The Rewatchables - ‘Pump Up the Volume’ With Bill Simmons, Chris Ryan, and Andy Greenwald

Episode Date: August 20, 2020

The Ringer’s Bill Simmons, Chris Ryan, and Andy Greenwald eat their cereal with a fork and do their homework in the dark after they rewatch the 1990 coming-of-age film ‘Pump Up the Volume,’ starring Christian Slater and Samantha Mathis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Coming up. Chris Ryan, don't you see that you're the voice? You're the voice we were waiting for. Pump up the volume is next. Yes, who? He's the guy who lights up the night. that are you delused? He's got a pirate radio station.

Dementia. Hallelujah. Christian Slater, pump up the volume. Redid R. Now playing at theaters everywhere. All right. We're making history for a couple reasons here. One, it's a rot, a reunion of the watch,

Andy Greenwald and Chris Ryan. Andy hasn't been on this podcast for at least two years. He was like running TV shows. He was super busy. He's doing stuff. Such a pleasure to have him back. And then Chris Ryan, who lived his life the last 15 years.

thinking that he invented podcasting. It's actually not true. It was this movie. It was pump up the volume, which came out 30 years ago. It's an awesome movie, and there's a very special wrinkle we have for our audience. This movie can't be seen. This is the first rewatchables. We've done over 140 podcasts at this point.

We've never done one that nobody could find. Be like, oh, man, this sounds great. I'm going to watch it. You can't. This movie doesn't exist. Andy, you were the one who pointed out, I think, first, that you couldn't find this movie. I thought you were kidding and you weren't. No, I mean, for some of us, people of a certain age, we are of that age.

You could rewatch it a lot by going to Blockbuster and just keeping it checked out for weeks at a time, as I did. And I bet Chris did. But yeah, it's not out there. It's not streaming. It's not rentable. And I wonder if it's because of the incredible soundtrack and all the licensing issues of the music. But we're making history because we're going to demand this becomes rewatchable, right?

Like the power of this podcast. Yeah, it's the main reason. Because initially we were like, oh, shit, nobody. can see this movie, we got to pick another one. And then I think all of us were like, no, no, no, no. That's not what happened. Well, I was being dramatic. Me and Andy pointed out that this movie was unviewable and you were like, huh.

And then you were like, challenge accepted. Now we have to do it. Right. Well, maybe this will lead. This is, you know, a popular podcast. Maybe this will lead to at least one decision maker being like, wait a second. Yeah, it was. I was told you that.

I think for the purposes of this podcast, we should imagine a villainous figure named Joe streaming, who looks like the FCC commissioner at the end of the movie with a bad rug and a bad attitude. And we are the ones who are going to overpower him because truth, justice, and youth are on our side. Well, so for people listening, most of whom have no idea what this movie is. This is a Christian Slater movie. It's the best movie he ever did other than maybe true romance. It came out literally 30 years ago this week. And it is about, this kid who moves to Arizona. He is lonely. He's afraid to talk to anybody. But in his basement, he has this pirate radio show. And he just starts doing the show and a couple kids here and it kind

of spreads. And every night at 10 o'clock, he comes on as this guy hard hairy. He has a voice disguiser. My personal experience with this, my buddy Gus, one of my best friends in the mid-80s, had a pirate radio show. No way. Whoa. He used to, we went to, uh, we both went to, uh, we both went to 8th and 9th grade at Greenwich Country Day, which was a prep school in Greenwich. He would go into the Greenwich Country Day, use their radio station because he had the keys because his dad worked there,

and he would do this radio show and we would put it out into the world. He was doing it. I went on a bunch of times, and you just kind of never knew who would listen. We had a call online. People would call in. One time somebody called,

and they were asking us all these questions. We got nervous. We thought it was like the FCC. But this was the era, right? This was where you kind of threw things out in the world and you had no idea of one person was going to listen to it, 200, things like that. So the concept of pirate radio in 2020 seems insane because now we have podcasts. We did not have podcasts in 1990.

Andy Greenwell, did this movie invent podcasts? I think this movie invented the internet. I mean, the movie ends on a note of, sorry, I guess we're going to semi-spoil something. No, spoil everything. But the movie ends with a hallelujah chorus of T-Eargette. teenage voices rising up all over the country of people spilling their pain and connecting. And that's basically like it invented live journal. It invented AOL message boards or at least presaged it. Like this idea that teenagers were just completely isolated with their own thoughts and all

they needed to do was communicate with each other. It invented emo music. It invented my career. Like this whole thing. Really, it's incredibly prescient movie and it still plays. Chris, you're in high school when this movie comes out? Yeah, entering. No, no. Okay. This is typical self-mythalization here. We're 13. Yeah.

We were. So that's junior high school. Unofficially bar mitzvahs. I was, Chris Watson. But we were becoming men in the world, seventh grade. I would just say that at this time in our lives, Andy, in 1990 around them. And in the years that's the subsequent years, movies didn't exist in a first weekend-only world. Where it's like, oh, well, I'm attaching that to this weekend in 1990.

and that's how old I was. Like, I'm, I'm sure I saw this movie. I'm not sure if I saw it in the theaters, but this movie was a VHS staple. So in my early high school years, it was really formative to the extent that I think I might have gotten a pediguana because of Christian Slater's character in this movie.

It was really formative in this idea because right at that age is when you start to think, what if everybody is full of shit? What if my parents are full of shit? What if my teachers are full of shit? What if the government is full of shit? And you really start to think,

to wonder whether or not you have all the answers, or at least are the person who's asking all the questions. There's two, for us, for our generation anyway, there are just these two totems, and I can see them in their paper VHS boxes that suddenly emerged. And I feel like whether it was really her or whether it was just our version of her, they were always handed to us or shared with us by our own versions of Nora De Niro. There was Heather's, and there was pump up the volume. Yes. There was the shot and there was the chaser. I don't know where they came from in my life, but all of a sudden we went from an era when it was just like hanging out with your friends and hoping their parents would rent you Kentucky Fried movie to hanging out with a suddenly like with

girls too and you would rent these movies and be like, oh, there's another way forward here. They were so, so, so important and they felt secret kind of like the radio show. Well, you also were post-John Hughes. We're post all the 80s teen comedies. Heather's comes out, I think, in 88, say anything, which we did on this podcast a couple months ago, is 89. And then this movie. And these were kind of the post-John-Hugh's.

teen movies where it's like, hey, actually, it's not just all hunky dory and you play a couple cool songs from the air. Dark side of suburbia. People fall in love. Yeah. This is like, this movie gets into some dark shit, which was the kind of stuff that if you're in high school, you really identified with. And I'm sure you're still identify with now.

And basically, it's morphed in the internet. But a lot of people who are lonely, a lot of people searching for somebody who speaks to them, people who seem like they're doing well, but they're really not. But the public perception, you know, you have the character in this movie who's played by the girl who eventually ended up on Melrose Place. Cheryl Pollack. Page, character Paige. Paige, who seems like she has it all together halfway through the movie. She never seems like she has it all together.

She's gripping the wheel really tight in like the first scene. If you're Christian Slater, though, it seems like, oh, that's like the popular girl. But nobody has their shit together, which is the point in this movie. And I think that's the revolutionary thing. about this movie, because not just the John Hughes movies that came before it, but like Revenge of the nerds were trying to suggest that there was still a binary that you had to deal with in high school. There was the cool kids who were the enemy, and then there were the sensitive misunderstood kids who were the heroes.

And this movie suggested that everybody was fucked up. Everybody was confused. Nobody knew what they were doing. And all you needed to do was just reach all of them and they would respond to it. And it completely flipped the script. Which is also what say anything did. Or say anything is like this cast of fuckups. here's the one girl has their shit together,

the valedictorian, and her whole life is falling apart too. And it's like everybody's fucked up. And I think, you know, I was probably, I saw this movie in college in the theater. So I was past all that whole high school, doubting herself, all that stuff.

I was a little older. It still resonated with me, but the thing that was really crazy in the moment was the soundtrack. And I know we're going to spend half the podcast talking about the soundtrack. but I just never heard all those songs and all those bands, the type of songs in any movie. And, you know, they're doing the pixies, but they're not even doing like the fast version of

wave of mutilation. They're doing the slow version and they're playing Leonard Cohen. And, you know, they're playing this Beastie Boys song that wasn't even on License to Ill. And it's like, what is what's going on? And to me, that was the draw of the movie initially. I think now it's morphed into something else. Chris Ryan, this was your music. Andy, this was your music.

This was your first era. And it's a perfect portrait of how music was passed hand-to-hand back then. A lot of the times in this movie, his show is basically dealt like a drug among high school students. But even that moment where all the kids are gathered around listening to Ice Tea, the song is called Let's Get Fuck Naked and Fuck. But I remember when from like 88 to like 90, 91, when like a lot of that really illicit rap was coming out, that was essentially like, sorry to say, my introduction to some of those concepts.

You know what I mean? And just being like, holy shit, like listening to that EZE solo record. And that would be like really, like it felt dangerous. I remember the day in art class when Dan and Bobby were talking about the Beastie Boys talking about Wiffle Ball bats. And I was like, excuse me? Like there was no, you couldn't hear this stuff unless it was past you in that sort of secret way. And the movie felt like the cool older brother or whomever was, a cool older sister, who had the tapes who could give you that knowledge. And the thing about teenage entertainment, whether it's in the 80s, 90s, or today, is that teenagers just have the best bullshit detectors and they can sniff out if it's phony. And this movie was written and directed by a 40-something-year-old

Canadian guy, but three minutes into the movie, we're scanning Mark's collection and there's a Camper Van Beethoven cassette. I was going to mention that. Oh, my God. Three minutes in. And you're perfect thing to drop. Yeah. It's like, oh, they know. This is not fake. And some of the tapes are the record label, you know, bought it in a record store tape. Some are mixed tapes with his handwriting on it.

