The Press Box - 'The Big Picture' — Noah Baumbach and Capturing the American Family (Ep. 365)

Episode Date: October 16, 2017

Ringer editor-in-chief Sean Fennessey sits down with writer-director Noah Baumbach to discuss his new film, ‘The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)’; creating a serious role for Adam Sandler; Netflix purchasing his film; and how he captures the American family. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

At the beginning of this whole thing, if I could have looked and said, okay, well, you'll be here when you're 48. It was kind of exactly what I would have hoped for and wanted. I'm Sean Fennessey, editor-in-chief of The Ringer, and here's the big picture. Few filmmakers capture the anxiety of aging and family life better than Noah Baumbach. In his movies like The Squid and the Whale, kicking and screaming, and Francis Haa, among others, Bomback really gets to the heart of things that we have difficulty saying to each other.

His new movie, The Meyerwood Stories, New and Selected, is no different. It stars Adam Sandler and Ben Stiller as half-bron. brothers, and Dustin Hoffman is their passive-aggressively domineering artist father. The movie's streaming now on Netflix, and I can't recommend it highly enough. It's really one of my favorite movies of the year. It's surprisingly funny and unusually deep about how we deal with our parents. So Noah and I talked about the making of the Meyerowitz stories, his long career, and the art of a great movie-star performance.

Without further ado, here's my conversation with Noah Baumback. Joined by one of my favorite filmmakers, Noah Baumback, Noah. Thank you for coming in today. Thanks. So, Noah, you have a new film, but when I was watching it, I thought of your first film. and there's a particular reason why. In the movie, Dustin Hoffman's character and Adam Sandler's character bond while watching the Mets. It reminded me a lot of kicking and screaming in Elliot Gould's character and Josh Hamilton's character bonding over the Knicks.

I'm curious because of that, what kind of brought you back to fathers and sons and where this movie really started. Yeah, that's interesting. I hadn't thought about that. And to actually take that further in my failure of imagination, it was the Knicks in the first drafts of... of the Meyerwitt script, I realized that because it begins with Adam's character's daughter going to college, that actually this would have to be the fall. The Knicks wouldn't have started until November. So anyway, so I made it the Mets. That's smart.

It's synchronized, though. Did that occur to you that there's some, you know, 20 some odd years later, there's some recalling? Well, I think in both cases, it becomes a way to communicate that's maybe less common. complicated. It's a way to, you know, in this case, fathers and sons to bond, you know, because you're bonding with this sort of thing that's outside you. Yeah, it's an interesting thing. As a sad, Nixon and Mets fan, I have a specific connection to it. Right. Well, actually, when I also, when we were shooting it, you know, I anticipated that the Mets were going to have actually a better season than they did. In the movie, it's, this is a, you know, a less good Mets season than probably the season they're going to have. But in fact, it actually turned out to be the prophetic, I guess.

Yeah, you nailed it. August 17, we were just as sad as Dustin's character. But specifically, like, where did this movie start? How did you land on doing another story about a family and fathers and sons and daughters? It's always a series of little things and big things. And even in this case, it was sort of the idea of doing something with Ben and Adam together and that maybe they could play brothers. And so that in a way, I was even kind of thinking, well, what would the story be for those two guys?

I also wanted to write about, I wanted to put in a movie a certain kind of aspect of hospital life, you know, being in a hospital that I felt I hadn't really seen in a movie before. And this intersection of the personal and the institutional and sort of incredibly vulnerable state you find yourself in and, you know, you're kind of like putting your heart in the hands of all these people. that you don't know, who, you know. We all have a nurse Pam, right, who we connect with them. We're like, you have all the information, make me feel better. Right, right, exactly. Like, and you know, it's even can be arbitrary, like, who makes you feel better and who doesn't. So I wanted to find a place for that, too.

But I had no idea of, I mean, when I started writing, I thought, well, maybe that's a bigger part of the movie. Maybe it's a, and it was the structure of the movie that sort of breaking it into this, this, like almost a collection of short stories that kind of helped unlock, I think, a lot of the movie for me. Yeah, it's almost a Salinger-esque. I'm a little low to say that, but it's a Salinger-esque structure, where you have this story of a family, but each part of the movie is almost a chapter or part of the collection.

