The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 219: Chris Poche—The Beard is Getting Itchy

Episode Date: September 28, 2021

The true story of the most important novel ever written, and a conversation with the filmmaker who tried to put it on the big screen.

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This one's called the beard is getting itchy. The beard is getting itchy. Last week on the podcast, I introduced you to a man on a mission. My old friend, Scott Flansberg, also known as the human calculator. Scott is on a quest to change the way humans do math. He's also trying to completely revise our calendar and convince the world that basketball was invented, not in Springfield, Massachusetts, as the NBA Hall of Fame insisted was.

but in his hometown of Herkimer, New York. During our conversation, which I really hope you'll listen to, it occurred to me that this podcast began as a way to tell stories about people, all kinds of people who had embarked upon some kind of quest, all kinds of quests. Well, this week, I want to introduce you to another old friend who decided to attempt something truly quixotic. his name is Chris Poshay, and he's a writer I know down in New Orleans, who recently directed a movie that no other filmmaker has managed to complete. Many have tried. Orson Wells came close, but fell short of the mark. I don't want to say too much else because I don't want to wreck the true tale that precedes my conversation with Chris.

So let's start with that. A quick rumination on a man who embarked upon a man who embarked upon, on what I think might be the ultimate mission, once upon a time, a man who failed completely, but nevertheless changed the world. And in the process, gave my old friend, Chris Poshay, the inspiration he needed to attempt the impossible. This is the way I heard it. In his prison cell, the disgraced tax collector awakens from a dream, the same dream that's haunted him for nearly 20 years.

In the dream, he's on horseback, returning from a great battle. Weary and wounded, he's a scarecrow of a man, riding towards home as a fair maiden rushes to greet him, and his grateful countrymen gather in the streets to shower him with glory and chant his name, the name of a conquering hero. The dream first came to him when he was a young scholar, long before he was falsely accused of mishandling the crown's money and thrown into the king's jail. Back then, the dream had felt like a divine prophecy, a sneak peek at the man God wished him to become.

So vivid was his dream, so certain the feeling of providence that accompanied it, that the young scholar had awakened from it and immediately joined the army, eager to find a glorious quest so that he might fulfill his destiny. He didn't have to look far. The Ottomans were raising hell in Europe,

and the Pope had called upon the faithful to vanquish the infidel once and for all, a heavenly cause, if there ever was one. So the young scholar swore an oath to his king and prepared to march into hell, which is precisely where he found himself a few weeks later, specifically in the Gulf of Petrus, where the Battle of Lepanto was about to commence. Lepanto was the last major naval engagement to be fought entirely from, rowing vessels. And it was an absolute bloodbath. Over 600 galleys came crashing together, filling the sea with wooden ships, packed with Muslims and Christians determined to hack each other

to bits. It said that the water was so thick with ships, it was less like a naval battle and more like an infantry action fought from floating platforms. Combatants leapt and charged from one blood-soaked deck to another, praising their respective gods, firing their guns at point-blank range, slashing their way to glory. Forty thousand men died that day, and the young scholar was very nearly among them. He was shot three times, twice in the chest, and once in his left arm, a terrible wound that would leave him forever crippled. But when the smoke cleared, the Muslims were defeated, and this valiant warrior,

was headed home where his fair maiden awaited and his countrymen stood by to shower him with glory and chant his name, the name he heard in his dreams, the name of a conquering hero. Alas, there would be some detours along the way. For starters, his ship was captured by Barbary pirates who sent the wounded soldier below decks to row their ship with dozens of other galley slaves. With only one good arm, his rowing skills were deemed subpar by the corsairs who whipped him mercilessly for weeks on end. It was a brutal period, but the young soldier never lost hope, because even under the lash his dream persisted. Night after night it comforted him, reinforcing his belief that greatness was his destiny and suffering a small price to pay.

Thus, when the pirates cast him into a dungeon in Algiers, pending a ransom from his king, he didn't despair. He did what any self-respecting hero would do. He tried to escape. His first attempt failed, and the whipping he received in return very nearly killed him. Undeterred, he tried again and failed again, which led to more whipping and more suffering. His third attempt to escape also failed, as did. his forth, both of which were followed by lots and lots of lashing, until the wounded soldier

was very nearly skinned alive and left to rot in the bowels of that God-forsaken Algerian pit of despair. But even then, even there, the dream stayed with him, a nightly reminder that he would one day find glory, or that glory would one day find him. Five years. later. The soldier was finally ransomed, at which point he returned to his home, more dead than alive. And sure enough, just like the battered warrior in his recurring dream, he rode through the countryside, weary and wounded, a scarecrow of a man. But when he came to his hometown, there was no one there to greet him. No, fair maiden, no one to shower him with praise and chant. the name of a conquering hero.

And yet the dream still persisted. Night after night, he saw himself astride his horse, basking in the glory of some great accomplishment. But what? With a ruined arm, his days of soldiering were over. Perhaps he could distinguish himself as a diplomat or an ambassador working for the king for whom he'd already sacrificed so much. The king refused him an interview. Very well, perhaps he could find greatness with a pen.

Perhaps he would reinvent himself as a man of letters. My left hand, he famously declared, has been sacrificed for the glory of my right. To prove it, this disabled veteran spent a few years writing some plays that no one saw, some poems that no one read, and some essays that no one understood. Finally, with bills piling up, he put down his quill and accepted a series of jobs that offered an actual paycheck, a bookkeeper, a supply clerk, a salesman. Alas, he was fired from all of them. He simply couldn't bring himself to care about such mundane vocations. Finally, hungry and desperate, he took a job as a tax collector, a position from which he was also fired,

but not before being falsely accused of mishandling the king's money, which brings us back to where we began. In a prison cell, a disgraced tax collector awakens from a dream. The same dream he's had for nearly 20 years, a fairy tale of a dream. that's consumed his life with delusions of grandeur, leaving him broken, penniless, and utterly disillusioned. In that moment, the man who failed at everything he ever attempted, tried something new. He quit.

He vowed to stop seeking his own greatness and write about the dangers of dreaming it. The result? a story he believed no one would read, a cautionary tale written in prose instead of verse, a fable of sorts that ushered in a new literary genre called fiction and went on to become what many have called the very first modern novel. In short, he wrote the story of his life,

and today, 400 years after its release, it's still the most popular non-religious book of all time, with over 500 million copies sold. Not bad for a disabled veteran who dreamed an impossible dream, a dream of greatness that finally came true when a scholar and soldier named Miguel de Cervantes gave the world a character forged in his own image, a quixotic nizabeth. night on a glorious quest that only he could see. A man scorned and covered with scars who strove with his last ounce of courage to reach the unreachable star. A legend in his own mind from a place called La Mancha, a scarecrow of a man called Don Quixote. Anyway, that's the way I

heard it. So if you haven't read Don Quixote, You should. Heads up, though, it is two volumes and roughly 900 pages. Not exactly what you'd call a beach read. And if you're not up to speed on Miguel de Servantes, the wiki page, believe it or not, is a pretty good place to start. Cervantes truly wrote the book on writing books, and his own never-ending quest for greatness really did turn into the first modern novel with the publication of Don Quixote. And if you haven't seen the man of La Mancha, the music. inspired by the story or listen to a rendition of the Unreachable Star, do yourself a favor and Google Brian Stokes Mitchell after this podcast. And check out his performance in an empty theater last July 4th

at the height of the lockdowns. It's incredible. Or you can listen to me right now, push the limits of fair use with my favorite stanza from that tune. This is my quest to follow that star, No matter how hopeless, no matter how far, it's a fight for the right without question or pause, to be willing to march into hell for a heavenly cause. Probably can't get away with much more than that, but they don't write them like that anymore.

