The Big Picture - Top Five Movie Soundtracks

Episode Date: December 9, 2021

It’s a music-movies team-up episode. Rob Harvilla returns to the show to talk about the art of the soundtrack and share his top five favorites (1:00). Then, Sean talks with John Maggio, who directed the latest entry in The Ringer’s Music Box film series on HBO. His movie, ‘Mr. Saturday Night,’ chronicles the fascinating life of Robert Stigwood, an impresario of stage, screen, and music responsible for projects like ‘Saturday Night Fever’ (46:00). Host: Sean Fennessey Guests: Rob Harvilla and John Maggio Producer: Bobby Wagner Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Derek Thompson, longtime writer with The Atlantic Magazine on tech, culture, and politics. There is a lot of noise out there, and my goal is to cut through the headlines, loud tweets, and hot takes in my new podcast, Plain English. I'll talk to some of the smartest people I know to give you clear viewpoints and memorable takeaways. Plain English starts November 16th. Listen for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Sean Fennessey, and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about music and movies. And what if we put them together? Later in this episode, I'll have a conversation with John Maggio,

who directed the latest entry in our Music Box film series. His movie, Mr. Saturday Night, chronicles the fascinating life of Robert Stigwood, an impresario of stage, screen, and music, responsible for projects like Saturday Night Fever, Grease, Jesus Christ Superstar, and a whole lot more. John is a terrific filmmaker, very good guy. I hope you'll stick around for our chat. Robert Stigwood is one of the key figures

in developing the movie soundtrack. His role managing the Bee Gees connected the band to Saturday Night Fever, unlocked this amazing tradition that extends to today. So joining me to talk more about the art of the soundtrack is the host of 60 songs that explain the 90s and Ringer senior staff writer, Rob Harvilla. Hello, Rob.

Yo, how you doing? Did you i i want to tell you right up front that i when i was four or five years old i had a choreographed dance to the beethoven uh disco song on the saturday night fever soundtrack i don't think it was very disco oriented my dance i wish i could remember i would do it for you now if I could remember it. But I have a very strong emotional connection to what you're saying already. I believe you're referring to a fifth of Beethoven. There we go. Excellent, excellent work. That's exactly what you're referring to, what I'm referring to.

That was my one and only dance, I think, of my childhood. And that's why it's still so resonant for me, I guess. Well, so you've identified something right off the bat, which is that music and movies go together in profound ways. And when we match images to sound, we get something very special. Tell me your grand theories of the soundtrack, Rob. What do you think makes a great soundtrack? Well, the first thing I wanted to ask you not to answer a question with a question is do you is a great soundtrack for you like we've talked about needle drops

obviously is it a collection of needle drops is it a collection of moments from a film or is it a separate entity that stands alone that might in fact be much better than the film or much more famous than the film it's a part of and like functions as a film within itself i think for me it's the second one you know i it's like wayne's world for example right like i'm on the record now on this show is saying that bohemian rhapsody wayne's world is my favorite like music and movie moment but like other than crucial taunt doing ballroom blitz i couldn't name any other song on the wayne's world soundtrack like it's that's not about the soundtrack for me. That's one musical moment from that movie. What I think about with a soundtrack

is something that does stand alone and something that is animating the movie that it's part of and reminds you of it and evokes it, but it's almost trying to be better than the movie. It feels more competitive to me. And I think the best moments, of course, are when the soundtrack wins, when the soundtrack is better than the movie. It feels more competitive to me. And I think the best moments, of course, are when the soundtrack wins, when the soundtrack is better than the movie, when the soundtrack

decades hence is better known than the movie or the movie is only known for the soundtrack. I think there might be a couple of movies like this coming that we're going to talk about it. And so I do see it as, to the extent that you're a movie guy and I'm a music guy, primarily, I do see it as more of a competition. That's an interesting way of framing it. I certainly have never really thought about it in quite that way, though you make a good point. I don't want to put us in boxes. Can I be a music guy and you can be a movie guy?

No, you're also more of a music guy than me, which is very upsetting to me, honestly. But yes, I know what you mean. There's no way that's true. You know so much more about music than i do it's unbelievable um well i i've thought of it a little bit differently and and we picked some our top fives here to kind of be a little representative of what we think are accomplishments in soundtracking and the way that i chose was looking for different ways that filmmakers select songs or assign songs for a soundtrack. And I think there's a lot of different ways to do this.

I'm reminded of, for example, in Wayne's World, when Foxy Lady hits. It's almost like a diegetic use of music. Oh, God. Yeah, you're right. That's the other probably most notable music moment. In some of the films that I chose here, they were a compilation of songs recorded for the film that maybe are used in the film, but are more likely to capture the spirit of the times

or the sort of sound that the characters would be hearing in their lives. In other films, there's like this sort of archival approach where you're going back 10, 20, 30 years and kind of creating this landscape of what that sound of time was. And then there's also, especially in the last 25 years, I think a lot of our favorite filmmakers pride themselves on having this exquisite beyond the jukebox taste. You know, these sort of like. Yes. The Spotify curator before Spotify curation existed

and so and then of course there is the the album that is essentially written composed constructed recorded all by one person for an album in which they are effectively writing the score but the score is also a kind of pop music we're not talking about score here per se that that's a different thing that's a different episode of this pod if you'd like to be on that episode rob you're also invited it'll be within the next 7 to 12 years there we go 12 years i can i got time 12 years from now i will i will see you in 2033 for that pod it's good math right there go ahead yeah um what else what else are you looking for when you're thinking about a soundtrack you want to be overwhelmed by the music and forget

about the movie is that what you're saying? Ghostbusters shout out Huey Lewis but like that that I loved that song you know when I was six years old I had that cassette tape you know and then when I was living in New York I was in my 30s or whatever and I was watching Ghostbusters like music movie music in that movie like hit me again like it made me remember owning that tape I think that's the first soundtrack that really hit me and then there's stuff like The Breakfast Club, of course, like just the one iconic song in the vein of Don't You Forget About Me. I thought a lot about Ferris Bueller's Day Off. I think one of the more striking scenes from a movie from like the first decade or so of my life

is when they're in the art museum. And it's an instrumental version of Please, Please, Please Let Me Get what i want by the smiths which i didn't know at the time and like all the kids are holding hands and then ferris and sloan and cameron come in at the end and like cameron's like staring at the painting the sunday afternoon painting and it's like getting closer to him and getting closer to the painting like that that moment that song imprinted itself in me in a way that I don't think it had never happened like that for me before.

But I think that's the platonic ideal of what I'm looking for in a soundtrack. It can be a preexisting song. It can either be the song itself or it can be a rewrite of the song, but the movie sort of rewrites the song and the way that you hear it. And if you've never heard this song before, now that permanently is the way you're always going to think of that song. That's the first time where the union was absolutely perfect for me was that moment. What do you like more at this stage of your life when a film exposes you to a song that you are not familiar with and fall in love with, or when a film uses a song that you have a deep relationship with and hits it perfectly in

the film that's a really good question i was just thinking about more recent moments that hit me i do think it's more recontextualized songs it's like i'll be honest and say like the royal tenenbaums right like gwyneth paltrow getting off the bus to these days by nico in in the royal tenenbaums like that's a song that i'd probably heard before you know and i sort of understood nico to be important you know as a young rock critic at that point but i just as an emotional wallop i think anything i thought i previously knew about that song i forgot in that moment. Just watching old movie scenes with songs that I remembered, I have to tell you that I cried watching Juno. Watching the scene in Juno right after she gives birth and she's in the hospital,

