another aspect ratio? Is it getting inside the world of historical moviemaking with this story? Obviously, The Wizard of Oz as a story is larded with allegory. Is there something in that allegory? I don't know. It's a movie that has high production values and looks kind of bad. And most Sam Raimi movies don't look bad. So this one stuck out to me in revisiting his flicks that

it just didn't feel right. Something is off in the stew here. Would you agree with that? I would. And I think maybe there's some mark of interest in that he only does something like this once, whereas Tim Burton made one of these every year for about 10 years. You know, like his Alice in Wonderland movies

or his other Roald Dahl movies, it was just totally shameless. You know, it's just like, I don't care that this looks like shit, you know, $90 million, Dollar whatever I mean Rami only Went with the one but I also think it's interesting That he picked material Or material picked him or this movie was

Engineered when a show like Wicked Already existed on Broadway That kind of deconstructed that stuff Pretty well To like Tony award winning Effect I guess I don't know if you saw the tweet recently that wicked's going to be two movies which is just like come on like we don't need that but it's painful it's painful but i think wicked as a broadway show you know that

that takes oz apart pretty smartly i think ramey's movie god forbid we talk about screenwriting when we're talking about a director it's just not a well-written movie. It's not a good idea for a film. Not really. And then the execution is lax. When I said you can tell if someone's heart is in something or not, this is not like a bad passion project. Like whatever you say about Wild at Heart, some people think that that's Lynch's best movie. Some people think it's his worst.

That's his Wizard of Oz movie. His whole bloody heart is in that movie as a Wizard of Oz riff. Not here. Okay, Bobby. So we're making Oz the Great and Powerful number 15. I will submit to you. Yeah, go for it. Spider-Man 3 at number 14.

Probably, yeah. Say something negative about it. I want to hear you be mean. Well, meanness is not really in my zone. But, you know, it's a movie with too many ideas, too many characters, and kind of a loss of a sense of what made the first two films so vital. You know, it's overstuffed. And this happens.

And this really more so than the first Spider-Man movie is a symptom of what went wrong. Is the story got too big for its own good? The world expanded too much. We got a little bit too obsessed with the idea of like, who will be terrorizing Spider-Man next as opposed to thinking more closely about Peter and Mary Jane. And that's at the heart of the story.

And so, you know, it's about the superherofication or villainification of our culture. And it's also just a very oddly cast movie. Thomas Hayden Church as Sandman is just odd. Topher Grace is just so not Eddie Brock. After many years of seeing and reading Venom in comic books, I'm like, how did they land on this? I guess he's not bad, but he's just not what I was envisioning though neither was tom hardy for the record so that's unusual too um it's just you know all the people are there right bill pope is there shooting the movie bob murawski his longtime

editor is there you know the alvin sergeant has a screenplay credit on this as do ramey and ivan ramey his brother all the pieces are there but it just doesn't work and it's overstuffed and overlong and so that's those are negative what's the exact year but it just doesn't work and it's overstuffed and over long and so that's those are negative words about what's the exact year on it i don't have the year in front of me on spider-man 3 is it 2000 2007 2007 so i think it it it also suffered i think at the time critically versus what people were raving about in the nolan batman movies and some of the more serious comic book movies that were coming out, which is that same lightness that I think made the first two charming, kind of felt really out of place.

Like Twitter has reclaimed the bit where he walks down the street, kind of the fake staying alive bit where he's like, you know, like strutting and being an asshole. I think it's very good in little, little clips. But I remember watching that with the theater at the time, and the theater was just dead, right? I'm not saying that the audience is always right, but I think in this case, they kind of noticed the tone was a little off. I agree with everything you said, and I think all I'd add sort of on top of it is that it is possible to get fatigued with well-built narrative universes as well. Spider-Man 2 is a pretty good ending for that universe.

This is not a movie that needed to exist, not just because no movie needs to exist, because they kind of did the arc pretty well in two movies, I think. I don't think this movie adds much. I agree with you. I think it's just a symptom of the more and more and more of this genre. So for the sake of conversation, why don't we put It's Murder and Within the Woods together at 13 so that we can say, these are the early makings of a great filmmaker. This is what you have to do as an independent filmmaker to show that you're worthy and that

you deserve a chance and you deserve some money. And then we can get both of those out of the way. Now, we're getting closer and closer to a lot of good movies in a row here in our conversation and so our quibbles will be modest i do think that for love of the game has to go at 12 though because i re-watched it this week and i was expecting to to like it more and it really doesn doesn't work. And it is so close to being a very good baseball movie. And the baseball in the movie is kind of impressive. And we obviously understand that Kevin Costner is just kind of the most enduring athlete of the movies of the last 30 years.

He's somebody who's so believable in these parts and so credible in these parts but everything happening between him and kelly preston is so banal and so mediocre it's kind of mind-blowing to me that sam raimi made the movie and i know i i sense what he's after right he's trying to do a little bit more of um i don't i don't like a leo mccary movie i guess like something really traditional and sentimental and it just lands with the thud for me so i feel like it has to be for love of the game i like the nostalgia of an era where pitchers threw nine innings doesn't happen anymore you're telling me you're telling not a bullpen not not not a bill what do you have to complain about you've got the toronto blue jays lineup right now you're flying

yeah no i'm boba shett vlad jr i know I'm pivoting from the Raptors to the Blue Jays. Yeah, I don't think For Love of the Game is very good. I think it has some good actors around Costner. The baseball scenes are good. Even within the Costner sports movie rankings, I wouldn't put it at the bottom. And that's because I watched 15 minutes of Draft Day this morning on cable. And I'm like, well, For, love the game is better than that. But that's true.

