The Flop House - FH Mini 124 - Bad Movie Godfathers, with Harry Medved and Harry Pallenberg

Episode Date: March 8, 2025

We welcome one of the godfathers of bad movie culture, Harry Medved, of the seminal books "The Fifty Worst Films of All Time" and "The Golden Turkey Awards," and discuss his PBS show "Locationland" where he and comedian Dana Gould visited the filming sites for Plan 9 From Outer Space! And we also spend a little time talking to Locationland producer Harry Pallenberg about his father's work with John Boorman on Exorcist II: The Heretic (the Golden Turkeys' pick for #2 worst movie of all time) and the oft-referenced Zardoz!Thrive all year with clean, easy meals from Green Chef. Go to greenchef.com/flopfree and use code flopfree to get started with FREE Salads for two months plus 50% off your first box.

Hey listeners, I hope you're not skipping this part of the show because I have an exciting announcement. Max Fun Drive is of course coming up very soon and has, as has become traditional for us during Max Fun Drive, we drop an extra full episode during the drive period, so over the drive period, you know, including the little bonus days on either end that they kind of add as a grace period. During that period, we will be doing three full shows, and the theme is no Spidey's. Yes, movies without Spider-Man. We'll be talking about Venom, The Last Dance.

We'll be talking about Kraven, The Hunter. We'll be talking about Heartbeats, another movie that doesn't have Spider-Man in it. It's hard to find three, but we did it. So I hope that the listeners, that's you, enjoy it and I hope that you remember us come Max Fun Drive time because you're what keeps the show running. Okay, back to the show. Hey, welcome to the Flophouse. I'm Dan McCoy.

I'm Stuart Wellington. I'm Elliot Kalin. That's my name and I'm telling it to you and that's it. Okay, stop talking, Alex, because we've got guests. We've got on the show, we have one of the writers of the Golden Turkey Awards, Harry Medved, and we have Harry Hallenberg, am I saying that right? Who is the other Harry's producer on a new show. That's right, we have two Harry's.

Or not a new show, I guess, but. Some podcasts only give you one Harry. This podcast gives you two Harry's. It's extra Harry podcast today. What the hell? Incredible value for the amount we're charging them. This is it's like it's like they're stealing Harry's from us Now one half of the Harry's has to cut out a little early. So let's get to that stuff. Let's get into it. Yeah He's a TV producer you guys met as I understand it on

What is beloved by all of the California-based podcasters I know, a show called California's Gold. Is that true? That is correct. Yeah, I'll let the other Harry take it. Go for it, Harry. That is correct. We were looking at your show on movie locations, and Harry Medved had sent his book in called

Hollywood Escapes, which is about movie locations. And we decided we picked Leo Creos State Beach, which is also known as Corman Beach, because Roger Corman films many excellent, excellent top movies there. And so we did the interview with Harry and we got Roger Corman to come out. Oh wow. And it was one of the more popular episodes

and our show is rather highly rated on PBS, but it was definitely one of the fan favorites. We got more mail and interest every time it aired. And Harry and I were like, wow, we should do a whole show like this. And so that was like 2009. And it took many years and starts and stops and other projects in between,

but now we have a show called Locationland, which is just that. We travel around to movie locations and get filmmakers and actors and super fans and location scouts to tell us sort of the behind the scenes inside secrets. And when we did that show at Leo Creo State Beach, there were a bunch of other people who wanted to join us, including a director named Randall Kleiser, who did a little movie back in the 70s called Grease with John Travolta and Olivia and John there. So we thought, God, there's so many other stories

we can tell. All these filmmakers, location managers, and actors want to go back and retrace the steps of all the classic films that they shot, whether it was Attack of the Crab Monsters or The Karate Kid. And so we thought we got to get the show going. Oh, those are two different movies.

Yes. They're very similar. One movie. They're in the same exact area. Sounds like a Corman movie. We actually did get Randall Kleiser on one of the location land episodes. And we drove down literally in the LA river that you've seen in countless chase scenes, including this concrete road scene. And, uh, you know, it was amazing him recounting his stories and sitting exactly where Olivia Newton, John sat, uh, watching the race school. And it was pretty special. It's such a, it's such

a fun, it's such a fun show. And it's such a great idea for it because there's, there's something very, there's something very magical about being in the place where a movie was made. And it's like a thin membrane between cinematic reality and our reality that you can kind of like puncture in a very briefly in your imagination. And especially in this area, I'm in Los Angeles also, Dan and Stuart of course are still in New York being pummeled by weather of some kind.

And there's, from what I can tell, there's no movie shot in New York City. None, unfortunately. There's never been a movie shot or made or even set in New York by law. But when you're traveling around Los Angeles, it's just amazing because so much of the movie making apparatus is here.

How many of these locations have multiple lives as places that movies and other stories have been made? It's really, whenever the place that my family likes to go to is Vasquez Rocks. And whenever we're there, I'm like, I saw that rock in this Western. I saw that rock in this Western. That's the rock that Kirk is fighting the Gorn next to.

