#2240 - Roger Avary & Quentin Tarantino AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast The Joe Rogan Experience

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Episode: #2240 - Roger Avary & Quentin Tarantino

Author: Joe Rogan
Duration: 03:25:51

Episode Shownotes

Quentin Tarantino is an Academy Award-winning writer, producer, and director known for films such as "Pulp Fiction" and "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood." Roger Avary is an Academy Award-winning director, screenwriter, and producer known for "The Rules of Attraction" and his collaboration with Tarantino on "Pulp Fiction." Together, they

host the second season of their podcast, "The Video Archives," available now.

www.patreon.com/videoarchives Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Summary

In this episode of 'The Joe Rogan Experience,' Joe Rogan is joined by Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary, discussing their experiences in the film industry and their podcast 'The Video Archives.' They cover a variety of topics, including the impact of wildfires in California, the rise and fall of video rental stores, and the significance of personal experience in filmmaking. The conversation emphasizes the balance of artistic integrity and commercial pressures in Hollywood, and how passion and community support play crucial roles in their creative journeys.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (#2240 - Roger Avary & Quentin Tarantino) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:03 Speaker_07
The Joe Rogan Experience.

00:00:13 Speaker_05
So you're saying that someone was telling you how to kill someone with coffee?

00:00:16 Speaker_06
OK, so I got to know all these. You were talking about some.

00:00:20 Speaker_05
His name's John McPhee.

00:00:21 Speaker_06
Some operators. And I got to know through a friend, through a billionaire friend who loaned his plane to Clinton to fly those people out of, I think, North Korea. And so from that point on, he was surrounded by these guys.

00:00:39 Speaker_06
And one of them, this guy Mikey, which isn't his real name, I think he's actually named, they name them all after the archangels. So he was like Michael, Gabriel, like they take on these.

00:00:57 Speaker_06
Well, you know and so he You know, we got to know each other because of our mutual friend and I think what happened was He and a couple of the other guys You know, they were placed on me as like for surveillance purposes like, you know, I

00:01:19 Speaker_06
find out what this Avery guy's about, maybe, or just keep an eye on him or whatever.

00:01:22 Speaker_06
And they told me right up front, like, be nice to your surveillance, you know, like, don't try to lose us or anything like that, because I heard stories about how, you know, they're surveilling somebody in wherever, Bolivia.

00:01:36 Speaker_06
suddenly some gang attacks their surveillance and they step in kick the shit out of the gang and so so I got to know these guys and naturally, you know, I'm a writer and Filmmaker and so I of course want to talk to them about stuff and they immediately started volunteering Oh, yeah, we've learned all these different ways when I became an operator blah blah blah I learned how to kill people without and I was just making a list now of the ten ways to kill someone without Leaving a trace.

00:02:02 Speaker_06
I was like well Just like when I told Quentin about this, he's like, well, what are those?

00:02:08 Speaker_06
I'd like to hear those everybody wants to hear those and so one of the ones that I think is the best one is You inject someone with coffee caffeine like just inject coffee into their bloodstream gives them a heart attack and it's untraceable later on they do an autopsy and they just discover caffeine in your system

00:02:26 Speaker_05
That's it? That's it. Is this just right into the blood? Coffee can kill you?

00:02:30 Speaker_06
Sometimes the simple way.

00:02:31 Speaker_01
Like it's just right into the juggler in it with a syringe.

00:02:34 Speaker_06
Yes. Jesus. After extracting whatever information you need to get out of him. But how much coffee will kill you like that? I don't know. Is it the Turkish kind or is it Folgers?

00:02:45 Speaker_05
Cuban espresso?

00:02:46 Speaker_06
Yeah. But he was he was a medic, you know, during during the war. Well, the war. And he was a medic. And so he, you know, was kind of identified as somebody who knew how to kill somebody very easily, because you know, what will work?

00:03:04 Speaker_06
Yeah, because you're a medic. And so I would hear every now and then, I'd kill some guy and some diplomat or something in the Philippines and hit him with my car and,

00:03:14 Speaker_06
And I'd look in my rearview mirror and make a determination, a medical determination of, you know, is the guy still alive or is he? I better finish him off and put him in reverse and drive him over again a couple of times and then take off.

