The Watch - Ep. 66: 'The Night Of,' 'The Get Down,' and 'Rogue One' Reshoots

Episode Date: August 15, 2016

The Ringer's Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald discuss Episode 6 of 'The Night Of' and the mystery it is obligated to solve (4:00). Then, Chris and Andy tackle the ups and downs of Baz Luhrmann's 'The Get Down' (17:00). Finally, they wrap with a look at the 'Rogue One' trailer (32:00) and what the film will feel like, post-reshoots. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I need sports to have to clear the room. Stand up and walk now. Hello and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan and I am an editor at the Rigger.com and joining me on the other line. He's been cured by Dr. Yee. It's Andy Greenwald. Yo, Chris. No more itching.

You know, Chris, we're going to talk about a lot of stuff today. We're going to talk about night up. We're going to talk about Get Down. We're going to talk about Rogue One trailer. I'm going to yell you about a fan from the 90s. But I didn't know you were going to start. start with Dr. Yee. And I got to, this, you know, our podcast is steering into a confessional mode as we get closer

to each other in both emotional and physical proximity. I have no idea where this is going. That's my life. Do you know that? What, that you like, that is, do you got itchy feet? My feet are tremendous and always have been. Thank you. But I, I buy the herbal powders and I drink them with, with water.

I spoon. You do not. Do you really? Yeah. I do. You know that. Wow. Maybe you didn't know that. I didn't know that.

That's why I'm... That is why I am the paragon of health that you've always known me to be. You are perpetually suffering from an oncoming or exiting sinus infection. And you are always tired. Chris. Chris. Yeah. Two things.

I'm always tired when I talk to you because I'm just trying to tell you something. But the... I used to have sinus infections. That was my jam, right? And then I found my own Dr. Yee. And I'm an Adonis, man. I'm a mountain. This stuff works.

So all you haters out there who are like, that was really convenient that John Stone got his feet fixed just in time for trial because, you know, he went on a limb. He went to a faith healer or maybe it was just for comedic effect. No, no, no. I'm telling you, as co-host of the watch, we support. We support many products on this show now. I support Dr. E. I stand with Dr. E. We're obviously going to talk. Let's talk about the night of now.

Can we talk more about herbal remedies? Well, here's the thing is that people who, so for one thing, I just want to say, pride comes before the fall. And if I had just been cured of such chronic, long-running eczema, I think that I would be like, let me get two weeks of clean living under my belt before I went back to my support group and started hanging on the rim like Vince Carter on Frederick Weiss. You know what I mean? I think that's a great point.

Like I appreciate the fact that Stone was trying to spread the gospel, the Dr. Yeh herbal gospel. But I do, I just feel like he really quickly hit the floor shimes. You know what I mean? Well, I think you're right. And I think he also, I think it was a pretty aggressive move to return to your therapy support circle and just choose a seat on the other side of. everyone in the circle and stare at them.

Yeah. And just mock them with your shoes. I mean, you know, if we're just talking about the semiotics of that room, that's not helpful. I feel like that's just a bad idea. It was just, it was a tough look? I guess was that the, was that the scene that I saw at the end of the credits that Steve Bouchemmy's brother was in this episode? Was he in the support group?

Oh, yeah. He was the guy who looked kind of like Steve Busemi in the support group. Yeah, that's like, then I, because the problem with it is that I realized that like half the people on the night of kind of look like Steve Bouchemi's brother. Oh. That was actually the casting. That's what went out from the casting department. They were like, find us Steve Busemi's brother.

And they're like, for which scene? They were like literally all of them. Just let's just start and we'll tell you when to stop. Just keep them coming. So, Andy, I wrote a thing this morning for The Ringer about last night's episode of Samson and Delilah, episode six. Hey. Only eight episodes this season.

Yeah, just, I'm, look, we will all be recappers in Hillary Clinton's America. Welcome, welcome. And my thing was was basically like crime shows can do a lot of different things, but at the end of the day, they have to, if I can quote myself, can I do that? Everybody has to come back. I've done it on the show for years. Come back to the table and play a game of clue at the end of the day. And you got to find Mr. Mustard. Is it Colonel Mustard or Mr. Mustard?

I mean, he's been, I think he was discharged dishonorably. I'm sorry, Mr. Mustard is my herbalist, if you know what I'm saying. Yeah. Yeah, DJ Mustard side hustle. Dijon. And so at the end of the day, they're going to have, the,

Steve Zalian and Richard Price are just, they're pros, and HBO is still a television network, and this can't just be a prose poem about the wonders and nightmares of New York City. So, you would kind of alluded to this with the chasing Dwayne Reed into the night and kind of like it started to become like a little bit more a crime show.

