The Bill Simmons Podcast - Saving the NBA Calendar, the Koepka Era and Le Batard vs. ESPN. Plus: Kevin Bacon on 40 Years of Bacon Movies. | The Bill Simmons Podcast

Episode Date: July 22, 2019

HBO and The Ringer’s Bill Simmons unveils his plan to save the NBA calendar, appreciates the excellence of Brooks Koepka, and talks about the recent Dan Le Batard situation at ESPN (2:24). Then Bill sits down with actor Kevin Bacon to talk about his long career in Hollywood (38:29). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today's episode of the Bill Simmons Podcast on the Ringer Podcast Network is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. ZipRecruiter knows about the difference between working hard and working smart. Our guest later in this podcast, Kevin Bacon, I would say he's worked hard and worked smart. He's in like his fifth decade of acting. Pretty good job by him. ZipRecruiter's technology and tools make hiring more efficient and effective. Smartest way to hire. Send your job to over 100 of the web's leading job boards with one click. The tech does not stop there, my friends. It scans thousands of resumes to find people the right experience for your job. Actively invites them to apply. Qualified candidates. Fast. So effective. Four out of five employers that post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate

through the site within the first day. My listeners can try it for free. Go to ZipRecruiter.com slash BS. ZipRecruiter is the smartest way to hire. We're also brought to you by TheRinger.com, the world's greatest website, where it is Tarantino week. The big movie's coming. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. It is coming on Friday. We celebrated him with the rewatchables last week. We did Inglourious Bastards. And then on Friday on the rewatchables this week, we are doing Reservoir Dogs. That was supposed to go on Tuesday. What happened?

Top Gun. That's what happened. They announced the Top Gun sequel. So obviously we had to do our first ever emergency rewatchables. That is going up on Tuesday. Top Gun. Me, Chris Ryan, Mallory Rubin, Jason Concepcion. So two rewatchables podcasts this week on the feed.

Top Gun and Reservoir Dogs. Doesn't get much better than that. By the way, there's nothing going on this week. We're going to talk about that in a second. So you might as well listen to rewatchables podcast. Coming up, I am going to hit a couple things that just hit my fancy this week. Basketball, Brooks Koepka, a whole bunch of things. And then we're going to bring in Kevin Bacon, a guy who I've been trying to get on this podcast for years and years, who has had an absolutely fascinating career. And we're going to talk about all of it. And it's really good. That is all coming up first. Our friends from Pearl Jam. All right, why don't I hit a couple things? It is a Monday morning here, Southern California.

Has to be the worst week of the year for sports. I think this is it. I thought last week was the worst week, but then I forgot about the British Open. Or the Open. We're not allowed to call it the British Open anymore. This week is the worst week. As we can tell because people are talking about an Odell Beckham interview today that he did with GQ. That really wasn't even like that crazy,

but there's just nothing going on. I had a couple of things I wanted to hit, and then we're going to bring in Kevin Bacon after I'm done. But some things I was thinking about just in mid-July because I'm bored and I was with my family all week, zoning out, watching British Open at the beach, doing all kinds of stuff, just thinking about things. And I kept thinking about the perfect NBA schedule,

which I have written about off and on a bunch of times and I've changed my opinion on a million times. But I think I have it. I think I figured out what the perfect NBA schedule would be, what the calendar would be, I should say. The calendar from basically October through July. I think I have it. So here we go. First of all, 75 games. I know they're talking about this. I know it is realistic. From what I've heard, the teams lose way more money than I think we realize just by giving up games.

I think when you're talking about the biggest market teams like the Knicks and the Lakers, just taking a game from them costs them like $3 million. Maybe even more. Maybe even like $3 plus million. These teams don't like to lose money. If they lose money, the players lose money as well. Nobody like to lose money if they lose money the players lose money as well nobody wants to lose money so you have to look at this from the standpoint of how do we lose some games

so the quality of play is better but at the same time continue to make everybody money well here we go you cut this schedule to 75 games which basically so you lose 7 If everybody plays each other twice, that's 58, right? You play everybody from each conference twice. Then you play everybody

in your own conference, that's another 14. So that gets you to 72. I would personally say, let's just keep it at 72. But what I've heard that's really not palatable so I think 76 is where they want to land on this eventually but I'm going to go with 75 so you basically get three more games against division rivals whoever so we end at 75 starts in mid-October we spread it out a little bit

you want it to peak so that your playoffs are starting the week after the Masters, right? So that's like mid-April range. But we're also adding the Entertaining as Hell tournament, which I wrote about first in 2007. Initially, it was a tournament where 14 teams would make the playoffs. The other 16 would be in a single elimination for the final two seats. I've talked to people. I know they've considered it. I know they've talked about it. I know they've bounced the idea around in all different variations. And I think the most recent incarnation of that idea

would be basically the 7, 8, 9, and 10 teams in each conference having single elimination games, 7 versus 10, 8 versus 9 in both conferences. So you'd have four playoff games total that wouldn't really be playoff games, just teams trying to play themselves into the playoffs. I'd like to go a little further than that. I put some thought into this. We cancel the worst five teams,

the worst five lottery teams. They're done. They're out. They're not involved. They don't get to try to play in the tournament. If you've tanked your season, we're not rewarding you in any way. You're out.

You're just sitting on the sidelines. But if we have the top 12 teams make the playoffs, top 12, so six in each conference, teams 13 through 25 who didn't clinch one of those 12 spots. I could play a single elimination tournament with those teams for the seven, eight seats. All right, how does that work?

13 and 25, that's 13 teams. That doesn't make sense. Well, teams 13, 14, and 15, so the three teams that almost made the playoffs but didn't. Best records out of those three. They get buys for round one. Teams 16 through 25. That's 10 teams.

Now I have five single elimination games between them, right? 16 versus 25, 17 versus 24, and so on. We get five games over the course of two nights. Don't poo-poo this. You'd be watching this. So they bang that out. We have our five winners that advanced to round two. Now we bring back 13, 14, and 15, the bye teams. And we go highest seed, lowest seed from that point on. Now we have four more games, highest seeds against the lowest seeds. Get four winners out of that. Now we have a final four. The winners get the 13 and 14 seeds of the future NBA playoffs.

The losers get the 15 and 16 seeds. And here's why you don't want those, because now we're going into the playoffs. We have found our four playoff teams. Best of five, round one, with a catch. The one and two seeds in the tournament get four out of five home games at home. They play one, two, four, and five at home. So the 15 and 16 seeds that just clawed their way

into this tournament, they only get one home game. Now the odds are really stacked against them. They're like Rocky Balboa. We've abolished conferences for the playoffs. We have a 2-3-2 format for the final three rounds after we get through round one. First of all, round one is so much more fun now, best of five, because let's say it's Portland.

They're the five seed, and they're playing the Celtics. And the Celtics go to Portland. They steal one of the first two. Now they can come back. They could actually win the series, game three and four, and knock out Portland. So the pressure of this, especially if you blow one of these first two games, is intense. But then on the flip side of this, if it's a blowout, if it's a bad series, if it's a mismatch, we've just gotten rid of the series sooner. We don't have to sit there and

watch a sweep for a week and a half. We've watched Philly beat the hell out of some terrible team. They win three games, it's over. We're done. We're moving on from round one. The real problem with the NBA playoffs this decade has been round one. It's just been too much of a mismatch and it's last too long. It takes 17, 18 days. So we're condensing this. I've made this so much more fun right away. We have a play-in tournament. We have single elimination games all over the place. We have best of five. so we have more drama with that stuff. Now we get to round two. By the way, just chaos because we have no more conferences. So you can see round two, Houston versus Boston. Round two, Brooklyn playing Golden State. You just don't know

what it's going to be. It's the old shake the snow globe thing. And then we have the two, three, two format for the final three rounds. And that takes us the final start the first Thursday in June. We end by June 19th at the latest. Now I've heard, I've, I've thought about how the draft would work before free agency or after, because this is a big thing that Mike Zarin brought up. Uh, he's an assistant Celtics GM and he's been on the bandwagon of, we should have free agency before the draft. We basically had that this year. We had a free-for-all tampering thing for the entire month of June,

and by the time we got to June 30th, free agency happened. So I actually think that worked out. What I want to do with the NBA draft, we need a little more distance from the finals. So the finals have that so that it ends by like June 18th at the latest. NBA draft, I think should be targeted for the last couple of days of June. So this year could have been Wednesday and Thursday, like June 26th, June 27th range. Well, why two days, Simmons? Well,

here's why. Because it's a two-day draft now. That's another thing I'm doing. We have the lottery the first night, only the first 14 picks. It's going to be on ABC. It's three hours. We have 12 minutes between picks. Now we have time for these teams to call each other and try to make trades. We have time to actually dissect the picks. We're just moving. We're ready to go. This is an event. Minnesota goes sixth, and then we actually have 12 minutes to digest the pick. Why'd they do that? Are they going to trade it? What's going on? Who's coming up next? Oh, wait, there's a trade rumor. Woj bomb. And we're just moving. And that's a whole night event. 14 picks. That's it. Let's enjoy the picks. It's the lottery.

Why are we rushing through this? The NFL draft, they do 30 picks. It takes five hours. And we love it. And then it ends. And then everybody spends the whole next day trying to figure out who the first pick of the 33rd, who the 33rd pick, first pick of the round two is going to be. And that becomes like its whole little content thing. I'm doing this for selfish reasons because for the ringer, it'd be better if the draft was

two days. We'd get more content out of it. It'd be more fun, but you have to admit it would probably be more fun anyway. So that's a two night thing. Free agency starts June 30th, but really it started the moment the round three ended. And then we go to summer league in July. And then finally we take a breath around third week of July. And then we redo it in October. Craig, is your mic on? Yeah. What'd you think of all that? It's great.

It's like NBA madness. You like it? Yeah. It needs a good name though. What's the weakest part of the idea? I don't know. Do you think people are going to get upset with the East West blending thing? Well, your generation, just you, you love all this stuff.

You love just chaos at all times. You love player-switching teams. This is for you. This is for the 20-somethings. So there you go. I fixed the entire NBA for the next 20 years. Congratulations to me. Speaking of the NBA, we're doing this thing with PointsBet, New Jersey's premium sports book.