Michael Cera shows up in a track uniform and gets in the bed with her and Cat Power's cover of Sea of Love is playing. It's a Led Zeppelin song it's a cat power cover song as a critic like we have this idea of cat power and especially your cover songs like i have all this not academic but sort of professional quote-unquote insight into cat power in that song in that moment but that's that's just a pure again sort of emotional wallop for me. That moment that still works on me, even with like a soundtrack with a movie that I sort of understand intellectually to be like sort of twee and manipulative. Like I'm glad to be manipulated in that moment. And I still am. And so I guess the answer is, yeah, songs that I thought I knew,

or I at least knew of that totally take on a different meaning for me in a moment and that's the meaning for me going forward forever i like that i think the idea of being manipulated is very powerful here i don't mind being manipulated by music and score i do mind being manipulated by bad screenwriting and there's an interesting i don't know if that's a contradiction or not maybe it's because of the year spent thinking about and writing about music that i've given it a little bit more grace when it comes to that sort of thing but like i was watching um remember watching uh palm springs last year movie that i really yeah i loved that that was my favorite movie of last year there you go i'm definitely one of mine as well wonderful movie

and uh john kale's barracuda is in that film which is one of my favorite songs of all time. I don't even really know why that's one of my favorite songs of all time. I feel very locked into the energy of that song. And it started playing in the film and I was like, it is though someone has invaded my brain. I feel not just seen but understood. And there's something really fun about that. I think it's not that I can't be introduced to a song I've never heard before. There are millions and millions I've never heard before, but I'm surprised less and less the older I get by things. Even Wes Anderson films now, I watch them and I'm like, oh, Wes, up to your old tricks, huh, buddy? Here come the kinks.

Yeah, exactly. So it is fun when someone grabs onto something that is maybe somewhat modestly obscure, but that you're very connected to. And yet all my favorites don't really have any of those qualities. My favorites are almost all of these films that I have on my list are things that I experienced probably between the ages of like five and 20. That's important to note. Yes. Would you say the same is true for you? Yes. And I do think that's important. I mean, I think a theme of a lot of things that you and I talk about and a lot of things we do on this site is like the things that you experience between five and 20 are going to hit different your entire life. You know, there's plenty of things you can understand on an intellectual level and spend time with and sort of understand why they're important or why they're good.

And you can like them on one level, but it's just never going to be that same visceral, pure, emotional way that you liked or connected with someone when you were young. That's not to say that it's over and it's sad. It's just that that is such a specific block of time and there's just no penetrating that once it's sad. It's just that that is such a specific block of time. And there's just no penetrating that once it's over. That's your canon for better or for worse. Should we talk about our canon of soundtracks? Let's do it. Okay.

Why don't you give me your number five, which is not a film I expected to appear on your list. I've given this a lot of thought, Sean, as you can tell. Okay. My number five is Angus from 1995, a movie very few people have seen. Our colleague, Alan Siegel, and I, we talk about this movie quite a lot. Okay. I'm writing a thing. It might be up by the time anyone hears this about like the lost art of the junk drawer

90s alt rock soundtrack, right? The most memorable for me is probably The Crow. Like at one point, I could have read you off the track list of The Crow from beginning to end. Big Empty, hell yeah. Hell yeah. Like when I saw The Crow and The Big Empty was playing on the car radio during a chase,

that was a That's Chappy type moment for me. It's like, that's The Big Empty. I know that song. And so I was obsessed with soundtracks and movies and just corny alt-rock songs like that's the big i know that song and so i i was obsessed with soundtracks and movies and just corny alt-rock songs like that when i was young and like a prestige example now would be like singles right or even reality bites or like clueless i thought a lot about clueless i almost picked clueless here clueless has like cool 90s bands covering cool 70s and 80s hits it has like you know it shakes some action, Kids in America.

They have like Coolio and Mighty Mighty Boss Tones, like songs you know because of the movie. Like Radiohead and Supergrass are on there for me. The Beastie Boys, more for you. Like even the filler, ostensibly like Luscious Jackson.

Like Clueless is an objectively perfect 90s soundtrack that does everything that you want a 90s soundtrack to do so well but angus is a very small like sort of rom-com awkward kid you know bully type movie that bully is james vanderbeek actually i think it's his first movie ever like very few people have seen it but it it has it's a very scruffy pop punk soundtrack and i picked it because it's just a perfect hermetically sealed little world. You can listen to this soundtrack, and it's like you're experiencing the movie because it's almost assured you haven't experienced the movie.

It's got arguably the best Green Day song, Jar, arguably the best Weezer song, You Gave Your Love to Me Softly. your love to me softly there's you know there's a couple clues overlaps like smoking popes and the muffs and just like these sort of warp tour type names this cool irish band ash has two songs kung fu and jack names the planet it's like it's all of these soundtracks these 90s soundtracks to me at some point feel craven like they just they go for the big hits they go for whoever they can get like there's a lot of compromises and a lot of manipulation happening but i just feel like the angus soundtrack is also true to itself and it's just its own hermetically sealed little thing and it ends with this song called am i wrong which is sung by the dude from the psychedelic furs the guy who sang pretty in pink obviously like his other band is called love spit love it's a terrible band name, but this is the marching band version, Sean, of the power

ballad Am I Wrong? It's a monster mixtape tune. It's the Don't You Forget About Me of the 90s. This is my dark horse pick for the best soundtrack, alt-rock soundtrack of the 90s. It's Angus. I'm feeling good about this. This is why you get the call for these episodes, Rob. This is why you're at the top of the call sheet anytime we do a music movies episode.

Well, I saw Angus in a movie theater. I watched that film. Weird flex, but okay. Yes. I recall enjoying it just fine. I don't recall George C. Scott and Rena Moreno appearing in the movie. Two Academy Award winners here in the film Angus. I do recall this Weezer song though.

Boy, when I was 13, this Weezer song, huh? How about that? You gave your love to me softly. Where am I now? La la la, she said to me. It's profound. It really is. Great pick. Thank you. Id? La la la. She said to me. It's profound. It really is. Great pick. Thank you.

Idiosyncratic. Truly Harvilla Ian. Yeah. That's Harvillan. I guess you might as well just. I would never call you that. Okay. My number five is a movie called Juice.

I've been talking about Juice a lot lately on podcasts. A couple of years ago, went on to my friend Oliver Wang's podcast, Heat Rocks, and spent an hour. I love that podcast. Great show. Great show. Oliver, wonderful guy. Terrific critic.

Thoughtful dude. We talked all about Juice. So if you want to hear me expand on what I love about Juice and the Juice soundtrack, you can listen there. Or you can listen to the Letterboxd podcast. I was also on that talking about Juice, which is one of my favorite movies of all time. So I've been sharing about this quite a bit. The Juice soundtrack is one of those things where it's like one of the greatest songs of all time so i've been sharing about this quite a bit uh the juice soundtrack is one of those things where it's like one of the greatest songs of all time appears on that

soundtrack it's the song called juice know the ledge by eric b and rock him probably the most energizing hard agree theme song really certainly of the 90s maybe ever the soundtrack itself is this really interesting snapshot of not just a kind of new york hip-hop scene though the film is set in new york in the early 90s but also new jack swing and also a little bit of west coast hip-hop with cypress hill and you know uh son of berserk and a few other artists uh mc poo from this time and it's not it's not like a bad boy greatest hits kind of a record. It's got a couple of classics, but then it's got a couple of kind of run-of-the-mill album cuts.

