The New Yorker Radio Hour - Paul Scheer Picks the Very Best of the Very Worst Movies

Episode Date: June 18, 2024

Paul Scheer is a noted actor and comedian, and the author of the new memoir “Joyful Recollections of Trauma.” Off the screen, his true obsession is bad movies—even terrible movies. With his wife, the actor and comedian June Diane Raphael, and their friend Jason Mantzoukas, he presents the podcast “How Did This Get Made?,” picking apart all manner of bombs. David Remnick met Scheer at the Brooklyn Brewery and asked him for his top five of the very worst movies, and why they deserve recognition. Scheer discusses “The Room,” “Miami Connection,” “Samurai Cop,” “Jonathan Livingston Seagull,” and “The Apple.” “When I hear a director go ‘passion project,’ I’m in,” he says.  Plus, Francis Ford Coppola invested much of his personal fortune in a passion project, “Megalopolis.” It was mocked as a colossal failure before it even premièred. But the New Yorker film critic Justin Chang was at that première, and he thinks the chatter is wildly off base.  New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Paul Shear is an actor and a comedian, and he's been in shows like The League and Black Monday, and he was a recurring character on 30 Rock and Veep, both of sainted memory. Shear has also just published a memoir called Joyful Recollections of Trauma. But Paul Shear may be best known as a film buff. You may have come across. his podcast, how did this get made? It's a conversation among three friends. Paul, his wife June Diane Rayfield, and Jason Mansuchas, analyzing and picking apart bad movies, only bad movies. These guys are connoisseurs of the lousy. So when I talked with Paul Shear recently at Brooklyn Brewery, I wanted to get to the heart of things. It's my last week on this planet. What are the five

most horrible films that I can watch that I can take to the the Great Beyond. Okay. So let me, just because I want to make sure we're on the even playing field, there are horrible films like Gary Busey is in this

thing called like the the Ginger Kill Man or somewhere he plays it Ginger, right? And that's fine. Those are bad movies. Those to me are not fun bad movies. I want to enjoy myself. I want to be sitting there. going like, I need to show this to everyone.

It's how our podcast came to be. It's about sitting around talking about a movie. I did that all the time through my youth. So the Mount Rushmore, if you will, you have to put the room on it. Tommy Wazzo's The Room. A movie. This guy just went crazy. It's just the best.

It's the best. And people like, I often say that the AFI needs to put the room on the AFI top 100 list. because when you create something so epically disastrous, it should be noted. Like, it's like it is the worst movie ever made. It needs to be elevated. It is Tennessee Williams through the lens of Tommy Wazzo. He thought he was making streetcar named Desire.

And when you watch it like that, it's even more interesting. You're part of my life. You are everything. I could not go on without you, Lee. Lisa. You're scaring me. You are lying. I never hit you.

You are tearing me apart, Lisa. Why are you so hysterical? Do you understand life? Do you? This is the great surprise. You're sitting there watching one of these movies and so much work has gone into it. And the director and the writer must have thought, this is awesome.

Like Glenn and Glenda is really good somehow. Yeah. Oh, then this is the fear. I don't know if you feel this way, but as a writer, as an artist, you feel like I don't want to have that trick played on me. I don't want to make Glenn and Glenn and go, oh, no. Like, you know, like, do you ever feel,

do you ever have that, like, has it that you're writing or you're in the middle of something? You're like, ooh, I hope. Or do you know? No, I think it sucks all the time. Yeah, me too. And then as we're closing the piece, and I have to read it six times.

It gets worse and worse, and I just want to throw myself off Mount Rushmore. Yeah. What's the second movie? Okay, second one. So we got the room. I'm going to talk about this movie called Miami Connection. Miami Connection, a great, a great film made by an Orlando, an owner of an Orlando Dojo decides to make a movie about ninjas, a movie about finding your long-lost

father. My father. My father. I found my father. Oh my God. And the drug trade in Miami, even though it's in Orlando. Great film.

Really funny. The way they found this was the Alamo Draft House. They found a reel of film. Everyone was like, we don't know what this is. Alamo Draft House is like, we'll buy it. And they bought it and they screened it like just internally. They're like, this is a genius. We're going to re-release this.

this. And they did. So Miami Connection, that's number two. We recently did a movie on our show called Samurai Cop. There's a lot of cops in here. You guys have seen these films? Oh, yeah. Samurai Cop, to me, is a new favorite. I can't believe it alluded me for so long.

It is, again, it's lost in translation in the sense that this director clearly saw a lot of cop movies and tries to create the tropes, but the language barrier is tricky. It's like Google Translate, or maybe even AI had written this film. Like, you know, Danny Glover and Lethal Weapon would be like,

I'm too old for this shit. And this movie would be like, I'm too old to take shits. Right? Like, it's like, that's the difference. That happens too. Yeah, I mean, by the way, you know, Metamusel, just stir it up and stuff.

Then I'm going to go a little bit more random. And it's going to be, it's going to be a dealer's choice because New York especially hates this movie, so they might boo me as I say this. Jonathan Livingston Segal. Jonathan Livingston Segal is a movie that is just

Seagull's talking to themselves with the music of Neil Diamond underneath it. Oh, that's so mean. And it is based on Jonathan Livingston Segal, the book. It is one of the most insane film, because it is just footage of seagulls.

Some of them crazy glued to planks. And it's like, wow, I want to fly. I'm flying. I'm flying. The Neil Diamond is like, the bird is flying. And it's longer than it ever

needs to be. And it's, you know, pseudo-spiritual. It's Messiah. But I've, in the 14 years of doing how to this get made, I've never seen anything like it. How many times have you seen that?

