The Big Picture - The 10 Best Horror Movies of the Decade | The Big Picture

Episode Date: October 25, 2019

The '10s are nearly over, and horror has been one of the decade's most dominant genres. Chris Ryan teams up with Sean to break down the very best the genre has had to offer and where it's going in the coming decades (2:08). Then, Sean is joined by screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski to talk about their new, Eddie Murphy–starring film, 'Dolemite Is My Name,' and their long history capturing what they call "the fringe history of America" in their screenplays (52:21). Host: Sean Fennessey Guests: Chris Ryan, Scott Alexander, and Larry Karaszewski Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, welcome to the Ringer Podcast Network. Coming this Tuesday is the Ringer's third annual NBA Palooza, celebrating the tip-off of the 2019-2020 NBA season. Make sure you're subscribed to the Ringer's YouTube channel so you don't miss our day-long live stream, including the premiere of the new season of NBA Desktop, the fourth installment of our Take Hunter series with a surprise twist, the unveiling of the Bill Simmons' Lakers wine bottle team, and a live Ryan Russillo podcast to go along with so much more. Again, you can check all that out at youtube.com slash The Ringer. I'm Sean Fennessey and this is The Big Picture,

a conversation show about horror movies. I am joined by the horror sommelier, Chris Ryan. What up, Chris? This one has a bloody finish, but it has incredible notes of terror. Chris, you've been invited here, obviously, because you love horror movies. I do. And it's Halloween time. And so what I need you to do is give us some recommendations, not just for some pretty good horror movies, not just some interesting horror movies.

I want to hear from you the best horror movies of the decade. Yes. So we're going to do this in a two-part way. Yeah. You're going to fire away with the finely crafted, beautifully made, special to Chris Ryan flavors. And then after that, I'm going to go through year by year and talk about from each year what my favorite horror movie is. Right. So we're basically

giving people two lists. There might be some overlap. Yes. I like a little two-parter in this way. Yeah. Later in the show, I'll have a conversation with the incredibly entertaining screenwriters, Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski. They have a new film hitting Netflix today called Dolomite Is My Name, starring Eddie Murphy, about the wonderful Rudy Ray Moore. Before we get there, horror movies in 2019. Talk about that a lot on this show. I think last year was a crazy kind of breakout in the aftermath of Get Out for horror. There was Hereditary, and there was A Quiet Place, and there was, you know, the It franchise is really off and running, and who knows, maybe there'll be a third movie. But this year, it feels like it's come down a little bit. I want to get a sense from you of

what you think has happened to the genre over the last 10 years or so and what new shapes it's taken. Yeah, I think that there has been a little bit of a drift towards, as horror has obviously made itself into kind of a goldmine. You can make it at a really affordable price point. And it seems like the floor box office-wise is pretty high. It does seem like that was intoxicating enough that now there's a lot of prestige horror. There's a lot of horror that's masquerading. It's really blockbuster, but they're saying it's horror. When you watch It, there are some scary moments, but it's essentially a big CGI movie star epic rather than this is a really cool Stephen King thing. I think there's a couple of reasons for that.

One, there's like a cyclical nature. Different people are like, you know, didn't have movies this year. Two, I think that there is an interest from streaming television and horror a little bit more. So you see things like Into the Dark on Hulu, Castle Rock, which I think ordinarily might have been like two or three different movies within the bounds of Castle Rock is now on Hulu. I know Blumhouse is working on a bunch of different television products, not necessarily all horror, but I do think that some of the content is being spread around to different platforms. So it's hard to say for any definitive reason why it might be like a down

year for horror. I will say also, I often come on and I'm like, oh, me and my wife watched this weird indie horror movie on iTunes. And I haven't seen as many of those, even though I have still been checking. I would say last year, I probably watched 15 or 20 on iTunes that I really liked. And this year, it's more like five. And I feel like I've seen more things like more thrillers, more genre pieces, like crime movies than I have horror movies. What accounts for that? I don't know. I mean, I think that there's something to be said

for the fact that you had a generation of directors who kind of came out of that VHS era of like people who were maybe ordinarily, 15 years ago might've been more like mumblecore directors. They might've been making sort of more small domestic dramas and comedies and trying their hands at horror because they could get those horror movies made.

And I wonder whether or not those people have moved on to different things or in some cases are making movies for Netflix or making shows for Netflix and are kind of dispersed throughout the industry rather than simply like putting out a horror movie every 18 to 24 months. Yeah, I think I see three different lanes that have developed in the horror genre over the last 10 years. One is what you're talking about, which was sort of known as mumble gore. That was kind of the offshoot of the mumblecore movement, which was guys like Ty West who were making kind of really down and dirty and kind of chattery movies like that. The other was Blumhouse, which you mentioned, which was really quick, cheap and dirty and very high concept and very smartly

executed movies that maybe even featured movie stars, but were made for $5 million or less. And then the third was that blockbuster thing that you're talking about. It was like, you know what, John Krasinski is in a horror movie now. Or Get Out features one of the best supporting cast you'll ever see in a horror movie with, you know, Catherine Keener and Bradley Whitford and all these really great actors. And I feel like they're starting to converge a little bit and becoming sort of the same thing. And I don't really know where that leaves the genre. You know, I feel like 15 years ago,

we had a kind of a found footage moment. We had a haunted house moment. That haunted house moment has kind of evolved into the 2010s with movies like Conjuring and Insidious and stuff like that. But I don't have a clear sense of where we're going. So I have a theory about what this decade has sort of been for me. When I look back on this list of the best horror movies of the decade, and I was sort of putting together my top five, it occurred to me that this was really a decade where visually horror movies became very self-reflexive.

Obviously, with Scream and those kinds of 90s tongue-in-cheek movies, you had a certain self-awareness about the tropes of horror movies and sort of the conventions of, you know, Final Girl. And I think that culminates with Cabin in the Woods. But visually, I think the dominating kind of idea was this like return to Carpenter, return to the 80s and the horror movies that sort of shaped the minds of a generation of filmmakers from that 79 to 85 era was slasher films. And, you know, that was prevalent with like the use of synthesizers and a lot of soundtracks for these movies. The camera work felt very Halloween, very like empty, open, suburban spaces where there was just something not right. And I wonder whether or not we've kind of reached a logical end to that self-referentiality or at least that kind of paying homage to the early 80s masters. And now we're kind of like feeling around in the dark for something new. Yeah, I think there's two different kinds of filmmakers, too, that are exploring this space. You know, this year we had Midsommar.

That's Ari Aster's second feature film. I'll be surprised if his next movie resembles a horror movie at all. Robert Eggers, who made The Witch, just put out The Lighthouse, which is kind of phantasmagoric, but is not really a horror movie. Even Jordan Peele with Us, I didn't really think of Us as a horror movie, more so as a super high concept thriller. And I feel like that's the direction he's sort of moving in. They're all kind of Hitchcockian or Bergmanian. They're using horror as a portal to make the kind of stuff that they want. They're not the John Carpenter.

I am firmly in the genre of horror or science fiction for the rest of my career. Now, there are still, I think, Andychietti who made the it movies and mama. And I think particularly Mike Flanagan, who's kind of an interesting person to talk about on this episode, who has Dr. Sleep, the shining sequel coming later. And did Haunting of Hill House and has another Haunting of show on Netflix coming,

I think probably next year and did Ouija too, which was, I loved, which is a Blumhouse movie. Yeah. Probably the fastest rising big ticket horror movie director around. Like one of the few horror auteurs who's like, I make horror, you know? Yes. Very clearly. He, he's more, he seems more closely aligned with,

I don't know, like the way that Guillermo del Toro is related to fantasy. He's related to horror, where it's sort of like, it's a, it's a commentary on what's come before, but it's also its own unique world that he's trying to build and its own unique tone and its own unique look. But I am at a little bit of a loss for where the genre goes because I think in part, it, A Quiet Place, Get Out being three of the highest grossing R-rated movies of all time, three of the highest grossing horror movies of all time. They might be one, two, and three, actually. I'm not sure, pre-adjusted for inflation. I feel like there's dollar signs in studios' eyes about the genre, and that's usually a bad sign. Yeah. These are supposed to be

movies that get made with... The fewer notes on horror movies, the better. I feel like the fewer, less interference. I feel like it too kind of suffered from that. It was clearly a matter of, you're going to put all these movie stars in this movie and there's going to have to be service to those movie stars. And you're going to have to service the idea that this is a huge property rather than just like, boy, we really caught people unaware with that first one. They didn't think it was going to be that good. And I think that had a lot to do with what the word of mouth was, is people coming out of that first weekend and be like, dude, you should go see it. It's really good. Yeah. I think that was even true for the Halloween

revival. And I wonder if there will just be significantly less interest in the second Halloween revival movie coming out next year. It's very hard to say when it comes to that sort of thing. What about for you personally? What are you looking for now in a horror movie when you were putting your list together? Well, one of the things that is interesting, you mentioned that whether or not Us is a horror or a thriller, I think that that's a really interesting conversation about genre definition. And I can't quite put my finger on what it is. I have a couple of things here that you could call a thriller, but I think that there is a certain concentration on visceral reaction and a reliance on eliciting a response from

the audience that is to put them in a place of almost panic and put them in a place of anxiety and fear. And, you know, I wouldn't even say all of these movies are rewatchable, but the experience of watching them was very memorable. But there's a couple here that I was like, you know, this is on the line between a thriller and a horror movie. What do you think is the difference? I tend to think there has to be something either supernatural or extraordinarily visceral about the movie to qualify. So Texas Chainsaw Massacre is not supernatural, but it is incredibly gory and violent. And likewise,

a movie like The Innocents, the 1960s film, is not gory at all, really. It's mostly just sort of a creaking house movie, but it is ghostly. And both of those things qualify. When we get into the realm of just there's someone, there's a murderer tracking a potential victim for long stretches of time, but no genuine acts of violence, just the sense of fear. I don't think fear alone qualifies for horror. I think that there are some stylistic and plot-driven tropes that you have to execute. Yeah, I think also, ultimately, it comes down to extremity. You know what I mean?

And we've talked about this before. I remember we were sitting down in a very comfortable movie theater to go see Midsommar. Hilarious. And I think, you know, without having seen the movie, but now I would say, like,

our basic dialogue with one another was Ari Aster stuffed me in a fucking bear carcass and played Johnny Greenwood strings until my eardrums explode. You want to be dominated by a horror movie. Nobody goes to horror movies for, oh, that was subtly unnerving. I mean, there are some of those that work, but the ones that I really react to are the ones where I realize I've scratched my forearm or I realized like my popcorn box exploded because I was squeezing it so hard.

Yeah, that's a much smarter emotional definition. I think I've said this before on this show, but I think I'm pretty dead inside and very cynical. And so if you can get me to feel something in a movie theater, even if I'm being deeply manipulated, then I'm sort of impressed by that and it'll get me to react in a deeper way. And it's not necessarily I want to be cynically pushed around. You a deeper way yeah and it's not necessarily i want to be cynically pushed around you know i don't it's not jump scares necessarily it's more like

impending dread that is more powerful i think that the you know me you and bill simmons have talked quite a bit about the conjuring franchise and kind of how important that is to movies in general i don't think that the conjuring 2 is one of the greatest horror movies ever made necessarily but i can remember that experience that you're describing of seeing that movie and kind of like my arms tightening against my chest and the kind of the indescribable feeling of pain that is never delivered that a movie like that gives you. So I guess that probably fits into the mold too a little bit. But sometimes you get that feeling in a movie like Seven,

which I would say is a thriller. It fits some of the parameters I'm describing, but it's not horror really. If you want to get into my list, I think that there's like some good examples here to kind of tease out what we're talking about. Let's do it. How do you want to do it? You want to deliver it chronologically?

I'll do five to one. I'll do five to one and I won't belabor these because I think that almost in some cases, if you haven't seen these, the less said about certain plot points, the better. And I don't think that I picked very hugely popular movies here. So the first one that I wanted to do

is a movie that I've only seen once. It's called Unfriended. It came out in 2015, I believe. And I think it's only really a movie you can see once. And once you understand the premise, which is essentially it's a horror film that takes place on people's computer screens. So it's a group of friends who are gathering

on like a Skype call, essentially like a group chat call a year after the death of a person they went to high school with. And I believe high school, it might've been college, but I'm pretty sure it's high school. And essentially, this person was shamed into a suicide. The person was filmed at a party and filmed being drunk and soiling themselves.