00:03:26 Speaker_06
And he's doing that all the time.

00:03:29 Speaker_05
All the time, they're doing it. Well, Jamie and I were just talking, they think they have a photo of the guy who whacked that insurance CEO. Oh, yeah, yeah, uh-huh. Yeah, they think they have a photo of his face now.

00:03:38 Speaker_01
Oh, they do, huh? Well, I would think with the amount of cameras— From around the time, or they picked it up later?

00:03:42 Speaker_05
I think, you know, there's cameras everywhere now, and that's part of the problem with someone. I don't think this guy was a professional. I think this guy—

00:03:50 Speaker_05
If I had a guess some guy got fucked over apparently that company is really bad on denying claims 30s 34% denial rate something almost like 16. Yeah.

00:04:01 Speaker_06
Yeah, so Those guys I don't think anybody's gonna like be crying too hard over that guy

00:04:08 Speaker_05
Maybe it's family, but that's about it. Yeah, it's a dirty dirty business the business of insurance is fucking gross It's gross and especially health care insurance. Just yeah fucking gross.

00:04:18 Speaker_06
Well, actually all insurance. I live in California and All of a sudden because I live adjacent to any kind of open space like nobody will insure my house because of fire, right?

00:04:29 Speaker_06
And so suddenly it's like I have a house that's uninsurable and it's not just me. It's everybody. Mm-hmm. And so it's chaos and

00:04:35 Speaker_05
Yeah, I have a friend who's trying to sell a house in California, and it turned out it was $125,000 a year just to get fire insurance. Like, what?

00:04:45 Speaker_06
Yeah, it's insane. Fucking nuts. It's insane.

00:04:49 Speaker_05
Yeah, but I was evacuated three times when I lived there. I used to live in Bell Canyon, and you know, it was fucking, it was rough.

00:04:56 Speaker_01
Look, I've been, like, I've been really lucky. I live in, I'm almost afraid to say it, all right, because I've been living in the Hollywood Hills, and I've never, any of the fire stuff happens never happened around me.

00:05:05 Speaker_05
Yeah, it is just luck. Yeah.

00:05:08 Speaker_06
I mean, the benefit of your place is you're at least in a helicopter accessible, they're just going to dump all that fire retardant right on top of you.

00:05:16 Speaker_01
I literally am at the top of the hill on a bunch of rock. So if the whole fucking place turns into an inferno, I'm still fucked.

00:05:24 Speaker_06
And I think that place has probably been there a while.

00:05:26 Speaker_05
It's probably withstood all sorts of calamity. Yeah, when I was filming Fear Factor, I talked to this guy who was a fire guy for the fire department. He said, it's just going to be a matter of time.

00:05:34 Speaker_05
There's going to be one day where a fire hits LA, and the wind is the right way, and we're not going to be able to stop it. It's just going to burn right through to the ocean. He goes, it's just a matter of time. We all know it.

00:05:46 Speaker_05
I was like, what the fuck, dude? I go, the whole city? He goes, the whole city. He goes, when those big fires get going, there's not a damn thing. Like what happened in Malibu a few years back. Like those are, I always thought Malibu, those rich people.

00:05:59 Speaker_05
Well, that was the closest.

00:06:01 Speaker_01
Maui. That was like around 93. That actually happened while we were shooting Pulp Fiction.

00:06:07 Speaker_05
Really?

00:06:07 Speaker_01
Yeah, well, there was a big Malibu fire. The big Malibu fire happened while we were shooting Pulp Fiction. So we actually set up a TV on the set because Bruce Willis was going to maybe lose his house.

00:06:20 Speaker_01
And so he was like, actually, so we have a little TV area so we could like, in between takes, we can watch what's going on with the fire.

00:06:27 Speaker_01
And they're like, and there was all these reports that, no, Bruce Willis and his family are on top of the house with their water hose. And I go, no he's not, he's right here!