Some are peel sessions. Some are, you know, things that are half this record and half that record, which is the way people's record collections used to look. Their tape collections look like that. Well, when they, when that three minutes in, when they're scanning the music in his basement. I was basically in Joe House's room watching that because that was like in college, that was the pre-successful Nirvana. That was the wheelhouse. Basically, everything they pick in this is exactly what mattered in 1989 in 1990. I mean, I guess the one mistake may have been

not even actually having Nirvana in there, like one of the super early albums, because they easily could have played in any of these songs. Yeah, he has a sound garden tape. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, he's so hungry. They just nailed it. They're so hungry. Like, being teenager or a young person at that time, everyone was just so hungry for crumbs of culture because we didn't know how to get it. And you couldn't keep it necessarily if you heard it. If you heard something

on the radio, you couldn't shazam it and find out what it was. If you heard something coming out of a car, you couldn't chase down the car and figure it out. I mean, there was someone of my life who reminded me of Nora, who, like, father worked at the newspaper and had an advance replacements tape of their last and considered to be worst

album. She gave me that tape. And I poured over it like it had been come down from from the mountain like it was the ten commandments because where do I go from here and this movie is just full of every song he plays and you see in the reaction of all the different types of kids who are hearing the descendants or whomever for the first time and they don't know what it is and they may never know but they're responding to it and they're freaking out to it and that's so true that was so lived experience the way andy the way and he describes it is completely right because even that moment in the movie where mark is returning the lenny Bruce book and Norris like, who's this? That is, that is like how you kind of found out about stuff

before, before you, before you have like a really group of friends who were like sharing that kind of thing. You basically had to be an eavesdropper and a little bit of a looky loo and just be like, what's the, what's that cool person listening to? What's that cool person reading? As a digression, I don't know what your high school libraries were like. Mine didn't have a great collection of memoirs by profane comedians, but maybe high schools were different where you guys were. Yeah, that one definitely was not a lot of Richard prior vinyl.

Especially in Arizona. I thought one of the smartest things they do in this movie is they established that he came from another place. So he comes from back east where you're going to just be a little ahead of your time with some of the music gets dropped in Arizona.

And part of the reason his show takes off is he's playing these songs that the kids probably had never heard before. They never knew like there was this missing track on license tail of things like that. And it made me think like in 1990 how few places I had to find out about things that I would like. Yeah. Yep. You know, where it was like I was relying on Joe House and his friend Anthony Salsito for 80% of, you know, the music that I didn't know about or your college radio station or at that point, Rolling Stone, we didn't trust it anymore. And

Spin Magazine was on its way, but not really where it was yet. It was like, how, how? was I going to find out about some new band? Who did I trust? And you also needed the people to be the connectors, because it wasn't just about someone who's like, this is the new thing coming from New York. It was also saying, remember that old thing that you may have seen in your uncle's LP collection, Leonard Cohen, that's still cool. Right. MC5, that's still cool. Yeah. But, you know, this other band might not be, but this connects to this, connects to that. And so putting it all together was so powerful. That's why soundtracks, well done soundtracks like this one, were so formative because they were a popery of types of music and styles,

but that made sense together and helped us form taste. It's also worth saying that, like, most movies, even something like Goodfellas that has like one of the great soundtracks ever made, it's all actually soundtracking scenes. And Scorsese and Robbie Robertson are picking these songs to go over these scenes. A lot of the music can pump up the volume

is music marks playing. It's music that is dietic for the scene. He's like saying like, okay, I'm going to play everybody knows over and over. That's going to be the theme song. When he drops wave of mutilation, he's like lying back and smoking and then there's just that montage of everybody listening to that song. And it actually recreates the sensation of what it's like to listen to a radio. And specifically, you know, if you ever had any experience with college radio, most college radio is not like pump up the volume.

Most of it is, you were just listening to, uh, to Mud Honey. That comes off of the superfuss big muff EP and, uh, really, really good stuff there. That's, you know, that's, you. usually what college radio was like, but... But the shows that succeeded weren't like that. And the sensation that it was you and 50 other people, or you in 75 other people, it's the same thing as going to, when you used to go to live shows

that were just like in a basement or in a small, small club, and you're like, I can't, are we really just all... This is it. We're here to see this. This is amazing. I think that the other thing

that is really would be striking if people could watch this movie, and I hope that they can somehow, is that I would imagine people who are a certain age and younger have just never been alone. I mean, they may feel like they've been alone, and they've certainly, I don't mean to question their own individual experiences or suffering, but like, if you have a phone, you could text someone or you could read something at someone else's reading or listen to something

else. Like being Paige in this movie in her incredibly floral bedroom, clutching the boombox like it's a life preserver is such an indelible image of that time because you could just, once you left school, you were just alone, right? You couldn't connect with other people. Maybe you didn't have a phone in your room, or maybe you didn't have a lot of friends. And so the way that they all are suddenly bonding over this, it's nothing new. I mean, anyone today who could find a way to watch this movie could relate to it,

but this is all they had. It's all they had. Which way is better? Is it better to never be alone, or is it better to be alone? Because, like, I look at my kids now, my daughter's never alone. She has her phone. If I, if she puts it next to her and I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll jokingly steal it.

And she looks around two minutes later. It's not there. It's like I took her right arm. The people in her life are always constantly in her life. She's always getting suggestions on watch this. You should look at this. She's constantly scrolling through looking for things that might get her attention. You think like in 1990, it's so effective that scene when they just paint around to the different people in their rooms.

Listen to this. Because what were you going to do? You wanted to stay in your room because you wanted to hide out from your parents. you don't want to be with them. You might have video games. You might be lucky enough to have a TV in your room. Most kids didn't. So this freaking pirate radio person jumps into your life. He's playing music you've never heard of. He's railing against your school. You're going to completely idolize this guy. I think it's really effective the evolution of him in that school, how they pull it off, where it really does seem organic. I don't have a lot of this movie's 30 years old. I don't. This movie's 30 years old. I don't. really have a lot of nitpicks or, man, I wish they changed this. This person's badly cast. That's amazing, right? Andy and I both thought, I think, we were

like, oh, is this going to, is this going to hold up? Like, because, you know, it may have been a couple years since we'd seen it. It more than holds up. I think, I mean, maybe the three of us will be wrong and everybody's going to be like, pump it by the volume. No, no way, this holds up. This movie is held together by what, like,

half a dozen of those DJ scenes. And then like a pretty effective, subplot of them throwing all these kids out of school and the school situation slowly like spinning out of control. And a really good ending too, I think. It's tight. It's a pretty tight movie in that regard. Well, but they also, they reinvent or the movie is reinvented over the years because in 2020, you get to watch it thinking of all the things they were stumbling into that they had no idea they were stumbling into in 1990. The idea of somebody gaining momentum

just by throwing stuff into the ether and then people listen to it and you start building an audience, the fact that millions of voices, that anyone can basically have a voice. The less of this movie, the end of it is like, yeah, anyone can have a voice. Go use yours. And that's the internet. But also the ending of the movie isn't, well, Mark's family hired a great defense attorney and he beat the case and went on to become the hero of the school. The end of the movie is he's going to jail maybe.

He's got arrested by the FCC. Everyone has been expelled or lost their jobs. He gets arrested. One of the things that I really admired about it 30 years later was how much it doesn't pander or try to like soften the edges of anything, including the suicide that happens relatively early in the movie. One of the first things that struck me is that if you made this movie today, not only would it be noted to death and not made and the soundtrack would suck, but B, Mark would have

to know what to say to the kid who is potentially, who is super, potentially, who is super, He would have to have the right language. He could in no way be blamed for his behavior. He would have to be unimpeachable on that call because suicide is a very serious issue then and now. But he doesn't know what he's doing because he's a 16-year-old kid. And it's so raw that it surprised me with my more contemporary eyes that are used to things, everything being sanded down. And I think the reason why the movie kind of is a little, it feels timeless in some ways,

is essentially it's just a superhero story. It's just a guy with a secret identity. You know, it is, it is like instead of web slinging, he's got a radio show, but he walks through the high school halls like a Clark Kent or Peter Parker, me like, nobody knows what I really am or what I really doing. And his power gets out of, out of his own hands. And he sees it. And he's like, I, I didn't want this to happen. I don't, I want to be kind of the weird, lonely voice in the wilderness. I don't want to be starting a revolution until he finally embraces that power. You know, Andy made the key point before, the suicide scene.

when you said it would be noted to death. It's the most authentic scene in the movie because he's presented with this serious situation. He handles it poorly. He starts to realize near the end, oh shit, this guy, this guy's serious. I got to try to figure this out. But he still messes it up.

The kid kills himself. And if this happens in 2020, you see it on your Apple News two days later. Teen Pirate Radio kills Katie does suicide. But when he comes on, that next show, it's the best moment of the movie because he's like, I never told you not to do it. He made a mistake. He learned from it. He figured it out. And that's what I worry about with my daughter's generations. Like, people aren't allowed to make mistakes anymore. You make a mistake.

Your life's over, your career's over. And even if it was a mistake that was made with genuine which I think in his case in this movie, I feel like he was genuine. He just, he was a 16-year-old kid. He'd know how to handle it. He didn't know how to handle it. He didn't know how to to read the situation. And it's such an important moment. And I think you're right, Andy. I don't think it happens in 2020. I think one of the best things about the movie, and this is also probably true of the fact of more movies then than now, because I think one of the things that entertainment TV movies try to do now is they try to be about everything all the time and try to do the best possible story of every one of the hundred stories you're doing. This is very focused, as Chris was saying. It's really about Mark and this

community, and that's about it. And because it's so focused on that, that suicide scene leaves us with a number of conclusions. One is that Mark screwed up. One is that Mark is affected by it. But the other more subtle one that it does so well is it makes us understand that Mark also wasn't responsible for the kid being as isolated as he was and having those feelings. This is a deeper indictment of the community and the failure of all the adults within the community and certainly at the school to notice or support their own children. So all of that can be true. And then the movie moves on because the movie is about one specific story. And I feel like that's an underrated aspect of it. And I like the ambiguity of the two things.

that happened after that scene or after that moment, which is that Mark does his heartfelt apology, then he takes a beat, and he can't fucking log off. Like he can't leave it alone. He has to come back and be like, you know what, man, why would you even want to go to heaven? Like that whole thing where it's like the flame of having a little bit of an audience

is almost too hot to stay away from. And he comes back immediately. And then the scene with the kid who calls about the incident with the other boys and getting kind of basically hazed and pranked for for being for being gay he is like Mark's handling of that is like pretty direct you know what I mean it's not it's like it's not like he has learned from his past mistakes and becomes that much more sensitive I mean he has the same character response to that as he did really to the suicide well this movie is perched

right at the collision of two totally different pathologies for talking to young people right Like in all the movies from the 70s and 80s and the way that people behave, you just don't talk about sex, right? Like it's secret and anything bad is secret and meant to be tamped down. And that's, as we've learned, hopefully culturally and societally, like, that's not really good. And what Mark does in the second, when he comes back and he's just like, if you die, you crap your pants and you don't want blah, blah, blah, blah. Talking about something takes away some of its forbiddenness and some of its power and everyone's laughing again, even the people who are upset. And it's actually kind of amazing. But it also definitely presages like the way talking about stuff changed once we could all talk to each other.

