The Big Picture - Why 'Dark Phoenix' Flopped and 'Late Night' Works, Plus Joe Talbot on 'The Last Black Man in San Francisco' | The Big Picture

Episode Date: June 11, 2019

We go over Mindy Kaling’s feature screenwriting debut, ‘Late Night, before reviewing the box office flop of ‘Dark Phoenix,’ the most recent and final release of this generation of the X-Men franchise (1:00). Then, ‘The Last Black Man in San Francisco’ director Joe Talbot joins to talk about his directorial debut—a picturesque examination of his hometown in the face of rapid gentrification (55:45). Host: Sean Fennessey Guests: Amanda Dobbins and Joe Talbot Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey guys, this is Liz Kelley, here to tell you about some changes to the Ringer Podcast Network. The Press Box with Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker is moving into its very own feed and will now be coming to you twice a week. So to keep up with the media's biggest news stories, from sports to politics to everything in between, subscribe to the Press Box on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and look for new episodes on Tuesdays and Fridays. I'm Sean Fennessey. And I'm Amanda Fennessy. And I'm Amanda Dobbins. And this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about our long career working in the writing room of a late-night talk show. Amanda, we're here to talk about the movie Late Night, among other interesting subjects. Later in the show, I'll have an interview with the writer and director Joe Talbot,

who made an absolutely beautiful film called The Last Black Man in San Francisco that is in limited release right now and will be expanding through the month. I would highly encourage you to listen to that conversation. And before we get to that point, we will talk about The Last Black Man in San Francisco a bit on the show and a couple of other films that have seen release over the last few days. First and foremost is the aforementioned Late Night. Amanda, this movie premiered at Sundance in January, to what I would say is a great deal of fanfare. I would say it was probably the noisiest release that came out of that festival. It was purchased for a tidy sum of $13 million by Amazon Studios. Amazon, of course,

has done this in the past. They did it with The Big Sick and they did it with the Kenneth Lonergan film Manchester by the Sea. They've been able to release these movies out into the world and see some pretty solid returns on them, given that they're a traditional festival fare. What did you think about the movie Late Night? Well, it's important to note that Late Night was written by Mindy Kaling and also stars Mindy Kaling and Emma Thompson, who is among the most important figures to me in the world. Emma Thompson is really, really speaks to

me. I was wondering if you were going to add the to me assignation and because you were leaning into one of the most world historical figures known to this race of humans. Well, she is kind of the British Meryl Streep, which is a comparison I want to explore more. There's a specific Meryl Streep role that we will be talking about, and we talk about it every time I'm on a podcast. But she is also extremely important to me. I have a great connection to Sense and Sensibility, and she published the script that she wrote for Sense and Sensibility. She went and also published shooting diaries that she kept during the filming of Sense and Sensibility. She won an Oscar for it and also published like shooting diaries that she kept during the filming of Sense and Sensibility, which I read in moments of distress to soothe me. So I was biased going into this movie. I think another thing we should just briefly recount the plot of Late Night, which is that Emma Thompson is the first and only female host of a network late night show. And the show is not doing well.

And so Mindy Kaling is a young writer who is hired in the writer's room. And she is the first woman in the writer's room in a long time. And the only woman in the writer's room in this context and is young and new and is bringing some fresh perspective. And so it's about Emma Thompson's struggle to keep her show and learn how to be in the workplace. It's about Mandy Kaling's struggle to learn how to be in the workplace and deal with her ambition. And I'm a sucker for those types of movies. I think two of my favorite movies of all time are Working Girl and the afore-referenced Devil Wears Prada. And it's very much in that genre. So I really enjoyed it

while wanting a lot more from it in a both positive sense and a negative sense. That's interesting that you say that. I think I went in with a muted sort of expectation for this movie, expecting it to be a bit grungier, a bit more festival. And I was surprised by how polished and clever and clean and well shot and dynamic it was. And also how traditional it was in many ways. I've been thinking a lot about kind of who's the real star of this movie? Who's the main character of this movie? And then I main character of this movie? And then I was reading Alison Herman on The Ringer writing about the movie, and she, I think, correctly identified that this is actually a rom-com between a mentor and a mentee,

which I thought was an insightful way to imagine the story because the story really bounces pretty evenly between Emma Thompson's arc and Mindy Kaling's arc. Mindy Kaling is this woman who works in a chemical plant. By dint of some contest, she gets an interview with an executive at some mega corporate firm that owns a network. That gets her in the room interviewing with Dennis O'Hare,

who happens to run Emma Thompson's show. Then all of a sudden she's on this show. And then of course, as you pointed out, Emma Thompson, longtime talk show host. There's something interesting about this movie, which is that I've never seen a movie present a trailblazing idea being over already. That we see her at the end of breaking down the walls of a woman coming into this space of late night talk shows, a British person. There are now a number of British hosts over the last five or 10 years. We learned that obviously she's been doing this for at least 27, 30 years.

And so where we come into the movie, it is somehow both radical and old-fashioned at the same time, both because of the story and because of some of the storytelling choices that they make. So when you say you wanted a little bit more for it, what is it that you wanted more of? Well, I hesitate to turn every podcast that we do into some referendum on like the medium and the genre and the type of project that is being made. But Mindy Kaling is an extraordinarily accomplished TV writer. And much of this movie, which I think is really smart in the way that it talks about the comedy and TV industry and women in that industry

is based on her own experience and her knowledge. And it has that lived in authoritative feeling. She also is just very good at writing those kind of specific TV bits, like doing the very funny character scene or kind of those moments that feel lived in and like you want to spend time with the person. And obviously she wrote on The Office for a long time, which is the now as we know it peak example of people just want to spend time with this show. And, you know, also created The Mindy Project. But so I really wanted to spend more time with these people. I found the world very charming. Obviously, I just want to spend time

with Emma Thompson in any capacity. So I thought that that was a strength and I wanted more from it while at the same time feeling that some of the movie plot jumps were not as fleshed out as I wanted them to be. The whole John Lithgow plays Emma Thompson's husband and there is an infidelity scandal in this movie and it's resolved very quickly. And they kind of jump through all of those character machinations and emotional revelations really neatly. And that just felt like a lack of time. And we have this running category on the rewatchables that is Bill's category of would this work as a 10 series Netflix 10 part Netflix series and I thought about that halfway through watching the movie I was like

this actually would be a good TV show a good 10 series because it gives you more room to explore all the ideas that this movie introduces and explores to varying degrees and then also leads into I think Mindy Kaling's real strength which is creating worlds and atmospheres that you want to spend time in yeah I think she also writes with an incredible high energy she writes good punch lines she tends to flesh out her characters pretty well though you're right that and we talked about this last week with Always Be My Maybe that there is a kind of up from sitcoms quality that sometimes infects the writing of a first feature. And invariably what happens is, is you know how to tell a story in a very specific way. And if you spend 15 years writing stories in a very specific way, some of that is bound to find its way into movie writing, which is just significantly different. Now, hang with me because I know this is going to

bore the shit out of you, but I was listening to a podcast about screenwriting over the weekend and the challenges of screenwriting. It was a very interesting conversation. It was Craig Mazin who was on the show last week and he was talking on his show that he hosts with John August. He was basically reading a lecture that he's given before. And one of the things he talked about was finding the theme of your story. So the theme of a story is not good versus evil. That's not a theme. The theme has to have sort of a problem. It's a canard and a problem. And the theme of this movie, very interestingly to me, is excellence at the cost of decency. So Emma Thompson's character, Catherine Newberry, is, we are told, incredibly intelligent, incredibly gifted

at what she does, experienced. We see her Emmys myriad times in the movie. They can't stop telling us how good she is at this. And the reason she's so good, apparently, is because she's not a nice person. She doesn't play well with others. She's difficult to work for, but she expects nothing but the best. There's a problem with this because she doesn't seem to work very hard. And she doesn't interact with any of her writers. And she doesn't really put anything to the test at any given time. So there's an expectation that maybe she's lost something on her fastball. But also we're supposed to understand her as this all-powerful figure.