We'll discuss the origins of that famous tune, and much more, with the screenwriter who marched into hell for a heavenly film, his own film, when he decided to turn Don Quixote into a movie. Chris Pochet shot his modern take on Cervantes' magnum opus in New Orleans, where he lives today with his wife and kids. It is an independent film. It's shot on a shoestring, but it doesn't look like it. In fact, it just picked up a few awards at some various film festivals,

and it showcases a couple of terrific performances by Tim Blake Nelson, as Quixote and Jacob Adelonis, Sancho Panza. There were, however, more than a few setbacks in this production, as there always are, not as many perhaps as Cervantes experienced when he was writing, the original manuscript 400 years ago, but enough to make any aspiring filmmaker in the 21st century, think about quitting this godforsaken industry and go in search of a real job. Happily, Chris Poshay stuck with it, and today he's got a movie he can be proud of,

and some stories I think are worth sharing. The episode is called The Beard is Getting Itchy for reasons that will be made clear shortly. It all starts right now. Well, are you sick of it yet? Are you sick of AI hogging up all the headlines and sucking up all the bandwidth? You find yourself wishing we lived in a simpler time. Do you miss the rotary phone? Well, get over it.

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And while you're there, pick up their free business guy, demystifying AI. It's filled with super useful information. And again, it's free at netsuite.com slash mic. That's netsuite.com slash mic. Through your speakers. And he's joining Chuck and I. We weren't recording there. Of course you're recording.

I can see my voice print. you bastard. It just started. It started in the beginning of you saying. How many of these do you reckon we have to do before we somehow fall into a rhythm that one might confuse with competence? I mean, I said, I said, it's too hard. I'm going to hit record now, but you were talking in the middle of something. And it was very interesting and I didn't want to interrupt. So to be absolutely crystal clear. We are in fact recording now. Chris, thank you for joining us. First things first. You're down there in New Orleans. Everything. Okay, you survived the latest blow? Yeah, we're fine. I mean, okay is a vague term. I was actually telling me, when I came back right after the storm,

how completely psychotic we are. I drove into a dark city, no electricity, no gasoline, no ambulances, hospitals, policemen, grocery stores, nothing. And my first thought was, that's not so bad. Right? I've seen worse. It's like, there's something very wrong with that. It's not so bad.

We got our electricity back. They picked up the garbage. Good. A month of everyone's refrigerator and freezer being in their trash cans out front is pretty stinky. It's a look, for sure. Wow. Yeah. But, yeah, it's fine.

It's all good now. Places south of us are destroyed. I don't want to not mention that. New Orleans is fine. Terrible in parish. Lafourish parish just decimated. Just wiped out. Yeah.

I mean, what's it going to take for that town? to say uncle. I mean, is it even capable of doing it? Like, where do you get to the point where resilience and denial collide? I think we're right there. They have overlapped. But the love for this place and the devotion to it is mighty fierce. It's not a regular place. It's always been wrong. Like, for 300 years, it was a stupid place to build a city. Iberville and Bienville shouldn't have been here. everyone knew it. The natives didn't live here because it's a stupid place to build a city. And they built it anyway. And if you read descriptions of New Orleans from like 1750, they sound like they were written last Thursday. It's the same thing. Corrupt and wet and violent and it's full of malaria and pirates.

And that's March. Yeah. That's March. Yeah. And also kind of magical. I'm amazed at the way you guys live down there on the other side of the levees, how a accustomed you got to what I would call adjacent calamity, as opposed to the rest of the country, who, for instance, right now is still under this rubric of COVID, right? We're still getting used to this new thing that can hurt us, and we have not adjusted yet. We will, but we haven't. And I wonder if your big brain has any thoughts on the risk-reward ratio of living next to what could be the end at any given moment. I don't think anybody thinks of it that way. I think denial was exactly the word. And we do it all the time. And people live in Tornado Alley, people live next door to chemical plants. People, I mean, it's like, part of it's just need. This is not an

affluent city. So the notion of it, you know what, we're going to move to Nashville, honey, and I'm going to get a new job is not an option for 90% of New Orleans. Right. So a lot of it is you are where you are because you don't really have an option to relocate. And so you get up in the morning and you cut the limbs off the house and you sweep the drive and hope for the best. But the COVID thing, New Orleans immediately put on masks. Partly because, you know, it's a masking culture. It's try to stop the people of New Orleans from wearing masks. I dare you.

Mardi Gras. It's Mardi Gras year around now. I've got hundreds of masks. Which one should I? But we got hit so hard in the beginning. Yeah. It was like New Orleans, New York. and Italy. I knew someone that died three weeks in, and two guys that died shortly thereafter. And so

we got hit so hard that this place just wasn't messing around. Everybody was terrified. And if you live in a rural area and you don't know anybody that got it, it's going to take you a lot longer to see what we were forced to see right up front. Yeah. Like, oh, this is bad. Now, you had a front row seat for sure. I can't believe I missed it. That first week, we had a million tourists in New Orleans from Mardi Gras, the week before the shutdown. Really? in my stupid self and my 50 chums was driving an electric powered recliner through the streets of New Orleans from Marty Gras as part of a parade. And you know, you're not even up on the top of a float.

You're like down at street level and everybody, I must have high five, 2,000 people. And people are you shouting in your face and not one of this. Is that group called the Lazy Boys? It is indeed, Chuck. How knew you this? I googled you earlier and a YouTube video of the Lazy Boys show. And I saw these guys chugging down the street in recliners. They never mentioned your name in it, but I just, you know, you must have been one of the dudes.

I am one of the dudes. Were you one of the founding dudes? I am actually the founding dude. Good grief. Well, you buried the lead. This is the place where we start, Chuck. Joining us today is the founder of the Lazyzee boys. That will be my epitaph.

Well, I love that story. I can't say I have it beat, but I've got a close second. I gave the last official public address at the last official large event before the lockdowns began. No way. Yeah. And Mary was with me. Mary Sullivan, for those of you who don't know, has been on the podcast. She's my partner and she was Chris Poshay's lawyer for many years back when we met.

But Mary and I were in Las Vegas and I was addressing the Construction Expo, which happens every three years. It's like bigger than the porn convention. It's bigger than the consumer electronic show. Like 300,000 dirty jobbers from all over the world come to buy the equipment they need in order to do their work. And everything started canceling. But you can't pull the plug on a thing like this unless you're 100% sure it's a no-go because there's many millions of dollars sunk into this thing. So on March 8th, everything starts to topple. Very, very slowly, you can feel it going south by southwest is gone. Some of the exhibitors pull out.

So everybody looks at Caterpillar who had brought me in. And if Caterpillar pulls the plug, then it's over. And they decide, screw it, we're going to move forward. Anyway, the next day, that Tuesday, I go on the main stage and I start telling dirty job stories. And while I'm up there, Major League Baseball, Hockey, Disneyland closes down. The whole world shuts down. But they couldn't stop the Construction Expo after it started.

So it went for five more days, during which time I shook roughly 30,000 hands. Oh, my God. That's what I did. For four days, as the entire world shut down, all I did was walk around and listen to people, tell me stories about their dirty jobs while we shook hands and listened to the announcer, say, please stay six feet apart and avoid all physical contact. You're like, yeah, it's the beginning. Like, yeah, I'm not too worried.

Are you like every hand you're shaking? I'm going to die. I'm going to die. I'm going to die. Well, by Thursday, yeah. They was like, well, that's it. If this thing is for real, I'm riddled with it. I mean, there's no way I'm getting out of here.