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Tweet your bet to at pointsbetusa with the hashtag nameabet, and they'll price it up to you. So I made a bet for these guys. It was a custom bet. LeBron and Anthony Davis will play six or more regular season games than Kawhi and Paul George this year combined. So LeBron and AD combined will play six or more regular season games than Kawhi and Paul George this year combined. So LeBron and AD combined will play six more games than Kawhi and Paul George this season.

They decided the odds for this were minus 150. So if you want to bet on LeBron and AD, you have to bet 150 to win 100. So here's the reasoning behind this. Here's why I made Kawhi and Paul George underdogs. Paul George had operations on a torn rotator cuff and a torn labrum, which are on both sides of his body. That sounds dangerous. I'm not convinced he's going to be back before the start of the season. Wouldn't shock me if there was some news article that was like, yeah, it's looking like Thanksgiving. Who knows? I don't like those injuries. And then Kawhi has the load management

thing, as well as the fact that we watched him basically play on one leg the last two rounds. I just think he's at the point in his career where he's looking at, you know, 62 game seasons and that's it. They have depth on that team too. They're smart enough not to, not to grind their way through 82 games. They know all that matters is the playoffs. They have a veteran coach who's got a long-term contract who doesn't have to worry about trying to win 60 games. Kawhi's won titles in San Antonio and the Lakers,

and the Raptors. And I just think, I think Davis specifically is going to be motivated to play, you know, 75 to 82 games. I think that, I think he is a stealth MVP candidate. I think the odds for him are like eight to one, but I think the Lakers will ebb and flow depending on how much ass he kicks this year. I'm not sold on LeBron playing more than 65-70 maybe.

Maybe he's going to be looking at like 21, 2200 minutes, something like that total. Because he knows he's going to have to play 902,000 minutes in the, in the, uh, in the playoffs if they play four rounds. So, um, that's, that's how I came up with that line. I actually like LeBron and AD minus six, even, even laying the Vick, but that's just me. Uh, you can check this out on points, but New Jersey only Must be 21 plus additional terms and conditions apply. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER. PointsBet. Stay sharp.

Alright. Couple more things I wanted to get to before before Mr. Bacon joins us. One thing. Brooks Koepke yesterday at the British Open, aka the Open Championship, which we're not supposed to call it. I talked about this on Fairway World, but I wanted to expand on this one point. I think these last two years, Brooks has become the guy in a really important way where it reminds me of where Tiger was really from, I'm going to say 2000 to 2008. He was there earlier in 97, but it was more because he was young and he was so much fun to root for.

But at some point in the 2000s, he just became the guy you measured the tournament with. How's he doing? What's his score? Where is he? Is he within a couple strokes? You head into the last round and you think, well, Tiger's five back. He still has this. He's just looming like a shadow over the entire tournament. And that's how it went for Tiger really until he blew out his knee the year before the Escalade thing. And we haven't really had that since. We had that with Spieth almost got there. Spieth was in, there was like a 13 month range there where it felt like he could

become that. Other than that, it's, you know, it's been a rotating blend of the Rory's and the DJ's, but never anybody like substantive. And now you have Brooks here who has put together one of the best two-year stretches we've ever had in golf, who had two top four, I'm sorry, who had an entire year of top four finishes in majors. He went 2-1, 2-4 in these four. And what was interesting about that was he didn't really play well in the Masters and finished second. I don't think he was happy with how he played, and it never seemed like he really got going. His B game is still top five, top ten in the world. And then you saw in the British Open,

he's hitting the shit out of the ball and can't putt to save his life. And he's just crushing the course and then can't get it done in the greens. And it's still lingering. And with still six strokes back heading into the final round. Bogey's the first four holes. So he should be done at this point. It should be over. And then he eagles the fifth and you're looking at the score and you're going, well, he's seven back, he's eight back, whatever he is. If he could just birdie the next couple, he's back in this, like, watch out for Brooks.

I think it's an amazing place for any athlete to get to where even when they're not playing that well, and even when it seems bleak and ridiculous, and especially yesterday, the weather's terrible. There's 16 to 20 mile an hour winds in the course. He's not putting well the whole week. He's not even playing well and he's still kind of lingering and you know he has no chance and yet you wouldn't bet against him

because he's the kind of guy who can shoot, you know, a 27 on the back nine in 20 mile an hour wins. It's a really hard place to get to. So I was trying to think how many teams or players are actually in that spot now where you just kind of have to go through them every year or every tournament, regardless of what's going on. They're just on the radar. So obviously Serena has been like that

with women's tennis forever. And I think that's one of her legacies of the many legacies is this is now two full decades of her being on the radar. And it really started early 2000s, but the run that she's had, and it's not just about all the majors she's won, but just that she's been the measuring stick in that sport for two decades now. It's nuts. When I was growing up in the 80s, it was Martina and Chrissy forever, and they would just meet in the finals, whatever major every year, and they were the measuring sticks. I think on the men's side, it's been Federer and Nadal since last decade, since the second part of last decade, and then Djokovic joined in. And now it's the three of them. And if there was ever a men's final where at least one of those three wasn't in there, it would be bizarre. You would think like there had been a car accident or something. College football.

I think Alabama has been this team really since Saban went there. And then I think Clemson has kind of joined the party. And now they've become the two measuring sticks in that sport. College basketball, Duke and Kentucky, just because it's a one and done sport and they do one and done better than anybody. Major league baseball and the NHL, I don't feel like there's a measuring stick for either league anymore. It just seems like they've turned into these sports where seven to nine teams can have a chance to win the title every year. And that's just where they are. WWE, I think one of the biggest, I know I'm bringing in sports entertainment into a real

sports conversation, but WWE, this has been the biggest problem with them. They haven't had the guy. I think this is one of the reasons the ratings have gone down and they've had to blow up SmackDown and Raw and put new people in charge. They're doing the nostalgia thing on Raw tonight, which would be cool. But they really need the guy. And Cena, who was so polarizing for basically his entire run, but he was really important. He was the measuring stick and he gave them credibility and could carry the title forever. And they've kept trying to put different people in that spot and it hasn't worked. And they were hoping Roman Reigns would be that guy and it never really took. And then he got sick, he came back,

then it seemed like it was going to happen and it still hasn't happened. And they keep having to do these deals with Brock Lesnar, who basically just does the biggest shows now because he's kind of the only measuring stick they have where, you know, if you beat Lesnar, it means something. They don't really have anybody else in their whole roster where if you beat them, it actually means something. If somebody beats Lesnar, I'm surprised. So then you go to the NBA and I think this is one of the many fun things about this

season. In the East forever, it was LeBron. Forever. I mean, we're talking a full decade plus, even going back to like the 09 season. So 09 through 18, it was LeBron. And then in the West, it was the Warriors basically the last five years. And before that, it was the Spurs. And the Spurs were in a situation where they won in 02 and 03 with Duncan. They won in 05, they won in 07. They didn't make the finals again for another six years, but they kind of became that wrestler that the other teams, when they beat them,

they were the wrestler that put that person over, right? So if you beat the Spurs, it really meant something. The Mavs got through them in 06. It really meant something. It was like, oh my God, we beat the Spurs. We made the finals. OKC got through them with the Durant-Westbrook card in a bucket. Craig, did you know Harden was on OKC? Yeah. Yeah, that happened. They get through the Spurs and it feels like a really big deal. Oh my God, they beat the Spurs. The Clippers, when Lob City, when they couldn't get over the hump and they finally beat the Spurs in a seven-game series.

It was a big deal. The Spurs were basically the undertaker forever. And there's really nobody now. I guess maybe LeBron, but I have a lot of questions about that Lakers roster that they put together and where LeBron is at this point in his career. I don't know who it is. I mean, maybe it's Kawhi. You've seen Kawhi win titles with two

different teams. Maybe he's the guy you have to go through to actually get the glory. I don't know. I honestly don't know who it is. And I think that's one of the things that makes this season so much fun is that it seems like that measuring stick title is kind of available again. By Durant leaving the Warriors and Durant getting hurt. I think Durant could have been that guy, honestly. If he doesn't get hurt and the Warriors win again and then he goes to the Nets or the Knicks, wherever he's the measure. He takes the measuring stick wherever he goes. So the big picture point, Brooks Koepka has become that guy. I think 1000%, it is the most unexpected thing that's happened, in my opinion, in sports, just from somebody going from

one level of their career to another. Even like Kawhi, like Kawhi had won the... He was the best player in the 2014 finals. It wasn't inconceivable that he could go to another team, stay healthy, and win a title. Brooks Koepka becoming the guy in two years, did not see that one coming. So I want to talk about that.

I want to talk about this Levitar to ESPN thing really quickly. I've been watching this, obviously, as somebody who spent, God, how many years? 14 and a half, something like that. Levitard's a really smart guy. I don't feel like there are accidents. I look back, when I got suspended for my podcast that I did about talking about Goodell, there was one really avoidable thing. And I've talked about this before in a pod. I'm not saying anything new. I never heard the pod before it went up. up about the Ray Rice thing and just Goodell and all the stuff that I just thought, and I continue to think Goodell is just an atrocious commissioner who contradicts himself left and

right. And the way he handled the Ray Rice thing, and then when it blew up that weekend, the press conference on Friday, and it was just one of the worst moments any commissioner's ever had. And I took it so personally, just as somebody that really likes football, that he tried to change his story on it. And I really went in on it. And I did this whole monologue about it. And I was riled up and did the whole thing. We finished the pod. And then I immediately went with Jalen to do five hours of, we were doing the Bill and Jalen MBA previews, and never got to hear it before it went up. And I had two people that worked for me who said, you should listen to this. And I was like, no, no, it's fine.

Just put it up. And if I had listened to it, I would have taken out the stuff where I just am like borderline incoherent, challenging ESPN. The other stuff I would have kept. But my point is I knew what I was doing when I did the Goodell stuff. I knew I was really going after him. I knew it was going to be a problem for ESPN. And I just didn't care.

I really didn't. I was like, oh, I hope this causes them problems because at that point I was mad at them about a whole bunch of things that was going on. And I was just being a dick, you know, and happily being a dick. I was like, you know what? Fuck this guy.