Was that from the very beginning, you knew you wanted to do some structure or something in that specific way? No, I wrote a lot of scenes just between, you know, different characters, adult siblings, you know, with their dads, with each other, with their kids. I just wrote a bunch of crap, really. And then when I found this structure, I think it not only helped sort of tell, you know, form a narrative for the movie, but also it helped inform me, I think, even about the characters. By splitting the brothers up into two different sections, it spoke to, you know, maybe the sort of compartmentalization of this family and, you know, how the father has one relationship with one, you know, son and another with the other.

and having that sort of distinct differences helped me certainly write those sections, but even kind of like figure out what the movie was about. This is your 10th film, I believe, and having gotten to that point, I'm always interested in how much you're pulling from your life, your friend's lives. There's so much specificity in every character and in this mountain of dialogue that you're really characterizing every person very clearly. Is a lot of this the imagination at this point, or do you still find yourself plucking from your life and others? It doesn't manifest itself that way, or at least consciously for me.

I'm plucking from everywhere. And I like to use, particularly early on in the process, I like to use real names and sometimes real places. I think it just helps make it feel legit to me. You know, it's like, there's always that thing when you're like coming up with a name for a character and you pick this name and it just sounds so fake. You know, it sort of takes always like a few weeks before you kind of actually start to buy that this character has this name. This is a real name. Right. And it's not that I don't do that, but I do sometimes like to use, you know, names of friends of mine, you know, I mean, never, never in a, you know, one-to-one way.

I'm never, I wouldn't use someone's name of somebody, you know, and their personality. I would do it in a removed way, but it makes it feel personal immediately. And I think that helps me then invent stuff because I feel like I have a kind of base that feels credible. Yeah, when you create this New York artist world too, you look at like LJ's character, LJ, the character of LJ who's played by Judd Hirsch? I found myself watching the movie being like, who specifically is this supposed to be, which modern artist are we aiming for? Is that a similar thing too where they'll be like, I'm imagining a person that is like this and then I'll build off of that? Sometimes. And it also becomes like, you know, then for wardrobe, you know, you might draw upon a look of somebody that you, there's an artist Bryce Martin that we kind of looked at for LJ's. That is specifically who I was imagining.

But I wasn't thinking of him at all for the character of LJ. So. He has the look, though. Yeah, I just wanted him to have something sort of specific and I always really liked how Bryce Martin looked. And, you know, again, it's no, the character of LJ himself was just sort of invented. And, you know, we also meet him in some ways through Harold's eyes. So it's like you have a certain expectation of him. And then he actually turns out to be, you know, a different sort of person.

He's like a good man. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, you know, you mentioned that you wanted to put Ben and Adam together. I'm interested to talk about both of them in this movie. With Adam, there's been a lot of conversation about how this is a return to Adam working with an otore and he gives a certain kind of performance. You know, I've heard you say that Adam approached you and said,

if you ever have anything, I'd like to work with you. Do you know what movie or what thing inspired that to reach out in the first place? For him? Yeah. It's probably squid in the whale. And so often happens with actors, too, that they'll reach out and then, you know, you'll come back to them a couple years later and then they'll pass on the project. Of course.

See, I just didn't respond to the character. And you're thinking, like, why did you make me? I was saying in some ways it's like Hollywood in a nutshell makes you want something you didn't want before and then tells you you can't have it. How do you figure out the best character to write for someone like Adam? He's such a specific person in the consciousness of the country. But this is both, I think, some of the best of his comedic talent,

but there's also the woundedness and the sadness that is going on. How do you figure out how to build something like that for an actor? Well, that was something actually in our rehearsal process that I think helped free him up was talking about that it was okay to be funny, you know, that it was that he could bring that part of himself to the character that to not mistake the sort of responsibility he felt in sort of doing justice to this guy. You know, not to mistake that for like dead seriousness that, you know, that the character was funny too. And he's doing a lot of Sandler yelling, you know. It's still his essence. And I thought that we should have that. It's like, you know, you're not, I think when you, yeah, you cast somebody, you know,

sometimes you want them to transform into the part, but you also want to, you know, bring out what's special about them or things that you like about them. You know, it was interesting because also when I wrote it, Danny very specifically for Adam and Matthew very specifically for Ben. And then when I showed people the script for the first time, afterward, people assumed that they were playing the opposite parts. But I'd never thought of it that way. I mean, it wasn't, didn't even enter my mind. So in some ways, maybe I was, you know, willfully ignorant to, you know, kind of public perception or iconography as I wrote it. I kind of wrote it more for

the guys I knew. Yeah, and you've said that this is the closest character to the real Ben that you know. Is there a reason after Greenberg and while we're young you wanted to do something that felt closer to the person that you've come to know over the last 10 years? You know, Greenberg for Ben, it's a really deeply felt performance and he clearly found a lot of himself in that guy, but it was a transformation. The character was very different from him. And with while we're young, in a way, what I was thinking was I was sort of bringing my world and his sort of iconography together in a way. Like he was playing a kind of Ben Stillery character in my world. And then, and this one I felt like, well, this is something maybe he could really play close to the bone. You know, because now I know him very well.