But when I was 14, I didn't really know that. When I was 14, I was like, Don't Be Afraid by Aaron Hall is as good as any song that Motown produced. He's Gaming On Ya by Salt- by salt and peppa was as meaningful as anything by the shirelles yeah all these songs are great and so it's like it's very much a snapshot of a period in time in the music industry and also the sort of the vagaries of a record label that could corral a certain number of artists at that time that's the other thing is like some of these things feel alchemical but really they're just sort of practical and all these artists

were available to be licensed for an MCA soundtrack. And so they all appear here, but, um, the, the, the film is sort of defined by music because,

uh, the Omar Epps character is a sort of wonder kind DJ and training. And he's sort of competing throughout the movie while also engaging in these relationships with his friends. Notably his, uh, his wayward friend, Bishop was played by tupac

who is uh taking a turn towards the darkness but there's so much music in the movie the best music cue aside from the title song i think is probably during uh the sort of pursuit scene the chase scene which is shot in this like draped in red light in this party and um cypress hills uh how i could just kill him at his playing and it is electrifying it is like incredible filmmaking ernest dickerson who is spike lee's longtime dp uh uh directed this movie and he has such a great sense for how to use the music of this time in this movie and so it's just something that like i like to return to that makes me feel like uh like i'm young again and i'm not young anymore rob don't you don't say that sean please i in these podcasts that

you've discussed this movie have you ever discussed why there is no tupac song on this soundtrack i believe it's for the reason i just identified which is he was not on that label labels right okay that's good enough you know that's that's. I wanted to tell you, I drove my kids to school this morning and my phone started playing the last thing that I had been playing last night, which turned out to be So You Want to Be a Gangster by Too Short. Yeah, great song. such as myself, would be like, let's see how this plays out. And nobody noticed. The kids didn't notice. They were arguing about which episode of the Greek mythology podcast to put on, and we put one on. They did. I was bummed out that I didn't have to explain to them anything too short was saying. You should put on Caligula tonight for the kids.

See what they think. See if they notice what's going on. They're still scarred from Jurassic Park, actually. Listening to this last night, Eric being around Kim, as you said, if they notice what's going on they're still scarred from jurassic park actually i listening to this last night like eric being around kim as you said and big daddy cane were like the two revelations of the soundtrack for me i also love like sort of the random ass grab bag quality of it as you said aaron hall and and salt and pepper i it's there's a lot going on and there's sort of a whiplash aspect but it does all hang together

even though it is you know there are some practicalities behind how it was put together i i because he's not here our friend and colleague justin sales would want me to say that his personal favorite rap soundtrack from the 90s is high school high oh sure from 1996 he says there's a great pace one record on that song on that soundtrack yeah he says that the best a tribe called quest song post midnight marauders is on there there's like d'angelo erica badu scarface some wu-tang it's it's it that one is also chaos in a very pleasing way i've always been an above the rim guy myself like maybe that's you know let's regulate and afro puffs of course there's a couple tupac

songs swv the dog pounds like it's it's the 90s rap soundtrack field is so crowded with with absurd excellence you know you got friday and it's there's there's a lot to pick from but i think you picked the right one thank you we should that maybe this is a whole episode unto itself 90s rap movie soundtracks uh give me your number four my number four is waiting to exhale uh also from 1995 this is easier to explain than angus you'll be relieved uh to hear so the body guard right like i i think the body guard stands alone in terms of objective hugeness of I Will Always Love You in particular. As a full soundtrack, it's great, but I think I Will Always Love You is way up here and the rest of the soundtrack is sort of down below. In terms of the full scale of the lushness and the radness of 90s R&B, I think Waiting to Exhale is just sort of a murderer's row you know we got baby face

orchestrating this we got whitney houston to start of course you know exhale shoot shoot but then let it flow by tony braxton like not gonna cry by mary j blige which might be my favorite of her songs like yeah sitting up in my room by brandy i then aretha franklin you know patty labelle shaka khan like even like the back like the back end end is like, well, like TLC, Faith Evans, SWV, like it's this front to back. It's just such an emotional and like a generational journey. And again, like it functions as a movie, a full arc of a movie, whether you've seen this movie or not really good pick it's this is kind of the avengers of of there we go black female soul and r&b singers um and it feels like the bodyguard is a bigger hit and i will always love you is her biggest hit but i don't like it more than exhale shoop shoop no i get it i get you i mean i'm trying to figure out if overexposure or just more exposure is part of that like exhale is such it's just pristine quieter whitney like it's she's not trying to bowl you over but she does anyway versus she's trying to and she does

i yeah there's there's two different ways of seeing her and i think those two songs represent the apex of either way my number four is american graffiti perhaps you've heard of it um american graffiti of course well known for pulling the sort of uh 1950s and early 60s pop gems of george lucas's youth and affixing them to this coming of age story which is kind of back in the news with licorice pizza it's clearly a big influence on the new Paul Thomas Anderson movie and this soundtrack is indelible to me for a couple of reasons one it was that double cd case do you remember what those are great ones just the heft of was just very impressive yes um this was the one of the first soundtracks that i had me spelunking the history of music because it feels like even if

this is not entirely true you're almost trained to think that this soundtrack is like the origin of rock and roll that this is this is where it all begins and of course like you get a little older and you come to learn about you know rocket 88 and and you learn about you know ike turner and all these figures who are maybe a little bit more consequentially involved in creating this art form um but it gets you digging a little bit and it also perfectly captures time and place with the music around it there's a kind of like an innocence and a speed to all of these songs that i think it keeps this kind of propulsive story about these kids in cars all night kind of rolling along and rolling along right and it's also the first soundtrack i can recall like essentially lecturing an adult about uh i remember

being scolded by my aunt and uncle when i was like 12 years old about to be that adult yeah i mean you know obviously i'm still that asshole but uh when i was 12 it was even less charming and uh like telling them about the difference between the platters and the diamonds for example yeah like a pretty pretty very helpful sean hard to believe i turned out to do this for a living but um i really love these songs and i still have an abiding affection for late 50s american popular music but i feel like it's something that is like very passe now like there's not really any there's no like subculture around that you know they're not a lot of tiktok memes around like buster brown you know the monotones is this a request that you're making are you putting this out into the world

perhaps it's an account i should start you know I think you're the man to do it. My ode to the Fleetwoods. You know, why not? Be the light you want to see in the world. So anyway, American Graffiti, obviously one of the all-time classics. Okay, what's your number three? My number three is Once from 2007.

This one is for me, Sean. Okay, this is the Irish. Wait, who are the other ones for? For the world. Okay. The other four are for the world. This one is for me. This is the irish wait who are the other ones for for the world okay the other four for the world this one is for me this is the irish movie about the irish busker guy uh glenn hansard from the frames who meets a czech woman marquetta iglova they fall in love but not really they sing some irish busker type songs apart they sing some songs together their song falling slowly won an oscar which is what you remember if you don't remember any of this. However you define or categorize a movie where two people

meet and they sing some songs apart, then they write and sing some songs together, this is my favorite one of those movies ever made. It's very simple and modest and profoundly moving to me. If we're going to talk about the arc of the soundtrack over time, I think we, somebody has to say garden state, right? Like that came in 2004. Like the shins will change your life was so literal.

Like it's easy to laugh at now, but that soundtrack was huge. And that soundtrack sought to like combine immaculate old stuff like Simon and Garfunkel, Nick Drake with like the coolest indie rock new stuff. The shins, like Iron and Wine covering the postal services in there. You got Coldplay. In terms of not so much making you a mixtape as building you a personality,

Garden State, I think, was the signature moment in the mid-2000s for folk and indie rock. Very uncool, totally massive. And so lots of high profile people were doing that in the first decade out of the 2000s. And so somebody had to do it much better than everybody else. And Once is that very human synthesis of it all for me. I don't hate Garden State at all, but it's just two human beings like flirting awkwardly and then vibing musically in this stupendous way and sort of bridging van morrison and iron and wine to the extent you can do that and like i half thought that i was trolling you with this until i listened to the whole soundtrack again today and like i'm totally not trolling you

with this one at all like this is another like this is from the same era but this is another juno moment where it just it makes me emotional just in how lovely it is and how human feeling it feels to me you're so soft on this episode something so tender about the way you're selecting as the father of a daughter sean i've learned to access a certain yeah maybe i should tap into that i like once i i got nothing against once uh not just as an irishman but as a as a lover ah right right yes i should have yeah i should have led with that well i mean i feel like this soundtrack and the film live and die on the strength of igloba and hensard's chemistry and the way that their voices fit together and it's it's really really I mean, this movie was a phenomenon.