00:06:40 Speaker_06
The thing is, fires were normal. Like, it used to be when I was young, you know, I grew up in California, and so when I was young, fires would burn through Malibu constantly.

00:06:48 Speaker_06
But now they put all those houses in there where there never were houses, because the fire is a natural process. It kind of clears the land, cleans the land, and it's normal, actually.

00:06:59 Speaker_06
But, you know, when you put all that kindling in there, suddenly we end up with these, like, super storms of fire, just going crazy. It's, I think it's overdevelopment,

00:07:15 Speaker_05
This episode of the Joe Rogan Experience is brought to you by Craven the Hunter. Craven the Hunter hits theaters this Thursday, and it's a bloody, badass, R-rated action movie that must be seen on the big screen.

00:07:28 Speaker_05
Aaron Taylor Johnson is Craven, whose father is a crime boss played by Russell Crowe. Craven becomes a hunter with a list of people that he's decided needs to be stopped. And once you're on his list, you're dead.

00:07:43 Speaker_05
Crave and the Hunter is exclusively in movie theaters this Thursday. Get your tickets now. Fires that we're getting. Yeah, but it's a cool place to live. You're not gonna stop people from developing in Malibu.

00:07:54 Speaker_05
You know, it's just too nice Just take your chances roll your dice. Yeah. Yeah.

00:07:59 Speaker_06
Yeah. Well, but you roll your dice You take your chances and you roll your dice no matter where you live.

00:08:03 Speaker_05
Yeah, it's just it's just fucked up when it happens like oh my god Yeah, I drove home once we were filming fear factor way to stop the set early because the fire was so bad this was like 2003 or something like for

00:08:14 Speaker_05
And driving home, it took me 55 minutes on the 5 to get home. And the entire time, the right side of the highway was on fire for 55 minutes. Everything, like Lord of the Rings style.

00:08:24 Speaker_01
So three different times you got evacuated from your house? Yeah, three different times. So what is like, OK, so you decide what you're going to take with you kind of thing?

00:08:32 Speaker_05
Yeah. The last time was the last time. It was like the last big fire in LA. And I came home from the Comedy Store at like 1 o'clock in the morning.

00:08:41 Speaker_05
And my wife and I are looking out the window, and the fire's like maybe 500 or 600 yards away, and it's coming over the hill. And we were looking at each other, and I said, let's just get the fuck out of here before it gets bad.

00:08:50 Speaker_03
Yeah, right on.

00:08:51 Speaker_05
Let's just get out of here now. So we grabbed the kids, got a laptop, took some clothes. I didn't even have underwear. I said, we could just buy stuff. Who gives a fuck? Who cares? If you have your life.

00:09:02 Speaker_06
I'm always the, I don't want to say the stupid guy, but I'm the guy who for some reason always decides I'm going to stay.

00:09:07 Speaker_03
Oh, you're that old guy.

00:09:11 Speaker_06
I live near a fire department. There's a fire hydrant across from my driveway.

00:09:15 Speaker_03
You're the guy on the roof where the flood is happening.

00:09:19 Speaker_06
Yeah, that's me. My family went away and I was like, well, they're gonna close it out so we can't get back in.

00:09:24 Speaker_06
I'm just gonna hang out here until I know that it's, and you know, at a certain point there was fire like cresting the ridge and I'm kind of watching it. I ran down to the fire department to see, you know, like, hey guys, it's coming.

00:09:35 Speaker_06
I can see it from my house. And they're all there like hanging out and eating sandwiches and like not even worried about it. They kind of looked over at it. It's okay. It'll be fine. It'll just burn a little.

00:09:46 Speaker_06
Yeah, they get a little too blasé-blasé about firemen. They're pretty blasé. By the way, my spec ops friend, he's like, fuck those firemen, man. Fuck them. They get so much credit for nothing. They barely do anything.

00:10:01 Speaker_06
They're on these incredible pension plans.

00:10:04 Speaker_05
He hates firemen. That's ridiculous. It is a great job, but you can't get mad at someone for having a great job. For having a great job. There's a buddy of mine that I used to play pool with.

00:10:14 Speaker_06
He used to actually hump it into another country and kill somebody.