You know, we were the last flight out. I got home to San Francisco, made it back to my house, and Newsom shut the whole state down. I didn't get it. But I just felt like, well, that was a close one. It was like the sound the ice makes, the thin ice when you're walking. across a frozen pond. Every handshake was a crack. It's weird to think back to how little we knew about it. Like, if you're in a convention hall, maybe that's all right. If you're in a church rectory with 20 people singing, sorry. You know, it's like we didn't understand the transmission very well.

So the things that felt innocent weren't. You and I both thought, well, we've got it and didn't. I mean, the one thing about Marty Gros is we're outside. Outside in masks. God, what a metaphor for our times. you wrote the first draft of the story that we just listened to. I changed the title to call it a legend in his own mind, and I wound up taking a pretty deep dive on Cervantes. So I guess I should ask you first, did I get any of it right? Because if there's an expert walking around on this, it's got to be you. I don't know.

No, there are people that have devoted their entire academic lives to Cervantes. I'm a complete dilettante. Where you're safe is that nobody knows anything. anything about Cervantes. So there's only so wrong you can possibly be. Right. Like, nobody knew anything about him, really, until the early 20th century with some guys started doing research in, like, church rectories and town halls. And they found birth certificates and when he'd been to jail and when he'd been in debt. And all those things that happened

in his life are fairly recent discoveries. So other than a few kind of, he was here on this day, he was here on this year. The rest is there's a lot of speculation. There's not even a portrait of him that anybody can be sure is a portrait of him. This was a really difficult story for me to write because, A, it's probably emblematic of the most recurring theme in all the stories in this collection, the quest, the knight-errant, you know, the unreachable star and so forth. But I don't know how many people today have seen or read Don Quixote. I hadn't read it until later in life. I had seen Man of La Mancha, so I knew the musical, which was interesting. But I didn't know anything about Cervantes.

So it's kind of tough in this format to set the whole thing up as a good reveal. But I had to give it a shot because it's, Cervantes has informed my favorite books today. And I'm still kind of obsessed with the themes of the book itself. And I think the first time you and I met, we talked about this down in New Orleans. We talked about your own unreachable star, this notion of turning that 900-page colossus into some sort of modern-day film. And, dude, you did it. You actually pulled it off. Start where you want to start.

But how in the world did you identify that as your wishful fulfillment? And on a scale of one to ten, how painful was it? It was awful. Also, fantastic. It is the hardest, most rewarding, stupidest. this most fun I've ever had my life. But it started completely out of the blue. I was in a meeting about another movie,

like a Nickelodeon young adult movie, and it was about this character, this pirate, who is a psychopath. And you never know if he's telling the truth or not, if he's really a pirate or he just thinks he's a pirate, and he's this big, larger than life, actually dangerous character. I'd never read Don Quixote.

I went to architecture school. I've never read anything. You know, it's like, I have a big fancy Votec degree. there's no literature in architecture school. So I'm like listening to this producer talk, and he has a degree in literature from Brown. So, of course, he knew all about Don Quixote, and he's bringing it to this pitch that I don't have any idea what he's talking about. And he told a story about Cervantes, not even about Don Quixote, but about Cervantes that was so stunning to me that I went and read Don Quixote.

So the story is that in 1605, Cervantes publishes Don Quixote. It's a huge hit. This is new. Reading is new. It's immediately a hit. Not only in Spain, it's translated into other languages. It's printed and printed and printed. And he's very renowned. But his publisher stole all the money because there's no intellectual property law in Spain in 1605 because there really hadn't actually been any intellectual property to make law about. And he'd been poor his whole life. He's still poor. And since there's no intellectual property law, another guy or guys wrote a sequel. using all the characters and names and just publish it and made a fortune.

And it was a crappy book and it had stolen his characters. And Cervantes was so angry that he wrote a third book, which is the second volume of Don Quixote. Because at the beginning of the first volume, which was the only originally the book, Don Quixote goes home and he transforms back into Alonzo Kihanah and goes to bed, basically. In his second book, Sancho comes back and wakes him up and says, dude, remember how we wanted to be famous and well-known and like we are so they know about the novel in the second book they know about the first book incredibly meta that's i mean that's the thing yeah it's impossibly meta because up until that point we really hadn't had a modern novel so he's not only writing the first novel he's writing about writing the first novel two or three

levels down it must have been just a complete mind trip for the reader in the whole I suppose so. I mean, you write the first modern novel in 1605 and the first postmodern novel in 1650. That's incredible. That's incredible. Yeah. And then the second one, not only do they know about the first book, they know who the author is. And part of their journey is that they're going to find this liar and put him to the sword for all the lies he's telling about them. And they go through the second book, like challenging him talking shit about the second book, the false history. They disparage the whole thing. They find somebody and put a sword to him and go, tell me who the real Don Quixote is, not that liar, not that BS. So the whole second book, they're addressing the first two books. And what was already a book inside of a book inside of a book inside of a book before any of that happened. And I was so blown away by this story, I was like, well, maybe I could read Don Quixote. I mean, it's pretty thick.

That's the first thing you look at it's like, I'm kind of used to looking at memes. This looks like a lot of work. You can't read in the lazy boy, right, going down the street. Not when I'm driving, but I do sometimes sit in and read, I'll confess. But then you read it and you've read it. It's hilarious. Yeah. I mean, it's really funny.

The first chunk, for me, anyway, felt farcical. And I don't know if it was intended to be a farce or if farce was even a word in the early 1600s, but it seemed farcical. The second one did not. The second one seemed like somebody had an axe to grind, and they did it in the most clever way possible. And the second one's painful. Like in the first one, he's in physical distress, and it's kind of funny. You know, it's cartoon pain.

And the second one, he's in emotional distress. Like when he goes into that plowice and he's mocked and set up and ridiculed, it's a harder read, arguably a deeper book. It's not as whimsical as the first one. Right. But the thing about the first one is there's so much in it. that was informed by the abject genuine misery of his real life and the incredible failures up until that point of his real life. So it's like Cervantes knew that, or at least suspected, that he was going to write something

completely new and different based on a weird level of autobiography. That battle of Lepanto, which was just a side note that I stumbled. across when I was writing this. You go a little deeper. You know, you brought it to my attention in that first draft. And I wound up probably reading 200 pages on that. And I just couldn't get the image out of my mind's eye. All those galleys pushed together in the Gulf of Petrus with the most, I mean, you can't even imagine the hand-to-hand combat that must have been going on on that heaving wooden platform about a mile wide in every direction. And often in absolutely, darkness. Yes, they fought around the clock. Madness. Yeah, and to turn that into social commentary

and comedy, I mean, his whole life was, life beat him up from day one. Yeah. And life didn't turn around until he wrote about it. But even then, the first thing that happened as a result of his prescience and boldness, he gets ripped off because there's no such thing as IP. So he's just, The guy just got kicked in the head, basically, from the jump. Yeah, and was, you know, he failed at everything. He was a failed playwright. He was a failed poet. He was kind of a, I mean, he was a well-regarded soldier.

But, you know, if you come home with three bullet holes in you in a bad arm and you get read, that's not success, really. It's something you hope for when you go to war. Yeah, he's a failed husband. I mean, since you've put this in present day, since you've taken this story and updated it into the 21st century, And since the eggheads who write about the original book talk about it in terms of this weird blending of fact and fiction, of reality and non-reality, like almost a dream state, I don't know. I look around. Whatever fake news means to you means different things to different people, but the country seems to be struggling to figure out the truth, right? The reality, whatever that is, this project of yours seems to be in bed.

right in the guts of that as well. Did that have anything to do with why he did the movie? Or did you just think it would be cool to do? Yeah, absolutely. Part of it was the right time for me, which is, you know, kind of how it works. I read the book and thought, why is anybody made a movie of this?