Like, it's just so, it's really fun to see going to these places and kind of bringing that magic to it. It's really cool. Absolutely. And there's a whole like tourism, it's called set jetting, where people literally travel around the world. I know White Lotus has sort of put that back on the map,

but well before White Lotus, that was a thing. And it's a multi-billion dollar industry where people really follow the locations. So Elliot, you said that about New York, the movie, Them, about the giant killer ants was originally set in New York. Oh, I didn't know that and they because it was supposed to be like King Kong like these giant hands taken over New York and Apparently Warner Brothers couldn't get permission to actually shoot there So somebody said I just saw this other movie shot there in the storm tunnels

Underneath the LA River. Let's just go shoot there. And so they actually wrote a letter to like the mayor of New York city saying, sorry, we're not going to shoot in New York. We're going to shoot in LA. So there we found so many movies about the destruction of Los Angeles. And as you know, there's so much craziness about people saying the Hollywood sign was destroyed. It was in flames and the recent fire. I just met somebody from overseas who said said but I heard all of LA is gone It's just gone, right? I saw it. I saw the Hollywood sign on fire and it's like no this all came from AI and the movies and

Anyway, you live not too far from some of the burn areas, right? And I think they're yeah I'm very close. Unfortunately, it affected quite a number of people that that we know a luckily we're fine We're where we are but it was it was one of these very strange things in that, to get serious for a moment. It was one of these moments where you do start to feel like I've seen this happen in the movies and it feels like I'm in a movie right now, but not in a fun way, in a bad way.

And the thing it felt like to me the most was being in New York during September 11th, which similarly was like, I've seen this in movies, but in the movie, it's not horrifying. Like in the movie, I'm okay with it, but not now. Yeah. But it's like a Roland Emmerich trailer. Yeah, exactly. But it is true, Stuart, you made a good point that New York does have plenty of movies. And on the scale of how many King Kongs per city, LA is behind New York by quite a few King Kongs, at least three, yeah. All right, Elliot, shut up about King Kong because we gotta get all the juice we have from Harry number two before he has to jump off the call.

And so we'll get back to some of the other stuff later, but before you have to go now, Harry Pallenberg, your father was a producer and uncredited writer and maybe other stuff for the runner-up for the worst movie ever in Harry Medved's Golden Turkey Awards book. And we're talking about, of course, Exorcist II The Heretic, which we talked about

for a Flophouse charity stream actually during lockdown. And so one, I wanna know, how do you react when you learned that Harry had named it the second worst movie ever? And two, do you have interesting stories about it? Because I think that we all kind of enjoyed how weird that movie is. It's a strange one.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, he was a writer and I think his title is Creative Associate, which he had a few times and sort of was a catch-all for You know just guy who helped John out a lot because they were lifelong friends and John Borman the director. Yeah. Yeah Sorry, I assumed all these guys know that much better For the audience it's for the audience they know it's Johnny B who directed it was It was weird. It was interesting. I do have a couple of very vivid memories.

The first memory is that we got I got a bunch of candied locusts because there were tons of locusts in that movie. And you know some of the many of the dead ones were candied. So that was the first time I ever ate a candied locust. Thumbs up? Yeah, how did it taste? And I did for Linda Blair in the scene where she's teetering on the edge of the skyscraper. I was allowed on set for about five minutes of that time, but as a, you know, I think I was like 10 years old that time, maybe nine. I was a little too energetic and enthusiastic, and my mother was a little panicked by the

idea of me running around But you know it really was like a far drop-off I mean there was a a ledge below but it was like a 40 foot ledge So you wouldn't go all the way to the street, but you still get hurt really kill yourself. Yes Yeah, and in the very last scene of the movie There's a ambulance that rolls up and I am in the back of that ambulance oh wow so that was very fun for me for fun though you weren't like yes and I did get to try the the synchrotron machine that you know oh yeah wow and do

and sadly on the night it premiered I do remember you know after the premiere going to Musso and Frank's Hollywood that's sort of legendary and also in tons of movies and It was not the normal kind of dinner party that I sat through where the everyone was enthusiastic and you know drinking the red wine I'm really happy. It was very murmured and enthusiastic and you know drinking the red wine and really happy. It was very murmured and depressed. Like I could clearly tell something was wrong and things were not going well. Wait how old were you? I mean like nine or ten? Yeah. Oh wow. It's like that scene in Ed Wood where they're reading the reviews and the

newspaper. Yes. I mean they were you know it did get sort of laughed off the screen and as far as when I found out that Harry said that, I don't think I was insulted or offended at all. I think everybody felt, you know, if not in agreement as to the second worst ever, like they knew it wasn't good. And I know they recut it, like I think it got pulled from the theaters that first weekend and got recut and re-put out. And I think there's three different endings you can find on different videotape versions. Like glue. Yeah. I mean, yeah.

I admire that movie for trying to do something very different though, because so many sequels are, let's just rehash sort of exactly what was popular about the first one. And that really blazes its own trail. And it might be a weird trail, but I like watching it. You do have to admire that they didn't just go like, now another girl has been, or this time a boy

has been taken over by the demon. There's two Max von Seidapps. I did read some Facebook posts about people were talking about it recently for some reason, and I saw there was a huge chain. I read them to my father and people talking about how awful it was and how it actually sort of is okay. And he got a kick out of it. He thought it was funny and he enjoyed it. Well, that's cool because the movie that actually beat Exorcist 2 is a film

that is directed by Edward DeWitt Jr. called Plan 9 from Outer Space. And that's why Harry, the other Harry came to me, Harry Medved and said, if we're doing this show Locationland, why don't we retrace the steps of Plan 9 from Outer Space? And I said, that's an awful idea. Why would you want to do that?