I'm just going to go after, I'm going to go after him. And if he gets mad and calls ESPN people about it, great. I don't care. So when I saw what Levitard did this week, it reminded me of that a little bit because ESPN has changed its policy on how people talk about politics there. And the Jamel thing, I don't need to rehash that one,

but just in general, it's something that they really have made a concerted effort to move away from the perception that they're too liberal, that they don't care about one side of the country, all that stuff. And over the last two years, they've made a concerted effort to go back to what people basically liked about ESPN and consumed ESPN4, which was sports and highlights. And if you look at what they are now, what they're trying to do, it's live events and it's highlights and it's double downing on what SportsCenter is. Not trying to be really more than that. I mean, Bob Lee left outside the lines. I don't think that was really an accident. He went from a situation where he was going to take his first sabbatical

in I don't know how many decades to all of a sudden just deciding not to come back. I think, as I've said on this podcast and talked about with Brian Curtis, I think it's a decision that makes sense if you're them. ESPN was in a position there for years, and I was there for the best kind of stretch of this when they try to be everything for everybody. And they tried to be a place that any great idea could carry the day, that they could take a bunch of different chances creatively and spend money on things that might not be huge moneymakers, but mattered kind of for the soul of ESPN to some degree. I look at a site like Grantland,

and Skipper and I talked about that when he was on my podcast a few months ago. Grantland was never going to make like a kajillion dollars for them. It was about offering something that had real substance and cared about creativity and finding talent and long form and trying to be what the national was back

in the day and the Rolling Stone in the 70s, stuff like that. We had real ambitions for it. It was never supposed to be a site that was worth hundreds of millions of dollars. It was something that was supposed to be additive to ESPN. And I think the undefeated was like that. I think 538 was like that, 30 for 30, outside the lines, E60. There was a whole bunch of things. Skipper always intrinsically understood that ESPN had to do things outside of live events and highlights because that is how you resonate with people in a different way. Now, the catch on that is when you push the envelope and you push things creatively and you're really taking swings like that, it could also go wrong. And you have to be able to deal with the consequences of this went wrong, that went wrong,

this person went off the handle, whatever. And the reality is creative people are going to be a little different. I think I'm a little different. You know, I definitely, I had my battles with them. They've been documented, but creative people are usually going to be passionate and they're going to really care about what they do. So like when I see somebody like Bob Lee leave, that's, he can say what he wants and he's a great soldier and he's been there since 1979. He didn't just decide he was done. I don't think he wanted to work at what ESPN is right now, which is a place that has put a premium on relationships with leagues, live events, highlights, and

then also kind of trying to do all the other stuff. Bob Lee's not a kind of guy. And I think there's a give and take now with where that company is creatively, with the people that work for it, what makes sense for it as a business versus what makes sense for that soul that I mentioned before. And I look at the Levitard thing. Levitard, son of a Cuban immigrant, really cares about this stuff. Really cares about the fact that we have somebody who's the president of the country right now who just feels like he can attack basically anybody who's not white. And we're kind of used to it and we're numb to it at this point. ESPN has set these rules in place.

They don't want people to talk about that on their airwaves anymore. They just don't. And if you do, it's got to have some sort of doorway to sports. They don't want to be in a position now where they're constantly litigating, should somebody have said this? Should somebody have talked about this? They're just out. They're done.

I think over the course of the decade, they realized they just don't want to be in that game. They just want to show games. They just want to show highlights. So Levitard knew this. And full disclosure, I'm friends with him. I've not talked to him about this in the last week. But I know him pretty well. I've talked to him in the past.

I certainly talked to him after I got suspended. And he's a really proud guy who I feel like at some point he looked at it and said, I have a platform. I'm on live radio right now. And I'm just going to use the platform for this. And I know there's going to be repercussions. So is that a good thing? Yes, it is a good thing. On the other hand, it's going to cause a shit show for him. And it's not something that's going to go away. I found out with all my NFL stuff in 2014, once you pass this point and you become kind of a story, for lack of a better word, within the company and it's you versus ESPN or it's this person said this. And then ESPN's in a position now where

if they discipline them, everybody gets even madder. If they don't discipline them, then it's basically they're saying our policies mean nothing. It's now a free for all, say what you want. He's putting them in that position. Now I put ESPN in that position a few times and I knew what I was doing and I didn't really care because I wasn't happy with how things were going.

And it was such a frustrating place to work. At that point, you start seeing exit signs and you start thinking, hmm, the grass might be greener over there. And once you're thinking that way and you kind of feel confined, you end up slipping up. And you end up putting people that work with you and around you in bad positions because you're the one who's acting up. But what you're doing is affecting everybody else too. To me, reading the tea leaves, it doesn't seem like it's going to go that well. I don't think this plays out in a great way for his future there. Because once you go down this road now, every time he says anything, it's going to be blog posts and news stories, all that stuff. And I just think he's not one of those guys who's going to be like,

I'm not saying anything, especially you have an election coming next year. And I just don't see him backing off, I guess is my bigger point. And, you know, so what happens to ESPN next decade? If you're going to have people that are the faces of your company and the faces of your company creatively, how do they find the balance of when to weigh in on stuff so that they feel good about what their place is and what their platform is. I think the person who's found that balance the best has been Van Pelt

on the late night sports center. I think that shows good. I think he's good and he's able to seem like he has an edge while also doing all the bread and butter stuff that makes ESPN good. And I think it gets tough when, you know, I'm sure Levitar's thinking like, I'm a creative person on the platform. I am not able to talk about the same stuff that other people I respect are able to talk to or talk about. So he sees something like what Trump did last week, which was just awful. And even for Trump, really awful. And he's just like, I have to say something. I have a platform. I don't know how this plays out.

I don't think it's a good thing for really for him or for the aforementioned soul of ESPN because if you're just going to avoid this stuff completely and become games and highlights, great. You should do that. But then I don't understand why you're pretending to care about the other stuff. It seems like ESPN is in a no man's land now where they dip their toe in, but not really.

I think we're heading to a world where they're just games and highlights. And a lot of this other stuff probably goes out the window. And that's just who they are as a business. So we'll see. I have my eye on that, but I thought the Levitar thing was important. That's really it. I think we're good. I had a couple other things I was going to talk, but that went longer than I thought. We're going to bring

Kevin Bacon in here, but first let's take a break. Hey, have you ever worn a dress shirt that subconsciously reminded you of a straight jacket? Finally, someone has made dress shirts better. And that's someone as Mizzen and Main. Mizzen and Main makes dress shirts for men that are actually comfortable. They're made with performance fabrics that stretch and move with you all day long. And now it's summer, which means the sun is beating down.

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It's been forever. I've been dying to get you on. You must get a lot of podcast requests. You've had such an interesting, fascinating career, and you've worked with so many people, and you're a good talker. Yeah, well, it's cool, the podcast thing. The format is kind of refreshing from an interview standpoint because, you know, on one hand, you think to yourself,

if you're doing interviews all the time, you don't want to come and sit here for an hour. But on the other hand, you know, when you do things and you're trying to cram something into a six-minute bit and there's a lot of pressure to be, you know, clever and funny in those six minutes, it gets kind of old. So the idea that you could actually sit down and have a real conversation is cool. And I like listening to them. You know, I find them fascinating. Yeah, I've been doing, I think I've had mine for 12 years. And I remember 09, I really started to

start getting celebrities and they were also appreciative after, cause they're so used to that talk show, six minutes, crowd cheers, sits down. You tell your three stories that are prearranged with the producer. You act out the stories basically and then you're done, but you're not actually talking to anybody. Yeah, no, it's true. It's true. I feel like you've been in my life ever since I can remember watching movies. Like you're in Animal House.

It was over 40 years ago. Yeah, that was my first one. And then Friday the 13th, which had the scariest commercials. I think I was like 10. And they had those commercials where they would show each murder and you got to the point

where you're like, I don't even want this to come on. I'm terrified of the commercial. But yeah, so you've been, you're now in fifth decade,

right? Of being an actor, I guess, yeah. Yeah. Or live, you mean? Oh,

no, I'm sick. No, you're being an actor. Yeah. Five decades of acting now. Okay, sure guess, yeah. Yeah. Oh, live, you mean? Oh, no, I'm sick. No, just like being an actor. There's five decades of acting now. Okay, sure, if you say so. I mean, Animal House, I guess, was about seven, I think I got the part in maybe 77 or something like that. And that was your first break?

Yeah, I mean, I got out of high school in Philly. I got out half a year early because I decided to take more classes, and they let me out. I was working in a warehouse packing and shipping medical books, which is not the most exciting gig. And I knew I wanted to be an actor, and I knew that I wasn't going to go to college. And I was the youngest of six, And so my parents were cool with that.

You know, they were like, all right, you know, you do what you want to do. And, you know, I basically packed a suitcase up that summer and came to New York with a suitcase and a dream. And I got into acting school. My dad gave me enough money to cover, I think, the first year of the acting school. So what year are we talking about? Like 76? Yeah, I think the first year of the acting school. So what year are we talking about? Like 76?

Yeah. It was the summer of 76. Yeah. Oh, wow. What a cool time to be in New York. Yeah. New York's exploding 19 different ways.

Absolutely. I'm trying to think if that was son of Sam or not. That was 77. That was 77. That was Reggie Jackson. Reggie Jackson. Studio 54. Studio 54. All that shit.

I was there, man. I was in the middle of all that in in a good way uh yeah mostly good i mean you know dangerous for sure some of the things that i was doing and experiencing and and uh and certainly the you know new york was was was famously not as safe a place and uh yeah movies were telling that story a lot, you know, with things like, you know, Death Wish and, you know, those kind of, you know, kind of,

it was supposed to be sort of this terrifying place. But I grew up in Philly. So for me, I got to New York and I felt safer than I'd ever felt in my life. And my mom was from New York. And while we were very much a, you know, because of my father, like I really super died in the wool Philadelphia family. Uh, I think she always kind of was whispering to my ear, you know, you gotta get up to New York. That's where it is. And I felt like as an actor that, um, whether I

had or not at that time, I felt like I i had tapped i tapped myself out in terms of what i was going to be able to explore in philadelphia as an actor and um i was i was chomping at the bit to get going that was such a great stretch of movies that had new york basically as a character you know you think like the scorsese stuff and death wish and yeah all the way up to like 1980 and cruising without pacino but it was like the Warriors. New York is just this central piece, and it goes for like eight years, and it's a specific New York. I was in the Warriors for a moment.

What? What happened was I got the part, and I was working as a waiter. I was often on and off as a waiter. I was working as a waiter. I was often on and off as a waiter. I was working as a waiter when I got Animal House, and when the movie came out, I had already gotten my job back because I'd spent the money. I was not good at managing my money. I spent it really, really quickly doing things that I shouldn't do.