They turned into that. quite a bit this episode. That being said, and eczema aside, I thought it was interesting, you know, that they did it with such gusto, that they had the Hearst Driver straight up be the Zodiac killer, you know? And that Don Taylor, my man, Paul Sparks from House of Cards,

shout out to God's Cauldron and Scorpio, his great works of fiction. that he was so like, oh, of course he's chronically, you know, taking gray ladies for a ride on the money train there. Yeah, the ending every episode with a new red herring or lead is not my favorite thing. It's a very broad church. It's exactly broad church, yeah. And I think that what's interesting about the show is what you said exactly.

These are pros, and they're doing the best possible version of this. And for a lot of people who don't watch British crime shows, they might not be familiar with some of the rhythms of the storytelling, which I think, as you just said, this is a lot like broadchurch. This was based on a British TV show. So it's following a lot of those beats. It's just in many ways the best and or most New York version of this show possible. You know, you took the extreme position of quoting yourself on The Wriner.com. I'm going to be a little more demure. And I'm going to quote our friend, Sean Fennessee, who had an accurate.

Excellent piece on the TV corner today, talking about what his mind of the three best shows of the summer, at least the most interesting. And he wrote about Mr. Robot, the Get Down in Stranger Things. He basically, I think everyone should read this piece. I think he's right on about a lot of stuff. But he basically says what separates Mr. Robot from the Get Down in Stranger Things is that the Get Down and Stranger Things are doing, are trying, are working within established frameworks for TV shows in 2016. a robot is whether it's working for you or not, is sort of aggressively breaking that mold. The Knight of isn't in his piece, but it would definitely be in the former category, right? Because this is not reinventing anything.

It's just that the details of the margins, as we've said many times, the kind of stuff that we love in crime fiction elevates the material. Yes. The performances elevate the material. The little montage of jury selection elevates the material. The little stuff that most shows don't even think about, such as your choice of clothing in court and how you get access to it. this is all elevating the material.

That said, this week's episode, I think, was the most, in some way, there's no way to say this without it sounding overly negative, but I was going to say the most disappointing because of the degree of familiarity some of it had. And not just familiarity, coincidence or cuteness or TVness. Yeah, I mean, I'm too in the bag for this show, but I choose to look at it almost as like the disappointment is coming from the knowledge that it's wrapping up. And whenever you have to wrap something like this up, you're going to have to do the work. You're going to have to eventually put somebody, you know, and I think that there are still twists that could come from the show. I haven't watched episode seven. You know, I have no knowledge. But I don't think it will be as cut and dry as like someone gets arrested for the crime and Naz is let out.

That just doesn't feel like the world they've set up. Well, also, one of the interesting things about the show with, one of the interesting things that the show has done that I appreciate very much is that it has. it has smudged up Nas quite a bit. I mean, obviously, he's smudging himself. He's putting great pains to smudge himself. I personally did not know chess pieces could produce ink. If you look, you know. No, but, you know, even if someone had wanted to show me that,

and I would been like, no way, I still wouldn't have then thought the next step would be, you know, I haven't even begun opening arguments my trial yet, but I'm going to have the word sin tattooed on my knuckles. Because that's just a winning look for a guy who wants to be thought of as innocent. you know, that was a little extreme. You mentioned the Chandra's interview with the Zodiac Killer in the beginning. That was straight up Law and Order where he's just like, let me do my work while we talk, you know. And it was super creepy.

It was very well shot. It was very effective. But it also felt very much like a different show, one that I might be interested in, but I don't think I was as interested in it as I am in the show that had to this point been built up around it. Similarly, like, Naz's dad being the delivery guy, I got to. say the odds of that are pretty small you know a lot of a lot of delivery guys seamless very popular service here in new york city i feel like that's uh that's unlikely yeah um and they didn't need it they didn't need that one it's it is it does so i want to talk a little bit about we mean talking about the the sit and tattoo but the part of this show that has been dealing with the prison

plot and and i i i feel like every week i am more and more sort of mesmerized by Michael Kenneth Williams's turn as Freddie. It is at once you feel a lot of compassion for him as a character, but on the other hand, you definitely feel like he is Satan, both symbolically and possibly literally. And it's such an interesting, like this is, I think, what makes this show so unique is that in any other context, Freddie would be a very limited character, you know,

and you would have a lot more clarity or a lot less clarity about his intentions. Either he would be seemingly good and then betray Nas in a sense, or sort of, you know, like basically like turn him into a drug meal, which is what he did. Or he would be seemingly bad, but reveal himself to be good. And the reason why Richard Price is Richard Price and why Steve's alienist, Steve Zalian is that that isn't happening. That he is just both a good and a bad person who is sort of playing with an entirely different deck of moral cards than anybody else because, like he says, he's just like,

what's another life sentence? So, well, if there's no punishment for him, then, like he says, sweet can be found anywhere, you know? That's the classic Webe move, right? Yeah. Just tack another body on in exchange for a good sandwich. Mm-hmm. I think that the Freddie character, to my mind, represents the show's one major missed opportunity thus far, which is the nature of their relationship was pretty interesting when Freddie said, when he said, why me?