Well, he's also ahead of his time with how he handles the story from the gay kid. Absolutely. Because this is 1990. I mean, they weren't even letting gay people kiss on TV in 1990. And he's empathetic with it. There's two, he has two empathetic scenes, that one. And then when the teacher announces to the class that Malcolm dies and the whole, you could see the life goes out of his body and he's so upset. and it's not like, oh shit, I'm in trouble upset.

He's like, oh, my God, I could have helped that kid. And it's like all authentic. And just those two scenes alone, you're like, this is a good guy. I'm rooting for this guy. The thing is also about this movie and about this character and about his show is that it taps into something that a lot of very popular pods, but also talk radio from that era on, tapped into. Which is, yeah, it could be profound at times.

and it could be deep. There's a lot of fake jerking off going on in this movie. And the illicit kind of, this is what you can't hear anywhere else, but you know you think about it stuff, is really always been kind of the bread and butter of a lot of the more popular edgier shows, right?

Like since then, pods, but even, I mean, even like when you watch, like, talk radio with Eric Bogosian, or even if you, you know, had the misfortune of listening to like Alex Jones ever or like knowing, like, a lot of that stuff is like really crass. Aside from all the conspiracy theories, aside for all like the truth telling they claim to do, there's a lot of like really like, you know, they work blue.

Well, this is the era of like two major other streams in my life and your life too probably, right? Jerky boys and people talking about jerky boys, prank calls and those CDs and passing those CDs around and sitting around with people listening to them because they felt how did they get away with this? And also people taping Stern off the radio and playing you crazy Howard Stern bits because I mean, now he's an incredible interviewer, but the power of just being that transgressive and then being secretive about it was just it was irresistible. Well, then the third piece of that is this stuff would happen and then it would disappear. So like the Stern stuff, if you didn't hear it live, it was gone.

You know, if you didn't watch Letterman or tape it live, it was gone. And there's a lot of stuff like that. we didn't realize what was coming. I didn't realize YouTube was coming and streaming libraries and all this shit and that basically nothing ever dies. But I mean, I remember having tapes from the 80s. I remember having all the Letterman anniversaries on BHS. I had the 20, what was the Michael Jackson Moonwalk Motown special?

Oh, the 35th anniversary? From 84. From 84, whatever anniversary that was when he did Billy Jean. And that was like the greatest thing I'd ever seen in my life. I was like, I'll never erase this from my VHS, never thought like I'd be able to watch it wherever I wanted. Sure. So it was, I just think 1990 is such an interesting pop culture time. It's like all of the music that we love, it's not popular at all.

Nobody has any idea this Nirvana, Pearl Jam, grunge, all that shit, that that stuff is actually going to become popular music seemed inconceivable. And then you have basically blockbuster to rent movies and a couple cable channels and that. that's it to re-watch stuff. You had nobody to talk about with anything. That was the time when William Goldman was right in the New York Magazine movie things. And I felt like he was my one friend I could kind of talk to movies about,

even though he didn't know who the fuck I was. You just had so many limited people in your life to talk about the things you loved. And that's what this movie makes me think of. The other thing that I think is universal. And I really am curious if young people are ever able to see it what they think, is that the very first monologue

that Christian Slater delivers is basically about how everything is fucked, right? Yeah. Like, everything is fake. Everything is fucked. America, politics, music, art. It's all been done before and everything sucks. And you're like, check the micro-a-fiche for New York Times in 1990.

And it's like, the Berlin Wall had just come down. The Gulf War hadn't started yet. In retrospect, it's a pretty chill time in the American experiment. Oh, yeah. But living in suburbia, feeling detached and unheard and unloved and lonely, like, these are just the way people, this is the way people feel. And it's a different kind of suburbia because I don't know where Mesa is supposed to be situated. You know, is that supposed to be outside of Phoenix or Scottsdale or something like that?

But it's not exactly like a 30-minute train ride to Chicago. You know, these are these disconnected satellites. I would only push back on that because we have some evidence from the film. The only black character in the movie is the man who works with gangs, quote, downtown, who would like to rush happy. Harry Hard on and take him down. I was going to bring that up when we talked about things that age the worst. Yeah, that's what's age the worst?

Clearly there is a quote, downtown that is rife with gang violence. Yeah, we're going to have to chat about the inter-police department banter that happens in this movie. Oh, yes. Also, also a little bit interesting. So Slater did some interviews last month because he knew the, he's got that Dirty John series coming out.

I don't know why he didn't call us to be on one of our podcasts, but he's, he talked about how much he loved pump up the volume. He said it was his favorite movies ever made. And he said, you can never really introduce that movie to the next generation, meaning from a streaming standpoint. Because they were never able to saddle up on music rights. That is my favorite movie that I've ever done to a large degree, my favorite job. It was ahead of its time.

It wasn't a typical high school movie. It really did get into some of the darker, more gruesome details of what it's actually like to be a teenager in high school. I can't accept that because of some music rights. Like, really, they can't throw $25 grand at the Pixies? Can't Netflix get involved and just spend $2 million on the rights and just get this done and put it on their service? If something isn't on streaming, it is almost always because of music. Because it deals evaporate.

You know, there are even, there are deals on my show where it's like, we could get the rights to this in perpetuity, but it would cost this. So let's just get it for five years and make it someone else's problem, which means it's going to be my problem again someday. And reading, there's a, there's a, I was reading an interview that Vice did a couple years ago for the 15th anniversary of the movie. And with Kathy Nelson, who was the music supervisor and with Alan Moyle, the director. And you realize how much of this stuff, I think it still is this way, but certainly then, was just personal relationships and handshakes. And Alan Moyle knew Leonard Cohen because he's Canadian and his wife had worked with him.

And he begged him to get, to get his song to run throughout the movie. Beastie Boys never, ever, ever, ever, ever licensed their music. And the fact that this movie not only has a Beastie Boys song, but a song that has to date never been released. I mean, I don't know how you overcome it because it's not like it's just in the background and you could swap in something else, like the disposal of heroes of hypocrisy.

Here is a Beastie Boy song that is unreleased, and then everybody dances to it. You would have to reshoot the movie. Right. It's a 1990s problem because we've seen it with some TV shows. Freaks and Geeks was a big one. Melrose Place in 90210,0, there's key scenes, you know, rewatching some of those shows with my wife. And it's just the music is way off.

They're using, you know, music was a huge part of those shows, especially like new music, popular music, stuff like that. And it's being replaced by these generic. Is that why Homicide Life on the Street is kind of hard to find sometimes? Because they had, I know that they had a lot of like, they used a lot of music. They had like, I remember counting crows and belly. Like they had a lot of like a, of 90s all rock on. I don't think it was. a problem in the 70s and 80s. I think something shifted where maybe the music companies realized,

oh, you should only get this for a couple years or whatever. Yeah, after Barton Scorsese, he used 84 songs and Goodfellas. They were like, should we be charging for this? The director, is it Alan Moyne or Alan Moyle? I have Moyle. Okay, Moyle. I wrote Moyne for some reason. He said he wanted to make the Hard Harry character an amalgam of Holding Caulfield and Lenny Bruce, which, makes perfect sense. And I think, you know, at least my generation and years too, I think Holden Caulfield was a really influential shadow over a lot of stuff. I mean, he was really basically the first internet figure, even though he wasn't, they didn't have the internet back then,

but kind of that brash, you know, outspoken, not afraid of anybody, but deep down, afraid, you know, a character that was ripped off a lot of times badly in a movie. But in this movie, it works, I think. I think it's probably one of the best jobs of somebody just openly ripping off holding call field. And it also is a sign of sometimes notes can be good. From what I was reading about it, he wrote a script that was about a pirate radio DJ who was so depressed, he wanted to kill himself, and kept talking on the air about the different ways he was going to kill himself, and then everyone kept listening, and so he couldn't actually go through with it. And someone was like, this is pretty dark. If you want to make it, maybe reconsider. And he was realizing what he enjoyed. And he was realizing what he enjoyed

most about writing it was writing these rants, writing these riffs, and it was actually fun, and it could be fun to perform it and it would actually be able to be something other than a complete nihilistic downer, and somehow he pulled it off. A little like Good Morning of Vietnam in that respect, where the best parts of this movie are when he's doing the radio show just quickly. Slater, so, you know, he'd been around for a few years, and he'd been in, he was in Name of the Rose, he was good in that movie, he was in Cleveland in the cube. He was...

He's in future rewatchable legend of Billy Jean. Oh, yeah. You went in on to that one, Andy? Helen Slater? Yeah. That was another movie that created the internet.

Christian Slater was in two movies that created the internet. And then he was in Heathers. And after he was in Heathers, everyone's like, next Nicholson. Lock it down. This guy.

He's going to be the next Jack. How many Oscars? Then he made a couple, whatever movies. But then after this movie... Cuffs. Yeah. I really believe the next...