Only once. And I don't think I ever need to see it again, but I'm also happy that it's thought. Yeah, I got the nuances. Yeah, I was like, ooh, boy. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. There's a movie called The Apple. All right.

The Apple to me is like predicting American Idol. It's a future where everyone's doing mandated exercise. And American Idol is like the only show on television. and it's about dancing. Citizens. It is now one minute to four o'clock. Time to stop ordinary activities and prepare for the national BIM hour.

The national fitness program is watching you. Five. A movie that was so bad that when they premiered it, they gave everybody LPs, like vinyl LPs. And they started throwing the vinyl LPs at the screen. That's not nice. Not nice. Not nice.

Not nice. But great sounds. a weird movie. I love that level of weird. Again, it's like when I hear a director go Passion Project, I'm like, I'm in Megopolis, I'm like,

can't wait. We gave it a good review. They gave it a good review. Justin Chang just came to the New Yorker in February. Pulitzer Prize winning Justin Chang, yeah. So I've heard. He kind of liked it. That movie is a perfect example of something that I love

because it may just be weird enough that it could be great because it's so insane. It's like you're just shoving everything in there. And I think that that's like, that's what I love about a bad movie. It's like, Copa doesn't think he made a bad movie. He wanted to make this big up. Does he have all the tools to make it? Who knows? But I, I, that's what I get off on because I'm looking at it. I'm just like, wow, this is what you wanted to do. So just to be clear on your criterion. So a movie like the hottie and the naughty. Love it. Fine. Fine.

Paris Hilton. Paras Hilton. Vehicle. Great, great vehicle. Fine. But it never wanted to be anything else. Yeah, it's not elevating. It's not elevating the form.

Like, Garbage Pail Kids, the movie, great. Fine. But there are movies like, my brain is so broke that I saw Madam Webb and I was like, it's not bad. But then I'm also fascinated by like 50 Shades of Grey because I'm like, oh, here's this woman who wrote this thing. She's not having crazy S&M sex, but she's like imagining what it's, is. So then we're watching like this kind of chased sexual movie and I'm like, that's weird. But boring. Yeah, it's boring.

It's the worst sexual film I've ever seen. It's like, I'm like, it's like supposedly titillating. It's like, it's titillating to someone who's never like Googled anything sexual. I'm the editor of The New Yorker. I can't say anything about that. Paul, thank you.

Thank you. Paul Shear is a co-host of the podcast. How did this get made? His new book is called Joyful. recollections of trauma. We mentioned Megalopolis, a passion project of Francis Ford Coppola. So in fairness, let's give the last word on that film to our critic, Justin Chang. Justin, before the Cannes Film Festival, where you saw Megalopolis, everybody was saying this was

going to be an epic bomb. A huge amount of money was spent on it, much of it Coppola's own. Why was there so much negativity directed at a filmmaker who had made, after all, the godfather? Francis Ford Coppola has always elicited this kind of reaction. When Apocalypse Now, which premiered at Cannes in 1979 and was trailing, you know, epically bad buzz about how off the rails the movie had gone and how over budget it had gone. And people thought it was going to be some, you know, folly. I think people are very uncomfortable with outsized ambition, and I think it scares them. I think talent scares them.

And so I think a lot of the negativity was, how dare he do this? And I really take issue with that, not just because I like the movie, but because you blow your money, you blow your own money on some epic, you know, artistic or commercial. failure, so what? You know, millions, hundreds of millions of dollars are blown every day on far worse causes than that. It's not a perfect movie. I don't know if it's, I don't think, you know, it's a masterpiece or anything. But I think, though, that it's really disheartening when critics and journalists suddenly turn into, like, Hollywood bean counters. And what did you like about megalopolis? I like this movie. I mean, it's a strange movie. Is it going to work for everyone? Absolutely not. It didn't work for a lot of people. And we argued, I argued about,

this movie a lot with some of my closest friends and critics I love and trust. We were all over the map with this. The movie, it gives us this version of New York that is actually called a new Rome and that is modeled on, you know, the ancient civilization of Rome. And it is sort of asking big questions about the future and about a looming apocalypse and are we becoming a fascist state. It's asking questions about, fundamentally about civilization and specifically Western civilization especially. The movie is, you know, quite theatrical in a lot of ways. The acting is very theatrical and declamatory in a way that I found really interesting and some might find off-putting. There's a futuristic tinge to it. The movie is engaging with different layers

of artifice and reality. There are times when the movie looks like Old Hollywood, complete with the rear projection, and there's something very old-fashioned and almost classical about it. And there are times when the movie looks, you know, almost like something from the future, something that does not exist yet. And so the movie is kind of playing with our sense of time. And I just found all of this really stimulating and interesting and new. And does it all work? No. Are there parts of it that sort of, you know, fall flat? Maybe. But it's just, it's kind of thrilling to see a filmmaker like Coppola, who's 85-year-old years old, one of the greatest filmmakers this country has ever produced. Coming out with a movie

that in its idiosyncrasies is unlike anything out there on the landscape. You can find Justin Chang's review of Megalopolis at New Yorker.com. I'm David Remnick. That's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks for listening. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of tune yards, with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Bolton, Adam Howard, Callalia, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Alicia Zuckerman. With guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Michael May, Mike Cutchman, David Gable,

Alex Barish, Victor Gwan, and Alejandra Deccett. And special thanks this week to Chris Bannon. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund. Fund.