And there's just like a slight story problem in the movie when you're watching it. And because of that, and if you were in a 10-episode series, I think you'd be able to iron that out over a long period of time. You'd be able to understand maybe how the show got away from her over a period of time. Because is it that she was rich? Is it that she was tending to her husband who has fallen ill? Is it that she's just gotten complacent? We don't really know what happened to Catherine Newberry that led her to fall so far from her perch. And there's small things like that in the movie that were nagging at me too, where I felt like this is not quite totally ironed out. I will say though, the energy and the humor and even the emotion, I think it's just a very effective pop entertainment. But inevitably when you get into

a podcast and you're like, what was going on in this movie? And you start to, you know, take apart all the little chain links. It starts to feel a little bit janky. Yeah. I think it also, they do hint a little bit as to what has happened. And some of it is that she's out of time and that she is aging and that the world has changed. And, you know, there are a lot of social media jokes, some of which are funny, some work better than others. There are jokes about her age and being a woman in this world, which is an interesting idea. And this is when we have to point out that this movie does explore what it is like to be a woman in a male-dominated workplace, and I think interesting ways, and that's something that Mindy Kaling has unique experience in. We should note, and I thought that A.O. Scott put this really well in his review of

the movie, that they had to advance the cause of women in comedy beyond reality in order to explore the sexism in comedy, by which she means there has obviously never been a female late night host of a network show. It's 2019 and that has never happened. And so they are kind of retrofitting a level of progress in order to explore the problems that might come with it, which is fascinating. It's science fiction. don't care about late night, probably because they've never had a female host on a networked late night show. But I would love to hear more about it. And that's just another case where they raise a lot of questions. It's a rich text. And it's a text that's very interesting to me. So I would have liked a little more room to go around it. That said, I think the Emma Thompson performance is tremendous. I mentioned Devil Wears Prada because it obviously, she is kind of doing British Meryl. They've even got the hair. The clothes are fantastic. A lot of the

platform sneakers, they paid attention to that. And I think that it ultimately, I think the performance is great. The role is not as complex because the Emma Thompson character is ultimately pretty redeemed. And that question that you raised about like excellence versus decency, at the end, you can have both. Which is not true. Yeah. And you can see that Catherine Newberry represents, I think, a lot of people in the ecosystem of late night and just talk shows in general.

There's a lot of Ellen DeGeneres happening here. There's a lot of David Letterman happening here. There's not a lot of the new class, I would say. There's not a lot of Stephen Colbert. There's not a lot of Jimmy Fallon. There's not a lot of Jimmy Kimmel. There's a joke at Jimmy Fallon's expense in the show. There is.

And as you said, there's a lot of mentions of social media and kind of what you have to do as a late night talk show host to be popular now because people do not watch late night television. They watch YouTube clips of people performing late night television shows. And that is, I thought it was fairly modern. I thought they did a nice job of clarifying what the stasis problems are in the format and then also how certain people are trying to bust them apart.

So it was interesting to kind of pick and choose which shows. And of course, Seth Meyers late in the film makes a cameo. Nevertheless, it does feel, like you said, it's completely retro. I guess you could say, certainly there's been Chelsea Handler and Michelle Wolfe and Samantha Bee. There have been figures who have had roles somewhat like this. And I think Alison in her piece also pointed out that she's probably closest in presentation to Samantha Bee. You know, the pantsuits

and the sort of the tenacity and the intelligence. But just the simple design of the movie is one of the challenges of the movie. The movie most closely reminded me not of Working Girl and not of Devil Wears Prada, though there are obviously similarities, but a film called Morning Glory. Are you familiar with Morning Glory, Sean? I am. I am. And Morning Glory is an out-and-out rom-com, and it was released, I believe, in 2010. It was written by Aline Brush McKenna, who also wrote The Devil Wears Prada and went on to co-create Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. And it stars Rachel McAdams and Harrison Ford and Diane Keaton and Patrick Wilson as the love

interest. And it is set at a morning show. And it kind of, because of the morning show, which is kind of an older, more traditional television format, is very similar in that old school way. And also, I think it's directed by Roger Michel, who directed Notting Hill, and it does feel like a broad studio rom-com. And Mindy Kaling has great affection for those types of movies, as do I. So I think that it's borrowing on those traditions and I think also when you said something on network tv it's gonna feel a little more old school that's just kind of the nature of it so I didn't mind it necessarily I just found that Morning Glory is very simple because the character just like really

loves morning shows and wants to be great at her job. And then she convinces people that they need to care about their jobs again. And then they do and everyone's really happy. And that's simple. That's just like the workplace is a place to express yourself and find your family or whatever. And ambition is good. And this late night is more complicated. It has more ideas. It has ideas about what it means to to fail and what it means to deal with sexism in the workplace and what it means skated around, which is sort of interesting. So I appreciate that Late Night is more complex, but as you said, it's an odd fit with, not an odd fit,

but it's not usually how these type of sunny movies go. Yeah. It's also a movie with a tremendous supporting cast, but that also underlines sort of some of the problems of these movies. Every other significant actor in the film, with the exception of Amy Ryan and, of course, the two stars, are basically white guys. And they're white guys because they're pointing out that white men run late-night television. The writers' rooms are full of white men. The executives who run the shows are often white guys.

And yet, it's a very, it's almost an overqualified collection of actors. I'm just going to run down some of the names. You mentioned John Lithgow already, who plays Emma Thompson's partner. Hugh Dancy, who I guess that I hope the check was good. It's so strange that Hugh Dancy is in this. This guy's the star of many a television show. He's been the star of films.

He's got like a key role as a writer on the show, but not a very big role. Well, it's a pivotal plot role. It is. And then he disappears. Do you notice this? I did. He's just not in the last 45 minutes. We don't want to spoil too much if you haven't seen it.

This movie only appeared in four theaters this weekend, and it's starting to open up in more. But very interesting appearance of Hugh Dancy. Reed Scott, who I love from Veep, who is tremendous in this movie. And who I think has a real rom-com future ahead of him if he wants it. He has a little bit of a like acid burn comic affectation. Right, this was the transition role from Veep back into humanity. And he is like using some of the Veep associations. And they clearly wrote the character to that.

And it works here. I think he needs a couple more buffer roles before you can trust him as a rom-com star again. Which is no shots to him it's just like the triumph of veep as viciousness yeah who knows if it is permanently branded his brain uh it's hard to say i mentioned dennis o'hare max casella paul walter hauser who people recognize from itania john early who is hilarious in this movie and ike barrenholz who plays daniel tenant who is an interesting figure in the story. He is a fratty Dane Cook-esque comic who we see early in the film when Emma Thompson observes his standup,

which is quite boorish. And then as the film goes on, we realize that he is potentially a threat to Emma Thompson's character. And this too felt like something not quite sci-fi, but retrograde. It was like, this is actually 2005 2005 comedy and the idea of a Daniel Tennant being a potential threat to a late night talk show host in 2019 I had a little bit of a hard time with and I know what you're going to say about the system and who we hire and why we hire them but frat bro I don't I just don't think is the lingua franca of comedy right now at all well it's maybe not the lingua franca of comedy but I think that we've all learned that the lingua franca of comedy right now at all well it's maybe not the lingua franca of comedy but i think that we've all learned that the lingua franca of comedy and late night are quite different because

late night is for a different audience and i i don't want to get into political waters here but just like it's 2019 look at the president i think some boorishness is what many audiences expect right no that that's completely credible. It makes sense. The other thing that is interesting about this movie is there's a lot of conversation, a lot of comedy, and I feel like this is coming in a big way in the next five to 10 years,

about millennial concern. Older people being frustrated by the way that younger people express themselves. There are a lot of jokes at Mindy Kaling's character's expense, particularly the end, a note about earnestness. And there's a beautiful turn of phrase that Emma Thompson's character has where she says, I don't know why your generation is so obsessed with catharsis. You should call it catharsisism.

And I found that to be interesting. And I feel like every person that I know between the ages of about 35 to 55 is in this difficult dynamic where they want to be open-minded and thoughtful and work together with young people, but they don't know how to connect with them. And it's the same story that has obviously been happening for hundreds of years throughout centuries of society. But to see it manifest in a movie in this way, I thought was fascinating. I really want to single out, there's a speech that Emma Thompson gives that's about solutions. And you brought me all of these. And to summarize it, and again, to not spoil it, Mindy Kaling, it's her

first day and she's filed an analytical report on the ways in which the show is not working. And Emma Thompson sits through this and then is just like, what do I do? And the Mindy Kaling character is like, I don't know. And Emma Thompson gives this large speech about always bringing solutions instead of problems, which is definitely the best work advice that I have ever received. And I have, as a millennial, have been on the receiving end of it. And you could hear Mindy Kaling is so interesting because I think she is right on that edge. She's like us. She's kind of a late millennial. And has had experience learning how to do all this stuff in real time, which is clearly informing the piece. But is also now runs shows and in many ways has also inhabited the Emma Thompson role in the industry.