Nicholson thing after this movie. I was like, if Nicholson was 20 years old, this is exactly the kind of movie he would have made, and I'm in. Yeah, and what's incredible for, I think this is probably speaking for me and Chris, is that like, this movie came out at the exact time when I had no history of movies. I only had the present. So I heard people say he was like Jack Nicholson, and I'd seen Jack Nicholson in one movie, Tim Burton's Batman. And I thought he was great. And I was like, Well, obviously, he's exactly like that guy, but he's younger and he's speaking to my generation. So I was like, this is the most important actor alive. And then I went to see cuffs in the theater and began to question my own ability to judge things correctly.

But, yeah, I mean, he was perfect for it. And apparently in the contract that Alan Moyle signed with New Line, he said that he would direct this movie and he would, you know, make it for them. And everybody wants to make the movies they write. But he would only do it if he had final say on who played Mark because he had to get it right, be able to pull it off. And he had to spend all this time with him. And he wasn't sure he could find that person. Yeah, it's hard to overestimate, like, the impact heathers in this movie had. And, like, the fact that even though these are very, like, classic protagonists,

classic teen protagonists that he's playing, there wasn't really a contemporary, like, comp for them. Like, when I remember going into high school and these movies being very big, very big also among, like, the girls in my high school. And it was, like, it kind of split the average. him on like the jock or nerd thing because it was like super cool outcast which wasn't really a type like even John Cusack often played like very neurotic but incredibly sweet guys this Mark's not sweet you know what I mean and JD in in Heather's is not sweet so and Cusack by the way was the

first choice I mean and you just stepped on casting what ifs oh I mean I'm I'm sorry, we'll come back to it. God. I don't have the rundown in front of me. Come on, Andy. I thought we were doing things differently on the unwatchables, but I'll go back to the. They can't watchables.

So Slater hot, but we, Samantha Mathis is too good for what stage is the best. Nora De Niro, the two, I mean, I was in arguments in college about Nora De Niro or the Winona Ryder, Heather's character.

Like, who would you pledge your love to out of those two? Nora De Niro is probably my favorite character of the entire 20th century for female characters. I absolutely love every single piece of her. She's the fucking best. She ends up going to jail for the guy. It's like, what more do I want for my high school girlfriend?

The best. Nora De Niro invented the person that I would have crushes on for the next 15 years. Oh, yeah. From the way she dresses, from the way her walls are covered with photos and art, from the way she has like tapes and books strewn on shelves. and low-key, this is very important, she drinks tea. Like the coolest girls were always like,

would you like a cup of tea? And I was like, what? I mean, yes, of course. That's what I want to do tonight is drink seven cups of Lipton just to be at the same table with you. She is the pinnacle. But here's the problem. I never found even a 60% version of her.

Like what you realize is she, at least for me on the East Coast, didn't really exist in real life. There was this person I was like, man, if I ever meet this person, it's over. Yeah, but you would probably wind up dating people who had just one or two of her qualities. Like, or are you really into craft? Let's date for a year. That's my 90s.

Like, you're wearing a vest? Let's go. It's kind of like how Chris has talked to himself in a shake Milton during the NBA playoffs. He's like, you have one or two of the qualities that I need for my point card. Sorry, Chris, too soon. The title card of, I'm scared. I'm skipping right over it. The title card of introducing Samantha Mathis should just put it right next to Ken Griffey Jr's

upper deck rookie card as like that's the kind of debut we're talking about. Well, and then she makes, so I mean, the things I invested the most in in 1990 were Ken Griffey's upper deck rookie card and Samantha Mathis stock. I basically spent 90% of my money on those two things. She made that music movie that River Phoenix was in. You know what's the name of that movie? Thing called Love, right? Yeah.

Fell in love with River Phoenix. Yep. Then was dating him when he died. She was with him that night. Then had, she was in Broken Arrow, ironically, with Christian Slater, where they were reunited, which was super exciting for people like us. But it never totally happened in the way I want. And she's still around.

Like, she's still in, she's in a show now. With Winona Ryder, which was a very big deal for me. Head to head. But I'll say this. I am trying to maintain my comedy, my level-headedness, my marriage when I speak about Samantha Mathis just throughout her career. But I'll say that on a visit to Los Angeles in 2006, I went to Jones on 3rd, and Samantha Mathis was seated at a table behind me,

and I have never been more star-struck in my life. Wow. The shadow that she has cast upon my life, is unparalleled to the degree that I would still, if you were running down her CV, I would mention that she was on Lost when she was on one episode of Lost in a flashback to the old island science classes,

and I remember it. And she's still working. She's on billions. I mean, she's a working actor. But the role in the early 90s. Yeah, Nora is an all-timer. When we do, Chris, when we get to our 200th episode and we have the rewatchy awards,

nor is going to be for best actress. Yes. Because I think the other thing we should say, since we're comparing, you know, characters and archetypes from 80s movies or later movies, she's not a manic pixie dream girl. I mean, we don't meet her through Mark's gaze. We just see her as hanging out with her cool friend

who's played by a, there are two Zappas in this movie, Amet Zappa, and Lala Slotman, who plays the cool friend, is secretly a Zappa, a cousin. And she's just a fully, functioning a live person who has also been writing letters as the Meet Me Beat Me Lady and has her own reason for doing everything she does and is doing some early Carrie Matheson stuff with the with the

cork board on her wall. She's like breaking down like the clues of who Mark is. She's a home run even when the parents come down in the basement and oh my God and she pretend I'm like just the way she handles that it's like this is the greatest yeah she should be a wheel man in a bank job yeah yeah she has cigarettes She was. She drove the... How about that line? Have you driven a Jeep before? Yeah. Right. Doesn't even need to answer. Obviously, she has. Home run. You'll see her again on the rewatches for the 200 three watchable.

So this movie didn't do that well. It only made 11.5 million. Nominated for four Independent Spirit Awards in 91, failed to win any. Who knew they had the Independent Spirit Awards in 91? Roger Ebert. I'm going to go over under his two here. Under. What do you think, Andy? his review of it yeah it feels like a kind of a tossed off certain things are nice but he's seen it and heard it all before I'm with Chris three and a half stars what Roger he's back maybe why am I always underselling

he's back every every time I give up by Roger he pulls me back in he said it was hard hitting critical and worth seeing really liked it right at Raj man you're back huge for Raj all right We're going to do the categories. We're going to take a break. We're going to do a special break here. We're going to do a live trailer for the watch with Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald. Go, guys. You can listen to The Watch on Mondays and Thursdays on the Ringer podcast Network. We've been doing this for quite a few years, Andy and I. We've been friends for quite a few years. Currently, we were talking mostly about Lovecraft Country. I may destroy your two shows that have been on HBO recently. We've also been breaking down. It's the dog days of summer.

So Andy and I have been breaking down the novel and the 1989 miniseries Lonesome Dove. Oh. Yeah, deep dive. Summer of Dove. If you didn't have enough 30-year-old entertainment in your life from this podcast, have we got a twice-weekly podcast for you? Yeah. When you're done looking for a copy of Pump Up the Volume, you can unearth a 900-page Western by Larry McMurtry. Fingers on the poll.

Only on the watch. The watch, twice a week. All right. we're going to do the categories. I wanted to mention, I don't know how long it's going to be on there. But if you do want to watch this movie, the three of us watched it on YouTube. And somebody put the movie up in 24 parts and did it so that when the part ended it, it just immediately went to the next part.

Yeah, it's on a playlist. And it was kind of, kind of seamless. I have no idea how long it's going to last. I'm sure 24 hours after this podcast goes up, I'll take it down. God, it's, here's the thing. Maybe it should be taken down because this needs to be on a streamer. And Ted Sarandos, guy who runs peacock, Casey Blois, what do you need to step up? Do the right thing.

We've seven streamers. This could be a huge domino in the streamer rivalry who gets pumped up the volume 30 years later. Or let's just act like the end of the movie and put out a clarion call that this is a pirate movie about a pirate radio station and let a million dark web tour streaming sites shine. Maybe that was this movie's destiny, 30 years later, to be a torn pirate movie. All right, most rewatchable scene, the first scene, the opening scene where we meet Hard Harry. He does two fake masturbations. It's a six time in an hour. Oh, God.

He sounds like a chronic masturbator. He prides himself on it. You see, I have to take care of it. He has the classic quote, an exhausted decade where there's, nothing to look forward to and nothing to look up to. You see, great themes have been used up, turned into theme parks. So I don't really find it exactly cheerful to be living in the middle of a totally exhausted decade where there's nothing to look forward to and no one to look up to.

It should have been a really good senior year, but quote, we also meet that blonde loser in the parking lot, who I guess we're going to litigate later whether that character work. But he's like his one true fan. So we get that scene first. second scene hard harry i just wrote it down this way hard harry reads the poetry ladies letter plays beastie boys

and talks to suicidal malcolm there's a lot going on in that scene but it all happens all in a row and includes the quote which uh i'm sure Craig will pull for the clip but i'll just say it here where he goes i like the idea that a voice

can just go somewhere uninvited maybe it thought it's like a virus you know it can They can kill all the healthy thoughts and just take over. It's a great, it's just a great riff. It's really high level and it's just that whole scene's great. As it turns out, a virus is like a virus. So 2020 us can.

We're going to push back on that. That's what stage the worst. He also says about poetry lady. I bet in real life she's just like us, which is a theme. Then the Malcolm call, he's like, what's going on with you? And he's all aggressive. And there's a pause. And Malcolm goes,

I'm all alone. And he knows he's serious. It's just a really good scene. I was shocked by how good that scene has held up for the last few years. It's worth noting that that Malcolm scene comes after the prank where the two girls pretend to be the Jews being abused. And he's kind of already primed to be skeptical of the letters. Suspicious, yeah.

Yeah. Next one is his first show after Malcolm dies, which we discussed earlier. But he does consider the life of a teenager speech. He says, sometimes being young seems worse than being dead. These are things that are, you know, 10% corny when you see him on a thing, but are also poignant, especially if you're 16 and you're searching for anybody who can speak to you. He says, I don't mind being affected and rejected, but I'm not going to be afraid anymore.