It was. You can't really overstate. I know that The Shins is a very memorable kind of moment in Garden State, but this movie was very popular. And like you said, Academy Award winning. So, good pick. Okay, my number three is

sort of a degree of difficulty pick. I'm picking Kill Bill Volume 1 and 2, the pair of films from Quentin Tarantino from around the turn of the 21st century. And the reason I'm picking it is because I've never really seen a soundtrack or heard a soundtrack like this before or since. It's almost entirely instrumental,

not completely, but largely. And it's almost entirely pulled from pre-existing film scores, TV show themes, instrumental not completely but largely and it's almost entirely pulled from pre-existing film scores TV show themes and pop instrumental like Zamfir's pan flute hits and I don't know why or how he did this obviously Tarantino is well known for having this incredible ear

for somewhat obscure or forgotten pop gems that litter reservoir dogs, Pulp Fiction, et cetera. He's incredible at this. He's doing it to this day. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood features tons of great needle drops. He's a master at that.

This one is very, very different. The thing that this movie does is the same thing that the film is trying to accomplish, which is that it situates you in this film history and almost like informs and levitates the quality of genre movies by giving you more on top of more. So like there are sequences in the Kill Bill films that are very much an homage to blaxploitation movies. Maybe then you'd hear Truck Turner byac hayes when that's happening there are sequences that are huge homages to films like lady snowblood these sort of like um you know japanese uh samurai films and there you'd hear score from those films there are western style themes maybe there you'd

hear um you know sergio sergio leone score other spaghetti western composers. And he treats scores like pop music, which is how I treat, tend to treat score. Um, I tend to just listen for fun. And I, I, I've never, I've seen,

I've seen filmmakers obviously pull preexisting score, apply it to their film, but never in this kind of, uh, aggressively collage like way that is additive to the experience. I mean, the theme from the TV show, the green Hornet is like one of the key sounds of this movie.

And that's such a weird choice. Like imagine if the theme to, I don't know, what's the equivalent of The Green Hornet in 2021? Airwolf. Perfect. Thank you. Imagine if Airwolf just appeared

in one of your favorite films in 2035. That would be totally rad. That'd be weird. It would be totally rad that'd be weird it would be bold it would be fun um so i just think i just think the decision making in kill bill is really really cool and there's a lot to discover there that's like literally over 50 songs that were selected for this so that's my number three what was the was it homecoming the sam esmail series where all the music is scores from other movies yes Yes. Like three days of the Kong condor and stuff. That's the only thing I can think of.

That's kind of like that, but I know what you're saying that like, it's cause yeah, the Tarantino moment that resonates for me is Jackie Brown is the Delphonics and Jackie Brown. Like that's my, the shins will change your life. Right.

But I know what, what the kill bill is very different in that way. It's the higher degree of difficulty is the right way to frame that. Um, okay. What's next? My number two is the harder they come, uh,

from 1972. I, first of all, there's just a total emotional sort of gut level. Like every song starts and I just go, yeah, it's like, it's like being hugged by every person you pass on the street.

Like everyone gives you a hug and gives you a warm cup of coffee. And then like you three minutes later, you meet somebody else. I, it's very funny to me, you and I here at the ringer, like everything we're doing about movie soundtracks, like being built around Saturday night fever, right. Which is like a movie that 85% of our colleagues were not alive to experience as a present tense phenomenon. Like I, I feel like you, like you grow up with like 15 to 20 movies that you're told are the best soundtracks ever, but they predate you, you know, and they are, but like you, like I said, you didn't experience them as new when you were five to 20 and it's just different. It's like even something like the breakfast club now, like kids have to go back and seek

it out and like work to understand it in a way that you and I don't. And so I think that the harder they come is on that. Everybody knows this is the best list, but this is the one where I get the purest emotional reaction. Like it's, it's the gateway drug for reggae for generations of people now, just the plot arc of the Jimmy Cliff songs alone, right? Like you can get it if you really want to many rivers to cross to the harder they come. It's just that that's the movie. You know, this is a movie where I think the soundtrack is much more famous and beloved than the movie now, like it's fine. It's a great movie, but like the soundtrack is so clearly the best thing about it and the animating force behind it. And it's like the soundtrack

is giving the movie a hug. It's just like to drop Pressure Drop by Toots and the Maytals, like eighth on the track list to this movie. It's just, it's incredible to me just whenever I revisit this record now, like it's just, it's a movie unto itself also the rare film in which the star is the singer of some of the most critical tunes you

know we don't obviously that is something that is happening in once but that's more of a musical this isn't quite a musical it's something totally different right um okay great pick my number two is uh is goodfellas i i don't i don't i don't know what to say goodfellas you two is Goodfellas. I don't know what to say. Goodfellas? You seen Goodfellas, Rob? So is this a soundtrack that you listen to separate from the movie? I did.

I did as a very weird teenager, yeah. I wrote one of the first things that I ever wrote. A potent image. Yeah. One of the first things that I ever wrote. A potent image. Yeah. One of the first things that I ever wrote for The Ringer, a piece that I'm very proud of that I don't think many people have read, is a piece about the song Sincerely by the Moonglows and Harvey Fuqua. I read that.

Well, you are from Ohio. I believe I wrote it for Cleveland Week. There we go. Oh, Cleveland Week. Am I right? My life peaked with Cleveland Week, man. It's been all downhill from Cleveland Week. Rob, that was literally the third week of The Ringer.

But sincerely, the first time I heard Sincerely, which is a beautiful song, a fascinating kind of artifact of that transition that I'm talking about, the music that was popular in America before rock and roll kind of came to dominate. And that's a big part of the story that Scorsese is telling in Goodfellas. It's this transitional story where you're shifting from 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and the way that crime and human desire and impulse is changing over that time. And it's seen through the eyes of these gangsters, but he's using music to kind of shepherd us through these decades. And this soundtrack is... Certainly, these are very popular songs, Tony Bennett and Aretha Franklin and Cream and Derek Dominoeses this isn't obscure stuff but it is so expertly deployed and i used

to use soundtracks as like um as like training devices for learning about musical history sure and of course it's a very idiosyncratic point of view of a filmmaker like scorsese but um you know rags to riches by tony bennett is not a sinister song but deployed at the beginning of this movie it seems almost evil the way we see henry hill in that freeze frame so um yeah i did used to listen to it i i don't i don't know if i need to listen to it a lot now but um i it accomplishes what i want from my favorite soundtracks which is it puts me onto some stuff but more than anything what it really does is it amplifies the character's feelings in the film sure i mean the leila piano outro is one of my favorite pieces of music of all time and i think that was true before i saw the film and like talk about like redeploying

a song in like a sinister fashion you know but not ruining the beauty of the song it's not about the cheap trick of like making a beautiful song over something ugly, and now you associate the song with the ugliness. It's different. It's still beautiful, even in that sinister way. I don't know if I've ever listened to this front to back for pleasure or as a trip back into history, but that's a really smart thing to do, I think. Tell me your number one my number one is purple rain i it's weird to me how obvious and right this feels to me not that i'm right but just that purple rain is right like whatever else i am i'm a child of the mtv 80s and this just

feels like the new testament to me your pick your number one feels like the old testament and purple rain feels like the new testament it just it feels like the best album ever made in this weirdly inevitable and objective way and i just just trying to think about this at all logically right like as a movie soundtrack as a superhero origin story right with like the obligatory c CGI fight scenes replaced with like, let's go crazy. When doves cry, darling Nikki, purple rain. Like, I don't know what to tell you.

It's like good fellas. Like it's the thing that trips me out every time is when he plays darling Nikki in the movie and it's understood in the movie as like a heel turn. Everyone's like, oh God, stop. Don't do this. It's such a wild pop star move to me for Prince to have a scene where everyone else in the movie hates your sexiest and dirtiest song. It's like such a bizarre way to weaponize your rep as like this megalomaniac genius.