And so I wrote it sort of with that in mind. Did he respond to or recognize that this was something closer to him? Did he ID that? Eventually. Okay. I think when he first read it, I mean, Ben jokes about it. First, he had to get over the fact that he doesn't show up 50 pages into the movie. me. More star management.

Yeah. But I think Ben would be fine with me saying this. I think he initially wasn't sure he wanted to do it even. I think I think he felt like, you know, I don't know that I recognize this guy, which is funny, you know, because I, or he felt, you know, that it wasn't, you know, a challenge to him. But once we got into it, he really gave himself over to it. And, you know, I think it's a very vulnerable performance. I saw you and Dustin speaking together recently, too, and he talked a little bit about how much he worked with you on the movie. I'm hoping you can kind of explain some of that, what that means when you have an iconic actor,

someone who's very invested in helping to build a character. But also, you know, what the level of collaboration is like, how invasive something like that might be too, because you're obviously someone who has created stories over and over again. I don't know how often you have somebody coming close to you and saying, like, how do we build this together? Well, I wanted it as much as he did because I wrote the character very specifically. I mean, they're all written specifically, but that guy had a, I felt a really particular cadence to how he spoke. And Dustin really zeroed in on that. And I think, you know, he plays it very much from the inside out, but he also recognized that in some ways if he

could get the musicality and the cadence of the guy, it would actually help give him the character as well. So our meetings and our rehearsals were far ranging. I mean, there was a lot of just talking and talking about family in our lives. And he had a lot of, he recognized a lot of things in the character, reminded him of his father. Yeah, I heard him say that. There's something interesting there, too, about the failed artist. You know, it's like a trope that you've returned to a couple times, too, the father who never quite got to where he wanted to go and how you then, how the children that then positioned their lives after that, right? Yeah. Yeah. And I think that was helpful for him. It made sense of a lot of things for him to think of his own father. But then also,

you know, we would read it and we would just, like I said, he would always like me to say the line first, as I imagined it, which many actors don't necessarily. Yeah, you hear the opposite, But it was almost like, you know, getting the note on a harmonica or something, you know, like, you know, like, you know, it was just like, and it really was helpful to him. So, you know, and a lot of it is we created a kind of shorthand so that when we were shooting, we could cut right to what, let's get down to solving this. Which is sort of what I try to do with every actor. But sometimes an actor just sort of maybe has one or two blocks that they need to kind of get through or things that they need to kind of, you know, things that they need to unlock whatever it is that's going to help them find the part. Sometimes they just sort of slip right into it.

And then, you know, other times, it's true of like Ben with Greenberg and Dustin with this character, Harold, I do think it really benefits from a kind of long runway. So this movie made me realize that you're kind of sort of the maestro of American divorce now. You know, like that is the notion of the fractured family is something you're very good at. What keeps drawing you back to stories about these kind of mixed families that are coming from different directions and new marriages and new starts? Obvious answers, I have divorced in my life, both of my childhood and in my adulthood, so, you know, I know it. But I guess I don't think of it. I think I'm writing about family.

And obviously the specifics are going to be unique to whoever's watching the movie. But they might recognize their family or they may say, oh, boy, my family is nothing like this family. But I think essentially what I'm trying to document is true of everybody. And with this movie, this sort of also this notion of family stories and stories we tell ourselves and, you know, stories our parents tell us, you know, either directly or indirectly and how we kind of imbibed those and take them out into our own individual lives. And then sort of, I think part of growing up is realizing, you know, maybe I actually don't believe this thing that I thought I believed. And, you know, and I think everybody can relate with that. Do you find yourself either taking your scripts or your movies to your family or do they come to you and say, hey, I noticed something in here or what is happening with this? Everybody who is my family or my friends, you know, is at this point kind of used to, you know, the fact that they might recognize a thing or two, you know, in movies.