The real me is just as disturbed as the rest of you. This is fucking catnip for 16-year-olds. So we're listening to him in a boombox of their bedroom and hate their parents. I like the scene when Mark's parents almost bust them. That scene's really funny. And Nora pops up. Mark and Nora, another one rewatchable the next day when they're walking through school and he's looking at the signs, all that stuff.

And she's like, don't you see that you're the voice? And then the driving radio show at the end when they hop in the Jeep and he's doing the show and the reactions of the kids, everybody's in. All of those are super rewatchable. but I am going with wave of mutilation is probably the greatest minute of my life. It's one of my favorite music drops in a movie ever. Yeah, me too.

Good night, pal. Night friends. The way that they do it where Mark starts playing this song, he leans back. It's post-Nora, right? Nora's already left. He's smoking a cigarette. No, he's thinking about Nora.

No, he's thinking about, I think he's thinking about everything, but she is listening and she's sitting at her like drafting table with like paint remover or like whatever it can in front of her. And that moment where like she's listening to him play the song and they're all, everybody's having the reaction and everybody is smoking inside in their parents' house somehow. Yeah. It's fucking perfect. The movie is celebrated, we're celebrating it for a lot of reasons, but it's really well

directed and really well edited. And all the like the cuts, the inserts, like the moment that they cut to the iguana to the, to the shots they have. of the way suburbia looks when it's being built in the middle of a desert that probably shouldn't have houses on it set to wave of mutilation and the slow version of wave of mutilation? I agree. I would only vote for the screaming party shirtless dance scene that ends with Paige

microwaving all her shit. Yeah, that's a good one too. So you're talking this era of music where you have Camper Van Beethoven, you have World Party, the church, you have a little XTC, you got a little Morrissey solo at this point him and Johnny Marr little argument a little Fugazi in there Peter Murphy although they played not to nitpig I would have gone different

for working Peter Murphy and I had a couple other choices I might have gone and got a little Billy Bragg there's definitely like a specific era here but that slow version of Wave and Mutivate which I think is called the what is it called the UK surf version UK serve I think that's the single best song of that whole era. And the fact that they picked that song is amazing. Like, what a great job by the. And it speaks to an era when you were talking about Nirvana, like college rock was a thing. I mean, there was like IRS records compilations and 120 minutes and certain radio stations maybe on the East Coast played some of this at like 10 p.m. But it hadn't broken. It was all pretty secret.

Remember people were mad at, people were mad at R.m. They're like, wait a second, guys. Slow down. You're getting a little too popular, guys. Slow down. Don't go pop. That was, that was a thing. What are you doing? reading about the movie, like the Leonard Cohen song was always vital to Alan Moyle and to his vision of the character and the lyrics of,

of course, are really relevant to the film. But the company, New Line, was like, Leonard Cohen, I don't know, we want something a little more pop. How about Concrete Blonde covers it? So imagine a world

where executives are like, we need to go pop. Let's get Concrete blonde. Yeah. Concrete blonde is not pop. And they're great too. That was the same thing with one,

Massey Star did Sweet Jane and it was in Natural Born Killers, Right? Like, it was just that, like, kind of like, somebody's idea to contemporarize something would be like, let's have Massey Star just give her their take on it. Well, so rarely does a movie come out, but have the music that's completely relevant at the time the movie comes out. Sometimes you could even miss it by like nine months, you know?

I think one of the reasons, we talked about this when we did the Reality Bites podcast way back when on this pod with Chuck. one of the reason singles is considered to be a grunge gen X movie is the music and they just stumble into this right at the perfect time when that kind of music needed to be in a movie and Cameron Crow was in Seattle and saw it ahead of time. But as Chuck said, that's a movie about people in their late, you know, who were like adults. They're like the guys trying to build the perfect train in Seattle. It was like a weather lady, yeah. Yeah, it was like they were all fully formed people.

This movie has young people, but then the kind of music that the cool kid who moves from New York to Seattle listening, so it's got just the either the soundtrack or stuff used in the movies, Sonic U, SoundGuard and the Pixies were the big three choices that I think you had to nail. I was surprised they didn't do Nirvana. Leonard Cohen was a really interesting zag. Richard Hell, Love Comes and Spurts. How'd you feel about that one?

And that was like fucking deep dive. Yeah, but that's also perfect for the creature stirs. The sixth time in an hour, it's a gusher. Then they use, they have bad brains with Henry Rollins doing MC5. They have, uh, the cowboy junkies doing Robert Johnson. And then they also had the descendants, as you mentioned. They have was not was. And they had that Beastie Boys outtake.

It's fucking ridiculous. It's like a 10 out of 10. You can't overstate also what a giant. breaking of the rule it is because when you write a script, you're told not to write specific songs into it, because what if you don't get it? And so every time you see a movie where you're like, it's at a big club scene or a dance scene and everyone's sort of shaking awkwardly and not to the right rhythm, it's because they weren't playing the song that you're hearing in the movie because they couldn't get that song or they couldn't clear that song. So they try to make it

as nonspecific as possible. So they set this move. I mean, he guaranteed they had to get the songs like we were saying about Bisi Boys because it's in the script. And so they had to do it. And that specificity is totally different from something like singles where Cam and Crow is like, I know these guys. They'll record a whole bunch of new songs for me for this movie that has nothing to do with the lived experience of the characters. It's more my lived experience being married to the singer from Hart. They tell Aaron Moyle like, hey, man, 30 years from now,

we're going to be in trouble with streaming just so you know. It's like, fuck it. Let's roll the dice. I also, first of all, self-correction, it's Cowboy Junkies not Mazzy Star for that sweet Jane cover. But the second thing I was going to say is that they crucially never deviate too far from what like 16-year-olds would actually like. Like 16-year-olds might be like, oh, cool, Leonard Cohen, I feel deep.

They also listen to the descendants. And they love like a 12-second song that makes them freak out, like, you know, like a hardcore song like that. And it's got like a cartoonish element to it. It's got like a little bit of an immaturity. It's perfect. Yeah.

Great, yeah. Wonderful. Another what's age the best. I'm just going wave of mutilation a second time. Another what's age the best. You mentioned earlier how you, it's basically a superhero movie in disguise, Chris, where you have Mark Hunter,

nerdy kid who lives in his basement, who has to eat in the stairwell, and can't even have a conversation with the hottest girl in his school. And she's like, hey, what's this Lenny Bruce book? And he's like, uh, it just like runs away. And then he turns into hard hairy at 10 o'clock every night.

And it's the classic two identities thing, which, by the way, works every time. Yeah. If you pull it off correctly, it's great. Especially with a high school movie where in high school, it's so easy to hide and recede in the corners and, you know, kind of pretend to be this other person. And it's online life, too, where people might not be the same people, IRL as they are online and the versions of themselves that they create their best version, at least they think so, that could attract people or repel people or whatever and that you're performing. And he's most comfortable. And he turns his back on her when she's in his room to become his alter.

ego to speak to her. That's why, Bill, I think Andy wanted to use this opportunity to reveal that he's among the great Russiagate tweeters that we have. Yeah. You know, anonymous deep state intel, and he does like 60 tweet threads about meetings in, in, and pimacies. I'm actually a Krasenstein brother. I'm the lost Krasenstein brother, and I have a lot to say. I thought Andy was the head moderator on the Reddit conspiracy board. That's not true? No, it's not. Not doing that. Nora De Niro, I put her also in what stage is the best. I'm just putting her in every category we can sneak her in. I really like the Malcolm character.

That's a character that really could go wrong in the wrong hands. And that whole scene in general. But, you know, the mom comes in, want to come down and watch TV with us. He's like, not really. And she's like, oh, you never want to be with us. It's like, yeah, this kid's in pain. How could you not see this? And then just the way he hangs up the phone, all that stuff.

I thought that stuff was really good. What else to age the best for you guys? You mentioned it, Bill, the scene when the kid calls and talks about being hazed for being gay. And just the fact that, as you said, in a 1990 movie, the kid is like, I like guys and that's who I am. I mean, there's just a plainspokenness about that and about all the characters, ultimately their comfort with themselves that I just think feels. I would say it's aged the best because it just plays so well. I would argue that it's in some ways braver than a lot of the teen entertainment that gets put out today because it's a lot more direct.

You know, it just doesn't, it doesn't try to fix everything. It just presents things. I think it's, I think its tone is really amazing and is held up. I would say we've covered everything. I'd say what age the best except for Ellen Green as cool English teacher. Oh, I have a lot to say about Ellen Green. Do you want to say that has aged the best? Yeah. I had that in a what's age the worst, too. Interesting. Well, the role of- Coley-E

on Waiters. Okay. Okay. I just like, did she know he was hard-haired? Like, I just could never figure out there. Because at the end, when she says, hey, I just want to say I got fired.

And he kind of does the weird Christian Slater thing. And then did she know he's hard hair? I thought that was too ambiguous for me. I just thought to do what she did with the screen time, had to communicate that just through a few moments of sipping wine that she, in her off hours, that she, unlike these other stooges, is a freedom appreciating libertine who should be protected and exalted at all costs. I just, I was impressed. And also casting Ellen Green, who basically played the part of Audrey in Little Shop of Horrors for her entire career.

She played it off Broadway. She played it in Broadway. She played it in the movie. She continued to play it into her 60s in regional productions. Just the fact that he castes, and he was like, this role could have been played by any actress. Casting someone who was kind of a countercultural off-Broadway theater legend, I thought that was a good choice. I just thought it was the best because you got to have the cool English teacher. Every high school movie, there's got to be the one teacher who maybe steals a cigarette outside every once in a while and he's like, eh, you know, I just wound up in this job

because my novel didn't work out, but I'm here for you. And if you ever want to talk, you know, I'm around. Yeah, that's fair. Well, the answer for What's Age the Best is a tie between the soundtrack and Samantha Methus. What's age the worst? I think the Shep Shepard TV reporter could have been a lot funnier. That's in the right hands, like a really good role for somebody who's a little sticky but kind of gets it. And I just think they miss that one.

the gay scene that we mentioned earlier with the kid calling in, I can't say it was the best acted scene. I wanted a little more from the actor. It's just weird. It almost seemed like the real actor called in sick and they had to grab some other kid because they were filming the scene that day. That's kind of the Shep Shepard thing too, right?