And this just feels like a greatest hits of world history to me in every sense but i still get something new out of it when i go back to it i'm glad you picked it if if if you didn't pick it i think we would have had a lot of people who are very angry with us because i'm already gonna have i already got angus anti-angus people lined up outside my door but think about the pro-angus people lined up outside my door but think about the pro-angus people battling them outside your door will they be stronger people are too meek to fight anybody for any reason it's kind of a good idea for the angus sequel you know that was like a bullying text there we go yes okay my number one is um it's a little bittersweet for me this morning if i'm

being totally honest with you i'll tell you why. It's a film called Superfly. And I've been thinking a lot about Superfly lately. On the one hand, my friend and the person that I'm going to talk to on this episode shortly thereafter, John Maggio, just made a documentary, not just about Robert Stigwood,

but he also made a film for HBO about Gordon Parks. Gordon Parks, the photographer, the civil rights leader, erudite man, and a filmmaker. And Gordon Parks' biggest commercial film was Shaft. So I saw John's film, which I would highly recommend people check out,

and I went into a little bit of a kind of blaxploitation dive. And so I was tooling around on the Criterion channel, and I see that there is an ode to Curtis Mayfield and the musical scores that Curtis Mayfield wrote over the years for a handful of films. And I'm looking at the bonus material and what's in the bonus material, but an interview with Greg Tate, one of the greatest music critics and writers about culture of the 20th and 21st centuries a person absolutely uh had a chance to work with a few times who was always very very good to me and i just learned

this morning that greg passed away and shocking it really is i almost brought him up with prince people are already passing around his obit for prince need i for mtv like as i said i one of my the highlights of my professional life was when Michael Jackson died. I was at The Village Voice, and I edited, quote unquote, Greg Tate on Michael Jackson, which is I capitalized three things and put it up because it's Greg Tate. But yes, that's absolutely the way to frame it. He's just one of the greatest writers about music, about culture I've ever known that I've ever worked with.

And it's a terrible loss and it's that i didn't know about that on the criterion channel i need to find that right now because yeah it's he's he's he's a master at it he always was and he always will be it's worth seeking out and you can also it gives you a chance i think see greg and greg's sly sense of humor his incredible mastery of the space and contextualizing now he's this very lyrical and kind of fulsome writer but he he understood the landscape and he wrote so well about stars like michael jackson and prince very very well but he also had a sense of he had a sense of social import in culture that was not this sort of like overweening over overdetermined, modern social media approach

to trying to prove. It was natural. It was earned and he was very thoughtful. I learned a lot from reading him and even just watching him again on my screen, hearing him talk about Superfly,

which is the film I'm picking for my favorite soundtrack, and what that soundtrack meant and the way that there was this kind of social import in the songs that Mayfield was writing for this movie, which could be disregarded as kind of social import in the songs that Mayfield was writing for this movie, which could be disregarded

as kind of like a throwaway crime movie, but in fact has a little bit more to say and is powered really by the songs that Curtis Mayfield wrote and sang and performed for the movie. I made my list before I heard the news about Greg, but hopefully this is the smallest of small tributes to a genuinely, authentically brilliant writer and a good person so shout out to greg completely i i was i was playing this

this morning and it's this is another one where the the album is a movie like just freddy's dead to a minute and 40 second instrumental literally called junkie chase which is just music to chase a junkie to and then it's give me your chase a junkie to. And then it's Give Me Your Love, parentheses, love song. And then it's Eddie, You Should Know Better. The soundtrack gives you characters, gives you arcs, gives you always this sense of place. Like, you don't need the movie. Like, you would be the expert on how the movie is perceived

versus the soundtrack. I like The Harder They Come. The movie is fine. The movie is perceived versus the soundtrack i like the harder they come i the movie is fine the movie is great but this is the music is so transcendent this the soundtrack is so transcendent that like it lifts up the movie but doesn't need the movie at the same time it's um it's basically opera you know it feel if yeah it's creating a sense of of dramatic importance in the story that may not be there on the surface. So those are our top five. Good picks all around.

I think we nailed it. I think we absolutely nailed it this time. Usually we screw this up pretty bad, but for once we got it. I'm excited for you to be celebrated on the Angus subreddit. I feel like that's going to be big for you. Now I just got to go create that. I've never created a subreddit before. I'm that's going to be big for you. Now I just got to go create that. I've never created a subreddit before.

I'm going to have to look up a tutorial or get my 10-year-old to help me, but I'm going to do that right now and I'm going to rule it with an iron fist. Rob, thanks for doing this. If you enjoyed hearing Rob's dulcet tones, please check out 60 Songs That Explain the 90s. Now let's go to my conversation

with John Maggio. Jon Maggio, so good to see you. So excited about this film. How are you feeling? I feel great. I'm psyched for the world to see it. I feel so happy that it's at DocNYC and that it's on HBO and that it's part of this bigger series, Music Box, which I think is giving the whole idea of my film context.

I think your guys' approach, the approach around the Music Box series is really great and unique. And the way Bill Simmons always, even with his sports stuff, takes this different angle in. Entering this, wanting to do a film on music and entering from that sort of perspective is really fun and really unique. So tell me about Robert Stigwood. How did you come upon him? How did you learn about him?

And who is he? Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, originally I wanted to do a film on the Bee Gees. But by the time I got to the idea, there was already one in process, right? But in sort of digging around the Bee Gees stuff, I discovered this guy, Robert Stigwood, who was this kind of like crazy Australian guy who loves to say hitchhike to the United Kingdom when he was a kid and just had this insane entrepreneurial spirit, he was a gambler and he ends up showing up in the music scene in the sixties

in London. And just, you know, it was part of this sort of, it was this kind of really interesting kind of almost like gay mafia going on with some of the management, Brian Epstein, he became friends with Kit Lambeau who eventually managed the who,

and he just fit right in. because he was a total showman. And he took on, he signed the Bee Gees, an incredible record deal he signed. The Who, who loved him. The Who didn't trust anybody, but they trusted Robert Stigwood. Cream, Clapton. He was right there in that moment in London, that crazy 60s moment. And people loved him. He was a total hard

ass, the way managers used to be back in the day. But when he gambled big, he scored big. And then later in his career, he took some gambles and really sort of fell on his face with Sgt. Peppers, for instance. But he had a vision. I think he saw in a way that I think other people at that moment hadn't. know there's always these there's very few visionaries in Hollywood you know there's always like one or two and there's a lot of followers but he was one of those people who saw the ability of the sort of like marketing and merging of music and film and I think it came from his background you know he started with musical theater he did Tommy did Jesus Christ Superstar and he took those products

and then turned them into movies and motion pictures. And he saw where Hollywood was going before anybody knew what was going on. And I think that's why when you look at, when you think about Saturday Night Fever, you think about the Bee Gees, you think about the soundtrack, right? It sold hundreds of millions of copies. And the studio got nothing. No piece of it. So you can imagine how angry they were. So that's, I mean, those are

the kinds of deals he pulled. He's a guy like Travolta, right? Guy was on TV, good looking guy, kind of the teen beat magazine thing. But, but Robert thought big. He saw Travolta when nobody else would touch him in the movie world. Back then it wasn't so easy to go from TV to movies. He signed me to a three picture deal, three pictures that he didn't even have for $1 million. It was like a huge deal at the time, right? So, I mean, but that was a big gamble for him. And, you know, how did it pay? Of course, it paid off.