The whole film is studio bound. The best thing about Ed Wood's movies are the dialogue, the acting, not the locations. Who cares about the locations of Plan 9 from outer space? But he convinced- This is a question I wanted to ask, actually, because it's either a graveyard or it's an actor's house or it's in front of some cardboard in a small studio.

So were you worried about that? But even finding the actor's house, when we got there, the guy who lived there, we were waving at his house going, hey, with Dana Gould was our guest because he does a live show where they do a table reading of the screenplay actually and the guy who lives there came out and he's like oh you guys can come and he's like he gets mail to like the Plan 9 house at that address so even that guested you know the the actor's house which was Tor Johnson's house. You know, for me. And so it's interesting to people.

And no one had ever gone to the back and we got to see the back when the steps for Bela Lugosi is sneaking into the house. So like we got to really match that shot and that felt pretty cool. And also it's- The rose bush shot. Who knows if it's the same rose bush?

I don't know if roses lives for 70 years. Let's say it does. Don't ruin my illusions. I want to say it's the same rose bush shot. Who knows if it's the same rosebush. I don't know if roses lives for 70 years Let's say it does don't ruin my illusions. I want to say it's the same course they do 100 but the Studio also was interesting because you know like the shot of torr johnson struggling up to get out of the you know out of the ground like There's a hole in the ground in the studio and no one had been in the studio before for Location purposes. I mean it's now a recording studio, so people go in there all the time, but no one went in there with our lens, as it were.

And we got to look at that hole and try and decide, was that really the hole that Tor Johnson tried to crawl out of or not? And you have to watch the episode to see, but. Yeah, and while, I mean, I don't know exactly how long you have, but I want to try and get these questions in while you're here.

I was wondering, you know, like, if it's a great, accepted great canonical movie, there's a lot of sort of, you know, research about it with something like Plan 9, which is, you know, one of the most canonical bad movies, but I assume there's sort of less information out there. Was it harder to find the locations because of that? I think it was easy to find because because it is sort of you know the canon of the worst movie ever

You know has been hung on that from film. Yeah, and people have done videos about it. They've looked at it They look for it and Harry had written about it obviously extensively So to me it was easy. And also, you know, I just relied on Harry to do all the legwork. Well, for me, thank you. It was hard for me because a lot of times, like just the police station in the movie where Inspector Clay played by the 400-pound Swedish wrestler Tor Johnson. He really, but he really inhabits the part of an LA police officer.

With that accent, yeah. Expect your Daniel Clay and the police officer called you. He's got that thick Swedish accent. But yeah, we found the police station just by going back to like old newspapers, newspapers.com, and trying to find out where was the police station in 1957 or 1958, whenever they shot it, I guess in the mid 50s. And now it's a veteran of foreign wars building. So it was, it was just really fun to kind of go around and do this movie archeology. Cause I don't believe anything I hear anymore. And I don't believe anything I find on the

internet, you know, we have to find the original sources from the newspapers saying they shot this film here. We got to talk to people who actually worked in the film. And then you actually have to watch the movie to see if it actually shows up in the film. So there was a lot of work. Yeah. I mean, can I just say, I'm going to pivot off of that about watching the actual movie. We did a show on the Hollywood Sign, one of the episodes, and if you Google like first movie that destroyed the Hollywood Sign, like everyone says earthquake and like, that's just not true.

And it's pretty easy to watch. It's really easy to prove that wrong. Google says that. It doesn't appear in the movie. There's only an article, newspaper about that. There's tons of data. And if you just spend two and a half hours, you know it's not true.

Yeah, we talked to the director, Joe Dante, of course, who did Gremlins and so many other great movies. His very first film in 1978, I believe I believe it was called Hollywood Boulevard yeah and he was the first one to actually before 78 but anyway he was the first one to destroy the Hollywood sign and it was the first time Hollywood Boulevard that's he believes he was the first one and we believe it that's a research until we're me until we're proven wrong, but yeah. Can you prove it didn't happen?

I don't know. Yeah. Before we were recording, you teased some Zardoz props that maybe you have. I just wanted to ask about. Harry, do you have Sean Connery's diaper? I do not have, I don't have any props, but when we were, we lived in Ireland when they were filming

Excalibur that my father worked with John Borman on also. And in the barn, Charlie Borman and I are, you know, the same age basically, Charlie and Daisy. And we used to ride around the Moors in, you know, bare chested, bare back on a horse with the bullet bands across and the paper mache mask that was sort of rotting apart. Charlie usually got that. I didn't get to use that too often. But we did have the bullet bands across our chest. And so that was sort of a fun thing. That's cool.

That's amazing to be able to do kid Zardoz dress up with the actual costume. That's amazing. Exactly. Kids Zardoz. Everyone had horses so it was very, you know. Just kids riding on horses saying, the penis is bad, the gun is good. Exactly. Yeah.

Did you get to meet Charlotte Rampling? But no, I don't think I did. But I do have some deliver I have some Deliverance. Oh cool. I have an arrow from Deliverance and some stationery and some stuff from that. And I was actually in the end of that movie too. I was in the police car with Charlie Borman. There's a cop car at the very end. We're like hunched down in the bottom of that. So that's really cool. And at the end, did your dad was like, come watch this movie with me when it was finished, or did he feel like you were not ready for it?