Yeah. And so I found those, the work millennial balance to be a conversation with both sides of herself to an extent. And I thought it was really smart as a result. And I felt like it was something everyone could learn something from it. Yeah, I think so too. It's a very clever movie. And it's a very, it's like I said, we're kind of dissecting it piece by piece here. Generally speaking, I had a very positive feeling about the movie when I walked out. It's totally watchable and delightful and hits all of the pleasure points that a movie like this is supposed to hit. It also struck me as, even though we're talking about millennial concern and late night television and the intricacies of all those things, the hiring apparatuses, it's pretty old fashioned, I would say, just in terms of the execution, like what it gives you. You know, it gives you love, it gives you triumph, it gives you unity at the end. Like it's mostly

an up with feelings movie. And we talked, was it last week, two weeks ago? Two weeks ago about the kind of the difficulties of Booksmart. And one of the things that we talked about with Booksmart, which I would say is a similarly energetic and rewarding viewing experience that feels a little bit like an old kind of movie and a little bit like a new kind of movie, and they're mashed together. And they're both come from sort of relatively nascent studios that are trying to launch movies like this that feel like the old, but also look like the new. And Booksmart went into 2000 theaters right away. And Late Night was going to go into 2,000 theaters right away. And then two weeks ago, they decided, actually, you know what we should do

is build word of mouth. So what we're going to do is we're going to open a week earlier in fewer theaters, and we're going to see what happens. And they were hugely rewarded. Their per screen average over the weekend in a small amount of theaters was very, very high. It was the second highest of the year, second only to Endgame. And they now have buzz and they have people like you and I on a podcast talking on a Monday morning

about why this movie is cool and why you should check it out. And then the movie will open in, I don't know, 1,800, 2,000 theaters next weekend. And we'll see,

is Emma Thompson still the powerful Oscar-winning star that we imagine her to be or at least you hope she still is? Is Mindy Kaling a nascent film star? Was it worth the $13 million bet at Sundance? Is this this summer's big sick,

et cetera, et cetera. What do you make of the, I don't know, real time example of counteracting what Booksmart didn't do? Well, I think we sat here and just, we talked a lot about Booksmart and the only thing that we were sure of was that the rollout strategy was just mishandled. And I think we felt that even before it opened, that you and I sat here and we're like, well, we really like this movie, but are people going to go see it in theaters? And it didn't have major stars and it doesn't have the trailer with the one joke or all the things that you're supposed to have to open a movie like this. So I am glad that Amazon seems to be reacting in real time to pretty obvious information. And I think also it's slightly different because Emma Thompson, even though you refuse to see any of her movies besides this one, is like a real star. Mindy Kaling is a real star. There are

tons of people. The Office is kind of the most streamed show in the world right now. There are so many, especially young people, who are very familiar with Mindy Kaling. So I think that that incentivizes in a way that Booksmart, that has a cast that I love, just didn't have that name recognition, which I think still matters. I don't know. Again, I wonder how many people who are listening to us, I think they would go see it anyway. So I do wonder about the ecosystem of Buzz and how insular it is versus how many people outside of the film internet go to see something. I heard from more people inside the industry about our Booksmart conversation than

any conversation we've had since the Oscar show. And I think that's because there are people right now who don't know what to do. They don't know how to release things. And the people who made Late Night should be proud. These are hard movies to make. This is very challenging. It's hard to get made. It's hard to get bought at a festival. It's hard to get stars. It's hard to get Hugh Dancy to come in for five scenes. You know, this stuff is not easy. And the same with Booksmart. Booksmart's so well-made and interesting for a first-time director and fun. And it's got a great script.

And they discovered tons of actors. That's also incredibly difficult. And I understand the sort of the anxiety that comes with this. And I understand why people are interested in it. And I'm interested in talking about it. It just sometimes it seems a little bit less complicated than it actually is. You know, it's just, there's no, well, what are you going to say? Well, I, it just, I, I know I say this in every podcast and I'm so sorry to everyone who has to hear this, but we just, we do know how people go to the movies. Now the information is pretty much there. It's an event. It's like an amusement park experience. You go for, for the most part, though, in our next segment, we'll talk about a place where people

didn't go to see superheroes and explosions. But that is what people do. And then they watch other things at home. And to your point about was it $13 million well spent? Well, Amazon also has a streaming service that they can put this on. And I think that you would just have a fantastic time on a Friday night watching Late Night on Amazon Prime if you are a subscriber. And I will probably do that too.

And I was not paid to say that, by the way. I just really like Emma Thompson. And so I think it works out for them and they're able to kind of hedge their bets as well. I think in general, we do know more than we think we do, as you said. And it's kind of mostly people who are not willing to acknowledge the change as opposed to not understanding the change. I think that's right. Emma Thompson is very interesting. Maybe

I'll make a real effort to get involved in her work for the rest of the year for you, for the sake of these conversations. We have had, there's been a deal on the table where you will watch Sense and Sensibility and I will watch the cartoon movie and we'll talk about it. Please respect it by calling its name. I honestly don't know which Spider-Man it is. There are like eight Spider-Man movies. It's the one that has the drawings and all of the actors that I like. And I'm sure I'll be moved by it, but I will not watch it until you watch Sense and Sensibility.

Blaspheming it is no way to get me to watch that movie. Emma Thompson has another movie coming out later this year. It's called Last Christmas. It's a romantic comedy. I'm so excited. She is the co-writer of this movie. It's directed by Paul Feig. It stars Henry Golding and Emilia Clarke. You may remember them from Crazy Rich Asians and Game of Thrones respectively. I saw a trailer for this movie at CinemaCon. It looked great. It looked like it was in the Amanda zone, I would say. I read a description of it that, and I remember the phrasing because it said that this movie is, quote, somehow based off the lyrics for Wham's song Last Christmas. I think that the plot of Wham's

Last Christmas is very straightforward, and I understand how you would write a movie about it. It's not that hard. I mean, I suppose that it's unusual that we're using weird novelty Christmas songs. Isn't that one of your jams, though? I feel like that's in your top 10 Christmas songs. I would say top 25, but it's really good. I'm just looking through Emma Thompson's work here, and there are just a lot of films I've not seen.

I've seen the Harry Potter movies. She's a little daffy in those but it's good stuff. I also enjoyed her daffy work in the Meyerowitz stories. Yeah. Big fan of that movie. Oh God, when she drives the car

into the all-time scene. It's fantastic. But yeah, her classics, I'm just not that familiar. Howard Zinn, Remains of the Day.

Yeah, I'm looking at them. What'd you do about Nothing? Have you seen them? What'd you do about Nothing? Yeah, it was a long time ago. It's so good.

Yeah, I did see that. Kenneth Branagh, Keanu Reeves, Denzel. Delightful. I liked her in Primary Colors. That was good. She's very good.

Angels in America, I saw that. She is a tremendous actress. I'm a fan. I'm a fan of Emma Thompson. I'm going to watch more Emma Thompson movies in the year 2019. You know, you alluded to some of the struggles at the box office of these amusement park movies. And something happened this weekend that I have not seen in a long time. We used the phrase bombed about Booksmart a couple of weeks ago,

and that was probably too strong because Booksmart did not bomb. It underperformed what the studio had hoped it would do. X-Men Dark Phoenix bombed. It bombed in a way that movies like this just do not bomb. It made $33 million in America, which is the amount of money that I think Endgame had made after like four hours in America of being open. So this is an extraordinary thing. We're not going to talk about the movie. If you want to hear me talk about the movie, Chris and I spoke about this movie on the show last week. It is not good. That's one reason why this didn't work. Well, I said I wanted to talk about the movie because we are going to talk about all of the hand-wringing and various industry analysis.

And I think all of it does play a part. But you and Chris came out of that movie and were like, this is a disaster. And I, you know, being annoying, was like, is it really that much worse than something else? And you guys were like, yes, it is not. It's not good. It didn't make sense. And I think that matters. We don't acknowledge that enough like sometimes when you release just a bad movie and it's the third bad

movie in the damn franchise of course no one's gonna see it i believe this is the 11th movie in the franchise but you know it's like that first of all i was trying to be nice to the other movies and it's also this the x-men restarted with first class i believe right yes that was this sort of reboot and that was very good and i saw it it is very good because michael fassbender just like travels around europe and south america for a while and in leather jackets great stuff that's not the plot of the film but whatever you say that happens and that's a good thing to put on film just for people who want movies to succeed i think you're thinking of inglorious bastards it is like i always say it is like inglorious bastards it came after

inglorious bastards that happens it's fine and then i believe the movies in the series after in kind of that reboot phase were not as well received so correct not not exactly first class and days of future past we talked about we were both very well received. And revisiting them, Chris and I really liked them. And Age of Apocalypse, which came out a couple of years ago, three years ago, in fact, is quite bad. And a lot of the analysts have pointed to the fact that that movie essentially lost the faith of a lot of the fans. And so when they got word that this movie was also not good, a lot of people stayed home, which I think is plausible. And we've seen that happen with a lot of franchises over the years. There's been a lot of comparing this year of John Wick 3 to other franchises and the way you take care of your franchise and the way you supercharge every time and make people understand that you have to do

something new to come out and get excited. Dark Phoenix obviously did not do anything new. In fact, it had repeated a storyline that we already saw 13 years ago in a movie called X-Men The Last Stand. Have you seen that film? No. Okay. Why this happened is interesting. There was a big piece on Sunday in Deadline and then there was a big piece

in The Hollywood Reporter this morning about all the things that happened. I'll just point out a couple of the factors that are significant. Maybe read you some quotes from some unnamed sources that appeared in these pieces. So the date was pushed twice on this movie.