00:10:17 Speaker_05
He's got a real tough job. He's not getting enough credit, that's what it is.

00:10:22 Speaker_03
That's really what it comes from. That's the world's best way to say it.

00:10:25 Speaker_05
Yeah, that's the reality of our world today. Those people don't get enough credit. But Fireman, you know, it is a great fucking job.

00:10:32 Speaker_02
But I like the way he breaks it down.

00:10:36 Speaker_05
Huge pensions Everybody thinks they're heroes. They're not heroes. That's funny because they're just doing their job The firemen are very comfortable fire these people are very comfortable people dying.

00:10:47 Speaker_05
Yeah dying because of them exactly just get real They get blase blase about murder

00:10:54 Speaker_06
It's not murder if it's sanctioned by your own country, apparently.

00:10:57 Speaker_01
Isn't that wonderful?

00:10:58 Speaker_06
What a cool loophole. Yeah, isn't it?

00:11:00 Speaker_01
I had an interesting thing. You know, it's like, you know, when you live in the Hollywood Hills, you're paying actually, you know, pretty decent property taxes. So you get there's you know, there's a little big that comes with it.

00:11:12 Speaker_01
You know, you get a there's a reason why you you know, you don't have to wait two hours during when you're during election. You just go to the go to the local elementary school. You're in and out in five minutes.

00:11:22 Speaker_01
All right when it comes election day, but also It's one of those stupid things that you do that like, like, like, what was a fucking idiot where you turn on the burner and then you like leave the room for a while?

00:11:34 Speaker_01
All right, and then you come back and all of a sudden your your kitchen is flaming. And so, uh, has that happened to you? That happened to me once. And so the alarm goes off and I hit the button, let the fire department know, and then I put it out.

00:11:55 Speaker_01
I put it out pretty much immediately. And then maybe five minutes later, it could have been three, five minutes later, The firetruck is at my door. So I didn't even have time to say, hey, it's, you know, it's, it's okay now. It's okay.

00:12:16 Speaker_01
And so there's an entire firetruck at my door. And I, I let them in and go, look, guys, I'm really sorry. I was really stupid. You know, I, I left the room and with the pot on the stove and whatever, in any way.

00:12:30 Speaker_01
And so I'm really sorry I wasted your time. I'm really, really sorry I wasted your time. Having said that, it's nice to see that you guys are here this quick. Yeah, and I'm sure they were like, oh, we'll just get a selfie.

00:12:41 Speaker_01
And they were like, yeah, yeah, you're right. Yeah, why? Yeah, exactly. Your private taxes pay for something. Are you sure you don't want us to come in and just make sure? I go, yeah, go ahead if you want.

00:12:51 Speaker_05
The problem is sometimes they have to chop through the walls to make sure that there's not fire and embers inside. Spray it all down. It's a hard fucking job when it's a hard job though. The thing is most of the time they're just chilling.

00:13:03 Speaker_05
They get to cook, they eat, they work out.

00:13:05 Speaker_06
I take ice cream down to our guys. I'll go out and buy a bunch of ice cream or some pizzas and take it down just on random days just to make them happy.

00:13:15 Speaker_01
That's cool.

00:13:16 Speaker_06
I'm okay with the fire guys.

00:13:18 Speaker_01
It was actually funny because it was like one of the things that was a crackup It was like the local fire department when we worked at video archives at our video store the local fire department was a customer and so they'd rent different movies, but like it was almost out of Out of five movies that they would rent for a porno.

00:13:39 Speaker_05
Yeah No, they lived up to their Career, did you guys work together? Yeah. Yeah. No shit. That's how you guys met. Yeah, that's how we met Wow

00:13:49 Speaker_06
Video archives in Manhattan Beach, California.

00:13:51 Speaker_03
How fucking cool is that? Yes, from like, 84, yeah. Yeah. Wow.

00:13:53 Speaker_06
84 for about five years. Yeah. Meet me in a little bit before 84.

00:13:57 Speaker_01
Well, I started officially at 84 because I remember- But you were a customer before that. Well, I was a customer before. Yeah. I was a customer before, yeah.