Yeah, I was not ready for that one because I was like five at that stage. I mean, I was much younger. I did not watch that until I was in high school without my parents. He's in the movie. He should be able to watch it. Strong logic. Yeah. He should be able to watch it. Strong logic, yeah. Something about the location land nine episode, I just wanna say I was struck by the moment,

you're at Tor Johnson's house, you're looking at an exterior light on the house, and you're like, oh my God, the lamp from the movie. And that really struck me for two reasons, one being the idea of like, yeah, it's just a house, people still live there. If there's no reason to replace that lamp, that lamp's still gonna be there.

Sort of like a preservation by indifference. But two, just the fact that even if it's a silly movie, it's genuinely exciting to see that lamp. It's amazing because it's in a movie, even if the movie's plan nine. And it's not really a question, but do you have thoughts about that? It feels like sort of the magic of the show

in general, occasionally. Yeah, I will say that I have lived with Plan Nine from outer space since 1978. And I think my brother Michael Medved and I kind of helped popularize it in the Golden Turkey Awards. So to actually kind of go back, the lines of dialogue in the movie are like old friends.

And so just the scenes in the movie are like old friends, but I've never met them. You know what I mean? I've never actually, and unfortunately there's not one person associated with the movie who's still alive. All the actors are dead. So to act- The first is Plan 9, yeah. Is it?

Well, yeah, it's 1958. So, but to actually be able to go there and touch it, it's like, you know, touching the Western wall in Jerusalem or something, to actually go to the house, you know, it's a very spiritual place for me, the plan nine house. So to be able to actually go there and have that sense of discovery.

And I always wondered, you know, Ed Wood was actually so much more clever than people gave him credit for being. He shot to some footage of Bella Lugosi kind of horsing around outside of Tor Johnson's house a few days before Bella Lugosi died. But he had two different scenes, actually three of them, one in a graveyard, one in front of Tor Johnson's house where he's an old man grieving apparently for his dead wife. But then another where he's a vampire, like come back to life and he's skulking around

and he's ready to invade someone's house and terrorize Mona McKinnon. I never knew where that scene was shot. So to actually discover that it's behind the house, that was super exciting for me. And that's, I think what we're trying to do with this show is to capture us as we're discovering these forgotten movie landmarks. Because there's so many of them around LA that are right underneath your nose and you wouldn't know about them. Thank you. Thank you so much.

Thank you guys. Yeah, I appreciate it. Thank you, Harry. Bye. Thank you. Bye, Harry. Bye, Harry. In two weeks. Two weeks. Put on your gecko shorts and grab your pods. We're celebrating Max Fun Drive 90's style.

Support the shows you love. And get some rad retro themed gifts. Meetup Day, bonus content and more. So don't miss it. On the World Wide Web, March 17. Somewhere in an alternate universe where Hollywood is smarter. And the Emmy nominees for Outstanding Comedy Series are Jet Pakula, Airport Marriott, Frepple, Dear America We've Seen You N. And, Allah in the family. In our stupid universe, you can't see any of these shows, but you can listen to them

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So I want to go back and sort of reset. We did a lot of talking about Plan 9 from Outer Space, and eventually, sort of I'll ask you to talk about that specific movie for people who don't know it, but I wanna start it out really by saying, the Golden Turkey Awards, the book you wrote with your brother, really was a cornerstone of me loving bad movies.

That and Mystery Science Theater in 88, but your book was even earlier, it was 1980, and my older brother had a copy that I read until the binding fell apart. So first off, thank you for being responsible for our podcast careers. But- Not in any financially lucrative way.

Not in any financial way that can be. Emotional way, yeah. What do you think? But that's where I come from with bad movies. That's what got me interested. Where did your interests come from? Well, thank you, Dan, for that. And it is like, you guys were the very first show out there,

the very first podcast on bad movies. I think so, right? I think that's true. I think that's true. I've been billing us as America's first bad movie podcast, probably. Yeah. Certainly the first one that got any sort of attention. But just to piggyback on what Dan said just for a second, similarly, I remember so clearly

the first time I ever read the Golden Turkey Awards and like finding it in, I think, the house of my parents' friends and just the eye-opening of quality of reading it and being like, oh, there's fun to be had with like bad movies. Like they're not just things to dismiss. There's something to be really done with them in a fun way. And so I'm as curious as Dan, because it's not like you didn't come into it through that book, because you wrote that book.

So it's not like the book didn't exist. So how'd you get there? Thank you, Elliot. Well, so two things. One, thank you guys so much. I was 15 years old when I started working on the book called The 50 Worst Films of All Time, which predated the Golden Turkey Awards by two years. And it was my brother, Michael Medved's idea.

Michael had seen, I love this book called The Great Films. It was a list of 50 classic films by a New York Times film critic named Bosley Crowther. And I kept checking it off. I wanted to go out and see every one of them. Now this is back in the days, the 70s really shows how old I am, but you couldn't see these movies in theaters. They didn't come back.

It's just rarely. You had to watch them on TV in the middle of the night on what they called the late, late, late show. And my brother kept thinking, my God, why doesn't anyone do a book on the worst films of all time? And also there was somebody who predated us and that was the Harvard Lampoon. The of course, the student humor magazine at Harvard. They had their movie worst awards for many, many

years. Now, if you go back and look at some of them, it's shocking. I just looked at from the seventies, here's some of their worst films of the year, Day of the Locust, Barry Lyndon, Tommy, Shampoo, Coming Home, The Goodbye Girl, Oh God, and The Turning Point. Oh, and Flashdance, and Return of the Jedi. So it just shows that- I can see how a bunch of young Harvard guys would be like, eh, these movies don't have anything to say to me.