But it is not a particularly, it's not a, it's not a particularly fun, energetic movie. So, I mean, we also have to decide what to do with crime wave, which you've kind of said, you know,

you think is objectively bad. And I'm arguing is kind of subjectively good. It's hard for me to argue that it's better than most of the other movies on this list but i hope you're going to give me crime wave over for love of the game if we both don't like for love of the game and i really like crime wave maybe we can put crime wave next in sort of this weird spot of like agree to disagree and then agree that is that that's the plan that's what we should do crime wave goes to 11 yeah i don't love it it's it's an interesting movie it's you know it's i think it was issued

on Blu-ray a handful of years ago. If people are interested in completing the Raimi filmography, most people have probably seen a lot of these movies already because some of them

are so popular and some of them are so iconic. This is one that most people have not seen. Check it out. You know, there's not a lot of movies

that have the Coen brothers and Sam Raimi attached to them. So, I don't think it works, but you make a compelling case, Adam. That leaves us with 10 movies, all of which I like.

Yeah, me too. How to do this? What do you think is the least successful of his great movies? All right, well, I'm going to take one for the team here and say that even with everything we just said about it in terms of influence, I personally, personally don't like Spider-Man more than most of these next movies. But if you think putting Spider-Man's too low and people are going to be angry about that on Twitter, I guess you take a bullet and say quick in the dead, which I rewatched this year with a bunch of friends and really enjoyed i like it more than spider-man but it's it's not his absolute best work it's a question

of do you think spider-man 2 is one of the five best movies he's made no i'm shaking my head but no it's a tough one there's a lot of sentimentality for that one i i would probably i would put the quick in the Dead at 10. I'm willing to accept. We haven't really said much about this movie. An extraordinary artifact of the 1990s, a film in which Leonardo DiCaprio gets the ampersand and Leonardo DiCaprio title credit. Not just Leo, but Gene Hackman, Sharon Stone,

a loaded cast, a kind of revisionist slapstick Western. Interesting movie. Yeah, you've forgotten the amazing foresight. hackman sharon stone a loaded cast a kind of revisionist slapstick western interesting movie yeah you've you've forgotten the amazing foresight in 1995 he had casting russell crowe i love right i love russell crowe's 95 because he has quick in the dead and virtuosity a truly a truly uh wonderful like 90s internet is is scary movie where computers are scary movie but quick and the dead like owns man i mean it's got keith david it's got lance henriksen it's a great dual movie it's literally got the shape of a tournament so if people like tournaments you actually follow the thread of the tournament it's like cool that guy's gonna kill that guy in the

next round you know and it was sort of the last gasp with Casino, unfortunately, of Sharon Stone, like, opening movies. I mean, she's the star of the film, Post Basic Instinct, and I think she's great. And she reportedly had a huge influence on not just picking the script and helping this movie get made, but picking Raimi, okaying Leo, you know, getting everyone on board for this. And it's a very, very fun movie. It's not, it doesn't resonate in the same way for me as some of these other

movies do. Whether or not it's better than both Spider-Man movies, you and I can maybe agree to disagree, but you'll allow it since this is my podcast. It's a good movie in that at one point, you see the guy get shot through the back of the head and his brain gets blown out and then through the hole you see the guy who shot him standing 60 paces away and that's the guy who made the evil dead it's like if someone had said i wonder what evil dead would look like as a western that one shot is like this this is what it looks like and uh it's a great shot yeah it's a real uh we have have Sergio Leone to thank for this kind of a movie. For sure. Shall we do

Spider-Man at 9? If you'll allow it. I mean, I think this is where you start getting into how successful you find... You know... How successful do you find the gift, right? Yeah, I was just going to say... That's where I would go next. Let's go back. Let's go back. Let's do the gift at 8, because

I think the gift is an interesting experiment. You know, I will say, I rewatched The Gift early in COVID. And during lockdown, I was trying to spend of how many other movies are there about people having extrasensory perception and ESP, and how there just are not a lot of movies that take it seriously. And I guess you could say maybe like De Palma's The Fury is kind of sort of about this, but that's often related to people having these sort of like mind-crushing powers. And this is mostly a movie about a mystic, you know, someone who sees things and has visions and takes it very seriously. Now, Drag Me to Hell later does this as well in a slightly

different tone. But this is similar to your point about Russell Crowe and spotting him in 1995. This is before Cate Blanchett was a known quantity in America. You know, I think she had maybe made Pushing Tin the year before this, but had not been in a lot of big productions in the States. And also brings together like an incredible cast of character actors and burgeoning stars, you know, Greg Kinnear and Katie Holmes and Giovanni Ribisi.

It's a really amazing collection of actors. It's in my top five Keanu movies in terms of his performance. He's very good. He's in my, it's in my top five Keanu movies in terms of his performance. He's very good. He's very good. He's, he's terrific. But of course,

people who, people who don't like, don't like Keanu are also wrong because he's always good, but he's very good in, in, in the gift. He's scary. And he's part of a kind of textured regional feeling.