Originally, it was last November. They moved that date and they swapped in Bohemian Rhapsody. Good choice by Fox. Then it was going to be February. Then they moved that date and they put Alita Battle Angel, produced by James Cameron, directed by Robert Rodriguez, in that date. And somehow they made Alita Battle Angel successful. Miraculous.

But by moving the movie to June, it just didn't work. It was fatigue. It's not a summer movie. One thing that I think was a fair point that Deadline made over the weekend was Dark Phoenix is a very dour film, very downbeat, very theoretically sad, but it would need real emotional toll for it to be sad. And that's just not something you want to see in the middle of June. That's just not the kind of movie that works in that environment. Not something I ever want to see, but. Well, there you go. And a lot of other people agreed. Critics gave a 22% score on Rotten Tomatoes. We talk all the time about how Rotten Tomatoes doesn't mean anything. When something is this low though, that's pretty bad.

That's a bad sign because Rotten Tomatoes is efforting a sort of buoyancy around the movie going experience. And it had a B minus cinema score. A B- cinema score is like getting a 27 on a math test. Cinema score is the most ridiculous weighted thing. There have only been nine movies that have gotten an F. Almost no movies get a C. To get a B- for a superhero movie, which is the most crowd-pleasing style of movie, fiasco.

In the Hollywood Reporter piece, there's a quote here that says, there was a misguided feeling that Age of Ap apocalypse was an anomaly That we just got it wrong. This is an insider who works inside of fox. We were wrong movie studio Folks don't say that they can't say that if you say that you're in big trouble Now there is of course some complications because fox is now owned by disney

So a lot of this decision making was made by one regime. There was some conversation about the various marketing teams Not exactly syncing up over this long exasperating shoot which apparently happened two years ago this is a unique fiasco in recent modern hollywood yes though some of it and i think it's unique especially in terms of the honesty of that quote of we were wrong though it just seems like it was bad. And the- But this is, I actually really want to talk about this. A lot of movies are bad.

A lot of movies are bad. Yes. That's true. Was Captain Marvel bad? A lot of people would say so with a gun to their head. But in the MCU, there's a kind of brand management that happens

where we don't get to say that. We don't get to say that something doesn't work. You know, you and I talked about it on this podcast and we decided it really didn't work. There were some good things about it, certainly. And I would, Captain Marvel is definitely better than Dark Phoenix, but that's not really a great film. And it didn't matter.

And it has like a 91% Rotten Tomatoes score. Well, I mean, that doesn't mean anything either, as you know, so, because everyone is just kind of like, ah, I'll give it the benefit of the doubt. And then suddenly it arrives at 91. Right. I do kind of think, you know, even the scheduling is people understanding that they have a mess on their hands and they're doing their best to rearrange it and kind of minimize losses. And so you put it in June and you hope that Sophie Turner, who is the star of it, is coasting on Game of Thrones and brings in some.

Even though, you know, you got to know that I love Sophie Turner it is the summer of Sophie Turner like please listen to Jam Session for much more about her but she just doesn't have name recognition the way that people did 10 years ago the franchises have name recognition not the actors even ones as charming as Sophie so it just seems like they did their best and nine times times out of 10, a studio can always can find a way to at least market or, quote, save a bad movie. But then every once in a while, they can't. And it feels like they prioritized all the things that did work. And then this is the one where you got to cut your losses. That's what it seems like to me. And that happens like, you know, in the same way that Solo happened for Disney in a way.

It's like you can save almost everything and every once in a while you're just like, well, we got to take an L on this. The minute the toxicity becomes public becomes a problem. A lot of comparisons were drawn between the challenges of making Rogue One and the challenges of making Solo. And the minute that the filmmakers, Lord and Miller, were fired off of Solo publicly, the jig was up. Everybody thought Solo was not good. Now, Rogue One had what sounds like similarly fraught situation behind the camera,

and they brought in Tony Gilroy to essentially rewrite, and it sounds like reshoot, much of that film. You know, Captain Marvel, there were definitely reshoots. There are always reshoots on superhero movies. These are hard movies to make and things have to change. And especially when you're working with this much continuity. But the reshoots and the challenges that happened, and also look at the history of X-Men movies and the way that Bryan Singer has just gone under the bus

in all of these reports and the way that everyone has walked away and noted how Bryan Singer would just not show up for several shooting days on all these movies, which is something we heard about on Bohemian Rhapsody, but is now coming to light in a big way. All of the shoots of these movies are messy and seen from one angle, all of these movies are bad and seen from another angle, all of them have something that they're aspiring to that is credible, admirable. Even in Dark Phoenix, which is essentially Sophie Turner's the star of this movie. There had not been a female lead figure

in an X-Men movie before. Even in The Last Stand, which was ostensibly Famke Jansen, it was way more Patrick Stewart and Hugh Jackman. Notably, there's no Hugh Jackman in Dark Phoenix 2. I should point that out.

But also, you know, this is theoretically a movie about depression, about dissociative personality disorder. Like the themes in the Dark Phoenix story are really heavy. There's a feminist aspect to this story. There's all kinds of things that if you look

deep enough, you could really retrofit it and say, this movie matters. It matters to 2019. Now, would that be a bullshit line that we get on a lot of movies like this? Sure, of course. But that hasn't stopped anybody in the past. It hasn't stopped us from pursuing think pieces about these kinds of movies on the site. That's true.

It's hard to do it second or third, though, in the year because Captain Marvel did that. To middling results, I would say. Not middling returns. Not middling returns. But, you know, and then I think also the Avengers with that kind of whole girl power thing. I hated it. And it seemed like everyone else did. And they learned that drawing attention to the fact that it took you five or 10 or 15 years to make one movie

starring a woman gets as much negative attention as it does positive. And I try not to engage with the really fanboy trolly aspect of the internet who, but I suspect knowing what we know about how Ghostbusters was received and, you know, movies that are targeted to men and feature women generally, there is always a small but vicious outcropping of response. So maybe they just decided it wasn't worth it. It's plausible. It's plausible they just cut bait. That's a potential factor. But we're talking about a lot of money on the line. Marshall Schaefer on Twitter pointed out that three sequels this summer have underperformed their predecessors opening weekend by 50%. It's the first weekend a potential factor, but we're talking about a lot of money on the line. Marshall Schaefer on Twitter pointed out that three sequels this summer

have underperformed their predecessors' opening weekend by 50%. It's the first weekend of June. That's a bit of a cataclysmic number. The only reason to make a sequel

is to make more money than you made on the last one. That's the point. And if you can't do that, and a lot of these movies can't do that, we could also talk about The Secret Life of Pets 2,

a movie I have not seen, but also underperformed this weekend. And I mentioned this earlier in the year, I think after we saw Us, and I was like, I think this is going to be a weird year at the box office. It's not going to do that well.

And it was down 15, 18% early part of the year. It's still down 6%, which is not good. We've already seen the biggest movie of the year up until I think maybe when the Star Wars movie comes out. And Endgame was as big as a movie can possibly get. There's only been one movie in the history of movies that made more money. And the box office is still down. And the only movies that really make any money are superhero movies. And there's only two superhero movies left this year. Do you know what they are? The Joker. Yeah. Sad Boy Joker. Yeah. And

Spider-Man, the cute Spider-Man. Yes, it's not called the cute Spider-Man. But he is. They should call it the cute Spider-Man. They should call it that. Spider-Man Far From Home, which comes in July, and then Joker. Is Gwyneth Paltrow in that one? We'd have to ask her about that.

I wanted to chat with you about that very briefly. For those of you who haven't seen The Chef Show on Netflix or looked at Twitter, delightful moment. I can't believe it took me this long to reference it. I'm so glad you and I didn't even discuss this. Roy Choi and Jon Favreau have a show on Netflix in which they make food with famous people, I suppose. It's a fine show.

Great viral clip last week in which Jon Favreau was chatting with Gwyneth while they were preparing, I don't know, some beautiful taco maybe. And Jon pointed out that something had happened when they were making the movie Spider-Man and Gwyneth Paltrow in all earnestness said, Spider-Man wasn't in Spider-Man and Jon Favreau said yes you were when we were filming it and she again goes no I was in the Avengers which like clearly she had like practiced it it was like I know what the Avengers are and it's a full 30 seconds of Jon Favreau being like yeah but then there was the press conference and then we were in and she was like, that wasn't Spider-Man. I have never related to an energy more in my life.

Like ever in my entire damn life. And Gwyneth Paltrow is another person who's quite important to me. But her just being like really trying and also being like, what the hell are you talking about is number one deeply relatable to me but also just a great summary of how these movies are put together because she I remember this scene in question and I'm sure they just tacked it on to some other Avenger stuff and she's just doing pickups throughout the day and you barely know what it's for I mean Tom Holland has said that he just has to do a green screen and he doesn't even know the villain that he's fighting because they don't trust him to spoil plot points.