And Freddie was basically like, because you're not an idiot, you know, and I'm not an idiot. Right. And I need someone to be smart. Since they had that conversation, Nause has pretty much just been an idiot. or a prick. And I miss, you know, maybe that all fell in the cover of the floor. To be fair, it doesn't seem like the kind of place that really allows for not, you know what I mean? Like, jail makes you do dumb things, I think.

Yeah, but you don't think there's like a, there's no room for a little like Oprah's book club. You know what I mean? Like on the weekends. I just, I just mean, like, I would like to see more of that relationship when the stakes aren't as high as they are or when the heroin isn't being smoked or whatever. just because that was raised as the reason why they were getting along. And I also, frankly, I'd like to be reminded of some of Nas' good characteristics. And I imagine this is a choice they made because he was so bumbling and apparently angelic when he appeared that they've just been sort of smudging him up and pushing him down since then.

So that's probably a storytelling choice that you couldn't have it both ways. I kind of wanted a little bit of that back. You mentioned Sean's piece, and the piece is actually largely about uses of realism in modern television and like post-Golden Age television and how. A lot of those Golden Age shows, whether it was Sopranos or Deadwood or The Wire or Mad Men, or Breaking Bad even, were largely about, they were rooted in realism. And I think that the night of is very much rooted in process, but it's not necessarily rooted in realism. It's a heightened realism. It's a very specially dramatized realism.

Except for the stuff about Dr. Yee, which is a thousand percent. That's a fucking documentary right there, dog. But I think that what you have to understand is like that's Rikers and it is and they are doing very much like that's how you get to Rikers. This is how your process getting into Rikers. This is how commissary cars work at Rikers. But Rikers is hell. And he is finding out that I think the reason why he's getting tattooed, the reason why he's doing pushups, the reason why he's participating in all this stuff. Besides out of just like a sheer act of survival is that this guy is finding a family and an identity.

even if it's a twisted, fucked up one. Yes. I think the key line from last night's episode was, and I'm going to get it a little bit wrong, but it was basically like, was it, were you happy or did you miss your old life? Wasn't there some line like that? Did you like your life?

Did you like your life? And I think that is a, did you draw a bright line around that piece of dialogue? Because, you know, it really allows you to go back and consider the first half, half of the first episode where, you know, obviously in many ways, I would seem idyllic now, but, you know, he was tutoring guys on a basketball team who didn't want to be tutored. He was desperate to get to a party, desperate to meet anyone.

It didn't seem like he was, quote, unquote, alive in any real way. And we learned that there was some hardship and some difficulty and apparently some violence in his past. So that's kind of an interesting notion that, you know, all of a sudden now his stakes are higher. He's been accepted in some rough fashion. that's an interesting idea too. But as you also said, this is a show essentially about process and about the legal maneuverings and machinations of this one case.

So everything that we like about it from Nause's psychological state to the little bits of New York that shine through, those are almost secondary to the process. And as the show steers into the final two episodes, which will, I imagine, be entirely about wrapping things up. Yes. But it's a balance. And, you know, on balance,

it's been really, really good. I mean, I'm looking forward to what's to come. I'm going to miss these characters much more than I even thought I would. I even miss those, those halacious red eczema scars. I mean, I really felt like they're a part of the family at this point. Okay, let's take a quick break, and then we'll get back and we'll talk about the get-down. Hey, guys just want to tell you a little bit about our sponsors like The Black Tux. Do you guys have a wedding or a special event coming up, and you need a tux?

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Chicken tinga tacos with summer squash and tomato salsa. All of those sounds wonderful. Check out this week's menu and get your first three meals. free with free shipping by going to blue apron.com slash the watch you will love how good it feels and taste to create incredible home-cooked meals with blue apron so don't wait that's blue apron.com slash the watch blue apron a better way to cook okay Andy so this week on Friday Netflix released six episodes I believe of a promised 13 I believe there are a lot of promises and a lot of numbers involved in

Well, this is what we're going to get to. Feel free to throw some more out. We're talking about Netflix's original series The Get Down, which is largely, or at least credited to Basil Lerman, who is the director of Romeo and Juliet, and Milan Rouge, and Australia, and the Great Gatsby, as notoriously maximalist, let's just say, with his process. His projects tend to go over budget.