And when The Warriors came around, a lot of young actors in New York got a part because there was a lot of parts you know and I was in I was supposed to be in this band called a gang called the Dingoes I think they were the gang that was supposed to have dogs and I was out there

spending my money and had a girl with me and I was you know dropping you, getting like expensive drinks and stuff like that. I'm in this restaurant, I'll never forget, on the Upper West Side. And I see one of the actors who I knew who was already shooting the movie and was playing the lead or one of the leads. And I said, so I'm, you know, chomping at the bit to get to work, you know, how's it going out there? And he goes, you didn't hear? And I was like, what?

And he goes, you should talk to your agent, man, because I think they cut that gang from the movie. And they had. And so I was going to say, I've seen that movie 300 times. I don't remember the dog gang. Yeah, there was no dog gang. Kind of would have been nice. We kind of needed a dog gang.

Well, there you go. Well, I was like, am I allowed to curse? Yeah, hell yeah. I was like, oh my God, what the fuck am I going to do? I'm broke and I'm spending money I don't have. And now I quit my job in the restaurant. So I had to go back, ask for my job back. They were nice enough to give me my job back.

My agent reached out to one of the producers of the movie, and I believe it was Larry Gordon. And he explained to him the situation. He said, listen, there's this kid. You cast him in the part. He was going to be one of the dingoes, and now he's broke. And they kind of took pity on me, and they gave me – to me, it was like I was so happy to get it, but it was probably like a grand or 700 bucks or something like that.

It was like a week's salary to tide me over. Do you remember, like, especially those early years, like what you got paid for each movie? Because I'm like that. I used to be a writer, but I remember like the first few years, like every single

anything I got. No, I don't remember specifically, but I know that for a long time I worked for scale. So whatever, whatever the Screen Actors Guild

scale of that, you know, and it was a lot, and sometimes it was, it was dependent on whether or not you had under five lines or over five lines. So what was your first big paycheck then? Well, when you say big, I'm still waiting. I'm trying to think. I don't know. You know, I guess probably, I mean, look, they were all big to me.

Yeah. Honestly. Well, one where you could at least know you were paying for your apartment. Well, yeah. I tell you, the first time that I ever really started to make at least a decent living was when I was on soaps. I was on Search for Tomorrow tomorrow and the guiding light. And the thing about the money on the soaps was it wasn't, the money was so outrageous,

but it was very steady. Yeah. And you knew that you had a certain amount of episodes. You were guaranteed a week. So I was working on the soap for a year on guiding light as Tim, the teenage alcoholic. And, uh,

I would go at night and do theater, you know, and, and, and, uh, I had this at night and do theater, you know, and, and, and, uh, I had this steady income, but you know, a little bit of a turning point or at least, at least a milestone was when they came back to me after the first year and said, we'd like to extend your contract. And we'd like to give you another two years. I think it was. And clearly it was going to be a raise. And, you know, when you're in that situation and you don't have another paying option, it can be a very difficult and scary thing to turn that down. I mean, to this day, if somebody comes with an offer, I have a really hard time saying no because I'm always in the back of my mind thinking that I'm going to be out of work.

Yeah. And so at that point, based on really nothing other than cockiness and I guess also knowing that that's not the place where I wanted my career to be ultimately was working at 10 to Teenage Alcoholic. I wanted to get past daytime television. Yeah. So I passed on this offer with absolutely no job. So you bet on yourself. To go to, yeah, I bet on myself. And they were like, hey, man, Tim the Adult Alcoholic is going to be,

we have a lot of plans for that as he grows, as he gets older. I mean, you know, I looked at some of the, I would sometimes hang out with some of the older actors who had been on the sub for 20 years. Yeah. And I saw a level of

kind of regret from some of them. Not from all of them, but from some of them or a frustration or the idea that this has just kind of become a job

so that they could do other things, fish or play golf or whatever it was. And kind of become a job so that they could do other things, fish or play golf or whatever it was. And I was like, really, that's not, that's not what I want, you know, autopilot. Yeah. And I cared so much about work, but two weeks later I had an audition for diner. Oh, and there you go. Can we talk animos one second? What do you, it's been 40 plus years. Do you remember anything about Belushi at this point sure yeah i do uh well first off he was the first um star that i ever met yeah uh he was a star he was i mean he had the number one album he was on the number one comedy show and he had this movie yeah and and it was it's hard to even picture, but SNL was, you know, was incredibly sort of like hip and iconic at that time.

I mean, even I remember in, you know, in bars, you'd be hanging out on a Saturday night and everybody would turn, you know, kill the jukebox and put SNL on. Like it was, you know, like the World Series or something like that. It was like 30 million people. Yeah. I don't think there's a TV show, maybe like Game of Thrones got close to that. Yeah. But that was every Saturday night. It was pretty important.

And so he was a very, very big star to meet and actually get to be in a scene with in my first movie. You know, I mean, that was kind of mind-blowing. But I was in acting school, and as I said, they cast me out of acting school. I just went over and, you know, met John Landis, and, you know, they gave me this part. I didn't know anything about making movies. I was flown to Oregon,regon you know overnight quickly because they

needed me the next day it was like a whole crazy like mind-blowing experience and one of which was to actually meet this iconic figure who at the time was still doing snl so he would work on uh on animal house like mond, Tuesday, Wednesday. They would fly him back to New York on Thursday, jump into the show, do Saturday night and Sunday he'd come back. And he was – I really liked John. He was very nice to me. He was very nice to me he was very uh generous i think i think he knew probably that i was like a new york guy you know which a lot of the cast were were kind of la based there were

there were some new yorkers but but uh and he he one thing that just popped into my head the other day which which which was such a fond memory was that i uh he had a party and um it was such a fond memory, was that he had a party, and it was at a house. So we were all staying at this shitty hotel on the side of the highway, and he had a house. And that, to me, I was like, wow, the guy, they got him a house. Like, that blew my mind, right? It's huge. Yeah, it's huge.

And it was a rented place, probably wasn't even that big. And to have a brunch and be able to throw a brunch for the whole cast. And the fact that I got invited because I was kind of definitely low man on the totem pole in that hierarchy of that cast. I was really, really touched by that. bought uh locks from new york um from you know zay bars and barney greengrass or someplace and had brought it out to oregon um and at that time to me a lot like i could i could afford a bagel but i could never afford a bagel with locks because that was like and i loved it but it was like super super expensive it was like um gold And here was this just piles of this stuff that he was giving everybody for breakfast. And like that, I just, I was like so knocked out by

that. And then the other thing was that there was this thing called a mimosa, which was taking perfectly good champagne. It was like the most expensive thing in the world and mixing it with orange juice and drinking it before like, like 10 o'clock in the morning. That, that blew my mind, silly little things like that. But when I think of those things, I think that that was a, it was a good, uh, it was a good look at what, how being, um, number one on the call, she being the, at, at, at the top of the food chain in a movie, you can either be, you know, generous and positive and cool about the work that you're doing and let that trickle down, or you can be an asshole and everybody has a bad time.

And this was, he was not that. Tom Cruise is like that too, isn't he? Isn't Tom Cruise one of those trickle down, just super good mood, looking out for everybody? Very energetic, yeah. Tom runs to the set. Like when they call, like, you know, it's a thing with actors,

you know, people, stars, you know, they knock on your door and they tell you that they're ready. And a lot of people, you know, kind of take their time. They saunter there. They don't want to be the first one there. They don't want to have. And a lot of people, you know, kind of take their time. They saunter there. They don't want to be the, the, the first one there. They don't want to have to wait for somebody who is, you know, somehow, uh, less important to them. And, uh, Tom's kind of the opposite. He comes back on his door and he is charging, charging out of his trailer. He, he, he really loves to, he loves what he does. So diner was the big break and you don't realize

at the time that this movie is creating a template for – to become one of the most ripped off movies of the next 40 years basically. Interesting that you say that. I think that – I think Animal House was ripped off more than Diner in some ways because I think that – Oh, totally. off more than diner in some ways because i think that totally you know i mean animal house had you know uh it really put a whole genre on on the map which was some oftentimes um a period piece which was like a tna comedy you know um pushing the envelope and raunchy kind of stuff but at the same time with a little bit of heart. And that lasted.

That still goes on. That's happening these days. Rocky was another one. That was 1976. They remade Rocky 45,000 different ways. Right. Diner, surprisingly, I think was financed based on the fact that it was going to be that.

Really? Yeah. Mark Johnson and Barry Levinson, I think, I don't know if they would agree with this, that they convinced MGM, or maybe they weren't even really paying very close attention to it, that they were kind of making that. It was a period thing.

It was about a bunch of guys. Some hilarity was going to ensue. There was an original ending of Diner that involved a football game and people hanging from the goalpost, and I think there were some breasts being flashed. That was the era for that, because Caddyshack was doing that too.

Exactly, Caddyshack and Porky's and on and on and on, all going back to Animal House, right? Yeah. But these guys were really secretly, I think, kind of making a different movie. Barry was making a very personal, sometimes like sort of dark and edgier kind of comedy and, you know, kind of a romantic retrospective look at friendship, male friendship in an era. So when the movie came out and when MGM saw that movie, they were like, we're fucked.

This is not the movie that we paid for. There was this whole ending sequence that was in the script. As I said, it was about a big football game and, you know, it's the Colts are playing and the goalposts are going to come down and all kinds of, I even can't remember. I'd love to see what the pages were. And they came to us and they said, you know what? We're not going to shoot any of that stuff because all this stuff that's going on in the diner between you guys is working better than that. So we're going to stay in the diner and we're going to do some more stuff that's going to take place in the diner. Now, when the movie came out, um, they didn't want

to release it. They, um, they thought it was, uh, just boring and, uh, didn't have the kind of commercial you know you know pizzazz that a movie like that needed and a plus there were way less movies back then right yeah movies yeah yeah so they made a bet on a movie like that and they weren't going to release it that's pretty significant and as a studio movie it was you know it was an unusual studio movie in a way because it did have almost like an R-House kind of feel. Yeah. But there was a publicist who got behind it and started to slip it to various critics, including Pauline Kael, who fell in love with the movie. Yeah. And they sort of, you know,

kind of shamed MGM into actually releasing it. And then it became, I wouldn't say it was a big box office hit, but it became a classic and sort of in a culty kind of way and is now regarded as a great film. I also think it influenced probably two generations of screenwriters, right? It did.