And the backlash that they experienced online was so bad that they committed suicide. And now this person's ghost is haunting these people because according to the ghost, one of these people was the person who uploaded the video in the first place and led to her death. It is probably the most exhausting movie I've seen this decade in terms of what I didn't have any expectations for it. I thought it was like a cool premise, but it also, it just grabs you about the second it starts. You're like, oh, I understand what's

going on here. And almost in a disturbing way that your brain can process four quadrants of information and can actually listen to people while also watching a mouse clicking over different apps. But the way in which it's essentially just like an Agatha Christie novel, but played out in this hyperdrive internet driven way. And it shows about basically the interconnectivity of social media, our reliance on these apps to stay connected to one another, interface with one another. It's just an incredible piece of filmmaking, even if it's one that you're like, I don't need to revisit that and study it like it's Jaws. Yeah. You can see that it's in

that Blumhouse mold that I was describing. Cheaply made, high concept. Very successful. Made a lot of money on a small budget. Yeah. But it is, it also gives you that Titan chest feeling that we're describing. And it's, it's very, very clever.

And it's also, I think it's one of the first horror movies that felt truly modern in this decade. It could not have been made in any other decade

but this one. It's tabs horror. The tech, yeah. Too many tabs. And the tech is still like, oh, that's the old

iMessage interface and there's a few things that you're like, I don't even, it doesn't even occur to me anymore that this would be like that. But, you know, I think they did a really nice job casting pretty charismatic actors who nobody knew of. So it wasn't like there's no. Have those people done anything since then? Probably TV stuff, but I don't remember. I don't remember seeing any of them since then. So number five would be Unfriended. That's a very good one. Is that the only Blumhouse movie on your list? Yes, I believe so. Yeah. Interesting. Do you see that as sort of the memorialization of what they were able to accomplish in the last 10 years? I definitely think that that's... The two things that I always think about with them are little things like this, where they're like, here,

let's spend a million dollars on something. And the profit margin is like $25 million. And you never know what you're going to get with them. But we give younger filmmakers pretty much carte blanche within that budget. And the other one is the, we'll have Kevin Bacon star in this or Ethan Hawke star in this movie like Sinister. And there will be profit participation for them probably. And it really works for them financially to do it. And by that same token, they can do a lot of stuff in these kinds of movies that they might not be able to in a Marvel movie. So if this is your last Blumhouse movie, that means The Purge is not on your list. That means Happy Death Day. I think a movie we both

like. Very much so. Not on your list. Does that mean Get Out is not on your list? Get Out is not on my list. My Lord. The Visit, not on your list. Nope. I Am Night Shyamalan. Insidious, no. No. Sinister, no. No. Halloween, no. No. Okay, so those are some of the really heavy hitters

for the last 10 years. Yeah, I didn't really pick horror movies that I thought were events. I picked horror movies that freaked me out and that I loved. Interesting. So this is, I wouldn't necessarily call this like Chris Ryan's bulletproof undefeated top five

that you can- Shit, we're going to need to rewrite the SEO on that. Log off the internet if you don't agree. call this like Chris Ryan's bulletproof undefeated top five that you can shit we're gonna need to rewrite the SEO on that log off the internet if you don't if you don't agree Bobby we need a new title

um the number four one yeah go ahead you're next yeah I love this movie I think Adam Wingard it's there's an argument to me

that Adam Wingard is at least the most consistent art director of the decade I'll take some issue with this but it's an interesting idea. Adam Wingard, former guest on this show. Yes.

Let's talk. Tell us about him. So your next, I believe, comes out in 11 or 12, made for a million dollars, is basically The Strangers on Steroids. It's a bunch of pretty shitty people gathering for a family reunion.

They all hate each other. And a guy goes to the window and he hears a weird creaking noise outside and gets shot in the eye with an arrow. And then they basically are trapped inside of this upstate mansion being terrorized by people wearing stuffed animal masks

and running all over. There's a bunch of twists. Amy Simons is in there. I think Joe Swanberg is in this movie. He certainly is. This is what you were talking about, the mumble gore. This is sort of an extension of that a little bit. I think that it's a bunch of people who ordinarily would be in two, uh, late twenties artists trying to find love in New York city. They're like, fuck this. We're going to make a horror movie. And it's really balls to the wall. It's really gory. It's very funny, but it's really, really, really dedicated to what's the craziest things

that could happen if we trap these people in a house. So Wingard is interesting. That person that you described getting an arrow in the face was the aforementioned Ty West, who is a part of a cohort of filmmakers who came up around that same time along with Joe Swanberg. Yeah. And if you're curious to see them all at work, I think VHS, the anthology has got features work from a lot of these guys. Yeah. And the matriarch of the family portrayed in the movie is Barbara Crampton, very famous 80s scream queen and is kind of legendary in the horror genre. Wingard is simultaneously the most creative and somehow most disappointing auteur of this movement to me. Okay. So you're next in the guest,

I think are unequivocally like very good movies. Yes. And then I, I am. The guest immediately follows your next. Yes. And I think when the guest comes out, people are like,

dude, this guy's for real. I was like, is this James Cameron? Yeah. I was really, really excited about him. I think we saw the guest together.

And I think, yeah. And it was a little bit more like Terminator one that, and then I think we expected, but still really awesome. Micah Monroe's in that with Dan Stevens. And then, I'm not sure what comes in between, but he eventually, this is one of

my favorite little wrinkles of the last decade is the attempted surprise release. And so he does this movie called The Woods, which for months is like Adam Wingard's making this haunted forest movie. It's called The Woods. Nobody knows what it's about.

Nobody wants, and it turns out it's a Blair Witch reboot or a Blair Witch sequel really. And, um, it is, I don't think good, but the last 30 minutes of Blair Witch is the most scared I think I may have ever been in a movie theater.

Oh my gosh. It's fucking terrifying. It's essentially, is that on your list? No, I'm just saying, cause it's, it's just the sequence. I'm just, it's the movie theater. Oh my gosh. It's fucking terrifying. It's essentially. Is that on your list? No, but I'm just saying, cause it's, it's just the sequence.

I'm just, it's the same thing. There's a, there's a part of exorcist three that is scarier than any other moment in the exorcist trilogy. But I wouldn't say exorcist three is better than exorcist. We should do an exorcist three pot at some point. That's a fascinating movie.

George C. Scott, just playing with house money. Balls to the wall. Just like with the, like just undoing the Oreos like Malkovich the entire time. But just playing with house money. Balls to the wall. Just like with the like just undoing the Oreos like Malkovich the entire time.

But yeah, Blair Witch and then he does Death Note and I think he's working on a Godzilla movie now. So next spring, Godzilla versus King Kong is coming out.

He was here for Death Note. Right. Which is an adaptation of a famous Japanese series that I just didn't think was successful.

Right. And it was like kind of an early Netflix original that I just didn't think was successful and it was like kind of an early Netflix original that had some cool ideas and some cool visual wrinkles in it yes

great Willem Dafoe performance as sort of the the big bad of the movie yeah he's like the fairy or something like that right but it didn't

totally work Blair Witch I couldn't connect with it yes I'm being totally honest the movie that got my attention I like how sincerely you're trying to reason.

You're like, yeah, that Blair Witch sequel. It just emotionally didn't resonate with me, but I appreciate that. I'm Cisco and you're Ebert in this situation, I guess. Have you seen A Horrible Way to Die? His like breakthrough film? I think so. Okay.

For those of you who have not seen it, possibly one of the most fucked movies of all time, but absolutely riveting featuring your girl amy simons and also written by simon barrett who wrote the guest who i believe wrote your next as well and their sort of trilogy of movies i find to be incredibly um fascinating well-made rigorous but also kind of nodding to the genres that have come before it the landmarks that have come before it he's landmarks that have come before it. He's an interesting guy.

So that's number four for you. That's right. What's number three? Three and two, I had a pretty hard time separating, and I flip-flopped a lot. And to be fair, I think I flip-flopped a lot with one, two, and three, but just for the sake of putting these all in order, I'm going to do it, is The Invitation.

Yeah, this is a great movie. Yeah, it's Kareem Kusama's, I believe it was 2015 film. And one of the things that I think this and one other movie on this list share is that for different horror films, you may have a deeper connection or a different kind of connection with the film, depending on how the setup maybe lands with you or quite candidly, like whether or not it resonates. And as a veteran of very many Los Angeles dinner parties, Corinne Krasomachis gets this motif right. She gets this setting totally right

of you're with your significant other, you're going up, you have some trepidation, some social anxiety for whatever reasons. Obviously, this movie, there's a lot more melodramatic stuff. There's a dead child and a breakup involved. But the way that she kind of calibrates it

makes everything that happens. I honestly think that this is, it's not in the same necessarily level of importance as Rosemary's Baby, but that's the movie that I would compare it to in terms of this is a relatively realistic situation

that just keeps getting altered more and more until the end when it's absolutely pandemonium. So, Rosemary's Baby is about Satan raping a woman who then gives birth to Satan's son. But for most of it, it's about an apartment building. Right. And it's about weird neighbors. The invitation is, is it horror? That's a great question.

I think the claustrophobic nature that they can't get out of the house, to me, makes it horror. Okay. I think the way that the house becomes this prison, and it's sort of metaphorical, and then especially the twist at the end, it becomes much more of a horror kind of situation rather than just like a psychological thriller. Because horror, I think, requires this degree of suspension of disbelief. And what you wind up doing is there's multiple times in the invitation where you can say,

okay, but they would have left at this point. Or okay, but somebody gets on the phone here. Or okay, like he's allowed to wander through the house, but they can't do this or that. And I thought that that's what qualified it. There's a degree to which the emphasis is so put on these people are trapped together. How many dinner parties in Los Angeles have you attended in which you felt like the Logan Marshall Green character from this movie? Where you felt like everything that's happening around me is not right.

Well, one of my favorite parts about this movie is that Logan Marshall Green and Michael Wiesman play Spider-Man hot guy meme. Like it's like hot guys, but Spider-Man pointing at each other. Yes, they are. I think I actually, when I rewatched this, I was like, I always thought Logan Marshall Green or Michael Wiesman was in this movie. Not both. And like there's times when they're looking

at each other and it's just like I can hear Mallory Rubin crying because it's just two smoking hot bearded guys yeah but it's one guy who's Tencent Tom Hardy and one guy who's

Tencent Bradley Cooper like it's amazing that they're both the knockoff version of a more popular actor in Hollywood I think originally the people in this movie

were supposed to be Zachary Quinto and Topher Grace oh interesting I actually would have enjoyed that energy who's who though I'm not sure I'm energy a lot. Who's who, though? I'm not sure. I'm not sure who was cast as who.

But this is just a phenomenal movie. I thought that the way that she shot this house, the way that the set design works, it's just very knowing of its location and setting and it's really disturbing. It's a great pick.

Also features maybe the single most satisfying final shot to me. The red light. Yes. Yeah. It's amazing. All right. So number two, I'm going to go with a movie that I think is straight up horror and it is It Follows. So David Robert Mitchell's breakthrough movie starring Michael Monroe. And I love this movie because of some of the things I was talking about. If David Robert Mitchell happens to be listening to the big picture, I apologize for comparing this to John Carpenter because when I read interviews with you during it follows, you seemed annoyed that people kept bringing up John Carpenter. Let me just stop you there. If David Robert Mitchell is listening and I hope that he is, I would like to say one under

the Silver Lake masterpiece to come on the show and talk about it. I'd like you to come on the show and talk about this movie that I really like. Maybe I can bait him. That is misunderstood. Should I bait him? Yes, let's bait him. We'll add him.

We'll openly, aggressively bully him. It worked for Ennis Cantor on desktop. That's so true. Maybe we should be doing that for all guests going forward. Yeah.

Nevertheless, it follows, I agree, completely borderline masterpiece horror movie. Keep talking. Probably the most satisfying movie on this list for me. When it started, I was like, I hope this movie never ends. This sort of vision of a post-industrial dystopian Detroit where there's nobody there except for Micah Monroe and her six friends. And they're driving around

in these beat up classic cars. And most horror movies from the 80s and 90s, the ones that we grew up with, sexuality is a sin punishable by death anybody who has sex in a horror movie is is just the first person to die and it's the virtuous final girl who makes it to the end and this sort of inverts that but it also it talks a lot about um the pain of secrecy i think and like the pain of believability um it's pretty prescient movie in a lot of ways in terms of what would come in the years to come in terms of like Me Too and the idea of believing women,

the idea of believing victims, because a lot of the stuff that happens in this movie is just basically like people, it's basically Micah Monroe, her character Jay is cursed because she's had sexual intercourse and she's literally cursed in this movie. People have talked about this being a parable for STDs.