You know, these things transform so much, though, so that, like, I might use something, you know, in name. or a situation that's very sort of that's true or specific to something that's real. But then it really is so that I can kind of create and invent off of that. I said to it, I had a friend actually come to a New York Film Festival screening. We had a couple weeks ago. And I realized just before the day of, Greta reminded me that I had actually taken a couple things from him and that were in the movie. And so I called him and I was like,

I just want to, you know, it's not nothing. I don't think you're, you know, I just want to let you know that the couple things are in there. And he was, he said, he said, he's like, it wouldn't be one of your movies if I didn't recognize a couple of the things I've said are done. Yeah, you almost have to keep a checklist of the small notes that you've taken so you can warn people ahead of time. So I saw this movie in a packed movie theater for the first time and it really played. And people were laughing and it was, it's also a great New York movie. And I felt a lot of New York, a lot of walking the streets feeling.

But the movie is obviously premiering on Netflix as well. This is the first time you're doing that. I'm interested to hear how that experience has been for you and kind of what your expectation is for something like this rolling out this way. It's important to clarify. You know, I made the movie independently. And, you know, with the same intention that, you know, I make all my movies, which is to be, you know,

seen the way you saw it and seen in theaters. I think it, you know, I shot it in Super 16. a lot is made about, you know, made of the kind of spectacle movie or like, you know, movies like Dunkirk that are, that, how important it is to see them in the theater. And it's absolutely true. I mean, a movie, I saw that in the movie theater and it was, it was amazing. You were like the fifth consecutive filmmaker to come in here and be like, you know, Dunkirk really in the theater was amazing.

It's just interesting. Well, well, it keeps coming up. But I think what gets lost in the conversation, too, is just, the experience you were just recounting is that it's equally important, I think, to see movies of more intimate scale in the theater.

It's funny because Greta was asked this similar question in a Q&A she gave for her movie at the New York Film Festival. Now, a week after I had done mine. And she had this amazing answer, where she quoted Walter Merch who talked about

the... Famous sound is... designer and the editor. And wrote a great book about editing in the blink of an eye. And I guess this was an addendum he had added to a later printing. But he was talking about the home viewing experience versus the theatrical experience. And what he was saying is when you go into a theater, and so I'm paraphrasing Greta, paraphrasing Walter Merch, just to be clear here. When you go into a theater, you're giving yourself over to the experience.

It's a vulnerable experience. And that's true, whether you're in a packed house or you're alone, you're going in and you're going to be there for this thing. And that vulnerability is lost at home because now it's your slave. You can turn it on, you can turn it off. Even if you don't, you know you can. I think it's absolutely true. And I think it's an important experience for my movies, this sort of balance between laughing and crying or discomfort. comfort or, you know, there's, I edit them, this one in particular, there's, there's a kind of

fractured, you know, almost sort of experiential aspect to them, you know, and. Even the way you cut on dialogue throughout the movie is a very specific choice that, as I said, like in the theater, is it gives you a jolt, you know, and you feel it around you. I mean, I've seen it with, with the crown. So I also believe that experience, you know, it's unique. And even as all this stuff changes, and it's not going to go away. And it's not going to go away for these movies. And I feel very strongly about it.

If three or five or ten times as many people see this movie, though, because of the way that it's being delivered to the world, does that balance that feeling out for you? No, it doesn't balance it because it's not, you know, if you said to a photographer, you know, we're going to skip the gallery and the museum. and we're just going to put you on the internet and do you know how many more people will see her work? You know, I know that's maybe an exaggeration. But, of course, you want people to see. I want as many people to see. I make these movies for an audience, you know. And all movies end up there anyway.

You know, you're toggling around, you know, you want your movies on these platforms because people will find them later in a way that when I was a kid, you couldn't. I think that's great. But I think people should be given the opportunity to see them the way they should be seen in the theater beforehand. Do you have a measure of success now with a movie going directly to a platform like this? Does it change the way you think about the end result of the movie? Well, it didn't for me because I didn't make it for that. It was acquired in post. My producer sold it to Netflix. And I want to be clear, they love the movie and have been great and are really supportive. supportive of it, but I disagree with their model. You mentioned Greta, and Greta obviously has a film happening. You guys worked closely together on a couple of films. Have you learned anything specifically from working closely with her and then going back and doing something on your own?