00:14:04 Speaker_06
I predated Quentin as one of the employees, so I was there.

00:14:08 Speaker_05
Look at you guys. Yeah.

00:14:10 Speaker_01
Actually, yeah, that's us. That's crazy. Very unfortunate shirt on my part.

00:14:18 Speaker_05
There was a lot of unfortunate shirts in the 80s. Everybody was confused. They cut the drugs off in the 70s. No one knew what to do for 10 years.

00:14:26 Speaker_01
That's exactly it.

00:14:26 Speaker_05
Yeah, it's crazy. You would have never thought back then that that industry would completely vanish. You thought blockbuster video is going to be around forever.

00:14:35 Speaker_01
Well, you know, one of the things that... I didn't think film was going to vanish either. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

00:14:42 Speaker_06
I didn't think the theater experience was going to go away either.

00:14:44 Speaker_01
But one of the things though that was the...

00:14:48 Speaker_01
death keel to video stores that no one ever, like, when they were talking mom and pop, when they're talking old people to like, hey, you know, you've retired from your business, you've got a nice little nest egg, if you want to invest in a nice little business where you get to work with your neighborhood and be in a nice little store with your family, you know, video stores, that's a good business.

00:15:12 Speaker_01
I don't know anything about movies. Well, we have people help you, you know, help you choose the titles and everything. So there's a lot of people that like invested in this stuff. And it seemed like a good idea.

00:15:24 Speaker_01
The reason that it seemed like a profitable idea was the idea like, well, you know, I sell you this video cassette. and you pay for the videocassette.

00:15:35 Speaker_01
But the minute you rent it past the point where you paid for the videocassette yourself, then everything else is you. All that other money that you make from here on in is just all profit once you pay for the actual cassette.

00:15:49 Speaker_01
Of course, you'll have some cassettes that don't rent as well, but that's the way it works out, but it should work out great. Well, again, that sounds like a pretty good business model.

00:15:57 Speaker_01
Well, if I spend this money and then five years from now, boom, everything is profit.

00:16:04 Speaker_01
Where Where where it all fell apart is the idea that you always have to get new shit Because like life that it's not a bookstore bookstores need to get new stuff, too But it's not a library like life doesn't stand still every month There's new titles coming out and you have to be competitive and you have to get the new titles and so

00:16:32 Speaker_01
Even if that were the issue, that wouldn't be that big of a deal. But if you're a mom and pop store, you only have so much room.

00:16:42 Speaker_06
It's literally a shelf space issue.

00:16:44 Speaker_01
Within three to four years, you're bursting out of the seams of videos. you're just bursting out. You've got no more room. You've got no more room.

00:16:55 Speaker_01
And so now all of a sudden, rather than having your face, your tapes facing out, now everything is, you know, sideways, spine facing, spine facing. And, and you've got to really, and it just never stops.

00:17:09 Speaker_01
It never stops next month, and you got to get this and next month, you got to get that and next month, you got to get that.

00:17:13 Speaker_05
You need a Costco size building.

00:17:15 Speaker_01
Yeah. Well, yeah. Well, again, if you have four different video stores, or if you have a chain, you can move things around and it's easier. But when you're a mom and pop, that's just it. You know, mom and pop store and you have a bike store.

00:17:29 Speaker_01
You don't have to keep getting new bikes every month. If you have a pottery store, you don't have to keep getting new pots every single month.

00:17:37 Speaker_06
You constantly have to grow your inventory.

00:17:39 Speaker_01
Every six months you get something cool. You don't need to get it every month. And you're defined by you having the new shit.

00:17:46 Speaker_06
And then there was another problem when companies that were massively funded like Blockbuster came onto the scene, they would go in and they would kind of do this sort of gray market purchasing where they would buy, you know,

00:18:01 Speaker_06
50 diehards, and a mom-and-pop store can't afford to buy more than one or two diehards or three, maybe, to satisfy your clientele.

00:18:09 Speaker_01
Well, when it comes to a big title, yeah, the thing is, you spend the money, like, okay, like, you know, one of our big titles when we, in the early days of video, was Top Gun. Yeah, Top Gun. Perfect example.