Two of the biggest movies and soundtracks in Hollywood history, Grease and Saturday Night Fever. So, why was he not lionized like so many moguls and impresarios before him? I feel like there's not quite the same culture of awareness around Stigwood as some of those other folks. Yeah, no, that's right. I think in large part it was because he was always behind the scenes. He was closeted in his personal life, you know, back when you kind of had to be, obviously. So, he kept that very quiet. The people who knew him, he was a huge party thrower. He did a lot of stuff behind the scenes, which is in fact, one of the reasons why he discovered and knew disco was going to be so hot because he was going to the discos in Paris. He was going to underground discos in New York. He was going to discos in Rio. So he saw the

phenomenon early on before other people did, but he remained in the background. Excuse me. He didn't want to be a celebrity. He wasn't part of the, what we see now today with celebrity producers and, you know, people that we all, names we know. Back then he was interested in sort of being a pioneer. He was a gambler and he also wanted to hide his money. I mean, that's a little bit of a, you know, you see in the film, he basically, after there was a whole period of, you know, where, where, uh, in, in the UK, people were getting taxed like crazy. I mean, Clapton, then all of a sudden all these people start leaving, they start living offshore. He was one of them. He bought a yacht and lived down on the islands. And that's where he put all his money. So if you wanted to be with Robert Stigwood,

he wasn't going to go to the parties in Los Angeles or do any of that. He was, if you needed a meeting with him, you had to go down to the Caribbean and hang out on his yacht with him. So you have this figure who is essentially attempting to escape notoriety while also making the most popular things in the world. How do you make a movie about someone who doesn't necessarily want to be in the public eye? Yeah, it's tricky. There's actually not that many photos of him. You have to look a little closer every once in a while. You'll see like the Bee Gees walking on stage. And if you look through them and their shiny suits, you'll see Stigwood in the background. But it was a challenge. But one of the crazy things that happened was we met a guy who had been, one of the other reasons that Stigwood was hanging out in the Caribbean is that as a closeted gay man in that time, I think it was easier for him to be that way. And he had a lot of young men with him on the, as you'll see in the film, with him often. One of those guys that was with him on the, back then, took a ton of footage, video camera footage, like in the late seventies, early, like the sort of nascent, those giant,

like VHS cameras, whatever. And he was living in Bermuda and he reached out to us and said, look, I've got all this stuff here. And it was during COVID. So it was sort of like, wait, so you're in Bermuda. How are we going to make this happen? We were able to get a flight. We sent my producer, Carolyn Cannon to Bermuda and she had a quarantine there for 10 days. It was a tough assignment for her, I'm sure. But he gave us this incredible amount of personal footage of Stigwood on the boat. All the stuff you see toward the end of the film. He really sort of like, you know, the post-Staying Alive, Sergeant Pepper's sort of era. And that really helps, I think, because we sort of cut back to that moment and you're like, oh, there he is.

And he also had photographs that we'd never seen before. Because Robert didn't have any children, his estate is kind of, it's a little all over the place. So there are people like this guy that we met who have pieces ephemera that nobody else has seen that you've got to go to Bermuda to get. So that was a huge help. You know, when you look at like some of the Clapton archive, cream archive, you see Stigwood, the Bee Gees, of course, you know, he, he really took them under the ring and they became like a family. I think they definitely had financially some issues that they were at each other's throats over the massive success of satanite fever incidentally. Um, but, uh, there's some good photos there that we got sort of like through Bee Gees archives and stuff. So we're able to piece it together a little bit. What we do, you know, the approach of the film, which was, um, from the beginning, it was fortuitous because it was a style choice I made to not do interviews. I felt like I didn't want to see these old time rockers anymore.

I wanted them to be sort of in a way encased in amber, you know, a way to sort of just like see the beautiful Travolta, not the weird Lego hair Travolta or whatever. Like, you know, really live in the moment and have it be super immersive. But that required us to have a ton of archival to sort of stitch that together and do these, you know, we were doing audio interviews and all this stuff. So it was, it made it a little bit more challenging to sort of piece together. But in the end, I think forced us to really dig deep into the archive and find those, those moments that we could sort of tease out and to paint the picture. Tell me a little bit more about doing that because some of your films have featured extremely high profile people on camera over the years. You've talked to presidents of your films have featured extremely high profile people on camera over the years. You've talked to presidents for your films. So when you're doing it this way,

when you're trying to create a visual language using photography, maybe some footage, maybe some personal archival footage, how hard is that? What goes into doing that? Yeah, it's definitely a challenge because you're, you're, you're, you're really circumscribed to the, to the extent archive. And, you know, we did some decent kind of phone interviews with people. Like I was able to augment the archival stuff with the voices that you hear in the film, but it wasn't, it was a challenge that I wanted to try because I thought for me, there was, there were two things. The first one was,

I don't love seeing old rockers and old musicians and that kind of stuff today. I don't, I don't know why it's just like, uh, some people do. I mean, it has its place, but I also wanted to celebrate the music. You know, you guys, um, for the series, we had a good budget for music and I was like, let's drop people in, you know, I love disc. I love that music and you know, I'm not ashamed to say it, you know. And so I really wanted it to be this kind of, like I said, like super immersive experience. And yeah, and it was, and it also, then in addition to all of that, COVID had happened. So, you know, reaching out to Travolta and be like, you know, I want to bring, I want to come in with a camera.

Nobody, I mean, it was a serious lockdown sort of scenario. And to get the kind of number of voices we wanted, I just felt like this was the better approach. And incidentally, which was cool, was that one of the biggest key people in the storytelling was Kevin McCormick. You know, he's a big Hollywood producer now. But he was like a 20-year-old kid. And he was executive producing Saturday Night Fever.

I mean, he didn't, and admittedly, you'll see in the film, he doesn't know what the hell he was doing. They were making this, everything up as they were going along. So, but he was super generous with his time because he was actually making the film with Tom Hanks. Remember when Hanks announced that he got COVID? Yes, yes. The whole world was like, oh my God, you know, Tom Hanks got COVID. This is real. Well, that was on the set my God, you know, Tom Hanks got COVID. This is, this is real. Well, that was on the set of his movie that, that McCormick was producing.

Was that the Elvis film? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and so Kevin was, was stuck in Los Angeles. Hanks was stuck in with COVID in Australia. And so Kevin had all this time on his hands. So like I'd call him up and we'd like shoot the shit and like really was able to like

kind of dig into his memory. Cause he was there with Robert from the beginning, like when in London and then came over from London when Robert sort of started his empire in New York, you know, without the sort of like that kind of formative bedrock interview, it would have been a lot harder. So, so I, you know, it made stitching the archival together a lot easier, but yeah, I mean, and also like, you know, someone like Travolta, who also, I think sort of in the middle of COVID, his wife died. And I think, you know, all of our best efforts to be aware of that, cut a wide berth, you know, we, we, we, we went out to him and he just wasn't up for it,

you know, which I totally got, but we had all this great archival. Right. So I didn't need it. So at every turn where I was like questioning myself, like, is this the right approach? Is this the right approach? All of those pieces were sort of falling in place. And it just suddenly was like this, you know, as I, my editor, Seth and I were always talking about, I was like, it's a really great yarn. I mean, it's the kind of story where we set out to do. To your point, this wasn't a film, you know, I've done films with President Obama and other presidents and stuff. It wasn't that approach. This was like a story you'd want to sit in a bar and be like, let me tell you a story that you can't, you won't believe. And that's kind of where we went. That's a great way to frame it. The movie though does, it's not

one single linear story. You have kind of a big remit here because you're telling the story of this fairly mysterious, but hugely successful person. But you're also telling the story of the acquisition of a property and a production of a huge movie. And you're talking about kind of the birth and life cycle of the whole genre of music in pretty condensed frame of time. So like, how did you attack that?

You know, did that evolve out of the production? Is it something you always set out to do? How did it take over? Well, great question. I mean, I think it's definitely an evolution. You know, when I start these projects, I have a kind of, you know, a vague idea. I was just talking to somebody about this,

about like journalism practices. And it's often that I have an idea and then I'm like, well, can we say this? Is this really how it went? And I think one of the keys to that, the entire story, structure of the story revolved around Nick Cohn, the author of the New York Magazine article, the original New York Magazine article, which was written like a novella. It's an incredible piece of new, quote unquote, new journalism, right? When that was really its beginning. Maybe it was sort of like in the middle.

We were post-Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe. But Nick was in that spirit. And so that was one of the first pieces I read. And incidentally, having done a film years ago on Italian-American immigration, I had learned there were rumors that that story was made up, that he hadn't actually gone to the disco that he writes about in New York mag. So that was always in the back of my head and I was like, oh, interesting. Like that could be a really interesting element to the

story, a wrinkle that maybe people have never heard of before or whatever. So Nick Cohn is an unbelievable character. You know, he's been, he's been, he's like the quintessential rock, you know, sort of music writer, culture writer, busted for heroin possession and distribution and has lived underground largely. And I really wanted to get, I wanted to find him. And, and I don't even remember to be honest with you how it was. It was like a whole series of events through New York through old New York mag people, whatever. We found him upstate living in this barn.