His projects tend to get variety. and Hollywood Reporter pieces written about them that says, in trouble? Like, production slows on X. And this is no different. In fact, it sounds like this was an insanely over budget and kind of trouble-pocked production. It's gone through several showrunners. Lurman eventually took over showrunning himself,

although he was admittedly a novice at it. It moved production from L.A. to New York. If anybody is curious about the production of the show, I recommend them to check out this variety feature about the show Sean Ryan was involved. Stephen Aldeggergis, who's a sort of noted playwright in New York, he wrote The Motherfucker with the Hat, which Chris Rock performed in on Broadway, I believe. He wrote, he's got credit on a bunch of these screenplays. I don't know, I don't know, you don't really know what the final product is, what responsibility he has for the final product. Nelson George was a part of it.

Yeah, Stephen Adley Gerges and Sean Ryan were the marquee names. Early on, I think they were bounced early on, but due to, you know, the way agents and guilds work, like, their names are on this. Yeah, he's, but they're not involved. But Gergus is still doing interviews where he talks about it as if, like, he was, because he gave a very interesting interview about his disappointment with Netflix's decision to put it out in the fashion that it did because he was like, you know, they, they basically were like, we have spent too much money on this to not have product. We have to put this out. So we're going to put out the first six. And they were like, but we would have written it differently if we had known you were doing it this way. So that's that.

It's set in 1977 in the Bronx. It is about a group of young people growing up in that neighborhood at a time of incredible poverty and incredible creative expression. And it is what it says on the package. It's like a kind of fascinating mess, especially the pilot. 90-minute mini-movie that is part musical, part kind of documentary? I don't know. What did you think of the pilot? I mean, I think we're going to keep talking about this show.

I think we'll probably limit our conversation to the pilot because that's a lot to process. You said the word mess. That's what this show is. It is a occasionally glorious, occasionally frustrating, often mystifying. often mystifying, and to be honest, kind of noble mess. It is not the previous record holder for the most expensive show on Netflix was Marco Polo. Marco Polo was a mess and it was also a bloated disaster and it was boring. This is never really boring.

It is more interesting and tries to do more things than most TV shows do in multiple seasons. and it does this even when the first six minutes of the pilot. So I want to put that bracketed around this, that I'm pretty interested in this show, even when I found it tough to watch or just head scratching, there are moments in that pilot of just breathtaking beauty and ambition. I think I don't know what got into the water over at Netflix in terms of their casting offices,

why they seem to have access to a pool of talented young actors that no one else has been able to find between stranger things and this, it is really considerable. Just the, you know, the scene early on when the kids are after school, they find out that there's a new piece by this brilliant enigmatic, potentially superhero graffiti artist. And they just talk about they have to go into rival gang territory to find it. Like that in itself, just that idea is kind of like a different alt-universe stranger things

where the kids go to find, you know, a phantom piece of graffiti instead of an upside-down world with a monster in it. It's, but it's hard to get, it's hard to even consider or talk about the show without saying what I feel like a lot of people have been very too polite to even say, which is, was it supposed to be released like this? Like, is this really the final,

I mean, you said that, Kyrgyz said that it wasn't the final version. Was there a final version to be found in this? I don't even know because it just, I have trouble tracking the chronology of the pilot, and you don't ever really want that to be the case. Yeah. And it has, I guess, like at various points over the course of the pilot, I thought it reminded me of almost like natural born killers era, Oliver Stone, in terms of how both kinetic, kinetic to the point of needing ADD medication.

And there are parts where you're just like, wait, why is this person outside? They were just inside. You know what I mean? Like really basic filmmaking and film editing things where you're just like, you just broke the accent. or like, you know, the wall you're not supposed to break when you're editing. Can you talk me through just the simple, basic timeline of the fact that, like, in the opening minute to the show, Zeke, it wants to get with the girl, his name I'm blanking on as we're doing this podcast, but she's like, no, I have to go to a club.

Mylene. Yeah. And flirt with a label owner. So we're going to this club. And he's like, oh, no, she's going to the club tonight. And then they go to school, but it's the last day of school? And they still haven't gone to the club? Yeah, she's like, tonight I'm going to this club.

Yeah, and he's like, I want you to be my girlfriend. And she's like, well, I'm going to this club tonight. And I can't have a boyfriend because I basically need to get out of this place. This guy's going to make this happen. And then there's school. And then there's like a kind of convoluted plot about how he needs to steal a record for her that she loves. That they're only 50 of. But at the same time, Shaolin is trying to get that same record for Grandmaster Flash.