00:18:18 Speaker_01
So you get like, you know, you'll get, even the mom-and-pop stores, you'll get 12. or 15.

00:18:24 Speaker_06
Because everyone wants to see it and at some point it's going to be out and it's going to be checked out.

00:18:29 Speaker_01
And so you've got to satisfy your... Yeah, you'll rent all 15 of those for the next two weeks. You know, it's going to be, you know, it's going to be good, but then now you, now you have to sell them off.

00:18:39 Speaker_01
Mmm, you know for $10 a piece, you know, once the you know, once the Desire has died it largely fell on us because we were a smaller store and we had a blockbuster just a block away Basically, not even a block.

00:18:52 Speaker_01
We're talking about in the same fucking basically. It's not a block away It was in the on the block Yeah, in the shopping center that we were in. Well, you're missing the best, the most interesting thing. It's not about the bulk buy.

00:19:05 Speaker_01
The bulk buy is, that's what it is. But that's every mom and pop store has to deal with that, dealing with a franchise.

00:19:13 Speaker_04
It changes your strategy, though.

00:19:14 Speaker_01
Yeah, but what Blockbuster would do, and they were famous for doing this. They were famous for doing this. But particularly, they were strategic about it. is like, okay, we're going to go into this town. Okay, we're going in Manhattan Beach.

00:19:32 Speaker_01
What's the biggest video store? What's the most popular local video store in Manhattan Beach? Well, that would be Video Archives. They're right on Sepulveda. They're right across the street from the warehouse.

00:19:42 Speaker_01
All right, which was one of the big rental places. Before Blockbuster, that was the place. Before Blockbuster, it was Warehouse, Warehouse Rections and Tapes. And they still managed to survive across the street from Warehouse.

00:19:56 Speaker_01
And then, what does Blockbuster do? They buy the Shakey's Pizza that is in our shopping center. Our shopping center. And they moved into the Shakey's Pizza.

00:20:06 Speaker_01
Because of like, well, okay, with the warehouse and with these video archives guys, well, this is obviously the place to be. So they just bought out the Shakey's Pizza and opened up. And they still couldn't shut us down. Wow.

00:20:18 Speaker_06
I'm sure they had the attitude of, well, just brush them aside.

00:20:20 Speaker_01
Oh, of course. Of course, that's how they felt.

00:20:22 Speaker_06
And so consequently, because you don't you can only get three or twelve Top Guns, whatever it is, it's not as many as Blockbuster is getting.

00:20:29 Speaker_06
You end up having to focus on, like, how am I going to convince my clientele to watch something other than Top Gun this weekend? And so it. Landed on us to basically say, oh, you can't get Top Gun. Well, how about this movie that you haven't seen?

00:20:44 Speaker_01
It's the difference between being a cool coffee place and being Starbucks. Or a franchise bar and a cool little Joe's bar. And the bartender knows you.

00:20:56 Speaker_01
So it's like, look, if you just absolutely, positively need Top Gun that weekend, then go across the streets of the warehouse and get it.

00:21:03 Speaker_01
All right, we have what we have but we had customers that like came in every fucking day and Part of their day or every other day, you know when their tanks were rent were due and they were people of the neighborhood and they came in and Not only did they rent stuff they dropped stuff off and then they rented new stuff out but like they came in to talk to us for 20 minutes or 45 minutes like every other day and

00:21:30 Speaker_06
And there's no algorithm to tell them what to do. We're the algorithm. You have to know, oh, this guy. Oh, they're on a date night. So they're going to want this kind of rom-com type movie or this guy.

00:21:41 Speaker_06
He really likes, you know, Vietnamese hooker porn tapes. I got to make sure to find something like that for him. And those kids, they're going to want, you know, some skate stuff.

00:21:51 Speaker_06
So I've got to learn all about the Bones Brigade videos and stuff like that. And so, you know, you just kind of figured out, like, how can I upsell the stuff that they haven't heard of?