I don't think it's, I think it's a nightmare movie. And that's what makes it a horror movie aside from the obvious, there's just straight up some amazing jump scares in this. Incredible soundtrack, beautiful cinematography, just pound for pound, probably the best made movie on this list. Interesting.

And a real rewatchable horror movie. So are you surprised that Under the Silver Lake was his next film? Because his previous film, The Myth of the American Sleepover, is not horror at all, but does have a lot in common with It Follows in terms of its sort of atmosphere,

the way that it uses young actors and actresses to portray a kind of ennui and terror at the same time. Under the Silver Lake is a much different kind of movie with a much different kind of energy, more of a detective movie, more of like a hipster examination of paranoia and looking for coded messages. It actually seems to be more of an internet movie

in a lot of ways, a very modern kind of thing. It follows to me, feels like something that I know you always respond to you and your wife always respond to which is kind of like take me back to 1986

when teenagers are hanging out you know that's like a feeling that it evokes for you are you surprised with kind of the direction he's moved in? Well I think a lot of

these directors I mean you talked about Eggers I mean even Corinne Kuzma like because she directed Destroyer after Invitation

I think that there is like a real tension in being defined Corinne Kuzma, like, because she directed Destroyer after Invitation, I think that there is like a real tension in being defined as a horror director and staying in that genre. And I don't know that there's a lot of directors who are lifelong

horror directors. You know, Wes Craven, I mean, that's not a bad career to have for sure. Perhaps you've not seen The Music of My Heart

or whatever that Meryl Streep movie he made was. That's right. Wes Craven always had a very complicated relationship to horror. He didn't want to be known strictly as a horror maestro. Perhaps you've not seen The Music of My Heart or whatever that Meryl Streep movie he made was. Yeah. That's right. Wes Craven always had a very complicated relationship to horror. He didn't want to be known strictly as a horror maestro. So you don't see a lot of people who are like, I'm content being the master of horror.

So I think that pulling away is pretty natural. Okay. Number one. So number one, I think there will probably be some disagreement about whether this is a horror movie. But if it's considered a horror movie, it's the scariest. One of the scariest movies I've ever seen. It's Green Room. I'll just say, I do not think of this as a horror movie necessarily.

Yeah. But I'm ready for your case. So Green Room, while the characters are very interesting and I think it's got an absolutely phenomenal ensemble. It's directed by Jeremy Saulnier, who I think most people would know him from,

honestly, from his True Detective work, because that's probably when his name got thrown around the most. But this was sort of his, it's his follow-up to Blue Ruin, which was this micro-budgeted thriller that was set in, I think, North Carolina. Incredible movie.

And it's an incredible, incredible movie. But Green Room was almost like his like mainstream debut it's got patrick stewart and anton yelchin and alia shawkat is in an image and poots and uh the setup for it in case you don't know is um anton yelchin and his friends are in a punk rock band touring the northwest and they are playing a bar at a town which uh you know unfortunately is not uncommon in the punk rock circles or at least it wasn't back in the late 1990s when I was around there more, where you would get some pretty unsavory characters like white power guys hanging around in punk rock circles.

And it perfectly captures the desperation and anxiety of being on the road in that way. So these guys are just basically traveling around in a van, playing their shows at these really shitty clubs and bars. They go play this in this rural bar out in Oregon. And it turns out, I think it's Oregon, and it turns out to be a white power group's hangout bar, like a white power gang.

Sort of an enclave. Yeah. And that white power gang is led by Jean-Luc Picard, who puts in just like a straight up Hannibal Lecter performance. Purely menacing. Unbelievable performance from him. Yes. And the setup is they witness a murder and are stuck in this club

and are being attacked by white power punk rockers. And it's fucking terrifying. Now, it is, I think, by the letter of the law, a thriller. But what I was saying earlier is the idea is that the entire investigation the entire movie is about desperation intention it's not about anton yelchin learning anything about himself or you know uh any kind of like character bonding i mean there is some but it's about survival and the purity of its intent, I think, makes it almost horror in its execution, if that makes sense. It does. And in my definition about the visceral aspect of it, this is one of the most spine-tingling, gory films I've ever seen.

The actual physical limbs being torn apart in this movie is very upsetting. And there's a scene where, okay, so, if you haven't seen Green Room, go watch it if you have the stomach for it. If you, but here's, I'm just going to describe something.

There is a moment where these five or six characters have been trapped in this green room and they're basically, there's only one door, there's no other exit and they're stuck in there

and basically, they're getting waited out and they're like, we're going to have to make a run for it. the build-up and execution of when they open the door is the fucking most terrifying thing you will ever see though it feels so real and so freaky and the injuries people sustain and the things people have to do to get out are so intense uh i think it is that slightly altered reality thing that I always respond to

with these movies. So, I had a list of runners-up and Green Room made my list of runners-up as did The Invitation.

And I think that those two movies should almost be recategorized into what we might call terror. Interesting.

At The Ringer, we have a Slack channel called hashtag terror. But it's usually for like toenail injuries, right? Yes. But I feel like there is a kind of convulsion

that those movies create, but they're not exactly in the strictly defined Nightmare on Elm Street horror style. So you think that there has to be something almost supernatural,

like the get out. Well, I don't want to be a fascist about it. No, you're not. I mean, I think that's the cool get out. Well, I don't want to be a fascist about it. No, you're not. I mean, I think that's the cool thing about horror is that I don't even know if you would even say Green Room was even marketed as a horror movie. It might've been more successful if it were.

In fact, while you're talking, I'm going to see if iTunes has it in the horror genre. Okay, so you're going to ask me to vamp right now. Nevertheless, other movies that I have in my runners up include What We Do in the Shadows, which is also not strictly horror. It's a comedy, but it's a comedy about vampires

that has now become a successful television show on FX from Taika Waititi. Thriller. So that's a thriller. Yeah. Okay. So your list,

which you worked hard on, is null and void. Well, I mean. You've wasted our time here. I disagree with A24's categorization. Is it iTunes to blame? It's probably iTunes. Is it Apple?

Shall we call Tim Cook here on The Big Picture? Tim Apple. Tim, step it up. Free green room. A couple of other movies. You mentioned Ouija Origin of Evil,

which is Flanagan's Ouija sequel. Good movie. The Purge. I remember loving it in theaters. I remember feeling like it had as much to do

with horror as a movie like Death Wish. Yes. Or, what's the William Devane Rolling Thunder? Oh, yeah. You know,

like the coming back from Vietnam movie. Yeah. It was as kind of nasty and violent and crazed, but also, it's kind of about something.

I, you know, I have a couple of runners up as well. My runners up, though, I would say reliably the B- version of a horror movie

is my favorite kind of B- movie. I can't stand B- dramas. I'm just like, this is fine. I'm too old to really get into this. A B- horror movie, there's a thousand of them where they're all stuck in a parking lot where the gates have closed.

And I watched it one night and I was like, this is pretty good. One of those would be, for instance, The Crazies. Good movie. Remake. A remake starring

two of my faves, Timothy Olyphant and Roda Mitchell. Roda Mitchell. I think it was Breck Eisner directed that? Sure, that sounds right. Is that Michael Eisner's kid, right?

And he directed Sahara? Let's go with it. Dude, come on. Big picture. Breck Eisner, come on big picture. Breck Eisner's kid, right? And he directed Sahara? Let's go with it. Dude, come on. Big picture. Breck Eisner, come on big picture. Breck Eisner, I've never heard of you. Your name is Breck. But I wish you well.

Check my work. Michael Breckenridge Breck Eisner is an American film and television director. Directed Sahara with Matthew McConaughey. And then directed The Crazies, which is about... Wait, wait. Before you go into that, let's just read his credits really quickly. So he did direct the 2005 film Sahara. He also directed The Crazies in 2010.

His last film... Five years in between, like PTA. There were five years. And then there were another five years until his next film, which is a little gem called The Last Witch Hunter, starring Vin Diesel, which you may consider horror. And it says here that he's got a TBA for The Karate Kid 2.

Oh. So he's really spreading his seed across genre. Yes. It's impressive. Anyhow, you were saying about The Crazies. The Crazies is by no means

an American masterpiece, but is more deeply satisfying than like 80% of the movies I saw this decade. It's pretty good. Yeah. It's pretty good. Any other runners up you want to mention? Stakeland.

Yeah. You know, I've not connected with this one as much as you have, but do your pitch. Jim Nichol, who recently directed In the Shadow of the Moon, a Netflix movie, and this is a really, really good

post-apocalyptic, there's vampires running all over the country now and this band of misfits are traveling together trying to keep each other alive. Great Kelly McGillis performance in this one. Is Kelly McGillis in Stakeland? No, let me just double check. Okay. We're doing a lot of double checking here on this episode. I'll do one more runner up.

It's called Starry Eyes, which I think falls firmly into that B- thing that you're talking about. Very small movie made by two guys, Kevin Kulsh and Dennis Widmeyer, who actually made the somewhat successful Pet Sematary remake earlier this year. But Starry Eyes in particular is a nice double feature, I think, with The Invitation because it's a good example of the anxiety, terror, and— Would you say House of the Devil is the godfather of those movies?

Oh, interesting. Because House of the Devil is a 2009, I those movies? Oh, interesting. Because House of the Devil is 2009, I think. And so it just misses the cut. But that was the first one that I remember seeing where I was like, what's going on here? Like, you know, I think she dances to like, like the 80s classic. 8, 6, 7, 5, 3, 0, 9 or something.

And it's very 80s, but has great twist. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that that movie also, like Starry Eyes, is a bit slow and a bit more ponderous. Like, Gerwig's in that. Is in House of the Devil. Lena Dunham.

Lena Dunham's in it. Okay. Yeah, yeah. It's, actually, no. Are they both in it? I know Gerwig is. Actually, Gerwig is in it. Yeah.

Lena Dunham is in Ty West's follow-up, The Innkeepers. That's right. So he was befriending all of the exciting young female talents in New York at the time well because they were all

doing indie movies like where they were like Hannah Goes Up The Stairs yes here's what I'll do I'll run through my list last year I wrote a piece called The Horror Oscars

in which I gave for across 40 years the best horror movie a prize so many of these if you read that piece you've already heard me when you look at that are you like that was a that was time well spent

because I thought that was an amazing achievement but it's like it's one of those things where I wonder whether when you look back at it before this pod you're like did another person write this let me put it this way we're all dying every day right now I'm just trying to create a legacy of internet

content that people will enjoy forevermore. If they want to know about some good horror movies to watch, they can go to that piece. They can go to this podcast. They can hit at me on Twitter. I'll happily respond. Hey, bro, check out this movie. It's all just, it's part of the matrix. And I'm flowing through it like Neo.

I was just trying to like tear down the fourth wall here a little no you've just embarrassed me greatly on my own show uh 2010 black fucking content Sean fat pta heartbreaking yeah there's so much content 2010 black swan do you consider this a horror movie yes but I do not like it me why. It's just like totally not my bag. You know? Are you out on Darren Aronofsky? I respected Mother a lot

because I was just like... You respected Mother? Yeah, because he went for it. Okay. I mean, he goes for it every movie. He even went for it in Noah. He certainly did.

Tried to tell the tale of Noah's Ark. Yeah. But I wasn't... I've never revisited Black Swan. Like watching Natalie Portman's feet break is just is just not my idea of a good time. It is literally the feeling I was describing of wanting to squeeze myself until I break.

I think it's one of the more painful to watch movies. And I don't know if it's necessarily scary, but it is upsetting in a unique way. 2011, you're next. We've already discussed it. Check it out. It's a fucking banger. 2012, The Cabin in the Woods. Okay. I wanted to put this on my list, but then I had, here's my thing. Is The Cabin in the Woods scary or is it delightful and surprising and very interesting and thought provoking? Let me ask you this. Is Dracula starring Bela Lugosi scary?