And then they, I got to tell you, the Pekusa remix of that record is no longer in mint, because it gets tossed all over the Bronx throughout this first episode. I mean, I guess it's not really neither here nor there. But, you know, I was reading this variety piece about it, and there's a passage in the piece about how prior to filming, quote, what became known as the dojo room was created, which was an expansive rehearsal space with the show's production offices and stages in Queens where cast members were taught everything

from how to spin Turnedables a la Grandmaster Flash to how to break dance with late 70s authenticity. Choreographers work with dancers in the space to perfect many of the production numbers. The musical scenes and the dance scenes are mesmerizing. They're gorgeous. And that is clearly something that Lerman is just like knows how to squeeze every bit of sweat

and emotion and romance from these kind of sequences. But the idea that there was a dojo room where, you know, it was obviously a really creative and, like, intuitive place of learning and expression,

that's not how you make, like, a really, like, efficient show. You know what I mean? Like, that shows. It feels like sketches from the dojo room on screen. I mean... And there are parts where it's like natural born killers. There are parts where it's like,

literally being acted as if it is on stage. Like people are like, what's that, my lean? Did you say that this guy's coming? I did. You know? And then like somebody walks on like as if they're walking on to the stage, even though it's a huge expensive set.

I mean, I think in general, I'm not a fan of Baz Luhrman and his, I think you said that right, his maximalist tendencies. Everything is on the level of, um, he raises everything,

whether it's Romeo and Juliet or whether it's like Q. Jackman has like a fur trapper to the level of Greek mythology, right? Everything is on, everything is on, everything is up, everything is up to 11. What's interesting about this and what I appreciate is that that level of myth making and maximalist storytelling is rarely afforded to African American stories, or in this case, Latino American stories, or poor stories, to be quite frank. You know, it's something that's usually given to fur trappers and Australia or Shakespearean characters or, you know, 1930 swells like in the Great Gatsby.

So that's a kind of interesting idea, and it's fun to see that play out, to play out in the show. But there's, you know, but I keep coming up against this, this idea that it's just like that you want to go big, you want to go loud. But then you also want to just sit down Jimmy Smiths and be like, what are you doing, man? What are we doing here? Yeah. And I think that that's the thing is that we are, this kind of goes back to what Sean's talking about, is that for as adventurous as we may think of television, there are very basic rules that it follows. You know, there's an A plot and a B plot. There's establishing shots.

There's a pacing that we're all kind of used to. There's even a tone of the acting because for some reason we watch it on those particular screens, whether it's on a computer or on our television, we expect. a certain kind of performance. And Jimmy Smith's is acting the way you would act if you were doing voiceover work for a comic book cartoon. You know what I mean? He's, they're all playing different, they're playing with forum a lot. And it's very exciting to see that they're doing it.

But it is, in the first episode, and by all accounts, it gets much more confident in its approach as it goes on. So I'm excited to talk about this in a week or two after we've had chance to process a little bit more of the season. The first episode is just an example of like, you just can't always try stuff on TV and have it work. And I mean that purely formally, because every single thing about this show, to quote Martin Landon, Entourage, is something I would be interested in. Yeah, I agree. I thought Justin Charity's piece on The Ringer was right on in this because he likened it in many ways to Empire, which is a kind of like grand pop storytelling that doesn't necessarily have to follow process or reality, like something like

the Knight of does. It's much more intuitive and emotional and extreme in that it's taking its rhythmic cues more from the radio and from the music that inspired the show than from formal television storytelling convention. And I think, you know, he says that it's the most, in his piece he talked about, Justin talked to said it was the most fun. he's had watching TV since season one of Empire. I think season one of Empire was more fun

because it was a lot more confident in what it was. But the reason I'm eager to keep watching is there is a version of this show that is despite $120 million that Netflix spent, which seems almost impossible, despite all the talent that's cycled through it, despite whatever bad blood exists between those involved. There is a version of this that is so much worse.

And it's the narcos version of it, you know? It's the version of the show where it's like, and then the DJ put the record on the turntable and scratched it. And lo and behold, I mean, that's basically what vinyl was. Yeah, well, I was just going to say. The version of it is vinyl where it's like, well, we have this story, but we need to have the white male avatar who we experience it through. So we can't just have it be punk rock bands in New York in New York in the mid-70s

or a female A&R working in a male-dominated industry. It always, you have to have the Draper or the Walter White character who is the like the lens through which we view it. And shout out to the show for not doing that. Shout out to the show for not having it be like a newspaper man in New York City discovers uptown and like writes about it and like we experience it through his lens. That's great.