They stink, yeah. And so we were kind of like that. Very lending. What a stinker. Right. Ryan O'Neill, one of the worst actors. Oh, by the way, they also gave the wrong way Corrigan Award to a young director named Steven Spielberg for turning King Kong into a fish story and tried to pass it off as great cinematic art with jaws. So Steven Spielberg got like a movie worst award for driving.

That's a very odd reading of that movie. I don't know. Does this have any relation to the what? The raspberry, the Razzies? Yeah, so that's the point is that, so I'm making a longer story longer and I'm sorry about that. No, it's okay. No, we're also making it longer.

We're good at interrupting and- Yeah. You are. So I was working as a ticket taker in high school as an usher at the Village Theater in Westwood. My manager was a guy named JB, JB Wilson, John B. Wilson. And he noticed how much I loved bad movies. And he knew I was working on a book called the 50 worst films of all time. We decided to follow it up with a book called

the Golden Turkey Awards, which was our satire on the Academy Awards on the Oscar. And he said, are you guys gonna do this every year? And I said, no, man, I'm just, we're doing this as a lark, it's fun. I'm still in high school. And he said, well, I wanna do something called like a Golden Raspberry Awards.

Would you be cool with that? I said, dude, go for it, I love it. So he started the Razzies in about 1980, right after the golden turkey awards was published. And he made us honorary founding members of the Golden Raspberry Foundation. So the Razzies followed the golden turkey awards. So it always makes me laugh when people say, is this kinda like the golden raspberry awards? The golden raspberries are a little bit like the golden turkey words. But anyway, so there was precedence, there were people writing about bad movies before

we did. But in our book, the 50 Worst Films of All Time, we also put in a lot of sacred cows, kind of like what the Harvard Lampoon did. We put in movies like last year at Marion Badd and Ivan the Terrible. We even picked a movie that was playing at my local theater where I was working at the time called The Omen. And that's a film that is actually a very good movie. And it's something I've had to live down for years

that I picked it as one of the worst ever. Well, you were teens, which you've mentioned a couple of times. And I want to say, how dare you? Because I haven't read the book yet. Yeah. There you go. How old were you when you saw the book?

Man, you must have been a kid. Oh, yeah. I mean, yeah, I think I was digging into it There you go. How old were you when you saw the book, Dan? You must have been a kid. Oh, yeah. I mean, yeah, I think I was digging into it when I was like seven or something, like far too young. I'm sorry, man. I'm sorry for ruining your job. Oh, no.

No, it's always here. It warped my brain in probably a good way. I mean, you'd be a serial killer now if you didn't have bad movies. Yeah. Yeah. What's that? I said Dan would be a serial killer now if he didn't have bad

movies to- God, perfect. In his life. So you really saved a lot of people, Harry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There you go. Another person we saved is Joel

Hodgson, who then later told us, and you worked with him. Wow. Yeah. On Mystery Science Theater 3000, he said that he poured through our books that there were definitely the catalyst for Mystery Science Theater 3000. So we did kind of help start this bad movies,

the movies that are so bad that they're good, but I'd love to get an opinion from you guys. What is the, what really makes a bad movie? And for you, what is a good bad movie? I know Stuart, you've talked about that sometimes. What is, what is a entertainingingly bad movie versus like a depressingly bad movie like here, which I haven't seen, but I feel like I've seen it because I've listened to your podcast on it. I'll put some of these back. You saved me actually a lot of time and money by listening to the show.

We're very happy that we could have done that. If we can warn one person away from here, then we've done our job. Yeah, I feel like, I mean, like a bad movie, I mean, the hardest thing, the thing, doing the show as long as I have, the thing that I keep running into are the, there's like the different tiers of bad movies,

whether it's just like a wrongheaded, overly cooked studio thing, where there's just like so many cooks involved, it's been re-edited and like mushed together, and it's just this this soulless mess. And those, I think, are probably the worst. The ones that are the best are the ones that are passion projects from a visionary director

who, as a clear vision, it's just probably not the right vision. But you get to see that ego on screen. You get to see the like ego like on screen like you get to see the the directors Entire personal self revealed on screen and those are the good ones Yeah, and those are the ones we like to concentrate on I don't I don't you guys somehow make it entertaining when you're talking about those Depressively bad movies. I love you. Yeah, I don't know how you do it It's not anyone you're watching it, but it's entertaining to listen about you guys dissecting it.

I don't know how that works. There's something about a movie where, and I think this goes along with what Stuart's saying, where someone's ambition so far exceeds either their ability or their resources or... Or their grasp. Yeah, and I think that's one of the magical things about Ed Wood's movies in particular, is he is trying so hard and he's reaching so far and but his arms are so short that he's falling so far short of what he's trying to do.

And that's there's something kind of like, you know, the movie Ed Wood captures that it's so nicely in a positive way. There's something kind of beautiful about someone trying so hard for something that everyone else can really see like you you can't achieve this. And he's refusing to not achieve it. And what you end up with is something where it almost feels like he is recreating the rules of what a movie is and how it operates. There's certain filmmakers who are so off the target that you're like, I don't know if they're inventing

a new film grammar that is gonna look, that's gonna look beautiful in the future or what? Like it's like you hear something, a song in another language and you're like, this is affecting me and I don't understand what it's saying. Like, this is, you know. Yeah.