I was interested to hear about what the post-Gretta working experience is like, too. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I'm not even sure I can quantify it. But I know it's there. You know, I mean, it's something actually, you know, I made, with Jake Paltrow, we made this documentary about Brian DePama. Love it. And one thing Brian says, which is something he's said many times, you know, personally to us, but we made sure we included it in the documentary was that, you know, for him, he felt, you know, he wrote and directed a lot of his, you know, early movies, but he felt he needed to work as an interpretive director, you know, on things like Skagit. Garface and the untouchables, that it helped free him up, you know, by getting outside of

his own material, like that he, you know, he learned something. And so when he went back to writing his own material, he had sort of, some things had changed. And I think I don't do that. I don't, I mean, I haven't done that. I should say, I directed somebody else's material. I generated it all. I kind of consciously and unconsciously look to do things that, you know, I'm not going that sort of take me, even in stuff that I'm writing in a way, take me outside of, you know, my own stuff, you know.

And I think working with Greta on those two movies did sort of both, you know, they're extremely personal movies and I feel very connected, you know, as connected to those movies I do to any of my movies. But working with her and having this sort of other, you know, voice both in the script stage and also as a performer, kind of changed, you know, changed how I make movies. It was also with Francis. We also, we kind of changed the model of shooting it in a way, too, on that one. And, you know, I think that it was almost like making a first film I never made, you know, when I was in my 40s, you know, and it, you know, it freed me up in some way and changed then how I would approach movies that, you know, when I went, you know, while we young was the one after that. movies that I was making maybe in a more traditional fashion. Did you guys find yourself, she directed her first film, Lady Bird, and you're making

this film? Did you guys still kind of collaborate in that way? Did you show each other, each other's work and give notes? Yeah, yeah, we're always very, whether we're officially collaborating or not, we're very, showing each other things all the time and drafts and cuts. How do you feel about your career these days? I mentioned it's 10 films. You have been able to maintain your voice pretty consistent.

consistently, especially in the last 10, 15 years. Are the things that you haven't been able to do that you want to do as a filmmaker? Are there bigger projects or smaller projects that you want to pursue? I mean, there's lots of things that I want to do. But I feel lucky. I have very much the career I would have, at the beginning of this whole thing, if I could have looked and said, okay, well, you'll be here when you're 48. That was kind of exactly what I would have hoped for and wanted.

Movies and making movies and that kind of expression has always been something that I looked at as this sort of personal sort of conversation with an audience in some way. And I'm doing exactly what I want to be doing. Jason Blum was here last week talking with my boss and I, Bill, and they talked a lot about the making of kicking and screaming and how long it took to get that into the world. and some of the personal connection of that story. And Bill, my boss is quite obsessed with that movie. And you could see him placing his life onto the lives of the characters. There's a whole other generation of people that work at this company

that have a very similar relationship to Francis Ha, where they say, like, that is my movie, that is my life. I feel so connected to that. Do people approach you and say, like, you captured this part of my life on a regular basis? Yeah, I mean, people do say that. I mean, it's always nice when people say that. I mean, it's what, you know, I think back to movies that did that for me and how important they were in my life.

You know, it still are, you know. I mean, I remember when I was a kid and I saw a diner, you know, and I thought like, oh, I am those guys, even though I was younger and not living in the 50s in Baltimore. And I remember thinking about that movie. It was sort of everything. I felt like, oh, I totally relate to all those guys in that kind of conversation, my friends and things.

And then I also thought, like, that's the kind of movie I'd like to make. So it sort of was inspiring and sort of all fronts. And, you know, there are so many movies like that. I mean, people, like, asked me, like, oh, like, it seems so, what an odd thing for you to be Brian DePama fan. Or I think that, why? It's not odd at all. I mean, it was an interview I heard with Tom Petty where he, they asked him what his influences were. And he said, the radio.

and I feel that way that my influences are movies. That's part of the reason why I asked you about sort of the direction of your career, because after seeing De Palma, I was like, I wonder if he'll make like a thriller at some point. But do you still feel like the sort of the personal stories that you're telling and the familial stories that you're telling relationship dramas is kind of your bread and butter and where you like to work? It's not, it's even something I'm in control of. It's like I, these stories and characters and ideas come and I, I don't want to make it some magical either. It's just, but it's like I follow what is interesting to me and what I want to do and what feels like cinematic to me, what feels like a movie.