The movie has mostly works. I have a friend, one of my best friends, I'm not going to name her, but she will listen to the podcast and she'll smile. I saw that movie with her in university and she found one moment so scary, she actually got a nosebleed, which was like literally timed to this jump scare in the movie, which involves like some weird guy with a fiddle. I like that he was sort of trying to make something now that isn't goofy scary but he's going for actual horror movie kind of effects and they don't all land but it's a good example of like if you build the right atmosphere and the right sense of

of mystery you can kind of get an audience and there's at least two or three pretty good gotchas i think in in in the gift it is one of those movies where when the plot plays its hand, because I rewatched it last year too, when the plot plays its hand, you do find yourself going a little bit like, oh, come on. Agree, yes. It is an oh, come on kind of movie. I'm not going to spoil it, but you go, oh, come on. But I think it's a pretty good time.

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So let's swap those. Let's put Spider-Man at eight, I think Gifted nine, Bobby. Sure. So that leaves us with two, six seven films here are those films i'm going to read them to you so we can get a sense of the landscape that leaves us with the evil dead evil dead two dark man army of darkness a simple plan spider-man 2 and drag me to hell now how do you feel about that this is where i in what is going to be a losing battle uh would play spider-man 2 not out of dislike because it's good and we can say nice but but

if you want to save it for a little later i think now we sort of maybe go to the question of like how much do we like evil dead versus army of darkness that's where i am with these with these seven those are the three next ones evil dead army of darkness and spider-man what's next i i have to i have to make spider-man to a number five which means i think it goes the evil dead and then army of darkness and then spider-man too if only for the dr octopus in the surgery, which is this amazing homage to like William Castle and Alfred Hitchcock and is a genuinely thrilling horror movie sequence in a contemporary superhero movie produced by Sony. That's like that's Rami using his powers for good, in my opinion. In

addition to the Molina performance in general getting a character as potentially ridiculous as dr octopus right is amazing we see marvel still making hay of that character in spider-man no way home last year it's a pretty rare thing that they did with that movie and so because of it like i it has to be top five for me yeah i mean so you as you just spoke to spider-man 2 i guess the movie that gets stuck now in between is, is army of darkness at number six, which I know you're not putting down because I'm going to imagine, I'm going to imagine you love it. I'm going to say something about army of darkness too, which is certain movies hit just right at the right time. If you're like 14 and you are buying DVDs with kind of your own money and you're like,

oh, they put this out for the third time. I guess I should buy it again. It was that kind of your own money and you're like, oh, they put this out for the third time. I guess I should buy it again. It was that kind of movie for me. It takes the Evil Dead movies and just kind of Monty Pythons them by being in the Middle Ages. And it's really not... They did not throw

their back out writing the script for this movie. But they shifted the visual reference points to Ray Harryhausen, to Jason and the Argonauts and some of those 50s fantasy movies. And I think it's just a wonderful mix. I also think that if the Oscars mattered, Bruce Campbell would have won Best Actor for Army of Darkness, or at least been in that running because it is an all-time performance. He's more of a lead than he is in the Evil Dead movies in this.

He's the whole movie. I agree. This is the best thing he's ever done. He's so funny. His line delivery is perfect. The Ash character becomes whole in this. And, you know, Ash, there was a whole TV show called Ash versus the Evil Dead that came out a few years ago on Starz, which is crazy to me.

There's also been an Evil Dead remake by fede alvarez this is one of like the meanest nastiest movies of the last 10 years produced by a studio and now i don't do you know did you know that hbo max is releasing a new evil dead movie called evil dead rise in a few months no but i live in dread of this new information and i'm gonna go hide under some coats so i don't have to watch it it's so weird that they made this an enduring franchise. I mean, especially given how odd all three of the Evil Dead movies are, but they've done a great job. I love Army of Darkness.

Army of Darkness is, if you're a teenager, if you were a teenager when that movie came out, how could you not fall in love with it if you like genre movies? It's so fun, so funny, and Campbell's brilliant. I'm so averse to quoting things. I certainly don't quote things on podcasts, but it is one of those movies that I remember you would quote with friends because it's like a one-liner factory. And the one-liners that are funny are funny, and the ones that aren't, as you were saying, are elevated by Campbell's delivery.

So you'll indulge me. There's one bit where he finds himself in the past and he's kind of now acclimatized to the fact that he's just in the past for some reason. And he's probably gonna have to do battle with these demons and someone knocks on the door and he's like, what do you want? What are you doing? Raising a barn. And then he pauses for about five seconds and says,

it was like, he probably was raising a barn. And there's something about that. It taps the same aside, S sotto voce kind of humor that you have on the simpsons you know yeah it's it's it's like the one liner after the one liner and uh yeah these are gonna live in my brain long after i've forgotten most of the other movies i've seen in my life i'm i love army of darkness man it's so fun it's a lot of fun we've got four movies left yeah i'll say the four

films that are left dark man is actually my least favorite i don't know how you feel about that now so so i assume you think it's pretty high up there is what should be number four is it is it drag me to hell is it dark man what do you think i think we well it's an average between the two of us right yeah so i think to me, the question is now between Darkman and Drag Me to Hell. And the argument that I would make for Darkman, again, is it represents a moment

where a superhero movie, which it only is tangentially, it's not really a superhero movie. It's more of a wronged man, revenge movie. Yeah, vigilante movie. Vigilante movie movie but it represents when that was all tied to not just cultural underdog status but like it's it's cheap and kind of crummy and it actually

looks like comic book panels instead of a screensaver we're in the moment of screensaver movies, Academy Award-winning directors making screensaver movies. And Darkman is a panel movie, man. The angles in that movie are panel angles. The production design is panel production design. You can see the roots of the Doc Ock scene in the lab massacre in Darkman. Total smoke show Frances McDormandormand my god she's just insanely