So I understand how Gwyneth got there. Her presentation of the information is all time for me. Again, look closely enough and it's a metaphor for all of this consumption. All these movies are running into each other. No one can remember anything or keep it straight. It was a great comic performance, even though it was not pre-written. I mean, you could put that in a sitcom and it would work beautifully.

As I said, there are seven comic book movies in the books and there's only two left. Gwyneth Paltrow might be in one of them. I don't think so. I guess that means she won't be in Spider-Man Far From Home, though we can't trust her to say yay or nay. We literally have no idea. She easily could be in it.

I think the movie Box Office is in it. It's going to be in a tough spot. I think one other thing that I'll be interested to watch this summer, and you kind of alluded to it, of, quote, what is a summer movie? Because that has changed so dramatically in the last five years. just used to be that you would go see Independence Day or Men in Black or kind of one of these big dumb blockbusters during June, July. June and July, primarily. August was also even a dumping ground. And the calendar has shifted so dramatically. I don't know what a summer movie is now. Is it Once Upon a Time in Hollywood? Is that a summer movie now? I mean, it is to you and me, and I guess we are still the movie-going public.

Yeah, I mean, this week we have Men in Black 4, Men in Black International. Amanda is dancing right now. Yeah, I'm playing Men in Black in my head. Been enjoying those

NBA commercials with Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson. I'm the only person who enjoys them. Did you know that there's a Shaft movie coming out this summer?

I saw the posters for that. Yeah. Did you know that the pitch on those posters is that Shaft is mad at young people? Much like Emma Thompson's Catherine Newberry. Maybe a double feature in the offing. There's a Child's Play remake coming out. There's Toy Story 4. There's another Annabelle film.

Oh, yeah. There's Yesterday, which we'll talk about here. I look forward to chatting with you about that. The Beatles are important. Spider-Man Midsommar. I will not be seeing midsummer, but I support you cannot wait I the lion king. I think the lion king is probably the last noisy thing. We'll see the summer There is hobson shaw as well But hobson shaw and the lion king probably most closely resemble what is a summer movie for the rest of the year But it has been a strange slate

And in some ways I think Endgame was the best thing that could have happened to one of those studios and the worst thing, because it just set an unrealistic expectation. Everybody got out. It was like you always say about going to amusement parks. It was like everybody went to Disneyland in April, and then they were like,

I'm not going back to Disneyland in July. I was just there. And it might be a while before we get another phenomenon like this. And this whole business is now built on phenomenons. So it's challenging. Let's talk about a couple of other films that are in our atmosphere right now that really have nothing to do with Spider-Man or Gwyneth Paltrow

or any extended universe of any kind, but are good. That's my takeaway on these films. The first film is Pavarotti. Yes. Did you see this? I went. I went yesterday. Oh, my God.

Yeah. Okay. And wept at the end. So, Lugiano Pavarotti, of course, the fameded tenor born in Modena, Italy known probably primarily as one of the three tenors and a close friend of Bono's though he's

maybe the greatest singer of the 20th century Ron Howard has directed a documentary about his life as a movie I think it's fine yeah it's very straightforward

it's very hagiographic it's kind of cradle to grave he was a beautiful boy with a baker's father and he grew up to be an incredible man. He had some foibles, but they weren't that bad. And we'll kind of skirt around that.

And he loved life and he was charismatic and he just wanted to sing and bring opera to everyone. And then he did. Yes. Women loved him and men wanted to be him. However, here's what's good about this movie. You're in a movie theater and Pavarotti is singing so loud. I had this thought too.

That's all it is. It's just, we walked out of the theater. My husband asked, what'd you think? And I was like, I love listening to the songs really loud. It was, it's incredible. I was like a four year old. Now there is one part of the film early in the film that essentially explains why Pavarotti was so important.

And it's because he had a unique ability to hit the high C, which is a note that a tenor captures that is a sort of, it's almost like a thrashing of a bass and a soprano. There's a kind of tonality that you can hear. I'm sure Evan Campbell, our producer right now, is wincing as I try to describe music. But he is able to capture something vocally that less than 1% of the population in the world can do. Yes. And even amongst his other tenors, and we see him with other tenors in this movie, Placido Domingo, among others, just completely outclassing them. He's so much more powerful.

Yes. And his voice is so much more powerful. Yes. And his voice is so much more beautiful and full. Yes, the fullness is really notable. I think the other thing that the movie actually does very well in explaining and what made Pavarotti so singular is explaining how he became a worldwide phenomenon. And some of it was kind of engineered and commercialized. And there was a whole segment about Miss Sarajevo, which is his duet with Bono. And Bono's just in there talking about Miss Sarajevo.

And it was just like a Chris Ryan bit come to life in a documentary. My favorite quote of the film is when Bono says, he's a world-class arm wrestler. And he arm wrestled me into submission. And I wrote this song. It's incredible. Yeah. And I don't need to listen to Miss Sarajevo again.

But I was thinking a lot about how, especially in the beginning of the movie, when kind of the more famous arias like from Rigoletto start playing. And basically the public understanding of what opera sounds like is Pavarotti singing because it he became this ambassador for what was a pretty closed off and a niche and kind of outdated genre of music even though in the 1800s it was kind of the popular music of its time. We have since moved on. And opera world snobs will tell you that Placido Domingo is like the greatest technical singer. He is the best. And Pavarotti in his lifetime was kind of both

celebrated and reviled in the opera world because he was shinier and he was a star instead of a technician. But I think that that is also what made him great. And the movie explains that. I mean, it doesn't talk about how he's not the greatest singer. It definitely thinks that he's the greatest singer, but it does explain the star machine and how opera became so big because of him. And as opera goes more pop, its stars start to resemble pop stars. The biggest pop stars in the world, with the rare exceptions of the Whitney Houstons of the world, are not the best singers. They are often Madonna. They are people who present.

And Pavarotti presents this archetype of power, of grace, of romanticism in the form. He is my favorite opera singer. Without question, might as well. Because opera is also more is more, right? I don't want to spend too much time thinking about the technicality. It is ridiculous emotions and over-the-topness, and there is that fullness and warmth to his voice. He just is blasting everyone off the stage. You can even see it in the three tenor concerts. And if you, that's how you come to opera. If you're, if you are an

enthusiast of opera at the end of the day, you just like want spectacle and largeness. And he brought that in, in all degrees of the word. Yeah. I, I, I just loved watching him sing. That's not film criticism. I was really happy to watch him sing Nessun Dorma or O Solo Mio or any of the kind of very classic arias that he is closely identified with. And you will hear a lot of these arias as you're watching the film be like, oh, that, oh, that, oh, that, from that music cue, from that commercial, from that, the way that these songs are interwoven into our lives is unmistakable once you see them up close. Yeah, I don't think it's a spoiler to say that it ends with his Nessun Dorma performance from the first Three Tenors concert. That is moving every time.

And at that full volume and at that point in the movie, we're like, wait, but I didn't I need one more thing. And it just goes back to him singing Nessun Norma. And it's just so loud. And it is probably the closest now that you can get to being at a Pavarotti concert. It is. Because it is replicating the sound and the volume and the experience, at least. I saw this movie in a Dolby screening room. So you can imagine how loud it was. It was wonderful. I also, I thought of you as I watched it with the Princess Diana moment. Oh, yeah. He dedicates songs to her and then befriends her. Is that authentic to your understanding of Princess Diana's life, that they indeed were close friends?

Close celebrity friends, sure. Which is that I think that they definitely saw each other more than you or I would see either Princess Diana or Luciano Pavarotti. I don't know. Okay, that's fair. You know, I'm sure that there was a connection because they are also, Princess Diana is another person who understood celebrity and what people want from her and how to make the most of a global stage. That's an instinct as well as a skill, as well as a source of power. And this documentary

helped me remember and really understand how much Pavarotti used his own instinct and how much his charisma and personality led to his success. I don't know if you had a chance to watch The Black Godfather on Netflix. No, I didn't. It reminds me a little bit when you were just talking about how Pavarotti became a pop star. One of the interesting parts of that film, I think, and maybe this movie is actually better than I actually thought it was because I still remember a lot of it. I've taken away a lot of it, is there's quite a bit about the music business. And The Black Godfather is an interesting companion piece. It's a movie about a man named Clarence Avant, who is a longtime manager, record label impresario, friend to famous person.

And he's also notably the father-in-law of Ted Sarandos, who runs all content at Netflix. This movie is appearing on Netflix. And it's this unique convergence. I've never seen so many famous people in a documentary. Not ever. It feels like every famous black entertainer of the last 50 years is in this movie talking about what a brilliant and important man Clarence Avant is, who is largely anonymous to the public.