Oh, I thought you were going to say Marvel's Francis Ford Coppola. No, not Bram Stoker's Dracula. No, is the original Dracula film, not Nosferatu, Dracula, from Universal Studios, is that a scary movie? It would have been scary

like the day it came out, for sure. That's not what I asked you. No, it's not scary to me. But it's a horror movie cabin in the woods is the same okay i think it is representational i feel like i got checkmated just there well that's what you get for insulting me about the piece i wrote last year i'm not insulting you i'm not insulting you i think it was amazing accomplishment now you're just overstating things and making it worse uh i think that The Cabin in the Woods is like,

perhaps not scary, because through the first 40 minutes of the film before the twist is revealed, and if you've not seen Cabin in the Woods, I would encourage you to do so. It is at worst a very clever and entertaining movie. But through that first 40 minutes, it feels purposefully unscary.

It is so trite as to be recognizably trite. But then when you're not totally sure where things are going in that sort of middle 20, I do think it gets a little unnerving. Right. Before things are explained to us. When all the different curses are kind of coming to life. Yes. So I think it kind of works in that regard.

In 2012 or 13, when I was working at Grantland, I spoiled Cabin in the Woods in like an NBA blog post for like thousands of people. Are you here to atone? I feel really bad for that. Do you think thousands of people actually read that blog post? I got like at least a dozen mentions

being like, fuck you, bro. I didn't know that. Those were all my burners. No, that's actually really bad because it's not the kind of movie you want to spoil. I thought we were kind of Those were all my burners. No, that's actually really bad because it's not the kind of movie you want to spoil. I thought we were kind of like, this movie's out there. Also, that was kind of my thing. I was like, I'm just going to mix and match different medias, you know? That was kind of your thing. Yeah. Like, you remember like when I used to

blog, like I used to just be like, and then this, this like grabbing this disparate thing that you wouldn't necessarily connect with the NBA or the NFL. You mean like Matthew Barney mixing medias? That's right. Like the Craymaster cycle? Okay. The Cabin in the Woods is a wonderful movie despite Chris's

desire to ruin it for other people. 2013 The Conjuring. I think it's a pretty amazing studio product. I've not disagreed with a single one of your picks so far.

Oh, thank you. I think everybody knows what The Conjuring is. We probably don't need to belabor it. Low-key, incredible Lily Taylor performance in that movie. Oh, yeah. Definitely. So good. It's not easy to do possessed ghost

without seeming shriekish and over the top. Also, doing that without a net because there wasn't this expectation or understanding of The Conjuring Extended Universe or the Annabelles and stuff. It was a first. And they've spun up so much gold out of that first film. 2014 it follows.

We're on the same page. 2015 The Witch. If you're a listener of this show you heard an interview I did with Robert Eggers earlier this week.

I think he's a really interesting dude. I think he's like got iconic movies in him if he gets what he wants to do. Who knows if he's going to be able to

make the kinds of movies he wants to make. It's hard out here. The Witch was a weirdly successful movie, given that it was essentially a slow-moving, methodical portrait of a Nathaniel Hawthorne-esque puritanical New England America that happened to have a witch in it that stole a baby. And a goat, right? And a goat, yes. Black Phillip.

That goat went viral. I think that goat went viral i think that goat went goat yeah um and i don't know i i think that it's a movie that a lot of people saw and it did well but also a lot of people didn't like horror movies are very hard to please yeah there's very vocal contingent of very diverse opinions about horror movies online and so none of the movies that we have talked about so far i think is is not without its detractors there are people who think that the witch is self-serious there are people who think cabin the woods is like fake

horror for like indie rock nerds who don't really want to get dirty with like real horror sometimes there are people who think that it follows is like and just like carpenter pastiche you know like i think that every one of these movies it's like you're gonna find if you ask a hundred different horror fans their definition of horror all of them are gonna disagree with mine or yours it follows I think is

an interesting precursor to The Witch because that's when we started hearing what I think is kind of an ugly phrase which is elevated horror that somehow the studio that produces the film or the kind of auteur phrase, which is elevated horror. Yes. That somehow the studio that produces the film or the kind of auteur aspirations of the filmmaker somehow make it more valuable, which I think is something that you and I don't really buy.

It seems like kind of shitty film critics speak, or maybe even not even film critics speak, but just the way that people write about box office have to find a way to kind of write about horror movies that aren't just splatter murder movies nevertheless i do think that the witch does follow a lot of the traditional formulas it is a incredibly upsetting and unnerving movie through the first 45 minutes so long as you're a patient viewer and then it becomes something much more folkloric i would say and pretty strange um but

i would highly recommend that movie if you haven't seen it. I would throw, would you consider Kill List like another movie like that? Kill List, I think, has more in common with Green Room. Yes.

Which, that's Ben Wheatley's movie, which is a total masterpiece. I don't think of it as horror. I guess you could say that it is. It just, that's a movie that feels- I guess mythological? Yeah, sure.

But it also, it feels like somebody has two fingers on the back of your spine the whole movie it's so or as if someone were setting off a high pitched ring

in one ear for 20 minutes like it just makes you so uncomfortable yeah which is an amazing accomplishment unto itself

2016 Don't Breathe another one that I will never watch again but will never forget watching one of the more disturbing sequences I've ever seen have you ever 2016, Don't Breathe. Another one that I will never watch again, but will never forget watching. One of the more disturbing sequences I've ever seen. Have you ever, have you used a turkey baster since seeing that film?

No, I'm off turkey. Okay, I don't want to say too much more about the movie. It's Fede Alvarez's movie. He also remade The Evil Dead and he made a very unfortunate Girl with a Dragon Tattoo sequel last year. Oh, is that bad? It really did not work at all. Who was the girl in that one?

Claire Foy. Oh, yeah. Not what you want for Claire. 2017, Get Out. Yeah. Let's talk about Get Out. Is it the best horror movie of the last 10 years, even if it isn't your favorite?

Mm-hmm. You think so? Oh, yeah. No question. I mean, also, everything you could want from a horror movie, if not a movie in general. And also, a lot of the movies that I put on my list, I think even casual horror film fans might not have heard of some of them. One of the cool things about Get Out was it becoming a conversation topic.

It becoming part of the way we talk to one another is using the you know the upside down as like a as a reference to things the sunken place yeah stranger things is that a horror movie well i think that's where horror went you know what i mean it's like people going to do things like stranger things doing things like american horror story interesting yeah those kinds of movies and tv shows have nothing to do with i really that was a a self own to confuse the sunken place with upside down. Well, it just reveals what a basic guy you are and just what an elevated horror thinker I am,

which has been a great outcome of this podcast so far. Yeah. I'm really enjoying this. 2018 and 2019 are both Ari Aster movies for me, hereditary and Midsommar. Can I ask you what the runners up were for those years? Hmm. Well,

2019, we don't know yet. Dr. Sleep not out in the world. I would say that's probably the biggest contender against Midsommar for me. 2018, let's pull this piece up then. I mean, what was it?

A Quiet Place? Yes. Although I would put A Quiet Place, well, I don't think it's as good as Get Out. I think it's had the same sort of, wow, it's really awesome that everybody's going to the movie theater and you can hear a pin drop throughout this entire thing.

The first Purge, The Nun, Unfriended Dark Web. I don't think these are great movies. I think that they're pretty good. But I think once you put them up against... Unfriended Dark Web is really fucked up. It is.

It's about people buying snuff movies on the dark web. It's sort of an unofficial sequel to 8mm. Yeah. Remember 8mm? I worked for Bill. Yeah, I remember 8mm. What do you think Ari Aster is going to do?

Well, I think that Midsommar is obviously such an extension of his personal life that if he finds a little bit more happiness and stability, I would imagine that he would not make a movie like that, not make a horror movie like that. I think that, I venture to say that Hereditary is probably rooted in some of his ideas about childhood and parenthood. And Midsommar is rooted in his ideas about romantic relationships.

I think he's been pretty straightforward about that. Yeah. Imagine being Ari Aster's ex. Yes. It's a tough year. It's really not what you want. Yeah. Yeah. Imagine being Ari Aster's ex. Yes. It's a tough year. It's really not what you want. Yeah. It's just like...

To be burned alive inside of a bear. You don't want that. It's something you literally don't want. What do you think? I mean, I feel like you have your finger on the pulse more of what he would do next. You think he wouldn't make a horror movie next. Let me ask you this.

Does that bum you out? I think he is committed to the cinema of discomfort which is good by me i think if you've watched any of his short films you know that even if they're not strictly horror he's really interested in pain and trauma and what comes what comes from our past and affects our future yeah and i think he'll be into that no matter what happens, but he's one of the few crafts people, even out of this list of 10 movies or the movies that you've talked about. I'm like, he probably could do anything if he wanted to. He has an incredible eye and he has a really interesting sense of pacing and his movies tend to swallow me up. Ari Aster knows what a big fan

of his work I am. Any other lingering thoughts about the genre before we depart to make more content? I was kind of wondering how you were feeling because you mentioned the elevated genre and I noticed a couple of these movies were from A24. And whether or not you think that this will continue to be, I think, a reliable revenue driver for smaller studios and bigger studios,

and whether or not, you know, it obviously, I think, cost quite a bit of money. It too did, at least. I would imagine that it made a fair amount of money too. Whether you think that we'll still see smaller studios investing, you know, modest amounts of money to make profitable horror movies, and whether you see the Universals, the Paramounts, the Disneys or the Foxes or whatever,

making these big blockbuster ones. I'm more interested in the latter question. The former question, I think, well, that will always be true. Now, whether it's actually the A24s of the world making those movies, I don't know. But I always think small studios know that they can likely turn a solid profit leaning into horror it's really the only genre that never expired you know everything kind of has life cycles of dominance action movies brand the 80s superhero movies run right now yeah horror movies have never gone away they the thing they haven't done is what i mentioned earlier which is they've never gotten this big yeah never gotten this unwieldy in a way. It Chapter 2, I think, was the first time

it felt like maybe the genre was out of control. And I'll be curious to see if studios continue to double down. You know, we're getting A Quiet Place 2 next year. Do you think Peele will make another horror movie? I hope so. I hope so. He's clearly got his heart in that

and he's producing the Candyman remake, which is coming out next year. But again, that's iterative. That's not original. Us, for all of its detractors and all the people who are saying, oh, this doesn't make sense or whatever. That was an original movie. It was an original script and an original idea.

And I love that he did that. And I hope he keeps doing that. So we'll just have to wait and see. Chris, you fitfully scared of me now that I've bullied you through the end of this podcast? I like feeling things. I do too. Chris Ryan, thank you so much for joining us here on The Big Picture.

Now let's go to my conversation with the Dolomite Is My Name screenwriters, Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski. I am delighted to be joined by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski. Guys, thanks for being here. Thank you. Thanks. I've been such a big fan of the screenplays you've been writing for the last, I don't know, 30 or so years. I'm hoping you can take us right to the beginning of when you first met.

Oh, wow. Help me understand how you guys built this great partnership. Scott and I met in line our freshman year at USC Film School in the line where you get your card that gets you food for the semester. The meal plan. The meal plan, thank you. And he was just a person in front of me, and we started talking, and it turned out he was a film student, and I was a film student, and he's from Los Angeles, and now I'm from Indiana. And we just started talking about weird movies movies we liked. And actually at that, it was a very LA eccentric thing, but at that first conversation, he started telling me about

a place called the New Art, which was a revival theater in Los Angeles. And that week they happened to be showing movies by a guy named Herschel Gordon Lewis, who was kind of the original gore filmmaker. He was to blood and guts what russ meyer was to boobs and uh i actually knew herschel gordon lewis's movies quite a bit because i grew up in the in the midwest and they played drive-ins and and they were these they're i mean they're absolutely you know horrifying films and scott was scott knew had read about them but didn't know about them so he bonded over herschel gordon lewis which is kind of strange considering where our career went and how we became uh people who celebrate these kind of exploitation filmmakers. But literally our very

first conversation was about that. And what was strange is that I had an extra bed in my room and he was in a room that had too many people. And so we sort of manipulated the system and we became roommates freshman year. Did you sense a creative spark immediately when you first started hanging out as friends in school um not a creative spark we just like to love the same shit um i mean like like larry saying he was familiar with a lot of this weird stuff from midwestern drive-ins these were things that i was more fascinated with that I had read a lot about I mean you know when you're a high schooler growing up in LA

you didn't spend a lot of time down on Broadway at the grind houses you know which you know

it's four movies a night and then you can sleep there for free which is where you would see these movies in LA what were the kind of movies you were seeing when you were a kid then

sort of the big Hollywood studio productions? You were a Marx Brothers fan. I loved the Marx Brothers. The Marx Brothers kind of defined my childhood. I mean, I certainly went to, you know, The Towering Inferno and The Shaggy Dog and The World's Greatest Athlete, like everybody else. My favorite movie is What's Up, Doc?