This is still the only feature film version of Don Gujote. There's Terry Gilliam's version that's like a version that's got an actor in it, an advertising agent. It's a very different. He's kind of a prop. There's the man of LaMontia, which is a very different story. It's the story of Cervantes in prison,

and they, for obvious reasons, changed Delcinea from a plump, ugly peasant girl into Sophia Loren, which is a very different take. Wouldn't you? If you can, yeah. So, and when I started reading it, what struck me was that it's not a big, epic tale. It's little.

He never gets out of his neighborhood. He's on this cruddy old horse. He can't go very far. He just rides around the neighborhood, doing crazy crap. And I'm reading and thinking, well, that could happen to anybody, any place, any time. I don't need the desert in Spain in 1605. I don't need to see a monster through his eyes.

Servantes is unflinching. There's all this stuff about, oh, well, maybe he's not crazy. Maybe he's really seeing things. Sifante's like bullshit. He's crazy. They say it over and over again. He's mad. There is no question.

That windmill was not a giant. That was the whole point. He's nuts. And so I'm thinking, well, you can make that. Terry Gilliam spent $9 million on puppets the first time he tried to make his movie. It's like, well, I don't need puppets. Maybe I could just make this right here. It doesn't matter where it is.

It doesn't matter what year it is. It could happen to anyone. Little did I know at that moment, it was happening to me. Right? Yeah. I mean, that's what happened to Servantes eventually. And look, you're not a writer who just kind of came out of absolutely. nowhere. I mean, you've been at this a long time. You've been writing for years, in fact.

Did it prepare you at all? This was your first time directing. This was your first time, like, really owning the thing. I can't say the Smurf movies prepared me to do this. Over the hedge, maybe. I mean, telling the story is telling the story. I never worry about too much who the audience is or whether it's animated or not. It's either a good story or it's not a good story and I don't care if it's a raccoon. Why not? Or a panda. Yeah. The directing thing was when it really became, I really got lost in my subject because I didn't go to film school. I'd never directed a television commercial, a music video, a home movie, a student film, nothing, not one frame of anything ever. And I was like, yeah, I can do this. Based on absolutely nothing.

You know, I've been on film sets, but that's not the same. And it was quite an experience. Everything went wrong. We didn't have enough time. We didn't have enough money. And I had to make every single decision. I learned more about storytelling and about myself in that project than probably everything else combined.

Like what? What's the big lesson for reaching for the unreachable star? Be better prepared than I was. Like, I could have pulled it off. And it's good. I'm proud of it. It's a good movie. It's 82% of what I wanted it to be. Ironically, I think the thing that's less successful is the writing than the directing. Why? I was so in love with that book and with the idea of making it. And probably with the idea of me making it.

It was a very heady endeavor. And everybody I got pulled on board became another version of Don Quixote. I mean, people who had no business working on this movie, it doesn't look like a lot of, a $550,000 movie or sound like a 500. I mean, it feels like a feature film book is a whole bunch of... It's gorgeous, Chris. Thank you. I was standing next to an incredibly good cinematographer. The incredible John Peters did an incredible job, and he has no business doing what he did for what we didn't pay him. But everybody got sucked into the story and the idea of us making the story. You know, everyone, Tim was insane. Tell me about Tim. He's the guy, gosh, I've seen him all over the place with the Cohen brothers?

Yeah, he was in, Oh, Brother Where Art thou. He was Buster Scruggs in the Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Right. He's in Watchman. He's got a new movie at Venice right now that's tearing up the Venice Film Festival. He's unbelievable. He's a genuine clown. Like, he's funny, right?

But he has a degree from Brown University where he was his class orator before he went to Juilliard for four years. He's read every book I've ever heard of. He's directed five movies, been in 50-something. He's a prize-winning play. He just wrote a novel. He is all in. And when he says she's going to do something, buddy, he's going to do it. He was all in. Well, he must have started growing that beard the moment he, you know, looked at the script because you can't fake that. And you must have had to shoot all kinds of stuff out of sequence. Well, he did start growing the beard right away. And I didn't, I hadn't thought about a beard, right? So the second time we talked, he's like, what would you think about a big old beard? You know, like a big, ugly. He's a show.

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American Giant American Made. American Giant American Made. Meanwhile, my buddy Trey, who produced it with me, we're trying to raise the money. So we're furiously going around begging for money. and Trey's a monster. And I'm just following them around talking about the movie. But it's not coming together yet. And we've got Tim and we have this window.

And we're thrilled that we have him and we don't want to lose him. So we just kept lying to him. And he'd say, so how are we doing, fellas? He'd call about every few weeks. How are we doing? Like, oh, we're almost there, man. We got this thing and it's close to this guy that knows some people that met a woman that has a, you know, whatever. We'd all hang up.

It was like, shit, we got to find him. So we'd go back to finding money. And he'd call him a couple weeks. And Trey and I's shorthand for his calls were, Beards getting itchy. Yeah. It's like he wants to shave the beard. The beard's getting itchy.

And so when it's all over, we're sitting around drinking one night and we told Tim about this. It's like, yeah, we knew the beard was getting itchy. He goes, oh, yeah, that's exactly what it was. So not itchy to me. It's like, my wife hates that damn thing. And she kept looking at me going, Tim, they're not going to raise the money, shave. And I kept going, I think they're going to do it.

So we almost got undone by just the discomfort in his family with the facial hair. Too funny. So you shot this in the summertime in New Orleans. It must have been, I mean, just the weather alone. I've been down there plenty that time of year. It's wretched. Oh, yeah. It rained all the time.

It was 100 degrees. Tim's wearing that costume all the time. And the scooter, we found at a parking lot of a grocery store. Like, it was just there. And my buddy, Trace sat on it for like an hour. hour until the owner showed up and made some deal to use it. And then we painted it orange and dirtied it up. And it was the only one we had. So if it broke, we're done. Right. We're halfway through the movie if the scooter dies. And it fell over a bunch of times. There's a

scene where he spills the scooter. Totally not what was supposed to happen. It's in the movie because it's great. Yeah. The scooter basically becomes sort of the proxy for the horse, which was called, what was it? It started with an R. The horse was Rossinante. Rossinante, right. But, you know, Servantes used a lot of puns. Like Sancho Panza, Ponza means potbelly. So Cidhammi Ben Ingelli, who's the narrator, Ben Ingelli, they think is his bastardization of the Arabic word for eggplant.

Because there's this whole undertone of moorishness that happens in the... So I tried to take advantage of that and use just other puns. So if I'm calling the scooter Rosatia, which is, you know what, instead of Rossi's And Lédy Dolce de Lece Tabasco, because he's in the convenience store. I'm trying to use the same technique where this lunatic goes out. He's just appropriating whatever he can find around him. Names, people, scooters. I need a horse.

Here's a scooter. Fine. It's a horse. Were you playing the cards you got once you got into production? Because instead of windmills, you're using basically oil platforms and pump jacks, which I thought was great. You know, the side car and the motorcycle for the horse. Did you know that or did you just sort of figure it out?

No, no, we knew all that. Because once you decide it's going to be today and then you have all these decisions to make, what's he going to ride and, you know, what's he going to fight? We actually built that pump jack. Oh, really? It's made of plywood. Movies are magic, man. That thing was out in that field.

So a bunch of guys made it out of plywood. And the way it goes up and down, I drew it in like drafting software. Like, make this. And magically I show up and it's bloody. there and it looks like metal and it's rusty and it goes up and down. But it goes up and down because there's a box at the bottom. It looks like part of the gear. And inside of that box was this production assistant and my 18-year-old son.

And we drilled a hole in the ground. And they were just using their hands. So they were manually raising and lowering that pump jack, these two guys in a sweaty box in the field. So we had a limited amount of time to shoot because they just would give out after a while. Like, they're strong people. It was like, and you'd hear a groan and then the pump jack would just go fwing.