I love it. It's interesting that you say that, Ellie, because well, I actually had a question for you, Harry, that was sort of along these lines. And when I was talking about what we call on the show, good, bad movies, I think that there's like a feeling that they're exuberantly inept in some way. Like the stuff, like Stuart said,

that is soul killing is the stuff that is aiming for mediocrity and either succeeding or failing, but the stuff that comes from the heart and fails is sort of beautiful still. Yeah, and like it could just be a movie that has, like a character has one really weird line reading and you're like, that's amazing.

I don't know, it doesn't achieve what it's trying to achieve but it makes me happy for some reason. I have a theory and I'd love to get you guys, please give me your opinion on this, which is I really think that Ed Wood had a sense of humor about his scripts. I think that many of the line readings just killed the jokes. And that's what makes them funnier is like the actors didn't get the joke.

Like if you think about when Duke Moore, who plays the detective detective in plan nine says one things for sure. Inspector plays dead, murdered and somebody is responsible. He didn't get it. He was supposed to be a joke. He delivered it like it was a Sherlock Holmes deduction. But I'm sure Ed Wood wrote it as like he's dead, murdered, and somebody's responsible. It was supposed to be a joke. I think Ed, the director, the reason why we call them the worst director of all time in our book, The Golden Turkey Awards, is because he subverted Ed Wood, the screenwriter, who actually had some really clever lines. And he was so quick and on such a low budget that he didn't do retakes. So when he had these horrible actors,

he just kind of went with the take. And I would, there's something that, you know, the, the, I haven't read, I'm curious, because I'd love to get a look inside of what's had. I read his book years ago, Hollywood Rat Race, where he was a very bitter guy by that point. But you feel like when you watch his movies that there's probably a part of him as a director that just is really excited to be doing it and can't bear to tell somebody you're doing it wrong. This is how you're supposed to say it.

I think there's probably the feeling, they had to move so fast, but also the feeling of like, I'm so glad this person is doing this for me. I can't break them down. I'm just gonna let them go with it. That's fine. 100% agree with you. I think he was just a super nice guy.

And unfortunately, I think a lot of people over the years have criticized the Medved Brothers, my brother Michael and myself, for being condescending, a little bit patronizing towards Edward's work. As I go back and I reread our work from 40 years ago or whatever, I kind of get a little bit of that, but we've always loved his movies. And from everybody that we interviewed, and we were the very first ones to tell the story of Ed Wood, he was just the nicest guy in the whole world. Everybody just said he would give you the shirt off his back.

And I think it's kind of tragic in my opinion that we didn't discover him until right after he died. I remember going down to rent some of these movies because we'd be up late at night and I'd be falling asleep in my high school class and my teacher would nudge me and say, what are you doing asleep, Medved? And I said, I'm really sorry, I was up till four o'clock in the morning

watching Santa Claus Conquerors of Martians for a book that I'm working on. They didn't get it back then. They understood the idea of movies that are so bad that they're good But we went to the 16 millimeter rental place and that's where Ed Wood used to go To rent his Westerns that he would watch at home. Apparently I don't know how he had the money to do it back then because he was running out of money

He was kind of getting a lot of liquor He strikes me as the guy who would sue would not pay for food, but would pay to rent film. Yeah Yeah, yeah, yeah. He could rent his house, yeah. Yeah, there you go. But anyway, so I remember somebody told me, you'll find him down there and talk to the guys at Budget Films. And when I showed up, somebody told me, yeah, you just missed him.

And I went, oh, well, is he in the neighborhood? When is he coming back? I said, no, he just passed away. And I was so sad about this because I think he would have enjoyed all this attention. I mean, I don't know if you guys ever talked to Neil Breen or any of the people that you roast on your show, but I'm assuming these guys love it.

I mean, Tommy Wiseau loves it, right? Tommy Wiseau definitely does. I think Neil Breen, I think, is such an artist in his soul that he, I think, probably doesn't like it that much, but Tommy Wiseau certainly, and I think Ed Wood's more that way. I think- Neil Breen is really specific about

how his films are shown. Yeah. Like, he won't allow them to be shown as part of like a midnight screening or anything that might indicate that they're like, really specific about how his films are shown. Yeah. Like he won't allow them to be shown as part of like a midnight screening or anything that might indicate that they're like not a hundred percent serious. Yeah, but I bet you that, I bet you it's,

it's tragic, but that's what happened because I bet you Ed Wood would have said, would have thought as Tommy Oso would, attention. Like any attention to my work is good attention. And I will play along with you because I, whatever's getting my workout. And there's something really, and it shows the power of it that like,

I grew up when the film rental places had been replaced by video stores, but that every video store in the four town radius that I would go to video stores in had Plan 9 from outer space in stock at that store, which is phenomenal. I grew up in New Jersey, that this movie from 1958 that is ridiculous and made for nothing,

was decades later was across the country available, readily available to anyone who wanted to see it. It's kind of a dream for a filmmaker, I would think. Well, I mean, our conversation has kind of anticipated the question already, and I think I know the answer, but there's been pretenders to the throne since plan nine was anointed by you guys. I guess that was a reader's poll from the previous book,

I guess that got plan nine to the top, but like your troll two or the room, but do you feel like, but you really like pushed plan 9 into America's consciousness, which, you know, created this cult around Ed Wood. There's a, I could, you could draw a straight line from your book to the fact that there is a Tim Burton movie about Ed Wood.