I'm so glad that's not the case. Exactly. Especially because 70s, late 70s, late 70s, early 80s in New York City is one of the most off-covered periods and cultural periods in our contemporary culture. And the thing about that book, you know, it's about punk rock and the city being bankrupt in the blackout in late 70s. And this is all fertile stuff that obviously a lot of people are interested in and were interested in. But it kind of, you know, it picks these characters that are essentially in Manhattan and then they become cultural tourists to the

margins. And so for as much as I was, I just made fun of some of Jimmy Smith's choices, that scene where he's walking through the burned out part of the Bronx and he's like, this is my place. I see a park here. I see a library. This is my home. That in and of itself is kind of radical for storytelling, trying, you know, for this kind of storytelling and certainly for in this cultural milieu. So I think I'm, I'm into that. I remain unconvinced that Baz Luhrman was the guy to shepherded and I believe that Netflix probably remains unconvinced as well. But at the same time, I don't know who else was going to walk into that meeting and be like, sorry, I need, you know, 50 million more dollars so that my red Puma DJ superhero can

correctly jump off of a building. Yeah, so he could do parkour through a CGI'd Bronx or whatever. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's interesting. Well, okay, so we've talked about the Get Down a little bit. Let's chat a little bit about the Rogue One trailer. Yes.

So here's what was surprising. It wasn't very different than the teaser. It was slightly longer. It had a couple of more like clearer stakes and clearer definition of roles where it's like these are the people who are on the good side. They are fighting the people who are on the bad side. These are some of their skills. This is the odds. So you know why you want to go see this movie if you didn't already, which would be insane anyway.

I want this to be a war movie. I want this to be the Gareth Edwards' like insane war movie. And I'm feeling very strange about the fact that if you're going to make, if you're going to have somebody else go in and do reshoots and do reworking it, that it's like one of my favorite filmmakers is doing that. It's Tony Gilroy. But it was, it didn't really betray any over meddling. It's a slightly kinder, gentler take on the, on the material.

but I remain very bullish on it. Yeah, I agree. I feel equally torn because you read all the stuff about, oh, you know, Disney thought it was too grim. They want to make it a little happier, brighter, more fun. You hear they're doing reshoots and that Gareth Edwards might not even have been invited to be part of the reshoets.

And then you hear they gave it to Tony Gilroy. And I'm like, I want that movie. Like if they give it to John Turtle Tob, I would have been like free Gareth. But instead, I'm kind of like, oh, okay. I'm pretty into this. All of a sudden, we're like, yeah, it's a tough business kid. Toughen your skin up, Garrett.

Yeah, yeah. In a perfect world, well, in a perfect world, you know, we wouldn't have to still be talking about Star Wars. Well, in a perfect world, Garrett Edwards would be directing a Tony Gilroy script of this. And this is no disrespect to the other people who worked on this script. No, they could all play in their own sandboxes. What I was going to say is that Garrett Edwards could make his Star Wars war movie

and Tony Gilroy could make his movie about, you know, an intergalactic fixer who, you know, while driving his land speeder and tattooing stops when he sees two javas looking at him and he gets out of the speeder and he goes to the jowas and the speeder explodes. And then we flash back to the beginning of the movie. But, you know, I just know somewhere, Chris, some deep episode four slash Michael Clayton heads are chuckling. I know they are. the thing about the trailer as much as we're still talking about trailers when we talked about the teaser a couple weeks or months ago like that was a we felt that was an essentially perfect teaser trailer and just in terms of the scope the scale the way it looked once you have the characters start talking and having it be about some mcuffin and the death stars never it's it's not going to be as majestic and beautiful but it still looks good the cast is still bananas and it it looks fun. I mean, I don't really know what more people could ask for. Yeah, I was kind of reminded, do you ever seen that movie Mr. Roberts?

The Jack Lemon and Henry Fonda movie, James Cagney? That's quite a cast. No, I never saw that one. It's a Joshua Logan play from, I think, the 50s. And it's about a bunch of guys, a bunch of a Navy ship that's on leave before they go away to war. and just it's sort of like a dromedy about all these guys um and john ford directed was supposed to direct it and he uh he did do quite a bit of it but then wound up having a lot of problems with henry fonda i think they got like an actual fist fight and mervyn leroy and josh logan came on and did

directing and basically what happened was ford shot i think ford shot a lot of the exteriors and these other guys did the interiors and the sort of the more intimate moments. And I kind of think that that would have worked for this in the beginning. If Gilroy had done all the banter in control rooms and Gareth Edwards handled all the Star Destroyer flying over a mountain stuff.

You mean if there had been a shot of like Mon Mothma being like, oh my God, that's Darth Vader. I need a crisis suite. Enhance. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Here's my only other takeaway about this. It's just like, never let him see you sweat. Like, that's how you get through.