Did they do it with Tim hanging on it? Absolutely. So the shot Chuck is talking about is he's got his lance and he basically charges toward this pump jack and he gets it stuck into the rigging and then he's lifted up into the air. And you're saying that all happens because two guys are under the ground somewhere yanking on a rope.

Yeah, pretty much. Now, Tim's a very small fellow, so that was a big plus. He doesn't weigh a lot. But he's wearing armor. But he's wearing armor. And he went up and down a lot of times because to shoot all those angles and stuff, it's two days of those kids lifting them up. And they've got to keep the speed consistent.

Right. Right. I will say I lobbied really hard for a one and a half horsepower electric motor, which didn't seem like a big reach for me, but I could not convince anyone to spring the couple of hundred bucks, that it would have... Well, you're out of money, you know, you're out of money when you start shooting on a project like this. And people, you know, people listening probably don't quite understand the true lunacy and the leap of faith it takes to make a movie.

I mean, is it nauseating right up into the point where you start or does the nausea set in after you begin? Because clearly there's nausea. Oh, the nausea sets in. The shooting is like sublime. You're surrounded with people who think you're genius. Everybody, people are bringing you coffee. You just say, I want that. And it magics itself up and it looks great.

And there's some brilliant guy pointing a camera at it and setting dials and making things look good. The shooting part's fantastic. It's hard. Long, long, long days. A lot of improvising. A lot of, oh, it's raining. That sets washed out. We have to shoot this right there.

Like, literally that happens. Like, oh, the whole set's washed out. Put them against that wall because you don't have any time. Like, you can't do anything else. But that whole experience is, and it's like putting on a play, right? You've done all of this. There's a lot of love. There's a lot of camaraderie.

You become a company. The nauseating part is they have what you call the rough assembly, which is where your editor just takes their rough footage. It's not color balance, the sounds just out of the microphones, and they snip it together just following the script. And then you watch it. And it is so effing horrible. because they're always bad.

And this one was particularly bad. And I didn't care about the character. And it was just awful. And I knew I had to spend another year trying to make it good. Just me and the editor. That's when you come home and go, I don't ever, ever, ever want to do this again. This was stupid.

I hated that movie that day. And for the ensuing couple of months, really. And then something comes together and you're like, oh, wait a minute. Because you make a lot of stuff up. The whole opening, which is this sort of monroe, of the world and the narrator tells you about how the world's broken and needs a hero. None of that existed. That's all stuff that got shot warming up to cameras and color balancing.

And we stole all that. It's like, I don't have an opening. I don't have a beginning. I don't know how to get in this story. Like, you just fudge everything because you have just what you have, nothing else. And you spend months beating yourself up. Like, why didn't I shoot this? What was wrong with me?

That part's tough. I mean, also, you love the bull. book, or the books, which combined are over 900 pages, how in the world do you decide what to ignore from maybe the most influential writer in the modern age? I threw the book out after I had sort of the outline really fleshed out and had done most of a past because, first of all, I can't compete with Zervantes, right? I can't keep looking at the book and realizing my own very, very limited command of this compared to him. That was too hard. So I just put the book away.

And there was a point where I didn't even know what he had made up and what I had made up anymore at all became, which I guess is what you want. But I did feel an incredible sense of responsibility. It's like, I can't screw up Don Quixote. That's horrible. Spanish people will come to my house and kill me and they should and I'll let this. Yes, they will. Very passionate people. Very, and they very, very much love that book.

It was quite a process. You run out of money. I was showing up begging the sound design guy who's an old buddy of mine, who again has a huge career and has no business doing this. He said, okay, I give you a few days. A whole part of directing at the end is just bothering people and begging them and making them do things they don't want to do. And I didn't have all the sound effects I needed. And the sound effects guy had left and the Foley people were gone. And I was literally on Google downloading 300 free sound effects and bringing him in and going, okay, what's going to sound like when the pole goes into the head of that?

that pump jack. Ooh, a stapler. I downloaded a stapler noise and I added echo and all this stuff and went into the studio and said, I got it. And that's what's in the movie because there was no money left. So I had to do everything. That's why I ended up making the song at the end because I had spent everything on Casey and the Sunshine Band. I had not a penny left. It's like, well, I guess we got to make a song. Less people think this entire thing is held together with Kleenex and Spit and resembles a graduate film. Let me assure you, It looks terrific. It's fun to watch. And I really don't know how you did. I mean, it won an award or something, didn't it? At least one. Yeah. Yeah. At the New Orleans Film Festival, it won a couple of awards. Ironically, one of them being the film sound award, I told that secret story about the stapler.

But that's because this guy, Larry Blake, my old pal who did the sound is an absolute one of the great sound people in the world. And for all of our negotiations and my begging and pleading, he's a minch. He made that thing sound great. To me, the big killer and independent film, you can shoot some stuff that looks kind of cruddy and weird and you can pass it off his style. There's no style to sound really. Like, it just has to sound good or it's going to feel cheap. It sounds great. He is a magician.

How much of movies... Sorry. Yes. When two people talk at the same time, the sound is bad. And Chuck. Let's go to Chuck. Okay. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Chris. When the sound is bad, it makes the picture look bad. Yeah. It's a thing where you look at it and you go, yeah, it wasn't a very good movie. And just the sound being bad can do that. Absolutely. You lose faith in the movie. Yeah.

How much of your movie and how much of movies in general today are entirely ADR'd? A lot. We didn't do a ton of it because you have to get your actors back. And they're usually, you know, Jacob, Badalon, was off to shoot the next Spider-Man movie. So it's tough to get his time, right? He's on a $200 million movie. They don't just give him a day off.

I went to New York and did a couple of ADR sessions with him and with Tim. The narration, we did a lot of times, a lot, a lot, a lot of times. But we can do that. There's no picture to sync with. And as you might recall, Chris, there was a conversation one evening at a certain watering hole down there in New Orleans where you talked to me about the possibility of narrating. this amazing film. That did not work out. That did not. I didn't get it, Chuck. I didn't get it. No, Roy Blount, it was. It was. It was. And we talked quite a bit about you's narrator, actually.

But it felt not regional enough because everything else in the movie was so regional. And I actually resisted Roy for a long time. And Roy and I are pals. I love this guy. It's like hanging out with Mark Twain, man. He's the real deal. But he's a fine writer himself. He's a fantastic writer. and an intellect and a sweetheart and a smart ass and fun to drink whiskey with. He's terrific. That voice is a one-of-a-kind voice. And I thought, you know, this might be too much. It's already nothing but trees, you know, in Southern mosquito. It works. I was wrong. Once I heard it against picture, I was like, oh, yeah, of course, Roy. He did a lot of work, shall we say? Yeah, there's no doubt about it. We talked weirdly, though, about what happens if the narrator is actually in the

movie from time to time, right? Like I would be standing in a Starbucks line and you'd hear the narration, but it's actually my backs to the camera, but I'm talking. And then I would turn around and continue to talk and just kind of zealig-like walk in and out of the scene. That notion stuck with me for years. And Chuck and I just finished a project called Six Degrees where I do that very thing, basically walk in and out of the scenes as a host slash narrator. So it took a while. Well, it's also very Servantes. One of the frustrations was I couldn't figure out and never quite did in the film how to deal with the layers that he deals with in the book. Because there's Servantes.

And then he made up a narrator, Sidhamut Benigelli, who's telling the story. So there's another layer. But Sidhamut is telling this story because he did a lot of research, right? He's not firsthand knowledge. This is stuff he learned. In fact, in the middle of the book, he stops and says, nobody knows what happened after here. This is the end of the story. But I was in a market in Marrakesh.