Do you feel some sort of weird pride that you rehabilitated this man? You gave him kind of a happy ending? Dan, weird pride is exactly right. Right. I look, I feel like, you know, as Bela Lugosi said in Ed Woods, Glen & Glenda, the story must be told.

And I'm no happy that it's been told by so many other people. And so beautifully, Larry Karazuski and Scott Alexander. Apparently, I think this is what Scott told me. There's the screenwriters of Tim Burton's Ed Wood. They sent us letters in our worst film spool, and they had told us they're working on a script at USC for a project called The Man in the Angora Sweater,

that eventually became the Ed Wood movie. So, they were super nice. They invited us to the set. Gregory Walcott, the star of plan nine, has a cameo in the Ed Wood movie and he called me in advance and said, should I do this thing? Is this going to, anyone going to see this darn thing? It's a gun be embarrassing for me. And I said, no, we've got to do it for the residual. So, I mean, people have recognized that we had a hand in it. I've been appreciative. A guy named Rudolph Gray wrote the book Nightmare in Ecstasy that was the first serious work

devoted to a biography of Ed Wood. And I gave him at least like a dozen interviews of, with all the folks that we had interviewed, W. Manla, Mona McKinnon, et cetera. And so I'm just so happy that all of this research that we did has been used to help get the story of Edward out there and Plan 9. And as I said, if people want to see more about how Plan 9 was shot, I mean, the work is ongoing. And so for me, this is exciting. 40 years later, man, am I old, but I'm doing more. You started very young.

Yeah, well, I. In your defense. Yeah, whatever. But the fact that I get to go and find out more about Glen or Glenda and where it was shot that this studio, which is right at Santa Monica Boulevard in Western in Los Angeles, just down the street from the Hollywood River Cemetery where Vampira is buried. This is where Ed Wood shot scenes from Glen or Glenda and Plan 9 from outer space. Next door is a hotel called the Harvey Hotel. And that's where Captain Zeta, who plays the devil and Glenn's father in Glen or Glenda, that's where he lived. He was a booker for strippers. And in that same hotel, apparently that's where Tor Johnson used to say when he was in trouble

with quote, the little lady at home. He would say, because it's like there were strippers in the hotel, what can I do? And this is all right there. And then Glenn's apartment in Glen or Glenda is right outside of Quality Studios. And then across the street, that's where Glenn is window shopping when he's looking at the ladies lingerie

and admiring the lingerie for too long. And it was all right there. Ed Wood did not waste time. He was like Clint Eastwood. He was running and gunning all day long. And I feel like visiting these places so close to each other, kind of like, I don't know, there's something magical about that kind of attitude

of like, okay, so we'll shoot this, we'll shoot this over here, we'll do this over here. Like, it's the sort of thing that you expect to see from like high school kids, or like college kids. But to imagine like a grown man like having that same level of enthusiasm and like can do despite the fact that like we've addressed. He did not have the resources to match his aims.

And to that point, I wanna highlight something from the Location Land episode, where Dana Gould has one of the Flying Saucer models, and he points out, like, oh, there's a scene where they approach the Flying Saucer, and there's a wall, a square wall, and you're like, well, Flying Saucers don't have, like, right angles on it,

but on his model, you can see that they glued a little square to the end of the model to make it logical. But it shows you that Edward was thinking or somebody on his day was thinking who said, wait a minute, there's a square here, but it's also gonna put a square on it. So that's huge. But no, I would love to see a plaque

that says Edward Alley or something, because it's really like a block on Santa Monica Boulevard, just west of Western. That really where he shot so much of his work in Bellevue, LaGos, he lived just down the street in his last days, just at Sunset and Western. So that whole area is very historic for Ed Wood fans. And for me, it was just a joy to discover it because I had never been there. That's awesome. I'd never been there before. And it's because it's closed to the public and most people have never been

there. So the fact that they opened it up to us was a testament to Harry Pallenberg and the shows that he created before that. That's so cool. And it's such a, just kind of referring to it, it's who it was talking about, about that attitude of like, we'll shoot over there and then we'll shoot that thing there. It shows that Ed Wood, for all the people talk about him as a bad director, understood a basic thing about filmmaking, which is that all you're gonna see

is what's on the screen. So anything outside of that frame doesn't matter. And you can use that, whatever's in the frame, you can make into anything. And it doesn't matter what, like, oh, that can't be the door of a police station. That's a house. Doesn't matter, doesn't matter.

You're just gonna see the door. You police station. That's a house. Doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. You're just going to see the door, you know, that it's such a, it's such a kind of real understanding of, of film grammar, but then put to it, yeah. Put to this, to put this bizarre use, you know. Yeah. It's like that 11 point turn that they make us out of the police station. It's like, well, they were in a rush, you know, trouble getting the door open, you know, just use it. Why not? It's just so great. That's great. So for me, it's a real joy to visit these locations

and it's a real joy to talk to you guys and see how far the craze for bad movies has gone and how many episodes have you guys done? Is it like 400 now or something? There's something in the 400s of mainline episodes but then we have all these movie minutes in the early years and minis later on. It's probably something more like 600 at this point.