Everybody wanted to write their version of guys hanging out and relationships. Yeah. I don't ever remember seeing that in a movie before. No, I was a kid at that point. But I don't remember a movie that was able to just basically take dudes hanging out and the interactions between them, and that was the movie. That was the movie, yeah.

And now that's happened, I would say, a lot of times since. So then did things take off after that, or it just got better? Not as much as I would have liked. You know, I think there's a weird kind of, there's a weird thing here because I, in my heart sort of knew that I was a character actor and that's what, that's what I had been doing on the stage. And that's what that part was. That was,

you know, the part of Fenwick and in diner, um, was a character, a supporting character type part, you know? Um, and,

and, uh, but I had this idea that there was a certain set of rules that you had to follow in in in this career trajectory where you would go from you know a small part no no lines to a few more lines to bigger bigger parts yeah to you know an ensemble type thing like diner and then you had to be like the lead of the movie because that's the next step so that was the next step that i really really wanted but it didn't it didn't really happen right away it took it took a it took a long time so i was kind of you know going up for stuff and people didn't really see me as a

leading man um was there one that you really wanted that you didn't get oh yeah i'm sure there was a ton uh because there was a lot of good movies coming out around that yeah you and i think you win though because you ended up with footloose which i ended up with footloose which was a monster it was it was a it was a monster hit it was um it was and and unusual because there were things that happened with Footloose that had not happened before. For instance, they had this mega soundtrack. Yeah. And the music, some of it had already come out and was already getting radio play.

So they worked some of the music on radio before the movie ever came out. So then when kids saw the movie, they were already connected to the song oh that's interesting yeah uh because you know you you have a very visceral reaction to a song if you've already seen it so yeah footloose was a huge thing for me and he was a leading man um and then i was you know kind of like a pop star but uh you know 84 the greatest pop culture year or one of the greatest pop culture years of all time what else was happening oh my god what was it happening purple rain bruce springsteen michael jackson thriller mtv's taking off there's just miami vice i think that year. There's 45 things that were going on. And Footloose is one of the things.

Yeah, it was one of the things, yeah. My son's 11. He just finished fifth grade. And the school play this year was Footloose. Oh, really? And he played the Chris Penn character. Oh, cool. The overall is a Southern accent.

But it's funny because I was worried when the remake came out. You probably can't talk about the re I hate remakes, especially if the original movie is rewatchable. I'm like, why are we doing a remake? So I was worried my kids would gravitate toward the remake, but no, the 80 ones,

the eighties, one 84 still holds. Oh good. That's cool. That still holds the court. Yeah. But it was funny. Like seeing that he's like three generations removed,

but that movie, the premise still works. How long did I don't know? It was just funny. I also, And that, he's like three generations removed. But that movie, the premise still works. The outlawing dance. I don't know. It was just funny. I also, you did the bike movie the year after that. It was a bomb, though. It bombed because it was on cable forever.

So I never knew if it did well or not. Yeah, no, that was my first movie after Footloose. And basically, I wanted to do, I saw it and the director kind of pitched it to me as this kind of edgy Scorsese type sort of streetwise New York movie. Yeah. About a week before we start shooting, they broke it to me that we were not going to shoot in New York. And then eventually I got the sense that what they really wanted was, you know, Footloose on a bike. In fact, there is a, there's a bike dance number in there. My girlfriend is, it's pretty hilarious. If you go back and look at it, it just doesn't fit in the movie at all, but they were like, we have to have some kind of a dance number. So I'm on a, on a,

on a, uh, I was, I was riding a trick bike, like a, you know, kind of like a circus bike. I I've been training with a, uh, a, uh, trick, you know, rider and she's a ballerina and we're, kind of like a circus bike. I I've been training with a, a trick, you know, rider and she's a ballerina and we're like kind of, you know, riding the bike around this completely improbable loft that we have. It's supposed to be, you know, we, I remember that it was like the nicest apartment in New York city. Yeah. And it wasn't even New York city. We shot it in San Francisco, which makes very little sense considering the hills. Anyway. Yeah. So, yeah, that didn't do so well.

And that was a whole era. That's a movie that could only come out in the mid-80s. Yeah. I don't feel like there's any other year that movie even makes sense. But the 80s,

you know, a lot of stuff going on. There's a lot of drugs back in the 80s. A lot of scripts getting approved from people who were like zonked out of their mind.

That's right. Like, put this on a bike. I'm in. Yeahs, a lot of scripts getting approved from people who are like zonked out of their mind. That's right. Like, footloose on a bike, I'm in. Yeah, yeah, right. 20 million. Yeah. Get that bacon, kid. Yeah. So then did you find yourself getting, you were just the footloose guy?

You were worried about becoming that? No, I really was. And it's not what I wanted to be at all. I had lost my dream of – my original dream was of being that, of a pop, having some kind of a pop. I wanted to be Michael Jackson or Bobby Sherman or Donny Osmond or David Cassidy. David Cassidy, yeah. And then I lost that for wanting to be a serious New York actor. So when I actually got the pop stardom, it's not what I wanted. And, uh, and so I think that the choices that I made were,

had an element of self-sabotage in them after that. I also think I was kind of caught up in that, um, in some of the messaging of the, of our industry, which just was, okay, now you're the lead. You have to get this much money. You have to you know be on the poster you know um and and i'd lost track of who i was what else happened to make you lose track um like you're partying like what's going on um you just – you didn't – you lost track of what the finish line was. I kind of lost track of what the finish line was. And I probably – I don't know. I should have asked for some advice or some – you know, but I was a person that always thought that I knew best.

Yeah. that always thought that I knew best. I've never been someone to want guidance from anybody. This is all pretty young. You're pretty young at this point still. I'm still pretty young, yeah. But that's when you need the guidance. I thought that was the whole thing. When you become famous is the age you're trapped in for the rest of your life.

I don't think that you qualify for that one. But wasn't that like a George Clooney quote? That's interesting. George Clooney was always like, I turned out normal because I didn't become famous until I was like in my 30s. That's interesting. Well, listen, I think...

I think you turned out all right. I think I turned out all right, yeah. It could go badly though. The Footloose thing could have really gone badly. It could have. And believe me when I tell you that there's been, you know, I've seen a lot of people come and go since, you know, 1976 or whatever. He was dead four years after that movie. Exactly.

Exactly. have fallen off the radar or who have um let's put it this way as much fun as i had all through those eras and all the all the you know slightly self-destructive things that i've done i never put that above keeping my eye on the prize yeah you know i really i really was razor focused on um trying to get there wherever there might be so 88 you have john hughes right she's having a baby yeah and that was probably the that was the end of the john hughes run that basically goes from 16 candles high school breakfast club he takes it all the way through and then it ends up with somebody having a baby. Like those movies are all kind of weirdly related. Yeah. Well, here's the thing about that is that those movies were incredibly successful, including Plane Strange and Automobiles.

And She's Having a Baby was not. She's Having a Baby did not do well at the box office. Paramount was not, um, happy with it. Uh, it was not even really embraced critically in the way that I, I honestly felt that it should have been. I thought it was a really, really good movie, but the problem was, is it, you know, we put actors and filmmakers, uh, in a box and in a category. And if you sometimes try to step outside of that, people are, can be very resistant to that. And it wasn't a goofy teen thing. John was dealing with stuff that was, was much kind of more poignant and was out of, um, uh, you know, out of, out of, out of step with with what what people were used to coming from him and

and he'd also been incredibly successful i mean just one movie after another as you pointed out were really monster hits and they were not super expensive movies to make and um i just felt like the title hurt the movie maybe yeah because i don't really feel like that movie is that much different than about last night which came out two years earlier. But it's basically young adults dealing with a relationship and life and stuff happening earlier than they would have thought. Right. But it was presented as this, John Hughes, she's having a baby. Right.

I never felt like it was that kind of movie. Right. Maybe. Listen, I mean, marketing is a mysterious and elusive thing. So you could be right about that. But that was a big – it was a very big disappointment to me and an even bigger disappointment to John Hughes. I think that he was in, I think he, I don't want to put words in, in his mouth. He's rest in peace. But I feel like, um, I feel like it could have been the most

personal thing that he made and the fact that, um, it wasn't embraced in the way that he had hoped, I think, was really tough for him. It's tough when you have like five, six in a row like that. Oh, yeah. We've seen that happen with so many actors and directors, too, where at some point people are just kind of ready to go, hey, fuck that guy. Yeah, you're in the crosshairs. You're definitely in the crosshairs.

Not giving him another win. Yeah. And look for a reason this shouldn't work. Yeah. Let's take a break to talk about Luminary. It is a new podcast subscription service with some of the best content around. I'm excited about it

because it's the only place you can listen to the newest show on the Ringer Podcast Network. It's called Break Stuff. It's the story of Woodstock 1999. Definitely a podcast you cannot miss. This was one of the iconic disaster festivals, really the fire festival of the late 90s, but way worse. We've done two episodes of the show.

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Handelberg Brothers Handsome Rambler Wisdom from the top with Guy Raz and the rewatchables 1999 I think we've done

at least 10 right how many have we done Craig? I think 9 9? yeah alright well we have 6 more coming

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After that, it's only $7.99 per month. Luminary.link slash Simmons for two months of free access. Luminary.link slash Simmons. Cancel any time. Terms apply. Back to Kevin Bacon. You had Tremors, which was on cable for I think 20 years and it did well right

another bomb that bombed yeah another bomb yeah that's an outrage yeah I agree well it certainly didn't bomb for 20 straight years

on Cinemax and TNT and FX and everywhere else it was actually an interesting era because you know when they came to me with Tors, I was in a, I had been going through this,

you know, Quicksilver, she's having a baby. I'm sure there's some other ones in there that, you know, really were not, did not do well. And I didn't really know what to do. And, uh, my wife was pregnant and my mother was sick and I was running out of money and, uh, you know, had a lot of anxiety about, um, being newly married, bringing a child into the world. Uh, this, this, you know, pressure to, uh, hold on to a career that I'd had and not to, um, you know, be able to, to support and provide for my family, all that kind of stuff. And, uh, I read the script and while I liked the script and I thought it was funny and cool, it was a fucking script about underground worms. And I, I felt like, okay, I gotta do this because i need the dough but i've really sunk pretty far lower than the underground worms yeah like right i am now i'm now i'm living with the

graboids and uh so we went out to the desert and and made this movie and um it was ended up being you know a really kind of interesting and cool movie but it suffered from again with with marketing uh one of the problems is is to be able to sell funny scary that's a very very difficult thing right like friday the 13th, nothing funny about it. You just know. Saw, you know. It's all scary. The exceptions are, you know, things like Shaun of the Dead, right? That's an exception that ends up, you know, working really well. But Funny Scary is a tough one to hit. I just saw this movie, Midsommar. Oh, yeah.