In a jar, I found a scroll that had the rest of the story of Don Quixote on it. It's a miracle. But he says, the scroll was written in Arabic, so you can't really depend on it. Your three-level narrator is even less reliable. Because he's telling the story written on a scroll by some Arab fellow he doesn't quite trust. All of those layers are happening at the same time. And then Don Quixote is not Don Quixote. He's Alonzo Kihanah.

and his language is not the real language of knights. It's the language of knights as filtered through a bunch of propaganda written in the 1400s, and they're terribly written books. But that's what he believed. So even his language is like all his dialogues, like five layers deep about where it came from and what he's saying. So how to make that happen all at once was I had to jettison some of those ideas. There are no new ideas, right? except on those rare occasions when there is one.

And that's the point of this whole conversation. What Servantes did was utterly and completely new. And that device you just described, have you heard of this guy, George MacDonald Fraser and the Flashman books? I have read Flashman. Okay. Well, this is the exact same construct. Most people just kind of breeze over this.

But in the first book, and there may be 14. in this series, and they're all terrific. But in the first one, the author, Frazier, creates an editor called Pagent Morrison. And in the introduction, Pagent Morrison finds in a trunk in like Lichten, like Lichten, the journals of an old soldier who had no virtues at all, except for the fact that he was 91 and he couldn't lie. He wasn't going to lie anymore. So his narrator becomes Harry Flashman, this retired soldier who tells the true story from his point of view of all of these different battles throughout time, you know, through Victorian England and so forth. But I thought that was the most clever literary device I had ever seen. It was so compelling that after this first

book got published, serious critics reviewed it and in their review credited the existence of this pre-existing material. Yes. Oh, that's delicious. At the end, the end notes are so voluminous because Frazier was actually a historian. He uses the end notes to correct the things that his unreliable narrator may have gotten wrong. So the whole thing reads like actual nonfiction, written from a real dude. And it's all imaginary. And I thought Frazier was brilliant, and he is, but he just took it from Cervantes. Yeah. Don Quixote is the first buddy comedy. That was like the other thing we kept talking about was that he and Sancho are Laurel and Hardy, they're avid and Costello,

very much, I think, Max Bialystach and Leo Bloom, which is Bialystachunt Bloom, Budapute. And, you know, they say all great ideas are just two good ideas. And so the romantic novel,

but with the unreliable narrator, which is what we're used to now. We're used to reading a novel and reading it as fact, knowing its fiction. That's sort of the joy of a novel. This is why they call Don Quixote the first modern novel. No one had ever asked readers to do that before. Things were either presented

as a fairy tale, sort of, or as to truth, as a history. No matter how made up they were, they were presented, you were to read it as though it's true. And he was actually engaging you to do both at the same time. At a point in his life where he had failed at everything. And where Spain was failing. I mean, part of this is that Spain was a failing empire at that moment. So the pretense of royalty and magnanimity and, you know, all of this pageantry of Don Quixote is also a commentary on the pretense of the king of Spain and the sort of like, I've decided I'm the king and everybody's kind of going along with it. And they're just starting to question it's like, is that really make you king? Because you say you're king, because your empire's crumbling and maybe you're just

a crazy person with the crown on. Shameless plug. Long before she was Peggy Roe, my mom was Peggy Noble, daughter of Carl and Thelma Noble. It was her father, Carl, who inspired me to pitch a show called Dirty Jobs to the Discovery Channel and later start a foundation that honored the kind of work Carl Noble did for a living, trade work, skilled labor. That foundation is called MicroWorks, and today I'm proud to tell you that we've helped thousands of people get the training they need to begin a career in the skilled trades. In fact, we'd love to help you. You can apply for a work Ethic Scholarship right now at microwworks.org. We've set aside $10 million for this year's applicants.

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K-N-O-B-E-L-Spirits.com. Soon may the noble men come to bring a bottle for everyone. One day when the waitin is done, we'll take a drink and go. Meanwhile, this former tax collector who had done five years of hard time in the most unspeakable prison,

who really just can't point to one single instance of success finally sits down to write about his own doomed destiny and winds up writing the book that changes everything. And that ultimately, if you follow it all the way to present day, causes you, Chris Poshay, to spend an unforgettable couple of years in one hellish summer trying to bring your version of his agony to life. And you did it, man. You actually pulled it off. And I can't imagine what's next for you. But 20 years from now, 30 years from

now, whatever, you'll look back at this, I bet, as the unreachable star, as the thing, the time when you took a big swing. I hope that feels as good then as I hope it feels now. Yeah, I obviously needed it. You know what I mean? Part of this is that I could have read Don Quixote 10 years before or five years after and John, yeah, that's good. But we react to things that come to us that we need. And I must have needed to do that because, man, it rung me like a bell and there was no talking me out of it, not that a whole bunch of smart people didn't try. You can't regret. It is, it's the song from the Man on Lamontje. You don't regret what you do. You regret what you don't do. Isn't it so interesting, though, about how everything that's worth doing is big and small at the same time, right?

I mean, this is a big book, and it had a big impact on virtually every corner of civilized life. It touched everything. But in the end, it's so personal. The macro is the market. But the micro, the small part of this thing that is so intensely personal, that's why I wanted to show you Flashman, because for me, I wrote this simple little story on this simple little podcast because I love this book and I love this book. Everything John D. McDonald wrote, right, the Travis McGee Mysteries. These stories are in the book I wrote because I thought that this was the perfect embodiment of Quixote and, Ponsa, Travis McGee and his economist friend Meyer, they live on houseboats down in Beheumar. They solve crimes. This is the best pulp fiction that's ever been written. And he describes himself in every single novel as the knight errant who hops aboard his swayback steed and takes his rusty lance and goes out to try and correct some wrong, right?

He tries to help people who have been swindled, get their money back. And he takes his retirement in early installments, which for me. me form the basis of, you know, what passes for my whole business model. Have you ever read Confederacy of Dunsts? John Kennedy-Otool, right? I mean, it's very much the same story. That was going to be the third book I pulled down because that's it. And it's also the reason I love New Orleans.

I'd never been to New Orleans when I read that book. More specifically, The Forward by Walker Percy, which just changed just about everything for me from a literary standpoint. The fact that it had all been done before, Chris, the fact that Servanties figured this out in jail 400 years ago, that's macro. The fact that you, a writer of some success and acclaim, decided to take on the biggest work in the history of written works

and actually pull it off in the same place where a confederacy of Dunst is unfolded, that's micro, and that's amazing. the way something like that can reverberate over time, 400 years. Yeah. Well, and I will say New Orleans of all the places in the world, everyone in New Orleans is Don Quixote. Everyone. That stupid little Mardi Gras club happened because I looked at my buddy, the same guy that produced Don Quixote, by the way, who's my accomplice in all things stupid.

I looked at him and said, you know what, we're going to start one of these clubs. We're not marching. We're riding around in powered recliners dressed like lounge lizards. And he went, yeah. And eight months later, we were in the biggest parades in Carnival because everyone here supports madness and quixotic quests. You tell that to somebody here, they're like, heck, yeah, I know a guy that's in charge of a parade. He'd love that. Like, nobody looks at you like, you're crazy.

They look at you like, hey, that's a great idea. The stupid or the better, the bigger and bolder. You ever heard of Ernie K. Doe? No. I'll try to do this quickly. Ernie K. Doe was a soul singer in the 50s and 60s. He had a hit with the song Mother-in-law. You know this?

Mother-R-Law. Yeah. Mother-R-R-Lah. Yeah, yeah. Alan Tussaint song, I think. And it was a one-hit wonder, right? And that was it. That was his career.