Of various lengths, yeah. 17 and a half years, 17 and a half years. What are you gonna do when you're 18? What are you doing to celebrate when you're 18 years old? Oh man, probably start smoking. I mean. I actually have a question. So I feel we've actually have a question.

So I feel we've talked quite a bit about visiting film locations and film sets. And obviously you've seen you've had some emotional moments. Has there been one where you were not expecting like, you're like, oh, this won't be a big deal. But then you you were there and all of a sudden you it hit you like was there a moment that you had like an epiphany or an aha moment where you're like, oh my God, I can't believe I'm here. Yeah. When we went down to the LA river with the director of Greece, Randall Kleiser, and we saw the, the six street tunnel. So I thought, well, what's the big deal? There's a new bridge

over the Los Angeles river, which is all concretized called the six street bridge or viaduct. There's a little tunnel under that. and the tunnel is historic. The old bridge had to come down because it would have fallen in an earthquake. So they revitalized the bridge, they kept the old tunnel and I thought, well, it's just a tunnel. What's the big deal? But that is the tunnel where the giant ants from them come out. It's a tunnel that you see in Cleopatra Jones.

We found the first film noir shot there called Roadblock in the early 1950s. And the more we kept watching films, you can see it in the back in Greece. I mean, it's there in so many movies to actually walk into the tunnel and know that LA is gonna create like a little city park right nearby it.

That was pretty mythical. Because it's just one of those things where it's right underneath your nose and you would never think to walk into this tunnel of a storm drain and think that it's a major filming location. But location managers- And that is the one thing, and by the way, just to get serious for one second,

location managers are the unsung heroes of the film industry. Yeah. A lot of these guys in Altadena, Elliott right near you and also over in the Palisades are trying to help the fire victims of Los Angeles reclaim some of their losses with FEMA and with insurance claims because they took photos of their homes when they were shooting in their homes. So they've got these scouting photos. So if people are trying to say, yeah, I have these very valuable hats over here or whatever,

they've got the photos of it. And so if anyone listening to this podcast is in Los Angeles and has been affected by the fires or no fire victims, please check out scout photos.org. We did a whole location land episode on that too. Wow. Yeah. And we're also planning to do something on the history of Alta Dina and the movies and the history of the palisades and movies. Well, on that- It's gonna be good to have that remembered and to have it commemorated. And it's just like you're saying,

location scouts, location managers are such a backbone and they don't get the credit they deserve for making these things. These like amazing memories that we all share from the movies making them possible. And they're helping their neighbors in the community. I mean, they always have, but that's what they're like the

liaison between the film industry and the neighborhood. So, we're hoping LA is going to rebuild soon and filming will come back to Los Angeles. I've seen it already. I know that there's a film just shot on Venice Beach recently.

And so we're going to be following their footsteps as they come back to Los Angeles and film some more. On that very sweet note, we should start winding down. I want to say that when I told my brothers that this was happening, my brother Robert said, well, what are you going to do now that you've peaked? And I'm like, I don't know.

Because it really is quite mind blowing to know that just as you had inspired us back in the day that now that you have listened to our show. And the circle. Oh, I love it. Are you kidding? The circle, wow. You've introduced me to so many movies that I would have never seen,

or that I don't wanna see because I listen to your show. Yeah, no, you're right, Hanson. Oh, your useful service. Exactly, exactly. Thank you. We'll, of course, put a link to the Plan 9 episode specifically in this episode, but you should watch Locationland in general. I don't know if there's anything else you want to plug before we sign off.

No, I just keep passing the torch for more bad movie fans because I don't know, when I was a kid, people thought it was just so weird that I was into bad movies. Why would you want to spend good money on a bad movie? Like there was a film critic, not Roger Ebert, but when we asked a bunch of film critics for their list, a guy named Charles Champlin, not Champlin, but Champlin at the LA Times. He wrote to us and said, you have to understand that I don't see the worst films except by accident. Life is too short and I can take suffering or leave it alone. And I just, that's the way that people used to look at bad movies.

That was like a trap. People say like, why are you laughing? This is horrible. And it's like, but we're laughing cause it's like somebody's flipping on a banana peel. It's like, it's funny. I'm sorry, I can't help myself, but it's like the fact that 40 years later

you guys are still doing this show and 600 episodes, as you said? Around that, probably in total. I mean, one of these days, people figure it out and they won't be able to make bad movies anymore. Yeah, once they've cracked the code, we're almost there, yeah. I hope not, then we're all out of business.

I mean, there are days that I think that we provide a dubious service But I like your attitude that like you know what we're we're finding joy where we find joy. That's absolutely Hard to do but you guys do it really well. Thank you. Thank you so much for real for us. We really appreciate it. Thank you Before we go Thanks for our network maximum fun goumFun.org for other great shows. Thanks to our producer Alex Smith for making us sound good. You can find him online as HowellDotty. But for this episode, I've been Dan McCoy.

I've been Stuart Wellington. I've been Elliott Kalin. And we've been joined by... Harry Medved. And thrilled to be on the Flophouse. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you guys.

Bye. Bye. Maximum fun. A worker-owned network. Of artist-owned shows. Supported. Directly. By you.

Maximum fun. A worker-owned network. Of artist-owned shows. Supported. Directly. By you.