attractive in that movie and liam neeson's great i love that people talked about liam neeson being reinvented as an action star he wasn't reinvented he was awesome in dark man as an unlikely kind of action star i love it as a b-side to batman i do because because I like the Burton Batman. I do, and I like this as a B-side. I'll give you Darkman at three, but let me just make my quick pitch for Drag Me to Hell. Yeah. It's so disgusting and funny,

and we need more disgusting and funny movies. I would argue that that is potentially Sam Raimi's true superpower, is his willingness to just make something so silly and so goofy and yet terrifying at the same time. I wrote about this on Letterboxd. I saw this movie at the Court Street Regal in Brooklyn the night it was released, which was one of the most fun movie theaters in America, especially to see a horror movie because the audience was active. It was a shout back at the

screen, clap, cheer, and stand up and scream kind of a movie theater. And this is the perfect example of that. Movies as active participation experiences are so underrated. And Raimi is trying to draw a reaction out of you when making movies like this. And I just had a fucking blast watching it. And I rewatched it, you you know sitting all by myself the other night and I was like this is still as fun as it when it came out you know it's really nice that the chip that he cashed in on spider-man was to make something this silly um so I'll accept it at four dark man we can rock at three because it's so important um that leaves us with two films yeah people that too in a simple plan yeah I would just echo what you were saying with

drag me in hell also that he does it without the r rating which normally means that it's toothless or defanged but it's not because the ways that it's you're right that it's disgusting and you can't really put an mpaa rating on mean right i mean you can have a mean pg movie and a nice a nice x-rated movie you could i mean it's mean but it's also coloring inside the lines a little bit of old b movies and that it doesn't have a lot of gore it it's more spooky it's a combination of spooky and mean and i don't know i don't want to read it too much allegorically because again what's good about it is he doesn't make allegories or he's not trying to cash in and be one of these zeitgeist guys but weirdly as a kind of post bailout post bush movie about the fact that if you do bad things really in a just universe you you get yours it it doesn't just feel like ec comics in that sense

it in its way it's mean but it's kind of a moral movie and it has and it has an actually good ending these movies great these movies never end well it's the ending that makes it a raimi movie because it's the same kind of ending that army of darkness had or that evil did too had where it's just like well too bad when the movie ends i i was the living embodiment of the ha ha ha yes Yes, sickos. Yeah, it's funny. Like this is so fun. Here's the thing.

Like on the one hand, yes, it's a movie about a bank employee who, you know, rejects a loan extension on a mortgage payment from an older woman. And so it's representative of a lot of people who are booted out of their homes at this very critical time in American history. But it's not as though Alison Lohman is Jamie Dimon. Her character in the movie is a lowly middle-class person who is stuck in a system that is evil. And so there's something kind of hilarious about punishing this person who is ambitious, sure, and wants to climb the ladder in the bank but it's also just kind of a workaday schmuck and that's the that is where the meanness is the meanness is like in everyone has to suffer for

this there's a i mean this is a loaded way to put the subtext but there is an extent to which she is just following orders and you of course and you extrapolate on that in terms of where the punishment really lies i tend to love movies where the old world intrudes on the new world and basically says like you guys are such assholes we we might be evil to an extent and meddling with dark forces and you know we have power that you can't imagine like you guys really are pricks and And I think that this movie manifests that in a way that I really like. I think it's such a fit compliment to the Evil Dead movies because it moves them from the cabin to the city. But it has the same basic idea of evil, which is don't read the book.

Don't invite the curse. This is your fault to some extent. Don't mess with this stuff it's funny i love it i'm gonna i'm gonna settle something quickly here evil dead 2 is number one i don't think there's any argument about that we've already sung its praises it's it's a profound and profoundly important movie in very goofy ways a simple plan we barely talked about other otherwise just noting that it has certain coen elements it's probably the most movie of all of the sam raimi movies it feels less like an exercise or some sort of commentary on a genre or some attempt to revive something

or sentimentalize something it's just a it's a pretty typical neo-noir bag full of money movie. You know, it's about what is it? Two brothers who discover a crashed plane that's with a huge bag of cash in it. And they have to figure out what to do with the bag of cash. And then it becomes this moral quandary film where we see what happens to people who take the money. And it wasn't a big hit. It was not a big Academy Awards film. I think it did get a couple of nominations for thornton was nominated yeah billy bob thornton was nominated for for as as a sort of bumbling

brother and and scott smith's screenplay was nominated as well um but you know it's a movie that is a little forgotten to time that is just a gem just truly a gem it's the link from fargo to no country not that those movies need need a link because they're also kind of the same movie. And we'll save that for the 10th time you do a Coen's podcast. But the frozen location is very Fargo. And the stolen money is very No Country. But here, you're into ranking things. I'm going to throw a curve ball ranking at you is Bill.

Is Bill Paxton truly the greatest American actor that no one calls the greatest American actor. I love Bill Paxton and he's amazing in this movie. Thornton got the Oscar nomination and it's a showy performance, right? Because that's what Thornton does. And nomination and it's a showy performance, right? Because that's what Thornton does. And I say that as a compliment. This was the like Billy Bob Thornton show period.

This is like stuff like Sling Blade, you know? And he's like a six out of 10 on the Sling Blade meter in this movie. But Bill Paxton's awesome in this. I think he just recalls like a very specific American male actor archetype. You know, he's like a very specific American male actor archetype. You know, he's like a little bit John Garfield. He's a little bit Robert Ryan. He's a little bit, you know, like he is. There's something a little bit dangerous and crazy about him, but he can also play the very straight leading man.