And I think that this movie also, despite it seeming perhaps a bit nepotistic and its reason for existing, being informed by the person who runs Netflix, nevertheless, we learn a lot about how things happen in the business. And they happen because people have personal relationships. And somebody calls somebody up and says, I need you to do this for me. If you do it for me, I won't forget. And then all of a sudden, Diddy is not going to jail, or Bill Withers has a singing career, or any myriad things that have happened over the course of time. Michael Jackson has a European tour. Things like that, that we accept as, well, there's like somebody who's doing it, who's making it happen. And in this movie even implies that Bill Clinton and Barack Obama

became president because of this man. And it's a lot of weight to put on one person. And especially given that Clarence Avant's, I guess, personal disposition is that of like a very grouchy grandfather. Love it. Who curses a lot. Great. And it's just like, life is about money and numbers and we're all going to die.

So just get what you can get. Like that's what this guy's point of view is on the world. That's how things happen. That's honest. He's such an honest representation of what's really going on in the business. So I would encourage people to check out The Black Godfather. The last movie we're going to talk about very quickly, because I have a conversation coming up with Joe Talbot, as I said, The Last Black Man in San Francisco.

Amanda, this movie also premiered at Sundance. It was rapturously received. Our usual producer, Bobby Wagner, saw it when he was there. He said, it's an absolutely beautiful film. He did say to me, which I thought was notable, that it felt like a first-time film. Absolutely. And what he was saying, that was not a judgment on his character, but it was a very personal story set in Talbot's hometown, along with his best friend, Jimmy Fails, who was the co-writer of the movie and the star of the movie. What did you think of The Last Black Man in San Francisco? I was really moved by it. I think I know what Bobby means about it being a first film and not in a dig sort of way, but it was very a singular way of looking at San Francisco. And it felt like this had been in somebody's brain for a really, really long time.

And they had been thinking about how to tell the story and what shots to include. And what if we did it this way? And what if we did it this way? It has that kind of thing of like finally sharing a secret with the entire world. And it also, it centers on a young man, but it also is a friendship between Jimmy Fails, who plays a fictionalized version of himself, Jimmy Fails, and his friend Monty or Montgomery. Mont or Monty? I can't remember what they call him. I think he's Monty.

Monty. Anyway, who's played by Jonathan Majors what they call him I think he's Monty Monty anyway who's played by Jonathan Majors and who by the way wrecked me who is incredible amazing performance that performance is

unbelievable and huge talent definitely going to be a person that we'll talk about on the Oscar show at some point in 2022

absolutely incredible actor and in the movie they have a shared project that is really Jimmy's but Monty indulges him and they are they have something

that they've been working on and caring about intimately for a long time that they're finally trying to like share with the world and I thought and in that case it is a very beautiful house which always catches my eye in a movie but real estate corner here yeah exactly I was just like oh my god this is about a house. It's an incredible Victorian home with a witch's hat in the middle of San Francisco that is a historical piece that was once

in Jimmy's family and he is working hard to regain ownership of. Right. And so it becomes a movie about family and home and also gentrification

in San Francisco and I think that the movie is strongest when it is rooted in that personal exploration and connection. But some of the images and especially Jonathan Major's performance just were astonishing to me.

Yeah, there are some absolute wow moments. So please enjoy this conversation with Joe Talbot. I hope you'll check out that film too. Amanda, thank you for being here as always. We'll see you later this week. Maybe. Okay, maybe. I'm delighted to be joined by Joe Talbot today.

Joe has a beautiful new film, The Last Black Man in San Francisco. Hi, Joe. Hello. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, I'm thrilled that you're here. I want to start at the very beginning because I think people really first became aware of you

when this film premiered at Sundance, but it's a collaboration between you and a longtime friend, Jimmy Fales. Paint a picture for us. When did you and Jimmy first encounter one another? Jimmy and I met as kids at Presidio Park, which was sort of hugged the line between Bernal Heights and the Mission, where we both grew up. And so the movie is about Jimmy trying to get back this childhood home. And in real life, after he lost that home, he moved sort of all around San Francisco and wound up on Army Street, the housing projects down the street from where I grew up. So we met, and not long after, it felt like we had our first sort of long heart-to-heart, and that became a part of our dynamic, was these sort of long conversations we would share.

And San Francisco, for those that know, is a great walking city, so a lot of those conversations were had those those walks and talks uh turned to sort of our own lives and jimmy told me the story of um of how his grandfather you know he grew up with the story that his grandfather built this house that he grew up in in the film war and um i as a kid was sort of always employing anyone i could to try to enlisting like friends and family to to make movies and music and so jimmy and i made a few movies together en route to this one short films you know um so this was in a way our most personal film um but eventually yeah we sort of, those conversations turned into a more formal endeavor about five years ago. And we shot a concept trailer, which was essentially

Jimmy skateboarding through the city telling his grandfather's story. We put it online and we did it in part because I didn't know how movies got made. This is my first feature on my high school dropout. Jimmy's just my friend that's been in my movies, but otherwise had never acted. So we knew we were not the most bankable pair. And so we shot this concept trailer. we started getting letters from people uh emails i should say uh who were you know from people actually all over the world but many from the bay area and they were saying you know that they were going through the same things we started i think only then realized that we were tapping into something that was unfortunately universal you know people all across country feeling like their cities that

raised them were becoming unrecognizable and so some of those people that reached out became our film family there were fellow first-timers who hadn't made a movie before and they became our chorus so my producer kalia neil who was an oakland. She came back to the Bay to help us make this movie. She became our producer. Rob Rickert, Luis Alfonso de la Parra, you know, countless others basically came on and for years helped us develop the script and take these stories, which, you know, some of them are pulled from Jimmy's real life. Some of them are from our kind of collective imagination, but helped us develop it into the script that we eventually took to Plan B. And man, it's a trip, but we thought we had no shot at all,

so much that we called our collective that had formed around this movie Long Shot. And somehow they came on to do it and they brought A24 in to finance it. And then a couple months later we were in production. You just condensed what is probably an extremely complex story into about three minutes, which is impressive. You've had some practice. Let's go back and dig into it a little bit. I'm fascinated. I mean, you mentioned that your high school dropout, the way that you just told that story, it's very humble beginnings, but the movie is very striking. It's beautiful. And it does not feel like a first-timers film. So, you know, what were the things that you and Jimmy were bonding over when you were kids? Was film a huge part of that? Is that something that you started to talk about doing together at a young age? Yeah, I mean, I think film was a part of it. I grew up in a family that loved movies. They were like, we were agnostic,

but it felt like going to the Castro Theater was like our church. What'd your folks do? They're journalists. Oh, no kidding. Yeah. Oh, I'm sorry for them. Well, they were like,

well, at least you're going into a profession where you might be able to make some money at some point. Yeah, no, they're journalists. And so I grew up around journalists, not just them, but my friends and family and a lot of storytellers. And I think that was actually more than any particular art form. Jimmy and I bonded on telling stories because Jimmy's just got this incredible natural storytelling ability. Like it was something he was always good at even when we were kids. It wasn't just the things he'd been through, which were remarkable, but it was the way that he would sort of tell it. I think that that's part of why it triggered, you know, this idea that we should make a movie because it felt very cinematic um for

instance you know at one point he'd lived uh in a car with his dad because after they lost the house they sort of moved all around the city and um a friend of his dad's stole the car um and so jimmy always described as like he basically drove off with my house. And so in the film, that character is played by Mike Epps, who has a kind of wonderful way of interpreting this character who doesn't quite admit that that's what happened. He was one of the weirder experiences of my life. I'm like, you know, grew up watching Mike Epps. And I'm FaceTiming him while he gets his haircut, you know. And he's so casual. Like Mike Epps is kind of, you know, the person that you hope he'd be in real life. He is that guy. And he said to me, he was like, which actually that was brilliant.

He was like, you know, Joe, I think Bobby has San Francisco beat. And I said, why do you say that? And he said, because he doesn't want anything. Everyone else in San Francisco is chasing something. People have come there for a gold rush to chase something, and Bobby doesn't want anything. I don't even want this fucking car that I drove off with. You take the car. The car is a piece of shit.

You know, Jimmy wants this house. He's chasing this house, you know, which is interesting i think that is true of san francisco right now you know there's so much anxiety and this sort of blanket of stress that lives perpetually over the city and its residents no matter what you do because we're all trying so hard just to exist there you know um and so that was i, part of what we were trying to channel into this movie. Yeah. There's a unique energy conflict almost in showing a place that you love lovingly and also revealing some things that are happening to it that are unfortunate, frustrating, upsetting. Yeah. I'm curious about how you actually filmed there and made it there and, you know, what lengths you had to go to to make that happen.

Well, filming there was, yeah, actually, to your point, sort of spoke to the very feelings we had about San Francisco. It's beautiful. It's like a place that you, I've never left, actually. And so you keep finding ways to fall back in love with it over time. In fact, the longest that I'd ever been away from San Francisco in my life was to come down here to edit this film. Literally at this lot where we are now at sunset hour. So this is very strange being back here for the first time since we finished the edit.