You can feel the budget of the movie in some of the supporting performances who just have to step up and deliver in one scene. There's a crucial mistake that they make with the Shep Shep Shepard part, which is that timing-wise, they could have borrowed the character of Dick Thornberg from Die Hard. And then, like, after he gets fired in L.A., he washes out. He's in Arizona.

Shows up in Mesa, and he's like, Hard Harry is my way back to network. It always bothers me that movies don't do that. Just pull characters from other movies and just like basically cross the streams. William Anderson couldn't have been that busy. Just bring them on. Since this movie was doomed never to stream anyway, why not just cross all the copyrights and let it fly? Another what's age the worst.

His shows are pretty short the way they're presented in the movies. It's hard to imagine. It would be like somebody becoming a huge podcaster and the podcaster like, my podcast today is eight minutes. I don't know how you gain an audience. You would think there would have been that one night

where he's just doing a show until like 3 30. They said he does like a five-hour show sometimes. But we never see it, though. That would make it a much longer film. Well, but there should be one where we see the clock and it's 2.30 at night and he's fucking on his 100th cigarette still going. So this is a personal nitpick from any movie from like 85 to 94. I don't think the posters in the bedrooms were where they needed to be. And, you know, like how we talk about, yeah, well, you know, Chris and I talk sometimes on the pod here about how every time anyone's making us

sports movie, I should get a phone call. And they should just run the logistics by me and be like, hey, we're thinking about doing this. The team's going to be down 5'2 in the ninth inning. Can you just make sure we're not fucking this up? There should have been a poster consultant from 85 to 94. Posters were so important to everybody's bedroom. And you can even go back to the 70s, like, Boogie Nights Nails it. With Dirk Degler's room is like how somebody's room would have looked in 76. There was so much opportunity for the posters because you had, this is the height of the Nike basketball poster era. You have the early hip hop posters, all those around. But then you also have like those Sonic Youth Soundgarden Nirvana posters. You have concert posters that we can buy at

that point. Big missed opportunity. The only one that got it right. Maybe this is when they started bringing in consultants was Angela's room on my so-called life. The posters, the posters on my so-called life spoke the deep truth that the camper van Beethoven cassette spoke here. They would also like, this was also weirdly like people who didn't, wouldn't have posters on their walls, often had posters over the walls in shows back then, like, in law and order, they would go into like a pedophiles apartment and it would be like, here's my Elvis Costello poster. And it's just like, really?

Like, you're really like, my aim is true that much. That's the one thing you haven't sold for drugs. So that's any other What's Age the Worse for you guys? Yeah. We mentioned the gang leader. Yeah, we mentioned him or heard of that. That was tough.

I would say pretty much Christian Slater is impeccably cool in this movie except for that one moment when he's walking to his PO box and he puts on the wraparound shades. Yeah, that's weird. I don't remember being cool at all

and all of a sudden he just seems like a fucking total class A dork like real like he looks like Max Headroom all of a sudden. I've got one. There was only one thing in this 30-year-old movie that made me recoil

and it wasn't like the threat of suicide it wasn't the excitement of seeing Samantha Mathis on screen again. It was simply Mark's eagerness to be on the telephone.

As soon as he gets a letter, he interrupts all the good songs we've been mentioning on the soundtrack to pull out his cordless to extend that antenna and just cold call someone.

My blood ran ran to ice. The, like, the, the lengths that we go as a people to not be on the phone in 2020 is just he he flouts it he flouts it it's outrageous how much he wants to be on the phone do you guys ever use the landline anymore no no no sir i got you ever just in case did you do you run it from your neighbor's shed just to throw off the FCC by a matter of like hours yeah he's like he's like that now

don't worry it's within a thousand yards of here thousand yards not that much in Arizona. I had that in nip picks. We can cover that now. The FCC should have, no, let's do it now. The FCC should have figured out where this kid was within five minutes.

You know who else should have figured it out? His fucking parents. Well, that's the biggest. He's smoking in the basement for hour four. And we just hear him monologuing. Yeah, exactly. Well, how about the fact that 10 minutes into the movie,

only someone who is related to a school board official could have this document. Well, Let's not talk about that anymore. And then the little clues of like, we moved here from back east. My dad got me a pirate radio thing to talk to my friends from back home. I sit in the stairwell every day. You did not need Sherlock Holmes to figure out who hard Harry was.

Casting what ifs. The director wanted John Cusack. He read the script. He liked it. Told the director, I've just played my last teenage role if he got me last year. I would have jumped at it. I'm really glad John Cusack wasn't in this movie.

He would have been too old. I actually think Christian Slater seems like he's a junior in high school or whatever he's supposed to be. He's perfect for it. One of the amazing things about reading these interviews with Alan Moyle, who seems like a real character, is he's talking about Christian Slater and how great he was, but he keeps talking about how young he was and he needed someone young to pull it off. And, you know, he was embarrassed to take a shirt off. He was embarrassed to dance.

He didn't want to cry. He ate maple syrup soup for breakfast at catering. every morning. But yesterday, Tuesday, was Christian Slater's 51st birthday, which means the youngest he could have been when filming this movie was 20. But Alan Moyle seems to have thought he hired a 15-year-old and has continued to push this to this day. So I noticed the same thing. Yeah, he made it seem like he was a baby and he just wasn't. He was probably 16 when he did Legend of Billy Jean. Well, he almost hired Drew Barrymore to be Nora. Oh, no. And Drew Barrymore and her agents apparently pursued the part really hard.

He really likes Samantha Mathis and pushed for her and she got it. Drew Barrymore would have been 15 in this movie. I'm really glad that didn't happen. As much as I like Drew Barrymore and I'll ride or die with Drew Barrymore and Mad Love. Did she do Poison Ivy instead? Poison Ivy, yeah, she probably did. She's too young in that movie too. It's just like too early.

Thank God she wasn't it. Best that guy, aka the Joey Pants Award. So this is crazy. We just did Teen Wolf. I did it with Kyle Brandt. And two of the people from that movie are also, it's a double character.

They were in that category for that movie and this movie. Mark's dad is the guy who runs the play in Teen Wolf. And more importantly, was Professor Randall and 902 and O. In the incredible love triangle with Brandon, Lucinda, Nicholson and her husband. See, that guy, Mark's dad, and Teen Wolf's dad is the head of the FCC with the bad rug at the end. Yeah. So I don't know who you guys decide who you want to give that

to him. I would also shout out Lynn Shea, who's one of the parents at the PTA meeting and goes on to be incredibly creepy in the insidious movies and lots of other horror movies going forward. I've got one, which is the guidance counselor who gets pranked, you know, and Devers. Devers. Yeah. Played by Robert Schenken, who is a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, who has been celebrated for his 1992 play The Kentucky Cycle and wrote all the way the LBJ play that Brian Cranston took to Broadway. Wow, that has to win. Pulitzer Prize winner. That's great. But imagine being a like, you know, he's just this like a Renaissance guy, he's a playwright, he's an actor, he's a director, he's a writer. And then he gets the call to be the guidance counselor villain in this

movie. Okay, that's what he's going to do. The Vincent Hanna, give me all you got a word for overacting or bad acting. To me, it's the Humphrey High Principal. Who talks like this? This isn't going to happen in our school. It's just like a classic terrible actor. Can we discuss the moment where we're not sure. We're maybe on the fence about her, how much of a villain she is. And then we see that after hours at the school, she's sipping brandy out of a sniff her. That is an incredible moment by her. Yeah, she was terrible. The Dean Waiters Award, you mentioned the English teacher, who's the odds on favorite. Got to mention Mollett Seth Green. Yeah. Yeah. Mollett Seth Green, who has like two lines, but is one of the oddballs who loves

hard hairy and figures out a way to get the tape played in the loudspeaker system. Seth Green is basically like Gene Hackman or Jack Warden. I have no idea how old he was. It seems like he was the age of the guy in this movie for 25 years. Because he was in Camp Imi Love three years earlier. And he's Patrick Dempsey's little brother. And he seemed like a little kid. But now in this movie, he's fully formed Seth Green,

where he then remained for the next 30 years. So can I ask you a question? Yeah. Since you are a couple years older than us, so you were in high school around this time or earlier. The Seth Green scene you mentioned, Seth Green, he really does come off the top rope and just organizes effortlessly the biggest prank in the film and broadcast this mix of Divers that I guess he worked on at home borrowing Ferris Bueller synthesizer rig. I'm not sure. But he loops it in, hardwires it into the school PA system. Flomixing every single employee of the school, teacher, janitorial staff, groundskeeper, everyone. And then we have a brief moment where we see the PA system and it looks like something that is power. by dilithium crystals in an early Star Trek movie. It is the most complicated device I've ever seen.

The idea that they're like, we can't shut it down like it's the nuke in Armageddon. Yeah. Like the ghost is in the machine. I just made no sense. That's what PA systems were? Yeah. It's an unrealistic scene.

I didn't pick a Knits as well. So Seth Green or the English teacher? Let's go. For Dion? Yeah. I'm going to go. Seth Green. I also want to go

South Green. I'm outvoted. I'm on an island with Ellen Green where I'm happy to be. As much as I love the image of the lonely English teacher

drinking wine and listening to Hard Harry. Do you think they filmed all those shots of her drinking wine listening to the radio in one day? Yeah.

You're done. Ellen, you're done. Yeah. Same close. That's a picture wrap on Ellen for today. Let's, uh... Well, unfortunately,

I have Ellen for my my choice for recast and couch. How dare you? Just hear me out. All right. I do think this film needed one person who was some sort of umbilical cord to the John Hughes era.