And this is, this is the expression. I mean, I get asked the question sort of within the movies, like, are you, you know, aware of like when you want things to be funny and when you want them to be serious? And, you know, it's not that I'm not. aware of that in some ways, but I'm also don't care. I think that these things live side by side within the movies. And it's kind of something I'm in control of and not in control of. And that's the same thing with the material. I mean, I have ideas for things and things I want to kind of express and put in a movie. And this is how it's come out so far, you know. Do you still go to a lot of

movies? You talked about the theatrical experience. I'm wondering if you are still like an engaged viewer of them. I do. I do. And also in New York now, I feel like we're in this like the midst of a kind of, you know, great, and we call it a renaissance, but it's like a, you know, there are all these great theaters that are opening up. Yeah. The Metrograph has been a very cool thing. I love the Metrograph. And my friend Jake is the programs there and is just, you know, so good at it. There's always something I want to see. And also they show so much. on 35 millimeter and it's an incredibly emotional thing. Something I kind of rediscovered on Meyerwitz was shooting on film again, you know, that because I sort of tried digital on the last, the three between Greenberg and Meyerwitz. Have you flipped back now or are you now not going to work in digital? Because you had established something, I think, with Francis and, you know, Mr. America

in particular I felt like it looked like a new version of an old film. Yeah. I mean, I like what we did on those movies, particularly. on Francis, and I'm glad I tried that. But so much of what I'm doing is a kind of conversation with my younger self who went to movies and loved movies. And sometimes that's even more thematic in the movie itself, but it's also even just like spiritually true.

A big part of that was watching things on film and things that were shot on film. And I have, you know, it's a kind of an emotional connection to that. So you've made this, the palm film, you know, you now made a film with Hoffman. Are there other, is there another hero or iconic person that you'd be interested in working with? Well, I would say Randy Newman, but I got to work with him on this movie too. That's also my guy. How did that happen? He had reached out to me.

I'd heard that he, like, if, that he had sort of, you know, liked my movies. And so I sort of was like planning it, but didn't have yet the movie yet, you know. I haven't had like even that many movies. I've had like full scores, you know, original scores written for them. So, yeah, I just sent him the script and we had breakfast and talked about how, you know, that we could kind of theorize what we would, what kind of score it would be. You know, we really wouldn't know until he saw them, you know, at least saw the rushes and started to like, you know, have a visual component.

And it was a, you know, it was a great experience. we would, I would come out here and go to, you know, his house and we'd go to his studio and, you know, I'd sit next to him and he'd play piano and, you know, while the movie ran. And all the, all the, yeah, all the music and the movie also is him playing live to the movie. I mean, it's, I mean, he, we would work on it, he'd get it, he'd figure out what the theme was. And then, but then he would play it again and play it while the, you know, while the movie ran. That's what you hear. I usually like to wrap with the question about the last great thing you've seen.

And since you go to the movies, I'm curious what you've seen recently that's blown you away. Well, like, yeah, some things I saw at the Metrograph. I took my son to Popeye at the Metrograph, which I... Oh, yeah. They just reissued that soundtrack. I know, yeah, with the demos, which I had always liked also. Really good. It's one of the great bootlegs.

Yeah, it just, it was odd, actually. It came out like a week after we actually happened to go see it. didn't realize that they were reissuing it. And yeah, I'd love Popeye as a kid because I loved Robin Williams. And then later, retrospectively, I would also be into Altman and Nilsen. But when I first saw it, it was the Robin Williams thing. Did your son respond to Popeye? I don't know that he quite loved it.

Get the tone? We saw Popeye and we saw Bugsy Malone also in successive weeks because they actually, Jake did this as a, I asked him if we could actually just show Popeye. And because I wanted to show my son and... Really greasing the wheels there. You got the inside job. So he created a kids' musical thing. So we ended up seeing three successive Sundays. We saw Bugsie Malone, Popeye, and the Great Muppet Caper.

Oh, yeah. Which does not hold up. Oh, no. That's a groaning one, though. Yeah, it is. Yeah. Well, that part's all right. Are you trying to show him your youth?

Is that part of what's happening? Well, I see plenty of the things he wants to see, too. But yeah, it's a way to, it's also, yeah, it's sort of give these movies their best chance, too. Well, that's a great place to end about recapturing. Noah, thank you so much for doing this. Yeah, thank you. It was fun.