A screwball comedy from the early 70s. But the Marx brothers were really important to me. And I used to dress up as Groucho. I got to see Groucho once. My family snuck into the premiere of Animal Crackers on Westwood. The re-premiere. The re-premiere.

That would have been difficult. Very, very difficult. It premiered twice. It premiered in 1930, then it premiered again in 1974. And so I loved old classic Hollywood comedy. So I liked old classic Hollywood comedy, and I liked junky regional exploitation, do-it-yourself filmmaking, and I was making super great movies in high school.

And there was a whole, when I say community, it's not like today with the internet community, it was magazine subscribers. It was super eight filmmaker. And it was, it was these magazines that would tell you, you know, how you can, you can add a sound effect to your movie, how you can dub music in while they're talking. And this was like a whole piece of work to try to your movie. Ooh. How you can dub music in while they're talking. And this was like

a whole piece of work to try to do this, you know, back in 1980. And so, I was really interested in sort of the whole ethos of, you know,

making movies yourself and making shorts and you get your friends to act in the movies and whatever. We've ended up making a lot of movies about characters

who have a weird dream and then they get their friends to help them execute their weird dream. So maybe, I mean, I never thought about it before until I started babbling here. I mean, this goes back to almost junior high school with me. That was going to be my question was, obviously you guys have become very well known for distilling a certain kind of artist's life into a very particular, I don't know, screenwriting format, but what kind of movies did you think you were going to be making when you were,

when you met at USC? I mean, I don't know if we had a, you know, we were coming off of the 1970s. I mean, I think we, we began school in 1981 or 1982.

And so you're coming off of that great period of American films, Coppola and Lucas and, and Scorsese and Altman and Bogdanovich. And I like the Shaggy Dog. Was there anxiety at USC about following up that class of kids who had come out of there? No, because I don't think neither one of us gave a shit. Well, but no, but Lucas had changed the rules. Yeah.

I mean, Star Wars was such a big deal. And suddenly film school became famous. And George is USC. And it was George and Zemeckis and Bob Gale and John Milius. And we all knew that list. And every film crazy kid wanted to be at USC in that era. Right. But that being said, there were a bunch of kids there who were there because of Lucas

and wanted to make movies like Lucas. And I don't think Scott and I were in that group. They're also the film fascists. Yeah, exactly. There was a group of, here's the thing, what was kind of cool about going to a place like that where so many people really were into the whole Star Wars thing, the 10 people who weren't, they were your friends. You know what I mean?

I'm not knocking Star Wars or anything like that, but I'm saying the people who wore black and listened to punk rock or, you know, whatever, those people all knew who the other people were. And so there was actually a counterculture within that area. So what were the films that you guys cared about then that were kind of present at that moment if you weren't waiting in line for Star Wars for a fifth time? I mean, for me, it's like I had a really completely different childhood than Scott where I grew up like watching, you know, five movies a week since I was a little, little kid. And my parents, I mean, my dad worked in a factory. My mom was a waitress and they got divorced. And, um, uh, my dad had me one night a week and didn't know what to do with a kid. So he would take me to drive and drink beer and fall asleep. And I'll just watch, uh, you know,

nonstop. You would program the evening. Exactly. I totally would. I would be the guy like finding out and then, and I'd have to explain why something was rated R. So let me go, you know, I'd be like, oh, this rated R because of this, because of that. And they'd be all right. You know, they're trying to keep me from nudity. I think they didn't really care about violence, but I could just manipulate it any way I wanted to. Did you have an awareness when you were in school that you had been so deeply influenced by all this stuff or was it just like, well, this is just what is good? No, I think we totally had an awareness. I mean, we were film were film nerds you know there's no other way around the fact that we still are so how do you set about becoming professional screenwriters i i'm i know problem child is your first big screenplay that was our second script i mean we bumbled into it well scott was the first person i knew at school who had a personal computer. He had a computer. You could type on it and you could save things. You could erase. You could copy and paste. You could

do revisions. I was way ahead of the curve. I always forget. Is it early adapter or early adopter? Adopter, I believe. Adopter. Okay. I always mix those up. No final draft back in those days though. Oh, no. No. But a few years later, there was the very first screen running software was invented by guys we went to school with. Okay. It was called Scripter. And you would have to write your script in WordStar 4. But if you write a whole script, the software couldn't hold 100 pages because that's too big a file. So you're looking at me like this is science fiction, but you're younger than us.

We've come a long way. And so you'd have to break the script up into three WordStar documents, and then you would write it, and then you would run it through the scripter afterwards to fix all the margins. And it was cumbersome, but these guys were great. I mean, ultimately, final draft kind of wiped them out, which was too bad. But anyway, getting back to my bragging rights. It might be the dullest podcast. You can get WordStar files, you can have to copy them all over again. You can call us out. We're keeping all of it.

I was so interested in this new technology that I drove down to San Diego to the KPro computer factory, and I bought a KPro 2X for $1,895, which my parents loaned me. And I had a computer in 83 or 84, which was really early.

And basically we had an idea for a screenplay. Now you're making it sound like we wrote a script because I had a computer. Well, no, but that's not true. We wanted to write a script. We wanted to be filmmakers. And in all fairness, writing a script was not how you became a filmmaker back then. I mean, look at all those USC people that you mentioned, Milius and Zemeckis, and they made short films. So everybody at USC was all about making short films.

And when you took screenplay classes, you only wrote the first 20 pages. No, 40. 40, all right. You wrote, because you're not expected to write an entire 120 pages for a next-generation class. I mean, thinking about it, with the pre-computer age, if you're typing something on a typewriter, and then you have to do revisions, and I mean, you're either liquid papering over the sentence, or you're retyping the whole page, or you're retyping a few lines. Kids, listen to what your grandparents had to do here. Or you're typing a few new lines and then you're taping it onto the page and then going down

to Charlie Chan. It was very time consuming, I think is what he's trying to say. Printing. Yeah. I mean, just to do revisions was so hard so maybe it never occurred to anybody that a student could write a whole script. Because you had a computer, though, it really made us say, like, let's try to write a script and get all the way to the end.

Okay, but the motivation for the script was that there was a newspaper column, a self-help column, and it had a story about a kid in a high school who was vandalizing the gym, fell through the skylight, hit the basketball court floor. See, this is the ringer, so I'm working in sports here. Truly. And he got paralyzed. Yeah. And his parents sued the school district for liability, saying it was an unsafe environment.

And the school district said, what the hell? He was breaking the men's line. He was on the roof of the gym. And so it became this whole back and forth with the letters to the editor to the Anlander self-help column over whether or not this kid was in the right or in the wrong. And we started talking about this and we were joking about it and saying, well, that's not a very funny story. But what if it was our hero, Morris Day? Morris Day of the time, who had just been in Purple Rain. We thought he was the funniest man on earth.

We thought he was going to be the biggest movie star of the time, who had just been in Purple Rain. We thought he was the biggest movie star of all time. What if it's Morris Day and he's not on a school roof? He's robbing a house and he falls through the house. And oh my God, and the house is owned by Albert Brooks, who's our favorite comic filmmaker. And Albert Brooks is great when he does that bad temper where he just loses it. And he just starts yelling at the thief. And then, oh, and Albert has this neighbor. It's Walter Matthau. And Walter Matthau doesn't get along

with Albert because he's annoying. And Matthau is a shady lawyer. So he pulls the thief aside and says, well, you've got a good case here. You can sue the homeowner for negligence. And then I had an uncle, Uncle Marty, who had just had a midlife crisis. He had left the pharmaceutical business and become a lawyer in his 40s, so he was just out of law school. It was all fresh in his head, and I was at his house one night. I said, well, Uncle Marty, could this really happen? And he says, well, let's go look up the rules, and we started going through law books, and it turned out that this could really happen, and so then Larry and I said, well, this is kind of a funny idea. What if we wrote a script?

And all our friends thought we were crazy because no one at USC back in the mid-'80s would write a whole script. But we thought, well, why not? No one's stopping us. So we wound up writing it. We wrote 120 whole pages. Yes, exactly. And we didn't know what to do with it. Oh, the title's Homewreckers.

Homewreckers. Homewreckers. And we got a Morris Day album and we flipped it over. Was it Oak Tree? Yeah, I think it was Oak Tree or Color of Success. Color of Success. Ow! The color of success. He has a new autobiography out right now. So go buy Morris's book.

Everyone support Morris Day. And the back, it said like managed by Sand Dollar Management. And so we got the white pages and we found Sand Dollar Management. Got the phone book. Phone book. And, uh, god dang, we were old. Um, and then we call up Sand Dollar Management on our rotary phone. And they, uh, they, uh, and we said, uh, can we talk to the people who manage Morris Day?

And, and someone picked up and, and we said, hey, we, we're USC Film Studios. We wrote a script for Morris Day. And they're like, really? You did? Because no one had ever written a script for Morris Day before. Who would do such a thing? And so they brought us in and that didn't quite happen. But that was a Hollywood meeting.

They brought us in. Within two weeks of us graduating from college, the script had sold for what at the time was like one of the record prices. And all of a sudden we literally, I was working at a record store. You were like holding a boom mic for movies. I was production coordinator on a horror film, The Kindred. And we all of a sudden had an office at Fox and money. And strangely enough, we've kind of been working ever since. That's absolutely incredible.

So that was 1986 when that script sold. And even just hearing you essentially do the pitch for the movie, it sounds like even then you kind of knew how to sell yourselves as screenwriters and how to sell a movie. A little bit, yeah. Is that inherent?

How did you know to do that? Well, back then, there was a big thing called the high concept picture. So you sort of had... High concept. You had to like, you know... High concept comedy.

I kind of miss those, honestly. Yeah, a little bit. Yeah, I absolutely do too. I mean, there was that whole run of touchstone high concept comedies down at Beverly Hills and Ruthless People, which I really loved. But what's very interesting about the first project is the sort of beginnings of all our good projects are right there, where it's based on a true story. There's a legal aspect to it.

There's, you know, there's a, but it's a comedy's a comedy, you know, so, so even Problem Child was kind of based on a article we read in the, in the, in the LA Times. And even me doing a slapdash description 33 years later, as soon as I start to

describe it with Morris and Albert and Matthau, you can kind of, you can kind of picture the movie. You can start to see. I was like, I'm in. I feel like I've seen

that poster. You can, you can sort of see why it's going to be funny, why it works. So why is Problem Child the first thing that gets produced? Well, Homewreckers went into development how we were really, really young. I was 22 when we sold the script. And now when kids go to school, they take classes called How to Break into Hollywood,

which is really bizarre to me. And they learn how to get an agent, how to go into a meeting, how to pitch an idea, which is the furthest thing from the minds of the professors at USC when we were there. Back then, they were teaching you what's a 3X structure. And then they're teaching you how to hold a boom mic, how, how to, how to, uh, how to, uh, measure light on a set.

So you can get an exposure, uh, how to mix the tracks. It was, it was, it was a technical school, you know, with a,

with a little bit of a story structure thrown in. And, um, there was literally not one moment given to what do you do when you graduate? Yeah. And so we had no clue. And so we were young and enthusiastic. Fox at the time was being run by a guy who's a giant producer now, Scott Rudin. And he had this idea. He was a president of the studio for just about a year. And he wanted to

bring back the old writer's tables of the 1930s. because studio offices are always at a premium. And usually, I mean, Larry and I have a pretty good track record. We usually don't get them. It's hard to get a studio office. And Scott's attitude was, let's give all the writers an office

and you get all these creative young people with big ideas bumping into each other. They're in the commissary. They're walking down the parkway. And you get creative excitement from that. And it was just like what the old writers tables were back in the commissary, they're walking down the parkway, and you get creative excitement from that, which is like what the old writer's tables were back in the metro days in 1940. And so overnight, we suddenly had an office at Fox, and we didn't know what the hell to

do with an office at Fox. We did, actually. We knew we'd make Bloody Marys at 5 o'clock in the afternoon. I was leading to that. So we stocked it with a full Bloody Mary bar with Worcester and Tabasco. What is it? Celery salt? Which is like talking to journalists, too, who are working at this time where I'm like, oh, my God, this sounds so much more fun.