And he just kept saying, no, no, no, no, no. And then I just was relentless. I called him. I remember having this phone conversation with him. And he, I forgot what the key to it was. I just was appealing to his sense of like, you know, this is an important story. And like, you're a fascinating character, whatever. He agreed to it.

He's like, all right. And it was literally like come up like the next day. So I was like, done. So I drive up there. He's in this big, really cool old barn. And he's an incredible raconteur. And he didn't hold back. He just told us the whole story.

And he really, the beautiful thing was he did go to the club. It's just that he, he manufactured the characters cause he's such a good writer. Right. And, you know, and he based it on, he based it on the mods he grew up with in London and the people that he'd seen. Um, and so that, you know, helped kind of like, you know, you had Kevin McCormick, then you get a Nick Cohn, and then suddenly you have this really interesting sub-story, origin story. You know what it was? He was tired of talking about Saturday Night Fever. And so that's why I expanded it, you know?

And you'll see he's a great character in the film because he goes beyond, he really could, he understood Stigwood in a way that no other people did. He understood him in a literary way. He understood his motivations. He was way that no other people did. He understood him in a literary way. He understood his motivations. He was able to give voice to Roberts. Roberts is not here to speak for himself. But he understood, I think, yearning, both of young people, teenagers, wanting to escape the way the Mods did from working class London.

He understood Roberts' obsession with, I think, status. He was an Australian living in London who wanted to sort of, you know, be part of something bigger. He lived in these castles. Every picture of Robert in the film, he's got a Rolls Royce or something ridiculous. The flower bills, the $15,000 a week for flowers in the office. So Nick understood those nuances that I think give the film a lot of texture, but also a kind of narrative strength that, that to your point about like, you know, then it handed off to Kevin to talk about the changing scene in seventies Hollywood, um, and the need to attract young people. And that's sort of the idea that IP was going to be King, you know, all of these things that were emerging at that

time, um, which would be like a boring TED talk if you didn't also have all these other layered sub-stories, which is what I try to do in all of my films. It's like, you know, I don't want to lecture to anybody. I want to tell them a yarn. And so that was always the approach. That's always been my approach to almost everything I do, whether it's political or whatever. And it paid off, you know? It sort of ended up working out because of the characters we were able to pull together. So what is it that you think Stigwood had? I think it's described as

a sense of smell. Yeah. And I love that. Then thinking about it that way, I usually hear the word taste, but there's something different with Robert, you know, it's almost like it's not real yet. Like he can't, but so how did he converge these things? What was it? Because he was not a young kid at the time. How did he know what young kids were going to want? How did he converge these things? What was it? Because he was not a young kid at the time. How did he know what young kids were going to want? How did he know how to smash these worlds together and make these things fit? Having spent so much time talking to people and learning about him. Yeah, that's a great question.

And I'm not sure, you know, when you start, for me, getting inside a character's head, when you get to motivation and those types of things, it's hard, you know, they're not here to tell us or, you know, even, you know, it's funny. It's an interesting question. I was watching a Paul McCartney interview yesterday where he said something about how he never got to tell John Lennon he loved him. And because they were Liverpool kids and that's not what you do. You just don't, you know, talk to each other. And I thought, you know, that's a fascinating little bit of information and not something I ever thought about until somebody thought to ask the question.

You know? And so I think when I think about someone like Stigwood, no one ever asked him the question, so I don't really have the answer. I mean, we can infer, like I said, the sense of smell is an inference. But I don't think, I don't know. I don't know how he was so good at it. Like I say, the things we can see, the gambler, he was definitely fearless with his money. He invested all the money into Saturday Night Firm. Most of it, Paramount put in very little, reaped very little of it. Even the very little they reaped, though, kept them going

for several fiscal quarters. So it was such a mega hit. I think even more than Serenity Fever in a weird way, if you look to Grease, that's where you're like, how the hell did he turn a kind of staid 1950s whatever, greaser musical into this hit that my wife still sings. I mean,

just like people, little kids loved that movie. I don't know. I wish I knew. We present it in the film as best we can, but I don't know what that secret sauce was. And I don't think anybody ever, I'm not sure the question was put to him. Maybe he he would have said like, as a kid, I'd loved musicals or I, you know, I don't think we have that information. In an interesting way though, I think his sexuality, which we deal with in the film to a certain extent about, you know, how it sort of drew him to disco and the clubs that he loved to go to and how disco began as gay music, gay black music. You know, he did have love affairs with singers and things that were clear. He loved, I think we say it in the film, but, you know, he was in love with Andy and Barry Gibb. He was probably in love with Clapton. He was probably in love with Townsend.

It's, you know, a lot of, Joey from Joey from I'm forgetting Joe Kelly who's in Saturday Night Fever told me and I just didn't after a while it was like that would have

taken away from I think the narrative arc but told me that he one day went up to Stigwood's apartment it was just like

leapt upon by Stigwood so I think he had a yearning there was definitely maybe he wanted to be an artist maybe he wanted it celebrated in a way.

You know, and he loved singers. He loved songwriters. So I don't know. You know, it's like something I think we'll sort of grapple with. But I use the McCartney example just as like one of those things. It's like, I don't know, maybe, I wish he would have been less a recluse and maybe left a memoir or something we could have drawn into but there wasn't that it's so interesting because he has such great artistic instincts and understood how to put people together like great producers do right but also whenever he's asked about it and you show in the film he mostly deflects by talking

about the success of the things that he's done he seems to be measuring it by how many records sold how much money did the film make at the box office, you know, like that competitiveness, maybe a little bit of the class that he's consumed by. A hundred percent, Sean. I think it's the class thing. I think that's very real. There's a final scene toward the end of the film

when he's on the yacht and he's all sort of pink-faced and Nick Cohn mentions it, you know, and he's eating the tell that maybe you and I wouldn't know because we're from America. But the tell for Brits that I've shown this film to is the HP sauce he has next to his meal. That's working class. And it's like, that's not something he could escape, you know. And here he is on this yacht that's a city block long, right? I mean, it's not even a pretty yacht.

It's just massive. It's all about, it must have cost like millions of dollars. He bought it in Capri, had it shipped to the Caribbean. But there he is eating his bangers and hash with HP sauce. And so I think that says a lot about who Robert was. You know, it was like he was going to spend his way to class. But as every Brit knows, doesn't matter. It's like nouveau riche just didn't matter. Maybe that fueled him. I don't know,

but it says a lot about him and it's not something I ever recognized until I showed it to some Brits. That's so interesting. So the other thing is that this is a great film about the making of a film. I love films about the making of films, Saturday Night Fever, iconic film. So how do you go about trying to recapture some of those, you know, really among the most iconic American films ever made? I mean, the sounds and the images are so powerful in our collective memory. So what, how did you embark on that? Well, again, it speaks to a little bit of my Italian American-ness and knowing the neighborhood that that film was made in. And so one of the first things I did,

one of the very first missions I sent my producers on was to go back to Bensonhurst and find the people that were at that club for the New York Mac. They got to still exist. They'd be in their early sixties, late fifties, early sixt, and find any kind of bits of ephemera, go and find anything, stories. And we met this woman, Bunny Curcio, who just by total luck, her and her brother had been in the film. They won the dance contest. They literally

put on a dance contest and the winners got to be extras in the film. And then in the film, they win the dance contest, if you recall, and they call Bunny and Joey Curcio and they go up on the stage. So we found them. And so they were able to add this kind of very local flavor because that's really what Cone discovered in Bensonhurst was this tribalism. And I was drawn to that as an Italian American, super tribal people. And I understood, you know, that story he tells about going there with his black, the black dancer, friend of his, and he got preyed upon instantly, went out on the dance floor, danced with a woman for like five minutes and then was preyed upon.