But he was from New Orleans. So he got a radio show on the local community radio station, WWZ, which is a wonder. And he is a larger-than-life personality. And he proclaimed himself emperor of the universe. He called himself the emperor of the universe. Cato. He made up a catchphrase for himself, Burn, Cato, burn. That people shouted at him when he walked by.

everyone embraced it. Everyone here was like, oh, you're the Emperor of the Universe? Right on. Burn, Kato, Burn. So there's this Mardi Gras crew called the Crudeau, which is this very ribbled, satirical crew that goes to the French Quarter. It's extremely naughty and political. It's wonderful. We were in it for years. And they have a king every year, and it's somebody local. And one year, it was Kato. And so they bought him a real king costume, like a full rabbit pelt, crown, the whole, like a king, because he's the emperor of the universe. And he's, he's the emperor of the universe. And He wrote as the head of the parade. He took it apparently completely seriously. And he was the king. And then he died that year. And he was laid in state in Galear Hall. And Alan Toussaint and Harry's Connick Jr. and all these musicians paid tribute. He had one hit in like 1958. They paid tribute to him. He was carried out of the Gellier Hall in the king costume in his casket and put in a chariot drawn by horses to go to the cemetery. He was carried out of the galleyarer hall in the king costume in his casket and put in a chariot drawn by horses to go to the cemetery. He was. He was. He was carried. He was. He was carried out. He was. He was carried out of the treated like an actual emperor because he said, I'm the emperor of the universe. And everybody in New Orleans

went, damn right. Sure. The whole city's like that. And I think that may have had some influence on me resonating with this book and thinking that it was here was because, man, if one place is going to support your crazy delusions, this is that place. Either New Orleans or Hollywood. Yeah. Well, exactly. Yeah. Right. I mean, Hollywood is New Orleans, really, without the charm. Just the Craven. part of it, just the emperor part of it. It's a less benevolent emperor, perhaps. Agreed. More dictator.

Who said it was the benevolent dictator that was the ultimate, the best you could hope for, but since you can't hope for it, we'll settle for democracy. I think it was Socrates or one of those cats. But look, this whole notion of the emperor of the universe is pretty interesting. And so, too, is a one-hit wonder. But do you remember Mitch Lee? Does that ring any bells? No.

Well, I'm going to rock your world, dude. Mitch Lee was an advertising guy, worked his whole life in advertising. In fact, Mitch Lee wrote, oh, that great Sarah Lee riff. Nobody doesn't like Sarah Lee. That was Mitch Lee. Nice. Okay. So before he wrote that, he was working on some other accounts in the 50s, and he was

approached with this project that these producers thought he would be good for, because he had a really great ear. And he had a buddy named Joe Dorian, and Joe was pretty good with words. And these two guys got together, and they collaborated on this idea. The producers wanted some songs about maidens and love and yearning and quests. Mitch Lee is the guy who sat down and wrote, To dream, the impossible dream. He was an ad guy. Was it for an advertisement?

No, it was for the Man of La Mancha. Well, but how did you get from advertising to that? That's incredible. He never left it. 2,328 performances of Man of La Mancha. It changes everything. I mean, that musical had an impact on Broadway, not quite the same as the original text did on the literary world, but it was huge.

And Leon Dorian wrote that musical, basically from the ground up, an ad guy. And while he collaborated on some other revivals later on, he never, ever did anything like that again. That was his one hit. That was his unreachable star. And I was sitting here earlier listening to you talk about both architecture and advertising. And architecture, I think, has a hell of a lot more to do with writing than people give it credit for. And advertising has everything to do with storytelling. It is storytelling.

And in a very challenging way, because you have only like 30 seconds to tell your story. Yeah. It's like songwriting. It's like, how economical can you make this? That's funny. You bring that up because I think architecture and screenwriting are the same job. I used to switch back and forth between them all the time. And it's very much the same role.

It's a different set of tools, but they're the same thing. You wrote something. I read it. I want to say it was like a year ago. It was called The Space in the Box. Yeah, on my little blog. Yeah. And Chuck, this is such a, it's only like five or six paragraphs, but it's terrific.

He basically makes the argument that the simplest toys oftentimes out fascinate a kid, right? Why a kid would take out. this incredibly sophisticated toy, like a robot dog or something, and spend more time playing with the box than the toy. I don't think it's that mysterious because play is interaction. And if the toy does everything, then there's no role for you to play in it. And it will do its thing a few times. And then you're just, you're an audience at that point.

The robot dog performs and you're not engaged. But the box, box doesn't do anything unless you make it do something. So if it's not an airplane, so if it's an airplane, it's because you made it an airplane. It depends on your participation and your imagination. So writing, you have to leave space for the audience to make the rest of the story. You can't answer all the questions. I think the subheading in that article is answers are boring because answers are boring. Questions are interesting.

And one of the things you learn early in screenwriting is that you need to end every scene with a question. Not necessarily a literal question, but a question. is the second you answer the question, it's over. The movie's over. The scene's over. Yeah. And that whole premise of, I think this is why something like Don Quixote last 400 years. It's open-ended.

When it first came out, it was considered a farce. It was just like a little wacky people getting hit on the head kind of comedy, making fun of royalty, because that was the mindset of that moment. So they brought their half of the experience to Cervantes' half of the experience. and they made this whole experience. It was just kind of a joke. And then through time, as society changed, W.H. Auden had a whole different thing. It was all about romance, dreaming the impossible dream. That wasn't the original idea that people brought to the book.

This whole notion of dreaming the impossible dream and all that was a, that's like an enlightenment, romantic era kind of version. And then it was taken as a peon to literature. It's about the reading life. It's about having a rich interior life and intellectual, which probably wasn't what Cervantes was after because there were just, there weren't many books, really then. So we keep bringing to it. And what I see in it is if you want to do something, put on the costume and step out the front door and do it.

Which is exactly what you did. And your front door happened to be a little parish in Louisiana. Yeah. That's what's brilliant about your movie, Chris. And you made the point earlier, but since you don't want to pat yourself on the back, let me do it. that you did it. You didn't take the bait and get sucked into a giant set piece. You played the cards you got. You looked around. You made it in the town you love. And it's still fundamentally true. Because Cervantes, he left us enough space in the box to see it through our own mind's eye.

Look, Auden did the same thing. You mentioned W.H. Man, I don't know how many people are into that cat. he's the guy Chuck who wrote that famous poem that's in everybody loves it in four weddings in a funeral stop all the clocks disconnect the phone prevent the dog from barking with the juicy bone he was my north my south my east my west my waking mill my sunday best blah blah blah that whole thing has become god this homage to sentiment people to this day use it in their wedding vowels they repeated at funerals it was written as sarcasm and satire. Auden was lampooning the people in charge. He wasn't saying, stop all the clocks, disconnect the phones, prevent the dog from barking with the juicy bone.

He was saying, stop all the clocks, disconnect the phone, right? This is your big shot. Here we go. Yeah. Mr. Important. My north, my south, my east, my west. It was like, oh, God, this guy, it was the exact. It was the exact opposite, the whole thing was satire. And you don't get it unless you understand the context. And I think you don't get Cervantes and Quixote unless, as Chris said, you understand that Spain was a dying empire. And this guy was a failure by any reasonable metric. And so the fact that a failure writes the greatest modern novel, the first modern novel of all time lampooning a dying empire. And the fact that you just did it again, I'm not going to say New Orleans is a dying city.

That's too depressing. But it is a city with its back to the metaphorical wall to the levy, right? When the levy breaks, we know the party's over. And there you are. You're in your own Spain, you know, filling in the space in your own box. It's funny. You say that one of the main premise I was working with is that this could be anywhere, anybody, anytime. But the more you talk about it in New Orleans, it's like, maybe I'm kidding myself.