We didn't do cocaine. We didn't have cocaine. We're five years past the cocaine. I've never done cocaine. But we did have the Bloody Mary bar. In all fairness, that's what Scott Rudin wanted. He wanted the idea that we'd have Bloodyers at 5 o'clock so people would come over and hang out. Creative confab,

salon-type atmosphere. I think that's your original question. We wound up not really knowing how to balance things and so whatever. Selling scripts in Hollywood is sort of the research and development stage and the first one didn't get made. We got lucky that the second one did. I think it's interesting that

we didn't know what to do once it was sold. And that you get notes from the producers saying it should be more of a family comedy. Like, okay. And then you write down family comedy. And then you meet with the studio vice president. The studio vice president says it should be more like a smart legal comedy like Billy Wilder's The Fortune Cookie. We're like, ah, Billy Wilder's The Fortune Cookie. Got it.

And then you go back to your office and you realize you have contradictory notes and you don't know what to do. And when you're young and you've never done this before, you don't know. You have to make everyone think they're happy. And we didn't know that yet. And so we would like, I'll try to do note A. Note A makes note B unhappy.

So then you do note B and now note C is unhappy. And we were, after a year of this, we made everyone unhappy. Right, and we had a very long script because we just kept on writing. Yeah, we just kept adding pages on. 180-page high-concept comedy. Exactly. So after a year and a half, we sort of drove it into the ditch. And then we got fired, and then we were unemployed again.

I love talking to duos and teams. I'm always so interested in how you guys do what you do practically. So it's one person banging away at the computer and the other person is talking. Are you back-to-back in an office somewhere simultaneously? Back-to-back. That's really amusing. Well, yeah. Does someone write back-to-back?

Yeah, like Hepburn and Tracy or something in a movie. Oh, they were back-to-back, weren't they? You're right. So what does it look like? How are you collaborating? It's like Hall & Oates. That's our goal, to be the writing Hall & Oates. I'm Oates. I'm fine with that.

They're both very talented. Larry gets the couch and I get the stiff-backed chair with the computer. Okay. That's the short answer. I'd like to compare it to, you know, once again, even older. You're going to compare me to a secretary this once again no no you're gonna compare me to a secretary no he was saying

he's not a secretary because he's never seen the show if you ever watch the old Dick Van Dyke show it's sad who takes notes they all I mean it's

she's not a secretary she's one of the writers she's what's the name of the female person from your show shows Valerie Harper Valerie Harper never mind

but anyway but yeah so it's comedy Imogene Coca comedy I meant the writer lady Kaylin what's her name knows uh valerie harper but anyway but uh but yeah so it's kind of imaging coca comedy uh i meant the writer lady uh kaylin what's her name uh um but uh uh comedy writing that tends to be people in a room because you know instantly it's funny throwing ideas correct valerie curtain you're pleasing no one right now selma diamond oh. Someone out there is laughing. Someone's out there. One lonely guy is laughing right now.

Me. Yes. So, we have an office. We work every day. It's not like you take 30 pages and I take 30 pages.

Mel and Pew. We just keep, you know, we just come in and bang it out. Use Ed Wood as a way to explain to me how you arrived

at this sort of story that you're telling. Where does that movie come from? It came, Ed Wood was very personal. Ed Wood came out of, we wrote, explain to me how you arrived at this sort of story that you're telling. Where does that movie come from? Edward was very personal. Edward came out of, we wrote, Problem Child was a pitch. We sold it.

It was a bidding war. We wrote it. And then we got taken into a meeting by a producer saying, I want to meet a bar because I have good news and bad news. We go, ooh, just tell us. He says, no, you better be sitting down with a drink in your hand. Okay. What do you want to hear first? The good news or the bad news?

The good news. Universal Greenlight, your first draft. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. What's the bad news? You're fired. So we were fired because a lot of internal studio politics, some people wanted to make the movie, some didn't.

And Prom Child got rewritten by like eight or 10 other people. And then we'd get, it'd be a mess. And then we'd get rehired and then they'd fire us again. And then other people would write, then we'd get fired again. And it was just this tortured thing. And then we did Problem Child 2 for reasons that are hard to explain. And the agent got me drunk at a bowling party. There. And after Problem Child 1 and Problem Child 2, which were big hits, we couldn't get work. And I'd always been interested in Ed Wood. I had done a class at USC trying to do a documentary about Ed Wood. And Ed Wood, up to this point, was a subject of mockery.

He was in the Golden Turkey Awards. He was voted the worst director who ever lived. Planet Nine is the worst film ever made. And there were these traveling shows with the Medved brothers where they would show his three Lugosi movies. And then they'd come out and they'd make fun of him in between the movies and say isn't he terrible and we hadn't set out to make problem child terrible it just kind of turned out terrible and it it was very popular and it's still beloved and all your listeners like i i grew up watching it on on turner every it has a nostalgia every fourth of july every everyone loves it but it was it wasn't it wasn't anything good.

Well, it wasn't what the movie we wanted to make. You wanted something darker. But also, the idea that you had something earlier, like what kind of films did you want to make? I mean, we saw ourselves as making kind of interesting, good movies, and that wasn't what that was. When we had set out to write Problem Child, you always say, like, what are you picturing in your head for tone? And we had talked about The War of the Roses. Oh, interesting. You know, which was a grown-up film. It was a dark comedy, which our buddy, you know, Danny, directed.

And so it had turned out dark. So we started talking about Ed Wood saying, why do people make fun of him? That just doesn't seem very nice. Because he's this kid from Poughkeepsie, and he was movie crazy, moved out to LA with big dreams and he directed six features. And maybe they're not so great. But what if we celebrated that instead of kicking him where it hurts? What if we said, well, hooray for Ed because he had a vision and he came out here and he made it happen. And so what if he told his story sympathetically? So we started kicking that around.

Also, while going to college, I had been a PA at a bunch of low, low, low-budget horror films. You can look at my credits on IMDb. I was PA, a boom operator, an apprentice editor. And I had a great time on these movies because you know, shot for a few hundred thousand dollars, uh, you know, where we, we couldn't afford to rent, uh, the boom mic and the boom. So the boom was a hockey stick where we would tape the mic onto the end of it. And I would, you know, stand on a, on a box cause I'm short as the boom operator and everyone's chipping in. And I, I re I remember the salary, the salary was $105 a week for seven 16-hour days. So I was working for, I think that's less than a dollar.

Less than minimum wage, yes. I think it's less than a dollar an hour. And I was having such a good time. And this was back in 1982. And I made friends on those movies that I still have to this day, which is almost 40 years, which is crazy. And so that experience. Well, people are there because they love movies. You know, they're so excited about getting the experience of being on a movie set.

Oh, my God, they're shooting in 35. And so it's all about the joy of filmmaking about being part of that gang and for a lot of people it's their first movie and none of the actors have other credits because no one else has cast them and the actors aren't in SAG you know they've just been doing little tiny shows around town and now this

producer has offered to hire them the actors got more than us the actors might have gotten like $25 a day and when you heard stories about Ed Wood it was very similar to that where he gave a lot of these people I mean, the actors got more than us. The actors might have gotten like $25 a day. And when you heard stories about Ed Wood, it was very similar to that, where he gave a lot of these people a reason to exist in a weird way. Like gave them, you know, and so they were all of a sudden, they were part of this movie-making gang.

And we thought like, you know, let's celebrate this. Let's make it sympathetic. Let's concentrate on his passion. And it seemed like he saw certain performers in a different light than they were previously seen by how their day jobs were, just like you guys. The key thing, too, is the way he looked at Bela Lugosi. And so, you know, we had this thing where we were going to, you know, make it about our filmmaking background,

but also the idea that it was a love story between Bela and Ed. And that was the key emotional thing, the way that it was a love story between Bella and Ed. And that was the key emotional thing, the way that they took care about meeting your hero and being able to take care of your hero and give them a second act. So that's obviously a brilliant film and Tim Burton did an amazing job. You have all these great performances in the movie. After it comes out and is, you know, very well received, is there something spoken between you that says, like,

we've kind of got a loose template for something we want to do? Yes, very much so. To give credit to Hollywood, and I always like to say this to writing students, tell them the story, it happened before the movie got made. It happened when we wrote the script, which was that we couldn't give ourselves away before it would.

Because even though Problem Child was a hit, no one really wanted to be in business with the people. No actors were saying like, oh, God, I want those Problem Shop guys to come in and write a scene where I get a bag of shit dumped on my head. But I feel like there's a lot of people who do kind of quote unquote biopics, and that's not necessarily the most reputable thing. No, no, no. I mean, here's the thing. We changed the rules in that I think before the two of us came along, I can't even think of another biopic that wasn't about someone of great achievement. Biopics were about people who changed the world or were superb artists

or were elected to something or they cured cancer or they fixed poverty. They've done something noble and important. And usually the movies are like three hours long and they kind of are just really dreary. The life of Emile Zola. Exactly. Zola or Gandhi. I mean, like fucking Zola, whatever. But we had this idea like,

why can't you just celebrate somebody who's in the margins who had an interesting life? And it's sort of this thing that we end up becoming obsessed with, which is, you know, scholars would call it primitive art, or it's just looking to the margins of Americana. And for us, the people on the front page aren't the interesting ones. It's the people in the little two-paragraph story buried in the back that we find intriguing. And so we wrote this Ed Wood script, and then people wanted to meet us. And the movie hadn't been made yet.

I mean, word had gotten around that Tim Burton was talking about doing this as his next film. And so we started getting a lot of meetings with people just saying, well, what do you got next? What do you got next? And we had this one other idea, which was Larry Flint. Because when Larry Flint was going through his manic phase and running for president in 84, we were roommates. And we had started collecting all of the newspaper stories, all the stuff in the movie where he's wearing the diaper in the courtroom and he's throwing the orange at the judge. These stories were front page in the LA Times every day. LA Times was having a field day with it

because it was so entertaining. And so we just thought Larry was this incredibly interesting story, another story of Americana. And we found it incredible that no one had written a book about him. No one had written a major magazine article about him. And we're talking about a guy who was born so poor

that he had a dirt floor. That's poor. And then he ended up making $100 million. He ran for president. He was shot going in a courthouse, fighting for his beliefs. I mean, it's a fascinating life, whether you love him or hate him. It's really interesting. And no one had ever really taken a look at him before. And so we started saying, well, we should do this. And then we had a really formative meeting with Jim Brooks during this period. And we said to Jim, well, he said, I really like what you guys have done. And what are you thinking about? And we said, well, we have this other thing that we could do, but we don't want to get typecast. And we're like young

idiots saying this to Jim Brooks. And Jim Brooks says, he says, don't be fools. He says, most writers spend their entire lives trying to carve out anything that they're known for. If you guys have this thing that you do that no one else in town does, you should run with this. God forbid you actually have a reputation. More power to you. So a little bit of a sliding doors question for you both that film Ed Wood and

Larry Flint are directed by masters of their craft and they have incredible cast giving incredible performances if any of those moving pieces

doesn't fall into place do you get to be in that position do you think well here's the weird thing about that's a great question but what's been really interesting

about our career so far is we've worked with really, really good directors, but very different kind of directors. That's true. In fact, the two people you just mentioned, there aren't more different directors ever than Tim Burton and Milos Forman. Yeah, I mean, Tim is heightened, and Milos is all about naturalism. But what's strange is when they work with our screenplays, it's kind of this thing where it's a Scott and Larry movie. We've been able to become almost, it sounds silly to say you're an auteur of the thing that you authored, but we've become the auteurs of our own thing. I mean, Tim did an amazing job directing Ed Wood, and it is 1,000% a Tim Burton movie from frame one to frame end.

But it's also a Scott and Larry movie. Yeah. And same thing with Ryan Murphy on OJ or Craig Brewer on Dolomite. It's like you have all these different kind of directors, but for some reason, what we're doing kind of threads through it and they all feel of a piece.

It's interesting. I mean, that's why I wanted to talk to you guys. And I think right around Larry Flynn is when I had a consciousness about that. I was like, oh, these two guys make this kind of a movie. And there's something in the way that they're portraying a life that is unique. And I've not seen anything like this before. It kind of switches your brain on a little bit.

Did you know that you were going to be able to have that? I think so because we really enjoyed writing these things. And it allowed us at a time when Hollywood was becoming very, very corporate and very cookie-cutter and the superhero things were starting to take over, where we could write kind of subversive, strange movies. Movies about a transvestite film director, movies about a guy who's making a porn magazine, movies about a guy who was making comedy that's not funny. But we were getting them through the studio system, and we were making these big, big projects that were really odd, independent kind of films. And so we found ourselves in a very lucky, blessed position. And we looked at the biopic genre, you know, like I said before, all these movies were long and boring and nobody had come along and kicked its ass.