Like, I feel like Bos Lerman never lost a night's sleep over the fact that he was spending 120 million of Netflix's funny money to make the show, right? I think he might have been awake, but yeah, he didn't lose any sleep. Fair enough. What I'm saying is... That Dr. Yee, you know what I mean? Just a little bit of that Dr. Dijon to get you through the night. What I'm saying is Disney, and I can speak to Disney because we're old, we're old colleagues.

Yeah. You got Star Wars, dog. You have Star Wars. You don't you love Star Wars? Everyone loves Star Wars. You successfully brought back something that is essentially unfuck withable. So you don't need to put Darth Vader in the trailer. That's like when people are making bacon sandwiches out of bacon.

Like, it's cool, man. It's still Star Wars. Relax. The problem is that Force Awakens made 2 Bill. So now they're like, those are the stakes now. Those are the numbers we're playing with. I think that there was a world in which they could be like, we're just trying to establish a trust between us and fans and blah, blah, blah.

I mean, maybe they always were like, as soon as they broke the story for Force Awakens, they were like, this is going to be the biggest movie ever, and if it's not, we're a fucking bunch of failures. But it does, you know, I would say that in a world in which $2 billion is the potential, they can't mess around with who the fuck. is Felicity Jones, when does this movie take place in the Star Wars timeline, and where is Han Solo?

That's a great point. Because Force Awakens, it was like, this is exactly when this movie takes place. These are the stakes, and here is Han Solo. And there he goes. But that's a really good point, because I think the initial idea was that the main trilogy would be, the new trilogy would be like the main movies, and they would make these, you know, more personal, not personal, because, come on, it's still Star Wars, but more genre-based. side stories.

You know, that's why it's called a Star Wars story, and we would have some that would be more comic, like potentially the new Han Solo movie and some that would be more grim, like this was going to be a war movie. But I think you're right.

As soon as you say to the shareholders or whomever, you're beholden to, guess what we have this thing that could make, you know, to bill every time out, then they're all going to be expected to make as close to that as possible, which probably dilutes the fun of it and dilutes the franchise,

but we're not here to concern troll the Walt Disney company and their stewardship of fucking Star Wars. So, Star Wars. Fine. Star Wars. Okay, speaking of nostalgia, why don't you talk about how you went and saw Belly, the band? I just want to say. Not the great DMX home.

No, you know, although that seems weirdly relevant again due to Nas returning to the screen. Chris, I don't know why you're poo-pooing me here. I'm not poo-pooing you at all, man. I'm just, I'm jealous. You love the great 90s band Belly, Tonya Donnelly squad. They reformed. Did you say Tony and I? Got to go see them.

Yeah. Wasn't that the alternate name for the band before they settled on Beli? Yeah, I think it was either Tanya Donnelly squad or Dr. Ye gang, but they went with Belly. You know, history may judge that harshly, that choice. I was just, I just wanted to say that it was, so they reformed, they're on tour now. It was a very nice moment of like circle closing to go see a band from the 90s at the Bowery Ballroom as I'm leaving the city of New York where I used to see bands in the 90s at the Bowery Ballroom. quietly emotional. You're being very flat, but I know that this is very tender for you.

Hold on. Let me take a sip of my latest Dr. Yiko coffee. It does not taste as bad as Turturro made it out to be. The memory juice. Yeah. Okay. But what I wanted to say was you and I always rode for the second belly records. The first record, they had some, they radio hits, right?

Like Feed the Tree and Geppetto did well in this weird alt-rock moment. their second record, King, we think, we bonded over that when we first met. We think it's a lost masterpiece. I still think so. When they played super connected, I almost lost my mind. But it was very interesting to see this band stripped of its context. Because we've talked a lot about the differences, obviously, from when we were falling in love with music and getting into it and the avenues available to learning about it and having it fed to us versus now, when you can immediately learn everything about anyone.

You can listen to someone's entire catalog in a second. And what I was thinking about when I was watching the show was for as much as we loved our experience, learning, you know, getting into music when we were teenagers and the, basically the pipelines that were available to us then, because we could hear Belly on the radio, we could see them on MTV. At the same time, we were hearing or, you know, or listening to, I mean, I don't know what other bands you want to throw out there. but everything from like tricky to radio head, like all came through the same pipe, basically. But what I was interested in your take on was the fact that did that cause us to not fully, quote, unquote, get what the band was doing, or were we just too young? Because when I was listening to these belly songs now, 20 years later, it was pretty interesting, pretty radical songwriting.