Just put Ali Sheedy in that English teacher scene and work with me on it for a second. I've got the DNA of the Brat Pack breakfast club, but now she's grown up. I get to be like, oh, it's Ali Sheedy. Well, it's great to see her. She's in the movie, not too much. and I don't know. That was my choice. So she would have been what, like 28, 30 at that time?

I would say mid-20s. Like, realistic for like the single English teacher trying to figure out. Just a couple of years outside. She's done in Arizona. She's seen, what is that? She's like she's coming. She had a great time watching Sean Elliott at Arizona.

Great time. When you're talking. New Steve Kerr a little bit. Yeah, new Steve Kerr a little bit. Turned them on to some books. Yeah. When on one day with that it didn't work out. I think you're convincing me because if you cast someone like Ali Sheedy,

who is best case scenario for Nora to grow into, it suggests that there's a future beyond high school, and you could do it visually without, because there was no real estate in the movie for her to be like, kids, let me tell you it's going to be fine. Here's some cool tapes, and Lenny Bruce is funny. There was no room for that. So if you just cast someone who is aspirational, it does that work.

I'm switching teams. Great. Half-ass internet research. I'll go quick. Chris, this one more recasting that you mentioned, Bill. You mentioned 9021010. The dad, sorry, what if you put Jimmy Eckhouse in that role? What if you would put?

Because the parents in this movie, chain smoking, watching TV, drinking their wine from goblets at dinner time, filled the similar role that non-mobob people filled in the Sopranos, where you'd be watching the Sopranos and you'd be like, oh my God, David Chase understands the language of the streets so well. And then you'd cut to Dr. Melfi with Peter Bogdanovich, and they'd be like, did you listen to the radio interview on NPR this weekend? No, I was wine tasting with my associates. Right. They played that role to perfection, but it wasn't good enough. I wish that we could have seen someone who had a little bit of humanity so that when he has the turn at the end where he's like, no, you're fired, you're not completely flummoxed. You're like, he had it in him the whole time.

Yeah, right. That's fair. Also, Tim Kazerinsky should have been the main teacher. That's a great one. Or him or Brian Doyle-Dill-Berry. Have Fassnernery Research. one's for you. Christian Slater became physically ill several times during filming due to all the cigarette smoking he did. It's great. Famous really committed, man. When did they start doing fake cigarettes in movies?

After this movie. After Christian Slater gave us help. The school in the film was based on a Montreal High School where the director's sister used to teach that did some of the same stuff where they would weed out people that brought down the averages. Slater, the director wanted to orchestrate the whole masturbation dance sequence. Hard Harry has fake masturbation.

And Slater overruled him, wanted to be spontaneous. The movie was filmed in Santa Clarita, which makes total sense having spent a few weekends there for soccer things. It's very Arizona-e and kind of desolate and weird over there. And then apparently Christian Slater, his driver's license, had been suspended for the second time in two years over DUS. Yikes. So they couldn't have any scenes where his character drove. And that's why for the final scene, Mathis is driving.

Nora had to drive. Right. So there you go. Apex Mountain. Christian Slater. Yes. I kind of think so. I think so too.

I think he thinks so. I think that he thought it was going to be Robin Hood. You know, I think that that was the next level was being in Young Guns to Arkansas, Dave Rudebaugh or whatever he played there, and then being in Robin Hood with Costner, and that was going to be, you're now a blockbuster movie star, and it just kind of, it just kind of never happened. Costner's accent wouldn't let it happen. No, he did not.

But this was the moment when the way that he was treated and shot in Heathers and in this convinced everyone, and we were saying convinced us, that this was the next leading man. He wasn't just a character actor. He was a leading man because he had that charisma, and what kind of a movie gives an actor, or a young actor, this many monologues, just a cook. Well,

and then when he's in true romance, we're like, yes, I fucking told you. I knew it was going to happen. And then it never totally happened. Samantha Mathis, not just her Apex Mountain,

but I think we should change the name to Apex Mountain to Nora De Niro Mountain. It's fine with me. Apex Mathis. Or just at least put her face on it. Man, great job by hair. Pirate Radio.

I think this is the Apex. right? This was, uh... There's a movie called Pirate Radio Philip Seymour Hoffman in 2009, and it was not as good as this. Yeah, so I think he may be right. That's him on a boat off like the coast of England, right? Yeah, which apparently those like rave era pirate radio DJs inspired Alan Moyle to make pirate radio a thing in this movie. Right. But, but I agree. This was this was its best. My buddy Gus, nobody inspired nobody apparently. It's too bad. He was three years ahead of Hard Harry.

This is tough. Apex Mountain. The Pixies? Were they still together in 90? Yeah, right? Yeah. Yeah, they had 89.90, so they still had two more records at least to come out.

I mean, this is coming off of Doolittle. So it's pretty big deal. It's right in the range. Is this a bigger Pixies drop than where is my mind in Fight Club? And in every television show since. Sure. I think it is. Just because it's so perfect.

Counter argument is that you can actually still watch Fight Club, I guess. Fair. It's viewable. Yeah, I mean, it's Apex Mountain in the sense that this was because Pixies were the ultimate that band and that they never

got big, but the coolest person you know had the Surfer Rosa tape. And getting to hear it and having some it was a password of sorts. And this is right at the peak of it and it introduced them to the most people, but not a ton of people because the movie failed at the box office. So I can see that argument.

Where, uh, Pixies versus Replacements, which was the bird and magic of the late 80s, beginning of the 90s, where did you guys ride? I'm a replacement's person. Yeah, I was a replacement's person. I was Pixies from where they came from. Can I, can I suggest this was some some Massachusetts ties with them. I think I actually had a couple of, uh, a high school girl experiences that were wrapped around the replacements that tied me to them. I was just alluding to my own Nora who gave me that tape.

Is this Apex Mountain for flipping switches? Because every time he flips a switch in this movie, the sound design is so satisfying. Great point. This guy is essentially like Phil Specter. I think he has more control over sound than like our producer Craig does right now. Like in 30 years later.

It's incredible. And it's a warm sound. Bill, is this movie Apex Mountain for PO boxes? So I had that next. Yes. The answer is yes. Because they take a real dent to PO boxes with the Unabomber. Unabomber killed PO boxes. It's not in the first paragraph of his Wikipedia, but it's just a fucking fact. One of the many shitty things about the Unabomber, murdered PO boxes. Did you ever have a PO box?

I actually, I did when I had my old web. website. When we were selling t-shirts and stuff, I had to get one. It was surprisingly easy. You can see how it went so badly for psychotic people. Did you put on wraparound shades when you went to check it? Like, were you paranoid? I did. I did. I actually kind of, you know, when my website that first year, when it was like AOL only and, you know, basically by word to mouth, people had to read, this movie was like a movie that really resonated with me. It was like, you're throwing stuff out there. You have no idea if even one person's reading it. And then you get an email from somebody who liked the piece.

They're like, oh, my God. That person read it. It's very similar to the Hart-Herry thing when he would get these stupid emails in the PO box. You'd be like, oh, or letters. That's what writing for magazines was like. I mean, that's what every experience of trying to express yourself was like pre-internet, right? Like, you'd write a review in a... Like, when we were writing for Spin, we put like an inside joke or a reference to something we cared

about in a record review, and you have no idea if anyone got it or liked it or even read it. Also, because the only letters we got at magazines were from prisoners, because they had a lot of time to write letters. That's true. We talked about when we did the Silence of Lambs podcast, we talked about this, just how in the 90s, you just had no idea with so many things. Where, you know, like the Buffalo Bill, my friends and I, James Gumb, we used to have so many jokes about him. And we thought we were the only people with James Gump jokes. We thought this was exclusive to us, this James Gum thing that we had. And then the internet. it happened. It's like, oh, everyone thought this was funny.

Hard Harry's voice harmonizer has a little James Gum to it. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Last Apex Mountain, just the pre-Nevermind alternative college radio era. I think you can really say 90 was the peak. Because 91, it starts to shift. 90, it's still just completely pure. Yeah. I just throw that out there. It's pre-grunge, pre-lalapalooza.

Yeah, you couldn't make a soundtrack like this just a few years later. Picking Nets, I had, I mean, we talked about it, but how easy it would have been to figure out hard hair his identity and did he have the dumbest parents on the earth? I think those two questions are related. The moment they hear about this pirate radio kid who goes to high school, the dad is never like, hey, you know, I did get Mark all that short radio stuff, like never.

Lightbulb never goes off. He is in the basement. He has no idea what he's doing. And it's not like the wall rotates. Like he's got a hidden shelf like Scooby Doe. Right. He basically has all this shit sitting out there and is down in his basement and is like, don't even talk to me for hours on it.

But the movie also tells on itself because when Nora is there, they're like, we could hear you talking. Once they say that, it's like our son needs to be institutionalized. They must be drinking a lot of Shabli. Yeah. Yeah. I would say speaking of talking in voice, the biggest name. for me was related to my other obsession with the phone. The movie tries to hide this from us,

but when he's on the phone with people, there's no voice masking. So the person's, the people that he calls just hears Christian Slater's voice. And all he has to do is say, answer one thing in English class. And those girls who are pranking him are like, oh, that's you. Done. Yeah, that's all Harry. Yeah, there's a lot of ways he should have been found out. I also think, I just know from experience from my buddy Gus when he was Chuck Stevens for GCD radio. The pirate radio signal is just not that good. Yeah. You're going to be able, and that's why it's actually pretty authentic when the weirdo kid is like,

this is the best place to get the reception. He must live around here or whatever. But you're just not getting it all over the town in Arizona. There's going to be pockets where you don't get it at all. They kind of come and go from that. And then him being able to be in a car doing a pirate radio show is completely absurd. I don't know what kind of technology you would have needed. He attaches it to a car battery.