You know, people had come along and kicked the Western's ass. You know, they went from stagecoach to the wild bunch to good, bad, and ugly. You know, people come along to the game. They're getting longer and longer, Larry. Exactly. But, you know, but I'm saying

they rethought them. They're revisionists. And we came in and said, what if you do the fringe history of America and do biopics about the people that we're fascinated about,

not necessarily the people who are, like, you know, making the world a better place. I mean, that almost goes back to what I was saying when you first said, how'd we meet, in that we were both

interested in these fringy exploitation guys who are just running in the margins and whatever. We were both fans of this book, cult movies by Danny Perry, you know, you know, the, the, the John, John Waters and John Joss, and just all these, all these obscure indie people who, again, they're in the margins, and that's what we found so intriguing. And also, we had a love for them. I think one of the things that goes through all our movies is we have an affection for our characters, and these, a lot of times, people would play these characters as dark or, you know, tragic or about their drug addiction or about, you know Ed Wood was an alcoholic. Ed Wood had his last five or six years where he was horrible and he was making pornography and things like this.

But we actually figured out a way to end the movie in a way that was about what Ed Wood should be celebrated about. And so we brought our affection for these people into the movies. And so people always – we, over our career, we kept on getting people who would, who would get a copy of our screenplay and say, Oh, why would someone make a movie about that guy?

And then they read it like, Oh my God, it's so sweet. Like, even like Donal might as a classic, but it's the sweetest movie you've ever seen where they say the word motherfucker 385 times. I was going to ask you about that.

I mean, do you literalize that kind of ebullience that the characters have in almost all of these kinds of films that you guys write it's it's not intentional no but we end we end up getting sucked in because we do lots of research we like research and the research is fun and it's like you're back in high school and the teacher assigned you to you know do some report on the Western pioneers. You know, go to the library. And then you start reading.

And then you just, you find a couple chapters that suddenly pique your interest. And when you start spending two or three or six months researching the subject, you start to fall in love with all the eccentricities and the weird details. And what Larry and I call the fun facts. Yeah. And all the fun facts we type up. All the fun facts started back in Ed Wood. Fun fact,

Tor Johnson used to break toilet seats because he'd sit on them and they'd crack. Right. Fun fact. And stuff like, you know,

and stuff like that would just get typed up. And so all these weird details. You know, Rudy Ray Moore, fun fact, he once wore a turban and called himself

Prince Dumar. What does that mean? I don't know. But we're going to write it down, and it's just going to be taped to the desk, and at some point we're going to shove it in. He once was a mind reader. Does he know how to read minds? I don't think so. But, you know, showbiz is kind of

rocky, and when you're trying to break in, you do whatever you can. And so, we would just type up all these things. And once you know Rudy was a shake dancer, and he was Prince Dumar, and he was a fortune teller, and he was trying to be Little Richard, and you start having affection for him because, God, this guy is really—he'll just try any move, any hustle he can come up with to break in. And so the more time you spend with the guy, then you just start liking him more and more. And also I think what we really like about almost all these characters is they're walking in kind of the wrong direction.

They have this big dream, but it kind of goes against almost everything that society wants your dream to be. I mean, technically, yes, Rudy wants to be a big famous movie star, but he wants to do it in such an oddball way, you know. It's like a ne'er-do-well quality to a lot of the figures. And Rudy, I mean, this is all in the movie, you know, but when Rudy finally hit, he was pushing 50. And until he hit with Dolomite, he was really doing this archaic kind of entertainment. He was just telling old vaudeville kind of jokes and tired nightclub jokes and singing like Little Richard from 1957. 50s R&B that no one really wanted anymore.

Did you guys have an awareness of the records when you were kids? When did he first cross paths with him. I knew of the party records more through I would say a rival of Rudy, but a peer of Rudy named Wildman Steve. Wildman Steve. There's a couple of Wildman Steve records in our movie, but Wildman Steve was another African-American comic. When Larry and I were

college dorm freshman year roommates, he had a Wildman Steve eight-track tape. I said, what the hell is that? One of the worst tricks he ever played on me is that We were college dorm freshman year roommates. He had a Wildman Steve 8-track tape. Yes, yeah. And I said, what the hell is that? One of the worst tricks he ever played on me is that. Oh, this is so funny. This has never been told anywhere.

This is a Ringer exclusive. I had a date with someone I really thought I was going to have some things going on. We were roommates. And so I was taking them out. And you did the whole like, okay, you got to be out of the room. Exactly. At 9 o'clock and you can't come back. And think about 8 taking them out. And you did the whole, like, okay, you've got to be out of the room. Exactly. At 9 o'clock, and you can't come back. I think about 8-tracks.

8-tracks were like, you know, you put them in, and they'd play over and over and over again. So I put on some, like, romantic music. Even when I walked in, it was romantic. I forgot this. Romantic music. And then I brought the girl back. I opened the door, and Scott had switched the tape with a tape of Wild Man Steve. So I'm walking like, you motherfucker.

You goddamn son of a bitch. And I was like, race to break the mood. And I pulled the Wild Man Steve tape. It's not very nice. But it was genius. Seriously. Like I hated him. But it was also like I had to bow saying, all right, he got me.

So I knew a little bit of that. And I knew Blaxploitation. But Rudy's movies were so kind of fringy that they never actually got to my hometown in Indiana. So it wasn't until we were in college together, a friend of ours, actually a screenwriter named Daniel Waters, who wrote Heathers and Batman Returns and things. He was running a video store at the time. And he brought this VHS home called The Best of Sex sex and violence and it was it was hosted by john carradine and it was just a collection of of uh really low budget really just this horrible like you know filipino uh uh you know women in prison pictures and things like this but in the middle of this like that's entertainment

but for the but for sex and violence exactly but in the middle of it was the three Rudy Ray Moore trailers, Dolomite, The Human Tornado, and Disco Godfather. And the Rudy trailers are the greatest trailers of all time. I mean, the guys at Dimension Films were geniuses. And to all you listeners, go look up The Human Tornado trailer. Make sure you get the red band version without the black lines and without the beeps. And it's so freaking crazy. It's just being smacked upside the head

with a board for three minutes. So funny. And so we became obsessed with it. And since Dan ran the video story, we didn't have to return the tape. So literally just sat on our... We would just watch this tape over and over and over,

these Rudy trailers. You came over, we would drag you over and made you watch it. And then it was actually my birthday following year, and this was before the internet. Actually, I just remembered a detail about this, which is

back in early video days, and everyone forgets this, I just remembered this the other night, studios were really nervous about piracy. And at first they were really against home video, and then they sort of begrudgingly there was some lawsuit and they had to do it. And so what they did was they priced videotapes for rent, not for sale.

What that means is, this sounds insane. I remember this. If you wanted to buy a copy, a VHS of a Michael Keaton comedy back in the 80s, it would cost you $100. Yes. Because they wanted Blockbuster to buy it and rent it over and over and over. They didn't want people to own it in their homes. So that's why I had to drive to the factory. So I wanted to get Larry the Rudy movies for his birthday, but you couldn't walk into a video store because they didn't have that stuff to sell. They only had it

to rent. So I went, again, to the White P, because we're old, and Xenon Video had a warehouse in Santa Monica, and I drove out to their shipping, their shipping store, and I just showed up with money, saying I'm here to buy some Rudy tapes. Then he looked at me like I was crazy, because there's no cash here, and there's no sales counter. But that was the only way I could figure out how to buy a copy of The Human Tornado back in the 80s. But you got him. He got him. Yeah. That was great.

Were you as obsessed with the movies as you were the trailers? I think that's the idea of Rudy. Yeah. I would say the Human Tornado movie does not disappoint. The Human Tornado movie is kind of great. There's a lot of Human Tornado in Don't Let Him Know My Name. Yes. Correct.

And when we originally had thought of Rudy Ray Moore as a movie, we thought we were going to cover his entire cinematic output. Okay. But once we started really doing specific research, all the good stories were kind of about Dolomite. But we figured you can't do a Rudy Ray Moore movie without him saying, you know, bitch, are you for real? Or him rolling down the hill naked. Yeah. You know, man, that'd be very disappointing. So when did it first occur to you guys to do this story as a script?

About 16 years ago. It was Eddie's idea. Yeah. We got a phone call from Eddie Murphy's office saying, Eddie wants to meet you. And we're like, holy shit, this is so cool. So we drove out to meet Eddie. And we walked in and Eddie started doing lines from Ed Wood. 16 years ago. This is like early 2000s. Nutty Professors? It's Ed Wood. He was like doing. 16 years ago.

This is like early 2000s. Nutty Professors. It's after that. It's after that. This is somewhere around. Eddie says it's around Pluto Nash. Pluto Nash. That sounds right.

Yeah. Okay. Shrek 2. It's somewhere around there. Okay. So. It's during the Eddie family film era. Yes.

Right. Okay. Okay. Pre-Daddy Daycare. Yeah. It's right around that. Right. Right.

And so he was just doing lines from Ed Wood and he was doing, you know, he was doing Tor Johnson, do my toes. And we're like, we're kind of freaking out because it's Eddie Murphy doing our lines from our movie. Wild. And then he said to us. And Eddie can remember every line in every movie he's ever seen. I mean, he's just remarkable. And then he said to us, do you guys know who Rudy Ray Moore is? We're like, oh, my God, holy shit.

Yes, we do know who rudy moore is we love rudy ray moore and we instantly got it that oh we you know it's clearly eddie loved edwood and thought it was basically asking us if we'd want to do a rudy ray moore movie and it was the best idea we ever heard the idea of eddie doing rudy would be just a complete home run and so we said yes and a couple days later uh he got us in a room with the real rudy and we started hanging out with Rudy Ray Moore, and Rudy told us his life story and how he saw it as a movie. And Rudy was really impressed, like, oh, my God, Hollywood has finally come around. Yeah. He thought he wasn't respected.

Finally going to get the respect, a big, fat Hollywood movie about me. Although I think he actually really wanted to play himself in the movie. And Eddie always says that when they would take Eddie aside and say, forget the movie. We should really just go on a tour. You and me. We do a tour together. Was he in his 80s at this point?

He was very old. He was living in Las Vegas. Mid-70s. Yeah. But he was still performing. Like I saw him. I mean, he was like one of those workhorse comics who was just performing until the day they dropped.

Yeah, right. Whatever. I saw Rickles literally the day he dropped. Rickles would come out on stage. No, he just performing until the day they dropped. Yeah, right. Whatever, I saw Rickles literally the day he dropped. Rickles would come out on stage. No, he didn't die the day you saw him.

He couldn't walk. He'd just be in the chair. It wasn't stand-up comedy. But they lived to work. Yeah, they lived to work. And I saw Rudy around the same time period at Club Lingerie,

which was at Sunset and Vine, right around that area. And I think, sort of like trying to put it all together now, I think Eddie had seen Rudy recently and that had given him the idea. Yeah.

And so we had this day with Rudy and he told us war stories and it was all great, great, great. And then we tried to sell it and nobody wanted it. And it was just, you know, it's just, oh God, it's Scott and Larry again with one of their obscure guys. I mean, Eddie was firmly in family film comedy land then. And I'm sure they looked up the Human Tornado trailer and said, what the hell is this? So they weren't kind of getting what we wanted to do.

But that couldn't have been the first time that you encountered that. I mean, do you guys find that it's harder and harder to make people understand? But to also be fair to the buyers, Man on the Moon lost money. And this was a couple years after Man on the Moon, which is also about a comedian. Right. So they might have like, oh, let's run the foreign comps on a Scott and Larry comedian picture. Oh, boy. Oh, boy.

Don't take it to South America, folks. Were you pitching it or had you written it? No, we had not written it. No, we didn't write it. We didn't write a word. So it didn't get set up. And then a few years after that, um, you know, Rudy ended up dying and we felt really bad because we felt like we had, we'd got him excited and we promised him we'd make a movie and we didn't do it.

And, uh, you know, I even did like a thing at the American cinema tech where I had, you know, some of the people who worked with Rudy, like the real Jerry Jones and Ben Taylor and Nick von Sternberg come down and, you know, talk about Rudy's life. Uh, and you know, every once in a while we'd hear, like, oh, someone wants to remake Dolomite or, you know, someone's going to make a movie about Rudy. And we'd always encourage them. We'd say, like, you know, let's, you know, hopefully someone's going to do it. But we thought it passed us by.