She was doing these big, glami hooks, but the lyrics were very, very strongly feminist lyrics. about things that most songs are not really about, like, childbirth and motherhood and things like that. And maybe it's because I was 17 and wasn't paying attention, or maybe it was because when it all got pushed through the same pipe, we were like, oh, that's song about the tree bangs. Let's on, let's go on to the next song. Do you know what I'm going with here? Here's what I remember. And I think I'm going to answer you in a roundabout way. I remember when, I remember when, so I remember when King, wait, Star is the second one. King is the second.

Yeah, so King. I remember when King was about to come out, and you have to understand that in much the same way that the stakes for Star Wars movies now are in these astronomical figures, there was a roulette wheel that bands could spin, and if they hit it, could be Soundgarden. And that was like a big fucking deal. Like there was potential for all these small bands. And I remember when that record was coming out, the line on it was like, this, they did it. They took a shot because they went to Apache Studios and they cleaned up their sound and they And they've really like, this is that there's hooks and there's singles and they're going to do it and this is it. And it's like they're a bunch of cool. It's like a cool girl band that's going to really break through.

And you listen to Super Connected, which is a absolute. spanger today as much as it was the first time I played it and it is murky and weird and it has a long bass only atmospheric intro and the video is a black and white video in which Tanya Donnelly pretends to be her own guitar tech right you're making a strong case here yeah and you're just like who thought that this was going to be a hit you know what I mean and I guess and then you know I think I might get my chronology wrong here which case I'll put my hands up but like and then Veruca Salt came through and was just like, that's our money, you know, for that that brief period of time that Sither was happening. I'll be curious to see whether I'm right on that.

But the point being is, that's what I remember about that music is just like the anticipation that would build up around those bands. And you're right. I don't think I actually, I need to go back and listen because I don't know what that stuff sounds like devoid of that context as it works Yeah, I think the context, I mean, I was having a conversation at that show with a friend who we were talking about, like Fiona Apple's first record, you know, is now 20 years old. And I am, I was so prejudiced against that record because I decided, or the narrative was that she was on a major label. So this was some sort of corporate performance. Yes. Which was such an absurd opinion to have about anything, to be honest, especially that record or about her.

I think your Veruca Salt chronology is off because I think Cedar was 94. So it came after Belly's first record, but then I think 96, 97 is when they both made big glam rock records to be like, oh no, we're rock band. And then America was like, nah, pass. Right. We don't want a woman-fronted rock band right now. So Cedar came out in 94. The single was- Yeah, we're going to start buying the cores instead. Yeah.

And then Varucasol went out on tour with Hole. Okay, that's right. So, all right. Never mind me. I don't know what I'm talking about. No, but I, but it was, it was interesting to. realize that when thing Verucasol put out an

EP called Blow It Out Your Ass Assed out your ass. It's Verruca Salt in 1996. Yeah. I love Rurk Asol. Those two, they're amazing. They're wonderful ladies.

Oh, what a world. And they're back together and put out a really good record too. But I guess it was interesting to consider that for as much, for as bright as the spotlight was

when there was really only one stage, it was also that that light could sort of blanch everything into the same tone. kind of just took it as it was. So that's why Feed the Tree will show up and sound pretty good on like an alt hits of the 90s album. Sure.

Strip of its context. So it's kind of cool to see them. And Varucasalt do this too last year when they were on tour, basically reclaim the context. Anyway, this is a longer conversation. One of the, a buddy of ours who's at the show with me, Will Chef, who's from Ockerville River, who also has a new great album coming out, officially extended the evening. And does the music for Any Given Wednesday? What's Any Given Wednesday?

Is that a show? It's the night. It's three or four nights before the night of. Yeah. That's right. I still hope that someone will let us do, you know, any Thursday morning so we can recap it. But, yeah, Will did the music for Bill's show. He is very keyed up to have this conversation about 90s versus 2000s music. So we will have that in a month or two. I'm looking forward to it. But basically, go see Belly if they're in your town. Go listen to King. Re-Discover it or discover it for the first time. It's really good. And, Chris, there's no re-up this week because I'm moving across the country to be with you, my man. I can't wait. I can't wait for this bans to be happening in person. Tate can't wait. Joe can't wait. The ringer can't wait. L.A. can't wait. It's going to be great. Do you think I'm going to have any trouble with my powders and tinctures and getting them through customs? Do I have to go through customs to fly to California?

You actually didn't come here like 13 times this year already. 13? Come on, man. This is 15. 15 times. But this is a different one-way ticket, dog. Let's see what happens. I can't wait to start giving you some tattoos. I can't wait either. I've got some really good ideas. Talk to you next week, Dr. Dijon. Have a great move. Doctor on one hand, ye on the other.

Exclamation point. See you next week, Berets.