I think the last time I was here the edit. I think when I, last time I was here I was like, you know, nearly dead, killed over in the final stages of the edit.

It was, we were working really hard to get it ready for Sundance. So David Marks, my editor, is a hero. Somehow we, we,

we made it out. But before that I'd only left San Francisco for a week my whole life. That was the longest I'd left. Wow. So. You were sporting your Giants hat probably right now. I only, only a couple people threatened to beat me up on the way to work actually. This is dangerous territory. Most people were actually, I think, welcoming. And occasionally, more and more, I would get

like whispers from waiters at restaurants or people walking down the street where they're like, go Giants. Because I think, you know, LA is reaping the benefits of San Francisco's losses. A lot of people are moving down here. I mean, that is a key part of the story in a lot of ways. The idea of being priced out of San Francisco and moving to Los Angeles is insane. But in the last 10, 15 years, it's become such a literally competitive city. That must be so strange for someone like you who's lived there his whole life. It is. It is in part because you grew up on the stories, you know, on my mom's side of fifth generation San Franciscan, but my dad came from LA to San Francisco and some of his

siblings did as well. That was the place for his generation where you came to be an artist, to be a writer, you know, beats, hippies, if you were gay, African-Americans came, you know beats hippies if you were gay african-americans came you know to work in the shipyards during world war ii looking for opportunities that they didn't have in the south you know so it is a place you grew up where you you grew up on these stories of old san francisco being a safe haven for people to be themselves and for artists but now you'd have to be delusional or a very wealthy artist to move to san francisco and so the only people i think that at least that i know you know that are making art there are for the most part natives um have kind of rallied to tell these stories um and even us of course know, we're barely getting by.

We lived, me and Jimmy, at my parents' house for five years to get this movie made, which made for some pretty funny interactions with the neighbors. Because, you know, when we finally brought on Plan B, I was taking out the trash one day, and our very nice neighbor said, you know, oh, how's the little movie going? You know, is it good? Because they'd heard about it. And my mom said, you know, Brad Pitt is producing his movie.

And my neighbor was like, sort of like in disbelief, like that I would live at home and have a movie being, you know, EP'd by Brad. But that is, I think, in a way, what it is to be a San Franciscan right now. So what about actually filming the city? Is it easy to get permits and do things like that? Because like you said, you're really filming the city? Is it easy to get permits and do things like that? Because like you said, you're really showing the city in an incredibly beautiful and in a way that like, I'm not as familiar with it. So it was some things that I hadn't seen when I wasn't just being tourist guy visiting the city for two days. So how do you figure out where to go and how do you make that happen? Well, you know, we have sort of a lifetime's worth of

location scouting. It feels like in the back of our minds that we brought to this. But we learned as we got deeper and deeper into the process of making this film that San Francisco apparently is one of the hardest, if not the hardest cities in the entire country to film in. It used to be a place, you know, in the 90s, a lot of TV shows were filmed there. And so when you talk to veterans, you know, that have been there a lot you know tv shows were filmed there and so you when you talk to veterans you know that have been there below the line people for a while they'll tell you the stories of you know nash bridges and all the other productions the good old days san francisco

and of course before that coppola and zoetrope and lucas being there trying to sort of make it um uh uh a budding you know film community um but by the time we were getting ready to make this movie it didn't feel that way and so you know i think it was one of the hardest parts of this production one of the things we did because we knew it was going to be really hard and we we really wanted to feature exteriors we wanted wanted to feature not just San Francisco that I think people recognize in films, but our own side of San Francisco, the lesser known side of San Francisco. We scouted for years, more officially, for about two years um basically while we're still writing you know me and some of my closest collaborators louis alfazo and rob and jimmy would walk around the city and and look for places um that felt right and sometimes we'd meet people on the street or we'd find certain locations

that then we would end up writing into the script. And so scouting became a particularly important part of the early process. That's how actually we found Jimmy's house. It's a very hard house to find in San Francisco, an old Victorian that hadn't been gutted because we would knock on many doors of houses that had these beautiful Victorian facades. And you'd go inside and the new homeowners would gut them. You know, remove all the wonderful detailing in place of like open floor plan and granite tabletops.

So, you know, we were looking for this movie for something that felt like it was built by one man and sort of imperfect, but full of that wonderfully specific detail. And so I actually thought back on a house that my mom and I would pass on my ride to elementary school as a kid. My parents couldn't, as as journalists afford a proper Victorian. So we would, you know, when I was a kid, my mom and I would sort of point out our, our favorite dream houses on the way to school. That was like one of our routines. And there was this beautiful house on South Venice and the mission, um, that had always kind of stuck in my, in my brain. And so we went to the house and we knocked on the door.

This very sweet older man came out. Actually, he was sort of crotchety at first, if I'm being honest. But it turned out he was really sweet guys. His name was Jim Tyler. He welcomed us inside. And South Venice is a very busy street. It's one of the main thoroughfares to the mission in San Francisco. But when you went inside his house, it just felt like the whole world disappeared. And he had all these organs built into the walls. And it turned out he was like the preeminent organ repairman on the West Coast.

He had like one of Neil Young's organs there that he was working on. And as we got to know him, it turned out that Jim was sort of the living embodiment of what made San Francisco great. He'd moved there at first with his partner in the 50s. He's an older white man now. His partner was black, so they were a gay interracial couple in San Francisco in the 50s.

This was long before it was kind of the haven that it became known to be. And he lost the house. He broke up with his partner he moved all over the world came back it had been turned to a halfway house he re-bought it a second time and spent the last 50 years of his life restoring it to its proper condition including carving uh shingle by shingle the witch hat which you see in the film there's actually a video of him in the 80s flying through the air like mary poppins and he places the witch hat, which you see in the film. There's actually a video of him in the eighties flying through the air, like Mary Poppins. And he places the witch hat onto the top of the building.

The like construction workers, I guess, let him do it in different laws then. So he was amazing. This is your second film. That's a crazy story. I know he was amazing guy. And, and, and again, in the spirit of San Francisco, he has different young people living there now who I'm sure he charges very little to because he charged us next to nothing. It was the only way we were able to make this movie.

But it just felt like meeting someone like that. that were part of why we were able to make it in San Francisco and, um, and feature, you know, like you said, the beauty of the city, because without them, uh, on an indie budget with not a lot of time, it just wouldn't have been possible.

That's incredible. I mean, the it's, it's trite to say that a house is a character in a movie, but in this movie, it really is a significant, it's sort of the third star of the film in a lot of ways. Oh yeah.

Tell me a little bit about, um, Montgomery and the character of Montgomery. I suspect some of you is in Montgomery, maybe some other people that Jimmy and you have encountered over your lives. It's not lost on me that he spends a lot of time watching films with his father. You know, where, where did that character come from and what, what did he mean to the story? You know, it's interesting because Montgomery's character, you know, it's a lot of the film comes from this friendship that Jimmy and I have in real life. In part because I think friendship is one of the things that gets you through, you know, the strange pains of gentrification watching your city change. And I think that's a part of what the friendship in the film is about between Jimmy and Montgomery. But that being said, you know, we never consciously, I think, sought out to make him like a stand-in for me in any way.

Like, if anything, there was another person that I met early on in the process named Prentice, who was a wonderfully, you know, original San Franciscan in his own right. And I started imagining what a friendship could look like between Prentice and Jimmy. And so he inspired the first shades of the character. And then we spent some time as a group developing him and changing him. And then when we met Jonathan, it was like, oh, man. He took whatever we'd written to some whole other place

this is Jonathan Majors Jonathan Majors yeah he Jonathan's not from San Francisco but he really does feel like he is he

has a sort of empathy and a warmth that I feel like are part of you know quote San Francisco values even though he's from Dallas

which is our arch nemesis. So Jonathan just, I think on some level, he says that sometimes he feels like Montgomery is the subculture within the subculture. As more and more African Americans get pushed out of San Francisco, you see, I think, less people like Montgomery. And yet he's such, to me, an important kind of San Franciscan. He reminds me a lot of people we grew up with. But there were a lot of reasons why it felt like a blessing to meet Jonathan, but one of them was the film only exists, only works if you really love and believe this friendship. It's one of those movies, I think, no matter how pretty it is, it doesn't work otherwise. became buddies pretty quickly and like they really formed a love that continues to this day

they still when jimmy's like you know auditioning for something he'll call jonathan and jonathan will sit with him and help him prepare for it he really took jimmy under his wing you know i think he knew that this was a big undertaking and going to be hard in a lot of ways, Jimmy never having done anything like this. And so, you know, the only way to make it work was, oddly enough, to kind of mirror that love that he had on screen in the preparation as well. They live together while they're preparing for this. So Jonathan's sort of, you know,

his hands are all over this movie, even beyond the wonderful performance that he gave. He's a real powerhouse. Yeah. You mentioned Plan B and Brad Pitt. And I guess it's a little bit elusive for somebody like me and probably people who listen to the show to understand how somebody like you has never made a feature film. You've made a short, a short that went to Sundance, which is this film is based on.