Maybe this place and this moment, I saw what I needed to see in it. Maybe that's not available if you're not in a place that has its back to the wall. Maybe there are more ingredients than if I had been living in a suburb of Fort Worth at the end of a cul-de-sac and a 3,000 square foot house with a nice cocktail pool in the back, in a place where people don't really talk a lot. Maybe I couldn't. Then you'd have written Bonfire the Vanities, right? Right. You're not going to, I don't know. Or maybe I would have needed it even more.

Maybe that would have been like such a dead end. It's like, I still think about different setups for the beginning. You know how this is. It never stops. I'll be writing this in my head for the rest of my life. There's so many potential places a character could start and end up going crazy and putting on a steamer basket as a vest and stepping out the door. It's a lot of us, most of us, probably. We say this. Chuck and I've been around and around this topic a lot, and the ending is the thing that gets all the credit to your earlier point, right? It's when you answer the question, the scene, the act, the story, the movie is over. You don't start Citizen Kane with, let me tell you a story about a sled named Rosebud. Okay? Yeah, you don't do that. You just string it out all the way to the end. The trick, the real son of a bitch in the whole full. is where do I begin? Always.

I always worked backward. I just finished a huge project, this enormous undertaking of a screenplay. My writing partner and I picked the moment that was going to be the climax because it's this incredibly involved story and just worked backward until we found the part where it's like, oh, wait, that's where you come in. It's got to be right before the story really starts. Yeah. And it is.

Yeah. It's reductive. The whole thing's reductive. It's all ass backwards. It's a puzzle, and it's fun to figure out, and you've figured out yours. I can't wait to see what you do next, man. I can't wait for you to be the emperor of the universe. When I drive that recliner down St. Charles Avenue in my ankle-length silk robe,

sipping whiskey, I do kind of feel like the boss, I have to admit. It's the same kind of delusion. Actually, this is funny because you get in this chair, and I've got a lamp and fringe, and it's a whole living room that goes down the street. and you drive with a little joystick and you're dressed in the stupid like lounge lizard clothes and we're listening to lounge music and the whole bit. And people treat you like your Keith Richards. I mean, it's like your normal life, Mike, is what it's like. People just, I've been with you, I've seen it happen. People just can't stop taking selfies with you and they give you all this attention.

Girls sit in your lap and this whole thing happens. And then you get up to go to the bathroom and you leave your chair and you get about eight feet from your chair and you're nobody. Yeah. It's not me. It's like it's not that thing. It's the context. It's the setting that I'm in that makes it magical. Otherwise, I'm just like some old guy going to the urinal next to the parade. You know, I haven't, not anybody. It's the chair, man. You know what? That's the place to land the plane because really, I don't remember the quote, but Cervantes did say something along the lines of every man is a king. Every man is an emperor. It's just a question of, is he the emperor of Spain or the emperor of his jail cell? He's the emperor of wherever he is. I think one of the most brilliant things

Norman Lear ever did was put Archie Bunker in that chair. When Archie Bunker comes home, he goes to that chair. And if the meathead's sitting in the chair, the meathead's got to go. Nobody sits in the chair but Archie, right? And when he's there, then he is the emperor of his universe. And when he's not, he's just another guy taking the piss. Exactly. A throne. My Mardi Gras throne, and I get to be the emperor for a couple of hours. Since we're talking about parades, I was the Grand Marshal and the shortest parade in the world in Hot Springs, Arkansas. And it's the shortest parade in the world. It's one block, but 50,000 people show up. And they invited me to do this because because, because, I had made fun of parades on an episode of Dirty Jobs when I was dismantling the floats in the

Rose Bowl parade, right? I hate parades. I got caught in one coming back home on Thanksgiving. I got caught in the Macy's Day parade in like 1997. And I never got over it. And I ranted and raved about this. So the organizers of the shortest parade in the world on St. Patrick's Day invited me to come. And I said, all right, but my terms are simple. I want to be dragged down the street behind a tractor sitting on a low platform with wheels on it, obviously. But on the platform, I want to toil it. And I want to be sitting on my throne, holding a plunger as my scepter, as we slowly make our way down this parade route.

And they said, okay. And a month later, there I was. You can Google it. There I am, sitting on a toilet. I guarantee you I'm going to Google it. It's there. And you can thank our. mutual friend Mary Sullivan for making it happen because she was the one. Here, look at this, man.

Here's how we land the plane. Mary gave me this. Mary gave me this years ago when I finally convinced her to leave her law firm and help me build something. She gave me the Picasso rendering, not the original because she's cheap, but she gave me this version of it. And there's Pancho. There's Quixote. If only our listeners could see this, it was. would really be effective. You're saying that you stole my lawyer. Yeah. And for that, she gave you a Picasso image of Don Quixote.

Yes, because she at that moment began to see herself as the sensible one whispering things in my ear, not unlike Sancho. I'm sure she will appreciate that parallel to being Sancho. They're almost identical visually. I know. I know. Yeah, the classic sort of Sancho Panza. I assume you're going to edit that out so that she doesn't shove you. I assume Chuck will probably edit it into the open so she can't miss it.

Because there's no way she's going to listen for 75 minutes. You know her. She got the attachment. Yeah, that's fine. What's next? That's good. Hey, man. Thank you for making the time.

Congratulations on the movie. People should know, I guess, they can watch it for free on Amazon, right? Yeah, it's out there and easily available. In fact, it's about to be released in the UK as well. Excellent. Distribute there. Yeah. The true story of Don Quixote by Chris Poshay.

Chuck, did I miss anything? I think you nailed it. Although I think the title is the true Don Quixote, is it not? It is the true Don Quixote. That's what I mean by did I miss anything. Like maybe the proper title of his movie. You didn't miss it. You added to it.

You threw the word story in there. So technically you didn't miss something. That is a very subtle. distinction. And as the best writer on the call, Chris, what's the title of this thing? I wrote down two that struck me, the emperor of the universe seems an obvious one in a good way to circle back because it kind of runs through the whole thing. But I'm also intrigued by the beard is getting itchy. That's my favorite. I like the beard is getting itchy. It doesn't give as much a way. Yeah. When your beard's itchy, maybe that's when you go do something, shave it or go wear it out somewhere.

Or braid it. Or get your ass in a sensible easy boy and start tooling down the canal. Maybe that's what all this is about. You just get bored and itchy and you got to go do something so you can know that you're alive. And if what you need to know that you're alive, Mike, is to be dragged down the street on a toilet for a block in front of 50,000 people? Yep. More power to you. You know, in Pasadena, they have a parade called the Duda Parade, which is similar to the one you were describing, Mike, where it's just

I think it's like two blocks long, and it makes fun of the Rose Parade. And one year I marched in it with a group of grillers, hot dog grillers. We literally grilled hot dogs as we're going down the parade and toss them out to people with cannon, you know, like the guns that shoot hot dogs. Fantastic. This is why when you go to like, if you get stuck in the Macy's parade, let's be honest, the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade is the most boring thing that it's ever happened. And when you've been to the Duda parade, the one block for Hank Patrick's Day parade, Marty Grau to try to suffer through the Rose Parade, actually, or worse, the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade is just... Insufferable.

They're insufferable. Yeah, it's a pointless thing. They should throw hot dogs. They should grill. They should be on toilets. Or lazy boys. Or lazy boy and all of those things. Right.

Absolutely. All right. This officially concludes this week's episode. of whatever this was, we'll be back again. Thanks, Chris. Oh, it was my pleasure. Thanks, Mike. You too, Chuck. If you work in University Maintenance, Granger considers you an MVP, because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip-off, and Granger is your trusted partner.

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