People love that one. Yeah, it's a really cool movie and it has a lot of funny stuff in it but it's it's but it's scary as fuck i mean it's just you know really creepy and really terrifying so marketing that is a tough thing to do and i don't think that they again quite uh nailed it in terms of the marketing but right around this time is when the blockbuster thing is really exploding and when people are going and getting videos and taking them home and that becomes like a you know everyone said listen the movie business is over because it's your and no one's ever going to leave their house anymore and and it was it was huge you remember blockbusters they were everywhere yeah and tremors became one of those titles that just did great on video and then on you know cable and on eventually on uh dvd and all that stuff so so it ended up they

ended up making a lot of money on it uh but it was not a theatrical hit. Well, then you enter this really fun run, which is very 90s-ish. Flatliners. We have Julia Roberts, who's suddenly the biggest star in the world. And I was like, I think that was her next movie, right? She literally became a superstar while we were making the movie. Oh, the movie Pretty Woman came out and you're making this and she's now the biggest female star in the world. Yep.

And how do you think she was affected? What were you watching? I can't even imagine what that would be like. Yeah. Because especially if you're going to work

but then now everything's flipped but you're still going to the same place you were yesterday. But now you're massively famous. Yeah. Yeah, no. you're massively famous. Yeah. Yeah, no.

I'm trying to think if I can really pinpoint. Listen, I mean, that's true. That's what's going on in the outside world, and it's cool, and certainly everybody's excited about it, and she's excited about it. You know, when you go to work, we were. You she's excited about it. Um, you know, when you go to work, we were just doing your job.

Yeah, we're doing our job. And, and it, we had a lot of laughs because, uh, it was just a funny group between, um,

Kiefer and, and, and Billy, Billy Baldwin and, and Oliver Platt and, uh, and Julia and me, you know,

we, we, uh, you know, Joel Schumacher was a direct director of that and he's a very, uh, fascinating, funny, colorful guy. And so interacting with him was – it was cool. It's crazy you worked with her and then the next year you're with Cruise.

Who was the biggest male star in the world? That was after – Cruise was – well, 92 or two years later. Okay. I have no – like I don't't i have no timeline on this so that was like the probably the height of how famous at that point cruz was on a run and when that movie was coming i was like rob reiner jack nicholson right there were a lot of there were a lot of famous people yeah to be more to be more okay yeah when when can i go see this and demi was married

to bruce i think yeah at the time and tom was married to nicole so there was a lot of um that was one of those movies yeah when you when you're reading about in premiere magazine like oh that's going to be a big movie and then you see the trailer i was like oh that's going to be awesome and it just hit every checkpoint and then was it was really an iconic movie yeah we had a fun time we had a fun time making it too it was uh it was like a really kind of uh pleasurable um place to go to work one of the most rewatchable movies oh good cool although i don't know why he insulted he's he at some point says to your character how you're a lousy softball player but there's no evidence i don't know if there's a scene no evidence your softball prowess yeah uh but he would be he would be right if he

was talking about me personally now uh i'm not i don't know about the character and that guy think i think his name is jack right smiling jack ross right and so i've played about eight jacks for some reason uh someone pointed that out to me eight eight different characters named jack yeah like i get jacks all the time i don't know if it's eight but there's a a lot. You've also played four Boston guys. Yeah. My current character is Jackie. Yeah.

Yeah. So that might be my eighth or, I don't know, seventh. I'm not sure. JFK was the first, like, real, I'm going full bore character actor part. Yeah. Well, that was, was that after A Few Good Men? It was the year before. The year before.

It goes Flatliners, JFK, A Few Good Men? It was the year before. The year before. Because Flatliners, JFK, A Few Good Men. Okay, so after Flatliners, I, again, not a total Flatliners, but not a giant success, you know, not in the pretty woman, you know, kind of world. Footlooseose you know and uh i i felt a little like i was spinning my wheels and um i talked to uh to an agent that i had at the time and paul wagner and she said to me i i think you need to get back she was tom's agent too yeah you need to get back uh on track with being a character actor and she was a big theater fan and seeing a lot of stuff that I'd done in New York off Broadway and said, you know, you used to play all these like edgier off beat, you know,

characters with, you know, like accents and different looks and all that kind of stuff. Why can't we do that in the movies? And it, I said, okay, I'm, I'm good with that she said well you know you're not gonna you're not gonna make as much money and you're not gonna be number one on the call sheet and you're not gonna the you know maybe the budgets aren't gonna be as big as they were or whatever but i think it's a cool idea and she said and i got i got one that you should go and uh uh meet on and it's jfkK. And she represented Oliver.

And I guess she spoke to him about me. And he said, yeah, I'll meet him. We sat down. We had a, I don't know, 20-minute meeting. He talked a little bit about the movie. He said, can you be transformational with this role? And I said, yep. And he said, can you be transformational with this role? And I said, yep. And he said, okay.

Yeah, so you can do that part. And when that movie came out, it's one of the rare times in your life. You know how people will sometimes, maybe you've probably heard this as a kind of a cliche. I've actually had somebody say this to me. Listen, let me tell you something. Your life is going to change on Monday. You know, once this opens this week, your life is going to change. Never happens. Uh, but this time it did. It really, it really did. The industry went, saw me in a completely different way. And, uh, the movies that are

down that list, I don't know the order of them, after that were a direct result of JFK. And also JFK shaped a lot of what people thought happened with the JFK assassination, even if it was his interpretation of it. It is crazy how that worked out. But he was one of the hottest directors at that point. He was a very hot director, yeah.

And the JFK thing, it was within 30 years of when it happened. It was 28 years later. That was a really significant movie. And it's also still on cable and all those places a lot, which I think is funny because it's long and it's crazy and goes 90 different directions. It does, yeah.

It's crazy. But, yeah, he went for it in that movie. Yeah. He went out with a few good men. You're with Cruise and Nicholson. Did you learn anything from those guys? Like, especially Nicholson, he's only in four scenes, but he's like legendary for the four scenes.

Yeah. Yeah, my favorite story about Nicholson was the famous, you can't handle the truth scene, right? His last moment on the uh on the stand which is brilliantly played and and when you uh we were on the on the lot and had um a set for that courtroom where we spent most of the a lot of the movie at least yeah a lot of the movie i was in it was you know standing in that courtroom and um we shot in jack's directed direction first of course because he had the lion's share of the work to do in that scene.

And there's a wide shot and there's a medium shot and there's a close up and there's a real tight close up. And he's just fucking nailing that speech like time and time and time again. And now we're going to turn around and start marching back the other way with the camera and eventually end up on Tom's close-up and to me and me and everybody else and Kevin Pollak and who else is reacting to this speech, all the people in the jury and everybody. And, you know, an actor who is at that kind of point in their career, A, some of them might not even stick around once the camera's off them. He's like, I'll see you guys later.

Could be. Yeah. Or they start to give less and less and less. Nicholson just fucking kept doing that speech. So all of us had the chance to react to it. To like. Same kind of intensity. Top Nicholson.

Top Nicholson. Top Nicholson. And I was like, okay, yeah, he's making like six times as much money just for driving through the gate. Yeah. You know, as I will all year. But he fucking deserves it. I mean, he was killing it. there's a generosity of, of, uh, performance that, that is, you know, you need that, that I, I respect a lot when I see that, you know, and I held onto that and I try my best, you know, in my small way, if I'm on a set and there's other younger people there or whatever to do the same thing. That's a great, here's why Nicholson was one of

the best ever stories yeah and also you know the thing was is that when I was becoming an actor he was very very important to me because he was the he was like he had this it's hard for me to really uh put in, but Five Easy Pieces, for instance, one of my favorite movies. And, you know, The Last Detail and, you know, The Shining and and all these movies, you know, he he had this. He was able to deliver a performance and you could tell the really didn't give a shit about being liked or being appealing. He was just going to be true to who that guy was, whether he was an asshole or not. Yeah. And that was kind of an unusual thing, you know, for actors at that time.

That's an interesting point because William Goldman always wrote about how the best actors never wanted to play somebody who was weak or you didn't totally like them or whatever. This is during like the 60s, 70s, that they would always want to gravitate toward the part where they came off the best. And now it's different. Everybody wants to play, you know, the asshole or the antihero and stuff like that. But back then it was not like that. No, it's not like that. Yeah, he did enjoy that. So you work with Nicholson and Cruz.

You worked with Julia Roberts. You worked with Costner and JFK. And then you worked with Meryl Streep. And this is all at a four-year run. I mean, that's like at least four of the most famous actors ever. Then Nicholson and Streep are probably Mount Rushmore candidates but you were with Streep the whole time I liked that movie

did that movie make money? yeah you're the bad guy in that was that your first bad guy? nah nah no but I can't think of

what other bad guys I've played back then. Anything left for Meryl Streep? Oh, yeah. I mean, you know, Meryl is the, you know, at that time when I did that movie, she had the career, which is unusual for me to say because most guys would model their career after a man. But I'd model my career after her as 100% because the idea to me of being an actor was really about trying to walk in different people's shoes. Yeah. Trying to be surprising and different from the last thing that you've done, you know, and, and trying to,

uh, make people, um, lose themselves in that character that you've created as opposed to, uh, having a presence and an, and a, um,

a screen presence and a dynamism or whatever the word is that, that, that you can plug into, um, different parts, but, screen presence and a dynamism or whatever the word is yeah that that you can plug into um different parts but but you're kind of the same guy all the time you know but she was like trans a transformational kind of actor so so to get a chance to um work with her was you know it was a dream i was like oh fuck this is just i can't believe i'm doing this and uh and you know you walk into a room,

we walked in the room the first day of rehearsal, and Strathairn is there, and John C., and Meryl and I, and, you know, and Curtis Hanson was the director. And it's like the roundtable thing. You know, he'd been through it a million times, and she, what I learned from her was that she's hyper aware of what her legend is and that about the about the you know, the the history of her and the kind of how iconic she is. But she does not allow anybody to stay in that mindset very long. It's like, let's get to work this is what we need

to do and most importantly being an actor and being a superstar you know you can see it as a very isolating kind of thing i think i think movie acting can be a very isolating kind of thing but if you start out on the stage and you know i i saw you know i saw her in uh in the cherry orchard during the 1977 blackout down at lincoln center the night the lights went out um if you if you uh start out on the stage then you understand that your job is to play the play and your job is to play the scene and the only way that that's going to work is if the other actors are in the same play and in the same scene with you now whether or not they're going to be as good who knows yeah but you have you have to be looking at them you have to be talking to them they have to be looking at them. You have to be talking to them. They have to be part of this process, whether the part is big or the part is small. That's going to make the movie good, the scene good, and her good.