It's absurd. Yeah. There's no way. Zero percent chance. What else did you have for picking nits? I think for me, yeah, I think we covered it. For me, it's all related to just how obvious that it's, that it's him. Also, the collision between him, like,

like, I'm only doing this for a few people. You know, I have no intention of this getting bigger. And then all the remarkably clever lengths he went to disguise himself in case the FCC came looking. Like, the phone thing alone, like, that's not a day's work, you know, his remarkable ability to go to Radio Shack and basically jury rig a rolling radio station is, you know, that's pretty exceptional. And I feel like the fact that he's been clearly playing with soldering guns since he was a boy would. have also flagged something for his parents. It's also, my only other picking knit, and this is, I think probably only something that the three of us would notice is it seems like this is a movie for the most part of entirely

of only children. Like nobody's brother or sister is ever like, hey, how come you're smoking in your, how come you're smoking in your bedroom? We're perfect. Where have you been downstairs for three hours? I was going to beat you up and make you give me your allowance or like none of that. It's just all like these completely independent strident spirits like roaming through the world. Best quote. We already mentioned a lot of them, but I do like, um, but just remember one thing.

It can't get any worse. It can only get better. I mean, high school is the bottom. Being a teenager sucks, but that's the point. Surviving it is the whole point. Quitting is not going to make you strong living will. So just hang on and hang in there. It's pretty good. Could this be remade as a 10 episode Netflix show. There's one thing we haven't said out loud. I'm sorry to interrupt. We have not said the immortal words, eat me, beat me, push me, pull me, talk hard.

I don't care what, just do it. Jam me, jack me, push me, pull me, talk hard. Which I have to say, like, Proust had his Madeline, but for me, like, hearing that and remembering what it felt like for 14-year-old girls who are my classmates to say that and say that to each other, that was a gateway into the next phase of life, I would say. And it still rings out. It's clarion call rings out loud.

Could this be remade as a 10-episode Netflix show? So Slater said he's been having meetings about bringing an updated version of the film to life. Wow. Wondering what it would look like in the age of podcasting and independent content creators. Quote, I think it would be fun to reexamine what the heck happened to Mark Hunter. Where's the kid that had the pirate radio station? But now it would be like, who cares? everyone's got a podcast.

This was the original underground podcast for any of this stuff was going on. Again, this movie did invent podcasting. I think it would be pretty cool to reinvent this as a 10-episode Netflix show. Unfortunately, nobody can see the movie, so the idea will never get an attraction. Maybe this podcast will help. I think it's the opposite. I think you don't need to reinvent it since no one can see it. You could just pretend you've invented it.

Like, there's no original text anymore. Andy, when we finish this pod, just call your friend Sam. telling me you have this great idea. He loves this movie. I mean, Sam loves this movie. It's one of the reasons why he cast Christian Slater in Mr. Robot. Well, there you go. He would have a lot to say about it because it was one of the inspirations for making the show in the first place.

So maybe the Netflix show, Mark Connor is now grown up. He's, he flamed out somehow, right? Huge cocaine problem. Yeah. Huge cocaine problem in mid-90s. All the cigarette smoking. You know it was a gateway. But then he gets clean because he gets super into UFC.

It's the only really pure sport, guys. He shaves his head. By the way, is that the most nitpicky thing that we didn't mention that other than the adults who are all just unreconstructed lushes, the teenagers just chug diet Pepsi and cigarettes. They never, there's no weed, there's no alcohol that I can see. There is no actual bad behavior other than the fact that they all just seem to congregate on lawns at 10 p.m. every weeknight. It was 1990.

where everyone was afraid of everything at that point. We're afraid of drugs. We're afraid of sex. Everybody was telling us every single thing was terrible for us. Do you think maybe this is Mark Hunter's next five years? Because we could just do this for probably and answerable questions. Jail? But I think he gets a good attorney and maybe just serves 18 months probation,

but it's on his record as a felony. Because he's a minor. It's true. The question for me is what year is he on the real world? Because I don't think the real world would be able to resist his story four or five years later. I think he's on Real World Seattle. Uh-huh. The season with David and Irene and, uh, this is real.

You want the real world that season. I just think he's on that cast and maybe that leads to some MTV stuff. Maybe hosts a couple things. And then he hosts like alternative nation. He gets the Matt Pinfield gig. Yeah. And then I think eventually he's on Zane Low's corner and they have to figure out who's who becomes...

Mark, man. You're the originator. The OG. I'm just bringing the new school, the Apple beats. We're not competitors. We're not rivals. We're friends. Much respect.

So I think he does not go to jail, but I think it's on his permanent record. So do you think... Okay, so one thing that I didn't remember well from the movie, and it may be because most of my rewatches stopped at a certain scene. I thought that he and Nora consummated their relationship to a degree that they absolutely do not. They barely even kiss

and then they have a, it's actually kind of cool that they have that public kiss briefly the next day and then they just go to prison for each other. Do you think this relationship continues? Does it have legs? I have to say from my experience in high school and early college.

And in prison. No. Yeah. Relationships built on much stronger stuff than that. Do not last. Nora was too cool. She had to date somebody who was at least eight years older than there. I think there's a world in which she dates her lawyer who gets her out of the...

No, man. Nora's on a one-way ticket to Oberlin. She is never going to be back in Arizona. She's not waiting around for Mark to get out of his minimum security juvie. Nora's dating Dave Perner just four years later. Going to the VMAs. I don't think there was a more obvious spinoff character for anything than Nora that didn't actually get spun off. And maybe because the movie wasn't successful, so it wasn't that obvious.

But I think Nora easily could have been in another movie two years later where she's in college just being Nora. Or then she becomes the young English teacher and leads the revolution of her own in whatever the next town is. She plays that Ali Sheedy character that you've now suddenly got me. excited to see. All right. This is going to be a tough one. Who won the movie? I don't want to go first.

I'm going to go first. Say it. I think it's Samantha Mathis. Nora, I think she wins it. She's unbelievable. And all due respect to Slater. I think, you know, this is like one of those NBA MVP's where three people could have won and everybody's a winner.

She is a character that has singed into my memory, like in a way that Hart-Harrie isn't. And this is something that I think we, I bet we will get a lot of support for saying this. But remember when we were, well, not even when we were that age, but in this era, like late 80s, early 90s, there were a lot of things in music journalism or magazines they would say, no one bought, the Velvet Underground sold almost no records. But everyone who bought a Velvet Underground record formed a band. And I would say that everyone who saw this movie had everything they thought about themselves and the type of woman that they were interested in, rewerewerewerewere. And I think that she is the Velvet Underground record for an entire generation of people who now get to talk about her on podcasts. Like, she is that foundational. I think we can do this without being creepy.

The brief nude scene. No, no, no, I just shake this head. Let me go with this, AID. I'll shake my head, too. No, no, no, no, no. Okay. We grew up in this air and ate with 80s nude scenes. Yep.

where they were gratuitous. We have to work some nudity into this. It's a nude scene that's not a nude scene. She takes her shirt off because Christian Slater has a shirt off and it's almost like a power move. And it's not, they don't dwell on it. It kind of happens. You can barely see it.

But it's kind of perfect for that character. Like I totally bought that that character would do that. Whereas the 10 years previously where if the lead actress is getting naked, you felt like, you know, it's like Lacey Underaw and Kattyshack, the movie we just saw were like, it's in the contract, you have to take your shirt off. This is like a different era for female characters, and it actually made sense that she did that.

See, that wasn't creepy. That was classy. I agree. She is artistic and independent, but she is also fully realized and pretty powerful. And, you know, you see it at the end of the movie when he's like, I need your help. And she's like, it's about time.

Yes. You know, like she never saw herself as an acolyte of him or in his sway. saw herself as his equal. And I do think that that is how that scene plays. I also think that scene was very memorable. Craig. That's all. Craig,

who is five years younger than this movie, who probably, Craig's drinking red wine out of a sniffter right now. Craig, you had never seen this movie. You didn't know what the fuck was going on when we picked it. Give us your thoughts on Nora, knowing nothing.

You watched this movie last. night just like as a character just coming out of nowhere. Did it make you Google Samantha Mathis and see what happened? Like what was your reaction? Is it bad that I'm saying no? I don't know if it just makes me different than all of you, but she was not the girl that I was into in high school. What was the girl you were into? Page? Honestly, probably. Yes. Wow. Wow. Wow. So another L for Craig. So Craig's the one giving us wedgies, basically. Craig's like, why are you guys wasting your time listening to Pirate Radio? We could be doing two a days.

Life's great. You could choose to be a winner, gentlemen. Hard hair is a loser. Who were the descendants when I was in high school? Was it like, was it just punk rock? Was it Blinckwin 82? No. What year were you in high school?

2008 to 2012. Oh, that was a good era for music, though. I can't answer that question, Craig. Tail end of, you know what? We can't do that work for you, Craig. You have to find the older brother or sister of the friend who knows where the record store is where the flyer is hanging. Yeah. And then go to the basement show with that band.

And then that's your descendant. No, this is important, though. This is important because Nora is a character that specifically appealed to our generation. There's a specific birth year range where this was like kind of our dream girl. And maybe if you're looking at under 30 people, it would not be the dream girl. No, the girl that I liked was like the MS. Stone character in Superbad. That was the girl that I liked. So there you go.

Okay. That makes sense. That makes sense. I'm not at that. Here we go. I'm buying Craigstock. I'm selling some of my Samantha Mathis stock. To buy Craigstock. Buying Craigstock. Greenwald, it was a pleasure to have you on. Thank you to having me back, especially to talk about this classic that only we four have seen. We're the last four people to see this movie, and I couldn't be happier about the group that I watched it with. Tim Cook, drop the bag. Let's go.

It's going to get yanked from YouTube in about five minutes. Yeah, so this is an open challenge to Apple, Netflix, HBO Max, Peacock. And to our listeners. And to our listeners, like, get this movie back on there. It's awesome. Andy and Chris, thank you, Craig. Thank you. Rewatchables coming back next week.

We have a, what are we doing cocktail, Craig? What day is that? September 1st, I believe. Yeah, I'm going to start hyping that now. It's certainly one of the most important rewatchables. a long time. But we have some good ones coming up. Doing two next week, two the week after that. Stay tuned for that. Don't forget to listen to the watch.

Don't forget to listen to Craig's Fantasy Football Podcast. See you next time. Talk hard.