So all of that, all of that darkness to darkness, to your listeners, to your viewers, re-watch Saturday Night Fever. It's one of the darkest American films of the era. I mean, it's not a lighthearted, like, we think about the film, we think about Travolta and the great dance scenes, but underneath is a dark, dark story about a very tribal group of people and this yearning to get out. And a time in America when it was really hard for's a yearning to get out and a time in America when it was really hard for working class Americans to get out. They live, what do they live

for? They live for Saturday night. Um, and they had this little moment, but the language of the film, there's, there's rapes, um, there's suicides, there's, you know, just, it's, it's not something and, you know, I think they did a cleaned up version. I was, I Bill about the, he saw the, I think he saw the cleaned up version as a kid or something with his mom. And, you know, it's, so it's, so it's a really dark place. So I wanted to start there. I actually really started there just to find out what that community was like, uh, under having an understanding of, of how cloistered it was. Um, so I sort of interestingly keyed on the darkness at first. I knew, you know, everyone knew the iconic stuff.

And I think they add great color to the film. They talk about the gujins and all the different characters and the Argo and the whole, they really nail, they help kind of create that picture. So I knew I had McCormick, I had Cone, and then I thought this other sort of like implement, supplement to the story, which was actually quite key key was the on the ground, the people that had experienced it and, and just, you know, it took over that neighborhood. It was the biggest thing

that ever hit that place. Um, I mean, Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, Bensonhurst today is, it's not, it's not the best of neighborhoods. And back then it was like all broken down warehouses. It was such a far cry from the studio 54s. I mean, it was like all broken down warehouses. It was such a far cry from the studio of 54s. I mean, it was the exact opposite experience, but yeah. So, I mean, just finding all those textures, all those notes that I thought would sort of bring the making of it. And then, like I said, like Kevin was 21 when he made, as a producer of that film for Paramount, it was a huge deal. And I, and I think it was only like Stigwood, while he was a gambler, I think he only put up like 3 million bucks or something.

And so, you know, they were doing like makeshift smoke machines. They were like literally like burning tires or something to get the smoke in the thing. Everyone said it just smelled awful. And he was having to pay off the local godfathers and stuff to be able to put lights across the street and do all this stuff. So it was, yeah, it was a really messy, messy affair. But, but, um, what I thought was interesting is, you know, uh, there's God, there's so much trouble, you know, the original

director, Avilson, who had just made Rocky, right. I had no idea about any of this. Yeah. He just made Rocky and they were able to sign him up, showed him the script. Uh, they showed him Nick Cone's script. Avilson, John Avelson comes on and says, I want to work at Norman Wexler. You know, who had written Joe and Serpico, dark, dark movies. He was this crazy man who literally would write a script and have a mental breakdown, go into a asylum, come out, write a script.

It was like this, like, you know, back and forth with him. And so what emerges is this very dark, dark thing. And, and then Avilson leaves, John Badham comes on and basically an Englishman. Um, but his approach, which I think is really interesting was, uh, to do it more documentary style. You know, that's why it does have this great, you know, that walk, the opening walk down the street. He was describing being on a dolly and having this camera really low and they had huge speakers behind them. And at the time they're playing Bascax. Is it Bascax? Yeah, Bascax.

I think it was like Lido or one of those songs. And they would film walking on the street. Everything was handheld. It has this very gritty, real sort of vibe, which was emerging then. and they would film Rocky on the street. Everything was handheld. It was very, it has this very gritty, real sort of vibe, which is, you know, which was emerging then

in the 70s, as we talk about in the film. So there were so many aspects and so many like twists and turns and this poor guy, Kevin McCormick's kid was trying to like hold all these strings together.

They didn't know they had to have a sync track. You know, I mean, they talk about that, like, oh, we got to sync the music with this. So then, you know, then they finally got the right to use the Beezer. They had to recut stuff track you know i mean they talk about that like oh we got to sync the music with this so then you know then they finally got the right to to use the beat they had to recut stuff i mean it was just they were making it up as they went along and it's one of those things that

um one of those films that you know some sometimes you're in a moment and it can never be recreated you know and as we know the subsequent movie to try to recreate that spirit was totally just a complete failure. It was just a disaster. When we talk about the gambles and the wins and losses, that was a loss for Stipkid. But for a moment, he caught lightning in a bottle and it shows. It's an interesting sustained moment where it's happening over a period of years. And then the projects that don't work are also pretty profound. And you touch on those a little bit at the end.

One other thing I was curious about is, are there benefits to making a film like this about someone who's no longer alive? You know, they all have their unique challenges. I think, yes. The short answer is yes. There's a lot of benefits. We got the approval from the quote-unquote estate

which such as it is from um a guy who had been a long-time assistant to to robert uh patrick bywalski and he he bought in early which was a huge help i think that opened some doors to other archives and things um the advantage is i you know, I didn't have to show to Robert, which I think as we all know is tricky when you have a living artist and you show them a cut and they don't like it. You have all these sort of, you know, it's like there are boundaries, editorial boundaries and we, that we face every day. And I think we try to make, try to please people within reason. We never give up final cut, you know, all that kind of stuff. So I didn't have to deal with any of those issues.

Well, that's not true. I mean, we had to deal with some issues around the Bee Gees music, but for the most part, it was a pretty easy lift on the rights parts. And yes, to your point, I think it was easier that he, that he was no longer around and that his estate played ball. So it was an easier lift. John, we end every episode of this show by asking filmmakers what is the last great thing

they have seen? Have you seen anything good? The last great thing I've seen, I gotta be honest, it was the Vale documentary by Vale Kilmer. Yeah, what did you like about that? I don't, you know, I've seen a lot of docs. It's like a really

great year for docs it's messy as shit but it's so affecting yeah what i mean it's like the craft is like okay but there's a story at its core that i think uh is not overplayed but maybe you know like you go to a movie and you, you infer all your own, you bring all your own stuff. That's, you know, what I try to do in my own filmmaking is like connect to people emotionally. I see something, obviously something in Stigwood I saw, I see in myself. I just did a film on Gordon Parks. Obviously I see a piece of the hustle that Gordon had in myself. But for me, the Val Kilmer film is this sense that he has that he wasn't the one that should have been the success. That it was his brother who was this genius, right?

He was the directing all those films and doing all that stuff. And I think it shaped his entire life. You know, I think that's what the filming was about. The kind of not believing, you know, we all have imposter syndrome, but he had it in spades and he documented it. And I left that film, I couldn't shake it off, you know? And so that to me is the mark of something that really is, that's gone beyond just, you know, just being a good film. It, it, I found it really affecting. And of course, you know,

the shape that he's in now, he's this once great Adonis like character. And now he can barely speak and he's just everything seems labored but he's going through that loves his fans you know it's like but the ups and downs I don't know if you've seen it but the ups and downs

of that guy's life Jesus was just so intense and like I say it's a red hot mess of a film but it all adds up and so I have to respect it and it's one I haven't

been able to shake and I hope it gets I know it's getting a lot of buzz but I just thought it was really effective the one I want to see is Rescue I've heard it gets, I know it's getting a lot of buzz, but I just thought it was really effective. The one I want to see is Rescue.

I've heard that's really good. Oh, it's wonderful. Yeah, there's something you probably have never seen before in that one. Yeah, definitely. John, thank you. Congrats on Mr. Saturday Night.

Thanks, Sean. It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much to John Maggio. Please check out Mr. Saturday Night on HBO and HBO Max on Thursday night. I hope you dig that. Thanks to Rob Hartville, of course, for coming to the show. And thanks to our producer, Bobby Wagner. He makes us sound as good as we can sound, honestly. See you later this week on The Big Picture,

where we'll be talking about a very important movie directed by a very important man. I'm talking about West Side Story, directed by Steven Spielberg. We'll see you then. I'm Sean Fennessey, and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about music. Woo!