And hopefully, we'll get a little of that. By the way, I've had Saturday Night Live people on this podcast, and they say it's the same way for that show. Even if you have the part with one line, you've got to be all in on that smaller part because it helps everybody else. I had Pacino did this pod like probably like a year and a half ago. And he told this story about Meryl Streep about he was, you know, buddies with John Cazale because they were on Godfather together. They knew each other. And then he was like, John Cazale was saying, dating this girl, she's going to be the biggest, best actress ever.

And he's like, yeah, right. And it was Meryl Streep. But he was like, she's going to be the best ever to live, ever to do this. Then it actually happened. So you had, then you work with Tom Hanks, who also turns out he was kind of famous too. But Apollo 13, which was a giant movie. And I felt like at that point, I would say like 92, 93, they figured out how to eventize certain movies

that were not the superhero movies stuff. But that was just like, oh, cool. Tom Hanks and Kevin Bacon, these guys are all going to go to the moon. And Ron Howard's directing. It's like great. And the poster, and you could just kind of see how it was going to play out. But that's a movie that I think it's held up to. Yeah. mean i haven't seen it give me one hank story oh wow um one time we were uh me and well it was you know me and bill and Tom, we spent a lot of time in that capsule together.

We even went up in the zero-gravity airplane to shoot in the KC-135. Are you aware of that? So you were all in on every experience you could have that resembled the astronauts. Well, we were, yeah, especially Hanks because he literally was ready to fly like the rocket. I mean he's so into space and was so like deeply researched in this kind of stuff that he was really, really super into it. Bill was into it too. Me, you know, not quite as much. but um one of the ways one of the things that we did in terms of our training was we went up in in this airplane which is basically like a it's a big airplane it's like a 727 or something yeah

it's called the vomit comet uh kc-135 you fly out over the gulf of mexico and the pilot uh pulls a joystick straight back and you go straight up and then you dive and you go straight up and you dive and you go straight up and you go do this roller coaster thing and as you come over the top this is the only way on earth to create zero gravity because gravity just doesn't go away yeah i mean you can work in a tank a water tank a little bit and you can kind of sort of try to duplicate it but people even me i had this idea hey, go into an anti-gravity chamber, right? There's no such thing. So you have 28 seconds or 25 seconds or something of complete zero gravity, because not to get too technical, but the centrifugal force that is whipping you away from the earth's gravity balances with gravity as you go over the top of this thing this parabola

for 25 seconds it's incredibly nauseating but it is magical because you're floating and 25 seconds is a pretty long time when you can fly from one end of the plane to the other like peter pan yeah um and so we went up there to experience it and we went out and we did, I guess, about 40 of these things, 20 out and 20 back. Came back down, you know, kissed the tarmac, called my wife, said, honey, you know, the kids are going to have a father. I'm back and now we can go back to Hollywood and make the movie. And Ron was talking to Spielberg and Spielbergberg said why work with harnesses and you know in these days in this in those days you know trying to create it wasn't like oh we'll just uh you know we'll paint it out like like digital effects are now i mean it's like you know it seemed like one percent fake

yeah maybe even more yeah it was really hard to do and time consuming and so why don't you build the set up there and just go up and shoot scenes in actual zero gravity? And Ron came back to us and said, guys, guys, this is what we're going to do. And I was like, you're fucking kidding me. And we ended up doing it. Hanks is all in. Oh, Hanks is all in. Hanks is great.

100%. No, he's 100%. And so is Bill. Yeah, man, that's great. I can't wait. Rest in peace. Hanks is great. 100%. This sounds great. No, he's 100%. What's with there? So is Bill. Yeah, man, that's great. I can't wait. Rest in peace. I love that dude. He was such a great, enthusiastic person.

And so we went down to Houston and stayed down there, and we did it 600 times. Oh, my God. Yeah. Did you feel like your brain was like – I can't even imagine it was it was crazy but i feel fucked up when i fly and land yeah like weird for five hours no it was really really it was really really crazy on the brain but also because they give you this cop this cocktail of of two drugs uh to take before you go up which is going to combat the nausea.

And I don't know if you've ever taken a Dramamine, but this is like Dramamine times 10. But the thing about Dramamine is it makes you kind of tired. Yeah. So you got to take this other thing, which is basically speed to combat the Dramamine. So we'd have this cocktail every morning. And one would kick in earlier than the other. You never knew which one was going to kick in. And one day,

Hanks and Paxton decided that they were going to go, you know, commando and do it without the drugs. And, Oh no. Oh my God. They were absolutely green. They didn't puke.

We didn't puke. We, we got thrown up on, well on well cameraman threw up on us one time and what was really crazy is that the i don't even think of that you have cameraman too yeah we have cameraman sound guy yeah well i guess the sound guy wasn't i might have yeah i guess we did record some sound i can't remember but the the vomit was floating and then you see it floating there and you're going to go out of zero junior oh, shit. Here it comes. You got to get out of the way of the vomit. So I don't know if that's a Tom Hanks story, but I can tell you that the next time we went up, I think they were back on the drugs.

I think they only tried that one day. Did you have like withdrawal from the two drugs waking up every morning? Yes. Yeah. I had very, very strange dreams. I had out of body floating over my body dreams and uh yeah it was a it was it was bizarre i mean even without the drugs the the uh just the experience of of being there because if you weren't in the scene because sometimes it was just me or

sometimes it was just um you know tom or just tom and Bill or whatever. And we're moving between the, uh, you know, the command module and the, and the lamb and there's this tunnel. And if you weren't in the actual scene or in the actual shot, you had the whole back of the plane to play. So during these, these, it's, it was almost like a giant pad itself. Uh, during these 25 seconds, we would, uh, you know, play football and do flips and and dance around it was great since sleepers is the next year and i feel like this is when the six degrees of kevin bacon started right around there right mid 90s you you've been in with so many stars that i don't know when it started do you even when did you know that that was a thing mid 90s i think yeah i don't

know it was somewhere around there yeah somewhere around there yeah hey there were a lot of stars and sleepers yeah yeah sleepers because de niro's like secretly in sleepers for he's a priest but that movie's good yeah i think that movie held up you you don't somehow that wasn't the worst character you've ever played but it's pretty bad it's pretty bad yeah it was funny because i was reading it i didn't have the script but barry sent me the book you know we'd didn't have the script, but Barry sent me the book. You know, we had worked together in diners. Yeah. So he sent me the book and he said, hey, I want you to play a part in this. And I was reading it and he told me the name of the part.

And I'm going through and there's all these other guys that are kind of like, you know, described as sort of like, you know, handsome and edgy and all these kind of interesting, you know, parts. And they grew up and I'm like, no, it's not him. Not them. Then I get to that guy, you know, the they grew up and did it and i'm like no it's not him nothing then i get to that guy you know the abusive prison guard with yeah with the billy cobb it's working over over time and i was like of course that's the part i gotta play noaks so did you like the six degrees thing or did you get a kick out of it or you're like oh you know i didn't like it at first i i i thought it was a joke at my expense, you know. Really? Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because I thought, you know, I don't know. I think you, you know, you've talked today about, you know, working alongside all of the greats so you know i kind of felt like i was the guy that worked alongside the greats but not one of them so that i thought the idea of the game was like isn't this interesting that just this random dude who worked at this thing that this lightweight could be connected to something like olivier oh that's interesting i didn't feel that way at all from that i was just like this guy's had an awesome career he's's worked with all these people, you know, even in the moment. Well, you know, that's just the actor's thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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For a free online visit, go to getroman.com slash bill. All right, so the last big one, well, I mean, there's a million to talk about, but we don't have to go through everything. But Mr. Griver, that was your first Boston character. Yeah. So how'd you do the accent what was what was the practice because then you had to do it for three more things well yeah it was funny because uh because you're a philly guy we don't we don't really like philly i'm from boston are you from boston yeah we don't really like philly that much no i know um and i hardly ever get anything in philly i did i did a philly accent

actually in sleepers um which was kind of fun because that's an accent that rarely gets done. When people do working class people from Philly, they often make them sound like they're from Brooklyn, you know, which is annoying to me. Well, the Boston one, they always make them sound like JFK, which drives me crazy. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's like, no, that's not how you do it. Yeah. What's the Philly accent?

Can you do it? Yeah, sure. I don't know. I'm going down to Wawa. I'm going to get a hoagie and a Coke. What kind of Coke are you going to get? I don't know. Diet.

Why are you getting diet? Because I'm on a diet. You know, it's like, where are you going this summer? Down the shore. It's the only place in the, it's the only place in the, that I know in the world where you don't go to the beach, you don't go to the seaside, you go down the shore. That was soft.

So with the Boston accent, can you do it on command or do you need like a normal coach? No, I can't really do that on command. Because you're in the Showtime show now and you have to do it the whole time. I do, yeah. And you know,

it's interesting about Boston. I feel that nobody from Boston ever likes anybody doing a Boston accent, including people from Boston. I literally had a talk recently with someone who was from Boston ever likes anybody doing a Boston accent including people from Boston I literally had a talk yeah recently with someone who was

from Boston who was talking about an actor that was born and raised in Boston and now he's got a terrible Boston accent oh that's hilarious yes

and so I mean I that's why I couldn't watch Ray Donovan I was out on two of the accents I'm like I'm out I'm out I let myself off the hook

with it because I feel like I know I know Jackie's voice. Yeah. Jackie's voice is – I hear it. It's not just the way that he – not just the sound, not just the eyes or whatever it lives in my head like the actual placement of the voice how it interacts with the body there's a lot of things that go into

plus you know characters named Jack yeah I know he's really familiar with the 8 Jacks you don't know Jack I know Jack so this shit you never you done I love dick right but you never yeah tv was just following it following was the first one i did oh yeah i like the following i did three years

on the following yeah fox um on fox yeah um and but this was your first anti-hero yeah this is the first um yeah i don't even know if I call him an anti-hero. He's just anti. I mean, there's nothing that, there's never a scene in this show where I'm not doing something, saying something, taking something, snorting something, eating something. It's completely inappropriate. Drinking something inappropriate. What is it, it's 89, 90? It's 92.