And I love him. I think he is very similar to Raimi in that he is most closely associated with a kind of goofy genre movie. You know, he's most closely associated with working with James Cameron. He's most closely associated with movies like this, with with Gear Dark, with, you know, even in Apollo 13 or Twister. He's like the zany one, you know, and maybe that's held against him. Obviously, he died quite young at 61, four or five years ago. And that was very sad. And you could tell people really loved him. He was beloved in the community of filmmakers. But he's right for this one. He's perfectly cast.

It's a forgotten great lead performance because what he draws you into here is the way that someone in this situation is going to rationalize good and bad decisions, right? They're going to put themselves in a place where it's like, this is not supposed to happen. So I'm kind of playing with house money here. It's like, it's not supposed to happen. So if this is not supposed to happen, maybe I'll do something I'm not really supposed to do. Maybe I'll act in a way I'm not really supposed to act it's like you can feel him testing his ethical compass a little bit and he's not much like allison loman and drag me to hell without being a very bad guy he's certainly not fully admirable and also one thing we haven't mentioned because we talked about his visual facility is ramey's not really a writer director

i mean evil dead movies are written but they don't really feel written you don't really feel like someone sat at a typewriter and then took a deep breath and was like, ah, my masterpiece is complete. You know, it's just situations. You mentioned the Oscar nomination for the script of Simple Plan. We sort of said Oz is a bad script. Simple Plan is a really good script. I think Raimi, unless we're talking about the backyard Sam Raimi, he needs material, right? He's,

I don't think he, I think in that way, he's closer to filmmaker like Fincher, where to some extent, the quality of the material will dictate how good the finished movie is. As a technician, he can make anything. I don't think Raimi can redeem terrible material though.

I think with good material, he can do a plausible impersonation of the Coens it's not meant as a slight it's not meant as a slight that a simple man a simple plan is Cohen-ish it's a high compliment I agree with you um I think we've done good work I'm going to recap it for us very briefly number 15 Oz the Great and Powerful number 14 Spider-Man 3 number 13 It's Murder and Within the Woods 12 for love of the game 11 crime wave 10 the quick and the dead 9 the gift 8 spider-man 7 the evil dead 6 army of darkness 5 spider-man 2 4 drag me to hell 3 dark man 2 a simple plan and number 1 evil dead 2 i feel like

we we did it adam we we did we did right by sam ramey we did it Adam We did right by Sam Raimi We did, congratulations Thank you so much Where can we read you? Are you a new beat reporter For the Toronto Blue Jays for the next four months? Yeah, I'm just going to be tweeting Little fragments of like, that was a strike You know, that's

That's what I'll tweet this summer And you can Probably find me on On your website reviewing whatever comes out. And unless something happens in the next few days that stops me, probably writing about Sam Raimi. I think that's the plan.

Thanks so much, Adam. Let's now go to my conversation with Tom Gormekin. So happy to be here with Tom Gormekin. Tom, thanks for being on the show today. Absolutely. Thank you guys for having me. Okay, so Tom, you're a Nicolas Cage fan. You want to work with Nicolas Cage. And how did you do this?

How did you come up with this idea? How did you put this whole thing together because it's a it's a pretty outlandish concept it's a pretty outlandish concept yeah we you know i i think i just had this general sense that nicholas cage was going to pop back into the zeitgeist in kind of a a major way and part of that was just like, he's doing, he was doing really great work and like much smaller roles. And even in the, the projects that may or may not have turned out exactly as the filmmakers or people that intended them to,

you could still see Nicholas cage delivering at like a hundred percent in those, in those, uh, in those roles. And I thought there's gotta be, there's gotta be some way to get him to come back now at the same time this guy is like a larger than life like gigantic like expressionist

personality and i thought there may maybe there isn't a better role for him than playing him i was fascinated by him i thought other people might might also be what i imagine that approaching him is very delicate on a matter like this so are you doing this typical Hollywood fare where you have to call an agent and wait for them to share the script like how does how does the union actually happen well yeah that was that was a tricky one because we had written we were like look I didn't know Nicolas Cage we never met him I didn't have a relationship with him I knew agent, but we decided that we had better write the entire script beforehand to just show him exactly what we were trying to do. Because I don't know that there's

necessarily any way to communicate your intention. And our intention was, of course, to make like a celebration of Nick's catalog of work and kind of him as a, as a human being. And we thought we got to have this thing in hand, right? So we have that and we give it to the agents. And of course, you know, the first act of your script,

when you start reading it as Nick at his lowest points and perhaps looking the worst, he's a bad dad. He's a narcissist. He's like, you know, he's getting, not getting the roles.

He's all of these things that perhaps like someone or their agents do not want to admit to anyone within that circle. And you're going, if they don't read past the first 20 pages, you know, like, you know, they might close it at that point, throw it against the wall and get, why was this given to me? And it would kind of scare an agent to be like, he's like, you know, and to his credit, Andrew Finkelstein, Nick's agent and Mike Nylon, his manager who ended up being a producer were like, Hmm, you know, this is his credit, Andrew Finkelstein, Nick's agent, and Mike Nylon, his manager, who ended up being a producer, were like, hmm, you know, this is the most terrifying thing you could do as a representative is give a client something that might offend them. So, like, they had us do a couple tweaks to certain things that, you know, we may have been a touch too sensitive. And at that point, I thought, because I came out of the independent film world, I saw what a challenge it was to actually any one of those entities, if anyone were to come on and actually back the offer, then he'd be forced to take it slightly more seriously and go, okay, this is actually a real thing. Absence of that, I thought

in my heart, it's like we have zero chance of getting this actually made. So we started that process. And one by one, the studios started coming on and saying we wanted to make the movie, which is kind of a dream scenario. We're going, oh, this is great. They were like, has Nick read it? We said, he's generally aware of it, I think. The answer was absolutely not. He hadn't read it. There's even funny things where really big, really big, like powerful producers were, were,

were wanting to produce this movie, you know, Jerry Bruckheimer and when I didn't know, and Neil Moritz, when I did and, and, and they were calling. And I think,