It's a connected to, but different story, different story. And you convinced all of these people in a 24 to get involved and to make your film. I mean, how does, how does that happen?

I'm still trying to figure it out. What do you, what do you say? What, how do you pitch it? How do you pitch it? How do you make it clear that this is an important piece of work that they should be involved in? You know, it's funny. We spent so many years pitching it.

And, you know, with good reason, people were skeptical that we could, you know, pull this off. Again, having never made anything, Jimmy never carrying a feature film. Um, and so, you know, over time we spent all this time, we built this very elaborate lookbook. Um, we did all this original photography for it. You know, someone who showed IFP said this is like the most elaborate lookbook we've ever seen um we tried to make sure that everything else everything that we could do other than you know of course making the movie since we didn't have the opportunity to do that yet felt as fully realized as possible that we were not leaving it you know as much up to the imagination as you might we have j Jimmy casted. It's pulling from Jimmy's story. Jimmy featured really prominently in this lookbook, trying to give the lookbook the aesthetic that we imagined for the movie. I even wrote music early on as I was writing the script to help both me kind of internally flesh out the world that I wanted to make, but also externally to show people. Because I think you hear music, you see images, it does the work that words on a page can't always

do. But even then it was still like, you know, no one to take the risk, I think to do it. And so I honestly think some of it comes down to like there aren't that many companies at least in my experience that would you know do this movie um someone once told me akiko sternberger who's uh actually did the the posters for our movie we were talking about something else and she was saying you know everyone um wants to be first to be second in hollywood and first, it took me a second to process what that meant. But I think that's true. A lot of people don't want to take the risk. But once it's been proven that that risk works,

everyone wants to be the second one to follow up. But you must be living through that right now after the very warm reception of your first full-length film. You must understand that a lot more people get interested. Yes, that has been a nice you know part of it but i think um it's part of why you you know why the artists those of us get the opportunity to work with plan b and a24 feel this feel indebted to them in some ways because we know it you know it takes a risk um to do that And I think I really, you'd have to ask Jeremy and Didi and Christina, Fankle and Katz and Noah and Allie and everyone at A24.

I think I'd imagine the part of it beyond Jimmy and me in this story is this is something that's probably not that helpful to hear, so I hesitate to say it, but gentrification is tearing apart American cities. And it's the thing, at least in San Francisco, that everybody's talking about. Every conversation seems to somehow get back to this. And I think that because we've been working on it for a while, we had this material that we've been developing know, this, this personal element to it being that it's Jimmy playing himself. Um, I think that they probably also thought that this was going to tap into something, you know, um, or hope to that it, that it might. Um, but other than that, I think it's also just sadly strange fucking luck. It's incredible. There is this seemingly from the outside this perception of a growing contingent

of Bay filmmakers telling these stories. Last year we saw Blindspotting and the team that put that out. Obviously what Coogler's been doing the last five years or so.

Barry Jenkins too. Barry Jenkins of course. His first film is very kind of spiritually I think very connected to your film. Two people kind of walking around the city

and experiencing it. Yeah, and James Laxton went to Soda in my old high school. There you go. Yeah. Are you guys all connected in some way? Do you know each other, or is this just a sort of byproduct of all the things that you're talking about with what's happening in San Francisco?

Well, it's very funny because when I started this movie, not knowing anyone and really not knowing any filmmakers in San Francisco, I felt kind of lonely and yet really curious. Like, I don't know, to begin, how do you make a movie? How do you finance a movie? What does a producer even do? These are all the kind of naive questions, and I'm sure your listeners have answers to that I didn't know when we started.

And so I would see this guy around San Francisco that I knew had made this movie, Medicine for Melancholy, that was Barry Jenkins, wrote him an email and he responded and was very nice. And he actually encouraged us to write this and read early drafts of the script,

gave us notes. He was really gracious with his time. And then at one point I was like, guys, I'm not going to be as available because I have to go make this movie in Florida. And they're like, well, good for you, Barry. That's great. And then, of course, that became Moonlight.

That was one of the oddest things. I've never known anyone that's personally that has gone as far as that. And it was really inspiring to see. I cried watching the Academy Awards because it was really remarkable and, you know, gave, I think, us hope in some strange way. But that made it even stranger then to be working with plan b and a24 these years later we kind of would all just we first met i think we spent the first 10 minutes of of the meeting going like this is really weird you know um that we know the same people and especially for us because san francisco as close as it is to la feel so far away

i do think you're right on a larger level. I mean, there is this interesting thing happening in the Bay right now. I don't know if it's like the sort of reactionary rallying cry against what we're feeling is happening to San Francisco and to Oakland across the Bay as these places become harder and harder to live in, that the artists are sort of reacting and making this work. I think the sort of funny thing about it, though, is I know Boots.

Boots is great, and I met him when he was working on his movie. We made sure that years ago as we were first sort of starting out on our respective journeys, we'd meet sometimes and talk about what was going on in our films oakland does feel sometimes when you're in san francisco a ways away and so i think we were proudly watching what was happening with blind spotting with sorry to bother you and and ryan of course being being from Oakland and Barry having spent time in San Francisco. But San Francisco also has its own very unique sort of history and relationship to gentrification. And so for us, it at times felt like we were sort of in our own little bubble, you know, not just me and Jimmy, but our sort of whole little collective.

And I wish there was, you know, more of like,immy but our sort of whole little collective um and i wish there was a you know more of like uh because we're not the only filmmakers in san francisco obviously there are some other great filmmakers that are there they're trying to make work that have been working on their projects some of them longer than us um and you meet some of them along the way but one thing that is important to me and then i hope we can do more of is spending more time amongst each other. Because I hate to admit this, but I felt more connected to artists when I came to LA. It's a hard thing to admit. It's a proud San Franciscan.

There's just more people here. Well, I suspect that after people see this, especially people in your hometown, they're going to do to you what you did to Barry, which is like, hey, can you help me with this? Can you look at this? Tell me what you think. That is inevitable at this point. It's important. You know, and there are not a lot of things that leave you inspired about San Francisco these days, but occasionally there is something that gives you hope.

There was one kid who reached out to us when he was first in middle school. His name is Phil Elliston, and he was a young black skateboarder, and he saw the concert trailer we'd done. This was five years ago. And he hadn't thought about making movies, but I think he really connected to Jimmy's character. And so he looks deeply into things when he's interested in them. That's something I've learned about Phil.

So he figured out where I went to high school, School of the Arts, San Francisco. He applied. He got in. He became the star of the film department, one of the most talented students to ever go through there. He's like now teaching, you know, his peers about lighting because he's just like absorbed all this information.

Phil started working for us, you know, in different capacities on this film. A24 hired him to film our Castro premiere up in San Francisco and he is now a senior about to graduate and he's built this collective of friends from other mostly public high schools in San Francisco who love movies and so when I get depressed about the future of the city

and worrying that there won't be the next generation of artists there, I think about Phil because I think what he's doing is incredible. And in a lot of ways, they're way ahead of where we were 10 years ago. So I think there's still hope. That's amazing. Joe, at the end of every episode of the show, ask filmmakers, what's the last great thing that they've seen? Oh. What is the last great thing you've seen?

Women in Love. Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah. Throwback. I love that movie. Is that Ken Russell? Ken Russell.

Yeah, yeah. It's amazing. I don't know if I've seen it. Who's in that? Glenda Jackson? Glenda Jackson is unreal. I think she won an Academy Award for it. That's amazing. I don't know if I've seen, who's in that, Glenda Jackson? Glenda Jackson is unreal. I think she won an Academy Award for it. That's right.

Oliver Reed, Alan Bates. Where'd you see that? In a theater? No, I think it was poking around Criterion, you know, as one does, as filmmakers do in their off hours. It's becoming increasingly common when I ask this question. People bring up Criterion. I know, I hate to be a cliche off hours yeah it's becoming increasingly common when this when i ask this question people bring up i know i hate to be a cliche yeah no that's good but they're just so damn good um i oh man that movie is like blew my mind um it's you know just depiction of like male love and friendships and you know it's something that's a part of our movie and um i left that movie just like blown away and he's ken russell it's just like every some of

those scenes are just like bathing in excess it's like film at the highest level it's like it looks beautiful the dialogue's incredible the performances are incredible uh the colors and the setting and the cut it's just sort of like overwhelming sensory, you know, like, fuck. That makes sense. You guys are both centralists. I can see that. Joe, thanks for doing this. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks as always to Amanda Dobbins and to my guest Joe Talbot.

Please tune in later this week where I'll have a conversation with maybe one of the five or six most important filmmakers of my lifetime, Jim Jarmusch. See you then.