92, 92. Yeah. So you're able to get away with even more because Boston in the early 90s was pretty inappropriate in a lot of different ways. In a lot of different ways. This guy's a reflection of that. I'm a reflection of that. And the show is kind of supposed to be telling, will be telling the story of things taking a turn for the better. And Aldous Hodge plays a character named Corsi Ward who is a – He's really good. Yeah, he's awesome. Yeah.

Assistant district attorney who is a very kind of idealistic – not from Boston. He's from Brooklyn. He comes to Boston and has an idealistic goal to try to kind of clean things up. And my character is from another era uh to say the least old school boston old school and you've seen some stuff seen some stuff in the 60s 70s you've been in the combat zone a few times know where the bodies are buried in fact so maybe some of those bodies are my responsibility you know and and i i see in this guy an opportunity to use him and maybe corrupt him. I recognize in him a certain ambition that I might be able to use to my advantage.

You tell your wife, like, sexy in episode one. It's happening. Yeah. It's yet another one. Yeah, she knows. She's directed the show. Yeah, she directed episode seven. I didn't have any sex scenes in episode seven.

I told you before we started taping, your wife was the queen of grunge. She's in singles. Singles and reality bites. I think she's the queen and Winona Ryder's the princess. Singles and reality bites for those two things. But it was like, for anyone my age, that was such like a distinctive movie. Sure, sure. And there were actual, I think, who was maybe Eddie Vedder was in the movie?

Oh, Eddie Vedder's in it. Or Chris Cornell's in the movie. Eddie Vedder and Jeff Amin are in Matt Dillon's band. Oh, they're in his band. And they have like speaking parts and stuff. But like Soundgarden's in it, all these things. it's kind of became that movie really cool yeah it was cool it was such a it was such an era you're and your band is still going yeah we're still going yeah we put the band together in 94 just put a new single out like last week called play and uh

doing a lot of writing right now i'm in a little bit of a writer's bloom and we're about to hit the road on saturday and uh tour this summer and so when you tour where do you go we go all over the country we're starting in uh on the east coast going down south ending up in uh florida kind of down the eastern seaboard and then uh then we're going out uh after that to vegas and then coming down back up the West Coast. Then a few days off, and then we're going Midwest and, you know, like that. What do your kids think of this? Me playing?

Yeah, dad touring. They, well, my son is a musician and has been since he was a little boy and has done more touring than I have. So he, we can certainly relate to it. Because I'm always amused when my dad's doing anything. And now I get the feeling from my kids that when I do anything, they're just amused by it. And not totally in a good way. Well, no, no.

We don't have that kind of thing where they're old enough now that they're not embarrassed by everything that we do. And my daughter's an actress and we have – it's nice. I mean I had – yesterday was my birthday and I had dinner with them, just the four of us, my wife and my two kids and I. That's cool. we're at a very good place in our relationship, all of us, and we're able to discuss things and be supportive of each other in a really

good way. We've never shoved our careers and the things that we do down my kids' throats. They've seen very few of my movies, or Kira's movies. I don't think either one of them has seen Footloose or Singles, for instance, just because we mentioned those two. God, I would be the opposite. I would watch every movie my dad made if my dad was an actor.

I'd be fascinated by just even the hairstyles and what they looked like in the movies. It's like these home movies of your parent. Well, except that they're not because you're not yourself. True. And I think that you put your finger on it and that watching a home movie, I think they would be very – they love to do that. We used to make home movies all the time. Yeah.

They still will go back and watch home movies because they get a big kick out of that based on funny things like hair and my dad's being an asshole or whatever it happens to be but to see to have your father or your mother be pretending to be somebody else is it's a little i guess that would be disorienting it's a little disorienting yeah and they want to they want they don't want to keep they want to keep you in a place in their heart that that is is more um grounded and and and not like oh Oh look, my dad just, you know, killed somebody or kissed another woman or, or, or, you know, whatever mom's, you know, taking a shower. You know what I mean? It's like, you don't, you don't need to do that if you're a kid.

The fact that you've been with your wife for this song is abnormal. Yeah. Actor and actress dating, getting married. It usually doesn't seem like it has a shelf life for that long. I don't think it does, but I also don't know like it has a shelf life for that long i don't think it does but i also don't know if i've ever seen the statistics that it's any worse for actors as is that's a good point come on nobody stays married marriage is a joke it doesn't work i mean people date and then they break up they stay together for what what's the average i don't

know 10 years 12 i'm a i'm a children of divorce, so you're preaching the choir. Favorite movie ever made? Favorite movie I ever made? Yeah. Oh, wow. I don't know. I don't know. You don't have one? Not really. No, I mean, I

I'll be honest with you. I don't I one? Not really. No, I mean, I'll be honest with you. I don't, I've seen them when they came out, but I don't go back. There's only a couple that I've ever gone back and seen again. I saw Tremors again only because I was developing that as a television series. How about most memorable director you ever worked with?

Huh? I guess Clint, you know? That's what pops into my mind because, you know, he was such an icon. I wasn't expecting that answer. complications there were about on sets and in the process and how quiet simplicity and focus on the work can be just as powerful as people running around and screaming and kind of a chaotic And I also really admire, I admired him for his, um, you know, how he handled being the biggest movie star in the world for so long. And then also starting to direct when he was very young and do movie after movie, after movie, after movie. And so many of them are just, you know, masterpieces. And, and, uh, he was, it waspieces. And he was, it was a great experience.

I mean, I think we all loved that experience. And he's a gigantic guy. Yeah, he is. He's like 6'4". No, he's big. Yeah, he's big. Intimidating. And he's Clint Eastwood.

He's intimidating. He killed people in movies. No, he is definitely, everybody stops fucking around when he walks on the set. I can imagine there's no doubt about that dirty hairs here yeah but I mean shit

I mean you know I've had you know whatever Ron Howard and Rob Reiner and Al Stoker I think the thing with Eastwood Yo is here

is just like no nonsense bang it out right he's not a 99 takes for a scene guy oh my god no just like

show up prepared do your shit no he would literally sometimes say okay let's rehearse this scene over here and of 99 takes for a scene oh my god no no show up prepared do your shit he would literally sometimes say okay let's rehearse this scene over here and i i started to see him um you know lean a lot of times with with day players he would do this people that he thought thought would get kind of nervous once the thing was the camera was turned on he would lean over and say to the uh the cameraman just you know just flip flip the

switch and shoot it and then uh the rehearsal would end and he'd say okay that's it and we'd walk away and the actor would be standing there going well what about and he'd say i got it you know and so i saw that quite a few times i mean one of the coolest things that I learned from him was that, um, you know, this, the, the process of, of, of leading up to action is oftentimes a very, very,

uh, tense one. And it gets dialed up and dialed up and dialed up. And people say, rolling camera, quiet, screaming, yelling,

all this fucking, you know, craziness and then action. And someone takes a slate and just fucking slam, bam, you know, slams. And then action, and someone takes a slate and just fucking slams, bam! You know, slams a slate in front of your face. We had none of that. There was no open walkies. There was none of this, like, yelling, rolling.

He would just say, he didn't even say action. He would say, go ahead. And you get to the end, he'd say, that's enough of that. And the assistant cameraman would like barely touch the slate. And, you know, the only reason for, you know, slate marks what the, which take it is, et cetera. And then in theory, the sound guys are lining up, you know, the clap of the sticks with the sound so that the sound is lined up. And yes, that's true. You have to hear the slate but you don't have to hear it at you know 150 db you can if if i'm about to talk like this you don't need a slate that goes like that it's crazy right so he said he learned

this from doing um i'm trying to think what the tv show was that he was on, it was a Western. Oh, it was like Gunsmoke or one of those. It wasn't Gunsmoke. It wasn't Gunsmoke, but it was like- Brawhide maybe, or I can't remember. I can't remember either. And he said, you know, and in general, Westerns, you know, you'd line up, you have like, you know, six guys and a bunch of horses

and they'd take out the slate and they, you know, turn the cameras on and they smack the slate and the horses would all scatter, jump up and everyone's like trying to control them and all. And he said, you know, if this on they smack the slate and the horses would all scatter jump up and everyone's like trying to control them at all and he said you know if this is doing this to horses this has got to be doing it to actors yeah actors have to be feeling the same way and that was a great just just that concept in itself to me became try to live. Try not to make too big a difference between where you are before the camera turns on and where you are after the camera turns on. So there's a little bit more of a flow.

It's hard to explain. No, that made sense. I like nice, quiet sticks. And what have you directed i directed uh a movie for showtime that uh kira acted and produced and uh and uh helen mirren was one of the first um american jobs that she ever had and and she got a golden globe for it which i was very proud of her did you like it like directing oh yeah i loved it yeah and and i directed four episodes of the closer which kira was on yeah um i directed that show was a monster yeah it was how many years was that eight years eight years jesus yeah and i did

another uh we did another film called lover boy uh that she was in and a whole bunch of other people, a little kind of arthouse movie that she produced. And I've done some shorts and, you know, some videos for the band, stuff like that. I feel like you have an intense indie in you. I would, yeah. I've gotten close on a few that I've either developed or been attached to. And they're hard. I love them. And I love them as a consumer. And they're harder and harder to make and harder and harder to find an audience for. But yeah, I would love to do that. But nowadays, Netflix, Amazon, all these places, they're just looking for content. This is great. You've been in my life for a long time.

I think you've had an extraordinary career. Thank you, man. It was a sight to be able to talk to you about it. Good luck with the show. Good luck with the band. Thank you so much. All right. All right, that's it for the BS Podcast. Don't forget about the rewatchables.

Top Gun, Tuesday, Reservoir Dogs, Friday. Can't do much better than that. Thanks to ZipCruiter. Don't forget to go to zipcruiter.com slash BS. We are back later this week on the BS pod. We're going to do some NBA mailbag stuff. And then another Kevin who has never been on this podcast before. Kevin Costner.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. You're going to want to listen to this one. See you then. On the wayside I'm a bruised son I never lost it I don't have to ever forget