I think Neil had talked to Nick and said, you know, I'm so interested in producing this movie, like about you. And I think he was like some version of him. He was like, that's fantastic. Like what,

what movie, what are you talking about? You know, he hadn't seen it yet. And so eventually we, you know, we gave it, we just said,

okay, now there's a studio willing to back an offer on a piece of material that they don't control yet because they don't want to buy it. Cause there's only one actor that can do it. So we had to sign this kind of crazy deal where it was like, here's your script sale with an asterisk that if nick says no we unequivocally do not want this thing so i was like there was a lot riding on it but it was this kind of intense roller coaster and then nick was initially you know not interested

in doing it so then we i said okay if there's one thing like I learned, um, for many films, it was like, listen, you just like, don't take no for an answer. We have to figure out a way. So we wrote him this letter and I said, maybe he needs some like clarification on our intention,

but also why I think it's interesting. And, you know, so in that letter, it basically said, look, you've done every genre of movie. I think equally well,

you know, you can look at the breadth of his performances, look at Moonstruck, look at, you know, raising Arizona. Then he's like, you know you can look at the breadth of his performances look at moonstruck look at you know raising arizona then he's like you know conair face off then you know like adaptation and mandy like there's such a like wide variety of the types of movies and the types of performances he does in those movies and i said if we can pull this movie off if i can pull it off um yeah you know, you know, directorially like, you know, how exciting would that be to do all of those genres kind of within one film.

And I think anytime you say like, if we can pull it off to Nicholas Cage, he's like, Oh, I'm listening. You know, it's like a bit of a challenge. And then we said like, it's also like, you could take it like your, your, your, the narrative of who you are is litigated in public constantly like 24 hours a day with social media i love nick i hate nick i said why don't we take the reins of that uh narrative and and play with the idea of who you are and who people think you are and do it in like a large canvas it's like a big piece of performance art in a way because it's a combination of the real and fictional and i think at that

point he was like i can get i can get into this so and so he called and wanted to meet you psychologically read him appropriately and worked the system but this is sounds like a lot of work for a movie that like very well could have not happened just by one person either not agreeing or passing it along or more critically, Nick Cage just saying no. How much, how long were you working on this? How much, this was a lot of work.

It's a huge risk. This isn't, this is your life and your career. Like why, why hinge everything on these critical decisions? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think the answer to that is twofold.

One wasn't super busy at the time. Okay. A lot of people don't want to admit that, but I was looking for a bit of a rebirth or a restart of the career, a redefinition. Kevin and I, Kevin Etten and I, this is the first film that we had written together. And we thought, a very close, dear friend of mine, a producer called me and he said, guys, as a pure business decision, this is one of the stupidest things I've ever seen anyone do. There was one person,

how are you spending your time? And Kevin's going, oh my God, I got a mortgage and a son that I have to pay for. And we're going, but something about it just kept us going. We really, really, truly enjoyed writing this. We were having so much fun and we just thought this is the movie that we want to see. And're just going to charge towards this this end goal recklessly and until we can make it happen and and part of me feels like i don't know how any movie gets made without this kind of push and so part of it felt just natural to be doing it like we really truly cared as strange as that sounds about this film were you a desperate nick cage fan or were you a fan? And this is a great concept.

Like where does, what's, what's the line there? I think I'm a fan. And this is, this is a concept that like, I really bought into. And I thought this is a fascinating person.

And I liked the theoretical idea of combining the real and the fictional and not knowing exactly who someone is or what you're presenting to them, whether it's, you know, whether it's part of actual Nick Cage coming out, or whether it's part of a thing that we've created, and kind of the intersection of the two, when we'd be on set or giving them the script and talking about what, you know, real Nick Cage would feel, you know, he would always come over to me and say this, there's a guy who wears rings and leather jackets, and he lives in Las Vegas, and he would never say this i would say oh you mean you and he would say uh-huh and i'm like yeah but it's not you it's just a fictional version of you and he would say but he has my name and i'm like just say the line man please just say the line you know

we'd have this thing where it he would we would get and he would be smiling and laughing and i'd be laughing and i would i we got in these discussions a lot where I'm like listen man like I think about you more than I think you think about you at this point which is weird for both of us okay but I said I think I know what the best cage is and he would be like you can't know what the best cage is and I'm like he's like I know and I'm like no trust me man neurotic cage is the best cage and he would be like I'm and he would neurotically defend himself and he'd be like I know and i'm like no trust me man neurotic cage is the best cage and he would be like i'm and he would neurotically defend himself and he'd be like i'm not i'm not a neurotic guy and then he would he would tell me that he's very zen and calm and then we would both start laughing