Like, someone else is going to do it. And no one ever did. And then we made the People vs. O.J. Simpson. And it was a huge, gigantic hit. It's an incredible series. Thank you. Thanks. But it allowed us to have that one month

where you can go into someone's office, and all of a sudden, like, ooh, yes, wow, that sounds great. Was that your back pocket thing? This was the thing that you wanted to do? So we managed to get word back to Eddie. It's not like we remained friends with Eddie or something like that. We got word back to Eddie.

We hadn't talked to Eddie in 60 years. So we got word back to Eddie through John Fox and John Davis, the producers of the movie, and said, you know, would Eddie, is Eddie still interested in this? Because we didn't know. Eddie hadn't made a movie in like six years. He hadn't said the word fuck in a movie for 20 years. So we had no idea.

We figured he was retired. And we got a resounding, yes, come over tomorrow night. We want to do this thing right away. And we went into Netflix. And because we had this thing like 16 years ago where executives didn't quite get who we were talking about, Scott and I had a whole presentation about who the real Rudy Amore was and why he was important and why he's influential. And we started into it, and it was with Ted Sarandos who runs Netflix, probably the most important person in Hollywood at this moment. He's like, oh, guys, I know all about Rudy.

He already knew. I used to run video stores in the 80s. Like, that's how video stores stayed in business. We'd rent those tapes a thousand times.

Yeah, Rudy kept the lights on. And so we were all like, our pitch instantly like went into the shredder and Eddie just got up and started doing Rudy and before you knew it, like the thing was sold.

Was it better that it took this long for Eddie in particular? Oh, it's interesting. Now he's really, he's grown into the part. That's really, he's grown into the part. That's why I asked. He's grown into the part. I think Eddie was really hungry for it.

Yeah. I mean, we were really excited that we were going to bring Eddie Murphy back. I mean. That's definitely what this is now. I mean, we had a couple meetings with Eddie at his house and very, very much like the way Rudy is presented in the movie where Rudy's very quiet and thoughtful and a bit introverted until the spotlight hits him and then he puts on the hat and he pulls out the can and he turns into that other guy. And Eddie is a lot like that.

And we have these meetings with Eddie where he's just kind of quiet and kind of looking down and we're sort of thinking like, God, is he really, does he really want to do this? Is he really into this? And then we'd sort of say, well, we're thinking that maybe we could do this with the signifying monkey and blah, blah, blah. And there'd be like a moment and then he'd look up and then the light comes into his eyes and then he turns into Rudy in front of us and then his body posture changes and then suddenly it's magic and you go oh my

fucking god yeah this is going to be amazing so for the first time in our lives we wrote a script for one person we've never done this ever ever ever which was we're only writing the script for eddie all we care about is that eddie loves the script And we want it to just be jam-packed with all the stuff that we know Eddie's great at, which is stand-up, comedy, music, some quiet tenderness. It's like all these things. And then we threw in a thousand obscure Easter eggy kind of jokes that probably only Eddie got that were thrown into the script because we wanted to make him happy. Because we knew if Eddie loves it, he'll call up Netflix,

and we get to make a movie. And if Eddie doesn't like it, then what's the point? Then no one cares about this project. It only exists because of Eddie. Yeah. There are basically three people in the world who really wanted to make a Rudy Ray Moore movie. It's me, Scott, and Eddie.

So we had to make sure he was happy. So strangely, we were writing the movie as a tribute to Rudy Ray Moore but we're also writing as a tribute to Eddie Murphy. Because we wanted to see Eddie back on that screen.

It has that energy. I think that that's the takeaway that almost everybody I know who's seen it is saying. It's like it's just so good to be around Eddie Murphy again.

And Eddie Murphy going for it. So I have to ask you about the Netflix aspect of it. You guys are such film history fans, buffs. Yes.

So sophisticated. And also know... And Dolomite Is My Name is about going to movies. Absolutely. And there's a tremendous four-walling joke in the script. Oh, thank you. Oh, thank you. Yay!

Someone got a four-walling joke. Finally, someone gets it. We talk about Billy Jack and Grizzly Adams. Yes, I love... Two Billy Jack references in one year is pretty great with the Quentin's movie. But do you have any complex feelings about having your movie on the service? I have zero complex feelings because these kind of movies aren't getting made. So the people who are making these kind of movies, God bless them and may they last forever.

Because the bottom line is that Don't Mind my name is playing in theaters right now. Netflix is totally open to the theatrical experience. It's actually the theater chains that won't show Netflix films. So I don't, somehow Netflix is being presented as the villain when they're not. You know, so I'm just saying they're making The Irishman. They're making Marriage Story. they're making the Irishman, they're making marriage story. They're making our movie.

These are, these are the movies that we, uh, all wanted to make when we were watching movies in 1970s. Uh, um, and so the best things I've seen this year. Yeah. And so it's one of those things where let's thank, thank God that Roma, you know, and people were complaining about Roma not being in theaters. I hear the two popes is good. Yeah, exactly.

It was good. You know, um, that, you know, who else would give Alfonso that budget to make a movie, a black and white movie about his hometown and put it in theaters? That movie stayed in theaters forever. So, you know,

I think they're, you know, I don't want to kiss my boss's ass too much, but it's like, I think we have nothing but respect. Nothing but respect. That was Scott for the record. All right, fine.

I'll kiss their ass too. Who is the person that you guys really want to do respect. That was Scott for the record. I find out because they're asking. Who is the person that you guys really want to do the Scott and Larry treatment for that you

haven't had a chance to? We can't say that. Oh, come on. No, because it's one of those things where...

doesn't exist. Well, there are the therapeutic... Well, there I could bring up the old Marx Brothers script and give you

a headache. I don't know. We've written several things that didn't get made. We have a Patty Hearst

script that's amazing. Oh, we love our Patty Hearst script. There's a Ripley's Believe It or Not movie about the real Robert Ripley. That. You know, there's a Ripley's Believe It or Not movie about the real Robert Ripley. That's a very famous, that's a well-known thing,

Ripley's Believe It or Not. Will that ever happen? These things all have, like, a lot of money against them, and, I mean... There's a script about John McAfee and his adventures in Belize, which, which, it keeps threatening to get made. That's a thing that should happen. That's a movie that deserves to exist. That's a good one. We wrote a script about the man who stole

Einstein's brain. I don't know anything about that. The pathologist who was doing the autopsy on Einstein realized that he was going to be cremated, and he said, oh, no fucking way. This is one of the key... Dr. Tom Harvey. No one's going to burn Einstein's brain. Who knows what kind

of secrets are in there for scientists to discover? That's how it works. He stole Einstein's brain. And for the next 40 years, this guy... It wasn't really on the lam, but I want discover. That's how it works. He stole Einstein's brain. And for the next 40 years, this guy, it wasn't really on the lam, but I want to make it sound like he was kind of on the lam. With the brain in a jar.

No one knows the story. It's absolutely out of his mind. And it's a great script. But there are people that we want to do. But we find that if you announce what you're going to do,

first of all, someone else is going to do it. Is there someone we want to do? Yeah, absolutely. Oh, really? Oh, yeah, that guy. That guy. First of all, someone else is going to do it. Is there someone we want to do? Yeah, absolutely. Oh, really? Oh, yeah, that guy. That guy. Oh, yeah, we just,

this year finished a script about Guts and Borderline and the carving of Mount Rushmore. And that's an amazing script. Which we love that script. So it's a bit of a spectacle. I mean, our movies tend to be about two guys in an office

yelling at each other. I wonder how that happened. Exactly, which sums up our entire career. And Mount Rushmore, well, Mount Rushmore is Mount Rushmore. So it's kind of big. So how many scripts did you say you guys have written together? I don't know. Probably fewer than you think.

Yeah, we have an insane track record in terms of getting things produced. So fewer than 30? Sure, because we haven't been running for like 30. We don't... Does that include punching up the pacifier? That is true. We spend a lot of time being like old-fashioned rewrite guys.

We don't do it anymore. But whatever, we both got kids and mortgages. And, you know, when you spend six months interviewing everyone who ever worked with Andy Kaufman, it isn't necessarily time productive in terms of career management. And we will happily spend one year on a first draft, happily. And all the contracts say 12 weeks, but we just ignore the contract because we're trying to do it right. And so back when

saying, okay, my kids are going to go to college and I got to have money. So we would, we would punch up family films because for some reason people still remembered us as the problem shelf guys, even after we've written these, these other quality productions. And so we did that to help pay the bills. And then about five or seven or eight years ago, we said enough is enough. Now we're 50. We've been doing this a long time. We don't really need the money anymore. So let's only do stuff that we love.

We don't need to take jobs just for a buck anymore. How's that working out? It's fine. It's great. I see our whole life changed in a weird way. It was kind of premeditated. And then I'll say OJ made it work. Yeah.

And that OJ was respected and commercial. And so it made people look at us and go, all right, these guys aren't completely loony tunes. It's not just throwing money into a fire if you hire Scott and Larry. kind of showed that we could do almost anything in terms of like the tone where it was important, serious, really funny, outrageous, you know, current,

you know, the same tone. Yeah. But I'm saying, but it is, but I'm saying in terms of like, you know, it,

there, there was a, well, one of being good. How about that? It was very good. People liked it. And so,

but it's, it's been really satisfying and I mean, we feel very lucky. I mean, we are totally appreciative of the fact that all these years later

we can still make a living. Yes. But the fact that we can, we've, for the last five or eight years or whatever it is, we've been able to

continue to make a living and only do jobs we love. A couple more for you. Okay. And we'll let you go. All right. What's one script each of you is most jealous of that you've read? Oh, wow.

I'll just name one of my favorite films. How about that? The Last of Sheila. Oh, I love this movie. Okay. Yeah, I know it. Written by? It's Herbert Ross directed it.

Herbert Ross directed it. I don't know who wrote it. Writing credits are crazy. Who's on it? Steven Sondheim and Tony Perkins. What? Were they buddies? They were party pals.

Okay. They would throw New York scavenger hunts with clues all around the city because they like puzzles. And so they decided to write the world's greatest puzzle movie, and The Last of Sheila is so fucking clever, and it's this intricate puzzle, and there's no cheating. All the parts fit together, and all the characters are so funny and bitchy. It's a wonderful script. So I will say that's a script I would have loved to have been the writer of. That's a good recommendation.

That's like 73, somewhere around then. Yes, very good, sir. And even though we already talked about him once already, I'll say Albert Brooks' Modern Romance. One of my favorites.

Which is insanely funny. I think I know every single line from the movie, but it's also brutal. You were performing it yesterday. Yeah, it is a brutal look at a stalker,

but it's insanely funny. It's Albert Brooks trying to do his Annie Hall, but he just can't really make an Annie Hall. He can't help himself from just coming across as the worst human being alive.

But it's genius on every scene. I mean, it's every scene. It's one of those movies that you happen to be watching. You're like, oh, this scene's great. I'll just watch. Oh, that next scene is great.

And it's also maybe one of the best films about filmmaking. Everyone always thinks about the romance part that stuff but him in the editing room with Jim Brooks and him in the sound mix

him in the sound mix oh the sound mix Space Floor those are really good you know nothing it's Hulk running Hulk running I end every episode

of this show by asking filmmakers what's the last great thing they've seen what is the last great thing you guys have seen? Oh, Parasite. Yeah, we just talked about it earlier this week. What did you love?

Just the tone is just freaking unbelievable. It's just smart social satire that just very easily slips into horror. It's a terrific movie.

What about you, Larry? Well, I'm the head of the co-chair of the International Feature Film Oscar thing, so I can't say Parasite because we're actually in that corner right now. Good to know. But Parasite is really, really good. I just watched again an older film, Ball of Fire, that's written by Billy Wilder and directed by Howard Hawks. And that movie is just perfect with Barbara Stanwyck. And it's kind of almost like a gangster remake of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, but it's one of the funniest. It's a perfect movie. Those are great recommendations.

Guys, thanks so much for doing this. Great. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you to Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski. And of course, thank you to the big homie, Chris Ryan, for joining us to talk horror. Tune in next week on The Big Picture, where Amanda Dobbins and I will be back to talk about our absolutely reckless early Oscar predictions. And maybe we'll have a conversation with Bong Joon-ho.

See you then.