and then he would go do uh either the line or a variation thereof that he had thought of so it was this very strange fun crazy process even the filmmaking. So much of this sounds like the life imitating art and art imitating life, all the way down to the movie opens with a film director and Nick having a conversation about a role. I was wondering, what was your first conversation with Cage like? I mean, was it through intermediaries? I mean, did you have a sit down breakfast and he was agreed to do the part? How did it work? Well, yeah, because Kevin and I had said, what's the worst case scenario in writing this script? breakfast and he was agreed to do the part like how did it work well yeah because you know kevin and i had said what's the worst case scenario in writing this script and we said well i mean if we

get lunch with nicholas cage i think that would be an acceptable outcome right i mean it's obviously not the best outcome but i just want i what we're like yeah let's we could have a salad with nicholas cage and that's a weird story that we could tell our friends and that would be cool so we did uh and we went down to the pacific dining car okay downtown rest in peace pacific the dining car which is a place that he chose and we got there and we meet him and he's dressed you know just in jeans and a t-shirt and he comes over and he says it's a very nick thing he said this is where humphrey bogart would come and have a martini when he didn't get a role which like is there a role that Humphrey Bogart didn't get like at that time I don't know it doesn't seem like it but like lure the Hollywood lure in the story uh for Nick uh you know and the sort of

nostalgia for old Hollywood and his reverence for these ideas like came across like in that one sentence true or not it doesn't really matter I hope it's true um and so we sat down and you know it was a very strange meeting because we'd been thinking about this person and a lot of our research and trying to like understand the cadence of how he speaks and was just looking at interviews and looking at reading interviews things that he said and trying to capture those and put them into the script so it's really kind of surreal to be sitting there with this guy who ended up uh not being the wild and crazy like nicholas cage you think about he ended up being this like really sensitive kind of thoughtful human being who was really just interested in whether or not our intention was to sort of make fun of him or you

know take the piss in some way out of like his body of work. And I think when he understood that, no, we were trying to do two things. One, have a movie that works on its own, just in the way in its construction, but also have something that, you know, was really a celebration of the types of performances that he had done. And when he understood that, it started the process of him trusting us, which went all the way through the edit and had to grow across the entire time. And I think it takes a tremendous amount of balls for an actor like that and bravery to be like, here's the warts and all performance. Here's the vulnerable part of me. Here's the

narcissistic side of myself and bring those things out and then trust a filmmaker like me without really any track record that he could stand and go it's not like i'm spike jones or the coen brothers if you're like trust me i got this it's gonna be interesting he decided to trust me and that that was you know and once he dove in that pool he just he stayed there and and swam around with me to the end it's such a fascinating risk by by both of you obviously this isn't the real nick Cage that you're putting on screen there are parts of his personal life that are fabricated obviously the premise is ridiculous

but when you're both when you're constructing the story and when you're directing him how much of what you're getting from him and he's getting from you is I would never do this you know like how like the actual documentary life of Nicolas Cage colliding with the creation that

you guys have put together like is there often friction there how does it work yeah i there was friction i think it was you know it makes you really nervous because you're writing something you're like well this is funny he's doing this narcissistic thing to ruin his daughter's birthday party and then you know you put it out there and people laugh at it and Nick says, okay, I'm going to do it. And then, um, when you get to set that day and you set up all your cameras and you set the whole, and there's lots of people around and that particular scene, let's, let's say he actually has to do that thing, but he's doing it as Nick cage and you're going, is the audience going to think this is exactly what I would do, uh,

get drunk and make it all about me and do something like truly terrible to my daughter i mean he doesn't have a daughter in real life but you're going they don't necessarily know that so i think it became like a raw very vulnerable uh thing for him to do in those instances where he was asked to talk about things that were pretty uncomfortable um and do them as you know quote unquote nick cage so you know, quote unquote, Nick Cage. So, you know, that, that what starts as a fun idea quickly becomes a like, Oh, I like, I need, we really need to talk about this. And those I think were for me the most interesting, but also the most difficult parts of the film and trying to decide which level

we could actually push it to. The other thing about the movie is that it isn't just this character study of an actor at a crossroads. It's also kind of an adventure action movie and you're blending tones like crazy. You know, how do you balance something like that, especially since you haven't done that before? Because this seems like a really challenging kind of tone to maintain. Yeah, it was.

And for me me that was the biggest challenge um it was challenged for kevin and i's writers uh to try to make it feel somewhat seamless but then you know each time we jump genre you know kind of starts as an indie character piece and then becomes a buddy movie and then slowly morphs into like a thriller and an action movie and you know there's slapstick elements in there and then there's so we had to use like in in a real way all of the tools that were available to us that filmmakers ordinarily use to control tone but think about how important music becomes in this thing because like the music has to also well you never want it to lead you it has to make that transition feel somewhat seamless so the music starts as kind of music

from a comedy, maybe an indie comedy that's piano-based. And then we were able to transition that into some orchestral scores. It becomes a little bigger. And that was really, truly the most difficult part of this process. But I said, if the actors took it very seriously from moment one and acted like they were in a drama and let the situation sort of guide people's like ability to laugh um then we might have a shot of having a a through line or a backbone that made the tone um tone work you know you mentioned you come from indie filmmaking and that this movie is a huge risk there's also not a ton of movies like this being made these days this is you know i guess there is ip at the center of it in Nick Cage himself.

But generally speaking, original story, pretty wild. Seems like it wasn't a cheap movie to make given some of the set pieces. Was it really hard to actually compel people to finance the movie and now to promote the movie? And like, does it seem significantly more difficult than you imagined? You know, I think what's interesting about this is, you know, we had this general sense that as Kevin and I talked and we said, are you a big Nicolas Cage fan? He said, I'm a big Nicolas Cage fan. They see this kind of like authentic character who does whatever he wants, never touch performances.

And as we talked to friends of ours and expanded the circle, we started to see people go, oh my God, I love him. I loved him in X, Y, Z. And as that circle grew larger, we'd written the script and put it out to the studios. And Lionsgate had come on and there were a bunch of studios that wanted to make it, but they came on and they said, we feel the exact same way about him and about this. And they're like, I'm not sure, but I think part of a studio green light process is, can we market this movie to people? And I think they just saw the inherent opportunity and creating kind of really cool, interesting, different marketing that might have a shot of breaking through. And the movie doesn't really feel like many other things.

And I think to them, to their credit, they really got that opportunity, which I think they've done a great job with and had a sense of what the movie could be from the start. And so once they bought in, once they read the script, they were pretty committed to helping us achieve this thing. You said you wanted to have a kind of creative rebirth. What does that mean? What does that look like? Is it the kinds of movies that you're making, the kind of work that

you're doing? There's not a lot of movies to compare this one specifically to. So what do you mean by that? Well, I think at the time I met Kevin, I created this television show called Ghosted, which is on Fox. And I sort of see that as my film school period. And I hired Kevin to be the showrunner and we did all the episodes together. And that was where we met. I didn't know him before that. And so as we were rewriting all these episodes, the script to screen time is super short. We're writing all these scripts, we shoot them, and we had the ability to do all different

kinds of action comedy stuff, whatever we wanted, and then edit them and put them out they had to go out immediately and i thought the idea of doing this over and over again like gave me sort of confidence in the tools i thought to direct another film my first film i really didn't know what i was doing and i sort of got in there and and it felt like student film to me so you know, like Kevin and I were kind of thinking like we didn't have like a great time making network television. We weren't having the best time. We thought, is this really what we want to be doing? And I think you have these moments every few years in your career, we're going like, who am I or who do I want to be as like a creative person? Like, I don't feel like I'm on the right path. And so Kevin said, you know what,

I'm feeling the same way. And so we decided to take as much time off as we could. It afforded us that opportunity. It bought me some time to not have to do anything else. Not enough time, of course, but to basically say, all right, let's do something that we hope defines us as like creative people. And this was what we came up with, uh, I guess, which worked out. I mean, I guess it would have been a disaster.

We could be not sitting here, uh, talking about me talking to my friends about what a missed opportunity. Well, the track is interesting, right? Cause you, you made that awkward moment in 2014 and then you have this long stretch where you're working on this series,

and then this film. That's an eight-year gap between two films. Is your intention now to make only movies? Do you want to make another TV show? What is the reset? I think Kevin and I are interested in both. We have an interesting partnership because he comes from a show running background. So I like directing and being the director but he's also super involved

in the editorial process and we're interested in television and i think it's just the right idea and it's just about finding something that fits our sensibility we both i think feel and we've discussed this that the the sum is greater than the parts and you know writing on your own for for us we both did it for a lot of years and it can be like a lonely kind of like not great existence and i think we had so much fun collaborating on this both you know on the script on set and yet and editorial suite but i think we're going to continue down that path but we're sort of you know medium agnostic it doesn't have to be films it could be certainly we're going to continue down that path but we're sort of you know medium agnostic it doesn't have to be films it could be certainly we're interested in television so many great things

are happening there i'd be remiss if i didn't ask you what's your favorite nick cage performance you know barring the movie that you made with him uh yes i okay there's two and they're like neck and neck but they're i hold them very dear to my heart. Raising Arizona and Adaptation are two performances that are wildly different. One is just this hyperbolic, almost cartoonish in a good way, comedic performance that has a tremendous amount of power in Raising Arizona. That movie is incredible. I've revisited it a number of times. On the other side, you have adaptation and you're going, it's just this like very small, nuanced, detailed, like stripped away

real performance and it's split in two and he's playing both these roles. And I just think like, it's an illustration of really the versatility of Nicolas Cage as an actor and the sort of way that he approaches things. Just that's so story dependent. And I just think it's kind of fascinating and remarkable. That's part of what makes your movie so fun is that you're kind of asking for all of those versions of him, you know, and even the younger version of him. It's really, it's an incredible outcome. Well, good.

I'm happy you feel that way. That's the big challenge for us. Tom, we end every episode of this show by asking filmmakers, what's the last great thing they've seen? Have you seen any good movies or TV or anything you want to recommend? Oh, the last, I mean, I can tell you what I'm excited to see that I haven't been able to see it because we've been finishing this film is everything everywhere all at once premiered at South by Southwest at the same time. And I have not had the time to see it yet, but I'm so excited about it. And I'm just like,

you know, these like fascinating ideas that people have about like, you know, and, and, and I've heard that it's a nice analog to this film where it's, where it's got jumping genres and, and as like a meta narrative.

And I don't, I'm just so excited about that. I can confirm it's, it's amazing. And that would be a really fun double feature, unbearable weight. And I don't know, I'm just so excited about that. I can confirm it's amazing. And that would be a really fun double feature, Unbearable Wave. So, hey, congrats. Thanks for doing the show. Really appreciate it, Tom.

Thank you very much for having me. I really do appreciate it. Thank you to Tom Gormekin. Thank you, of course, to Adam Naiman for his insights on this episode. Thanks to Bobby Wagner for his production work on this episode. Please stay tuned to The Big Picture

because later this week, we are in fact talking about a new Sam Raimi movie. I'm talking, of course, about Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. We'll see you then.