00:22:01 Speaker_06
Because invariably, anybody who comes in... But you're making it just sound a little bit more cynical than it was.

00:22:07 Speaker_01
You are making it sound more cynical than it was.

00:22:09 Speaker_06
No, more like the challenge of it. You guys are like a married couple. Yeah, totally we're like a married couple.

00:22:17 Speaker_01
Tell them the whole story, honey.

00:22:19 Speaker_06
Tell them the whole story.

00:22:20 Speaker_01
We were just hanging out, and they're coming and hanging out, too.

00:22:23 Speaker_06
Yeah, and we would pop a movie on and, like, you know, pop the movie on and be watching scenes from it and be talking about the scenes. Then a customer would come in, or many customers would come in, and they'd just become part of the conversation.

00:22:34 Speaker_01
And we would have, like, you know, like a chat room in the... No, no, there was, like... No, there was... There was about, like, 15 customers that, like, You know, I talked to... five hours a week, every week for five years.

00:22:55 Speaker_01
Because they come in and I'm like, we'll spend at least 40 minutes every other day. And I expected to see them.

00:23:01 Speaker_01
And I watched what I watched on TV, I saw what I saw at the movies, and then they saw what they saw in the movies, they watched what they watched on TV.

00:23:08 Speaker_01
We all talked about it, and they talked about the videos, and then what else we're gonna get, and da-da-da-da-da. About our lives and everything, yeah.

00:23:15 Speaker_05
So at what point in time, while this is all going on, do you guys decide, we need to make our own fucking movies? Well, it was always the case.

00:23:22 Speaker_01
Well, we were always thinking, well, well, well, Roger and and Roger had another friend that it was a guy that connected me and Roger together was a guy named Scott, who took his own life at a certain point.

00:23:33 Speaker_06
His father owned another video store that I worked at as well and that Quentin used to come into.

00:23:37 Speaker_01
But the thing is, though, that while I was just thinking about making movies, Roger and Scott were like making movies on Super 8. And they were making little horror films and little zombie movies on Super 8. Supernatural thrillers.

00:23:52 Speaker_01
Word turns it's a zombie movie.

00:23:56 Speaker_06
Yeah, it's kind of a zombie movie. More of an afterlife.

00:23:59 Speaker_01
Okay, maybe. But you're making like legit horror films. I'm just thinking about this stuff and these guys are like Sam Raimi-ing it, you know, like Sam Raimi.

00:24:08 Speaker_01
They're making their shit in their backyard and they're working on it for like three months and stuff.

00:24:13 Speaker_06
Yeah. And you know, like I was friends with all the punk guys because it was like L.A. punk. And so they were always in my movie. All the punks were in my movies because they were media literate. They loved movies.

00:24:24 Speaker_06
And so they were easy to pull in and to be in the film. So they were always playing like, you know, the gang of punks who beat somebody up or something.

00:24:33 Speaker_06
So must've been cool working at a video store though, because it's essentially like you have it's like an education well when the time came where we actually wanted to be making movies where we were talking about making movies because I can remember when I think it was It was around the time of sex lies and videotape or maybe she's got to have it.

00:24:50 Speaker_06
No, no, definitely But I remember you coming to me and saying I The moment is happening.

00:24:56 Speaker_01
Yeah.

00:24:56 Speaker_06
It's happening. Like small a small movie is possible to get made like like it's happening for us for guys our age.

00:25:05 Speaker_01
Yeah. I mean I mean the one you know. The Sex, Size, and Videotape was sort of like the Seattle band that broke, but I was already looking at Blood Simple was my in.

00:25:22 Speaker_04
That's a great movie.

00:25:22 Speaker_01
Was my in, where that was, okay, it's an artistic movie, it's arty, it's funny, it can play the art houses, it can play the art house circuit, but there's a genre base to it. There's a genre base. It's like, you know, it's a thriller.

00:25:39 Speaker_01
It's a film noir-y kind of thriller done in a certain kind of way, but it's a genre base. Yeah, I go, that's the way you do an art film. You do it, you make it a genre base art film.

00:25:48 Speaker_06
If you keep one foot in... Because it's entertaining. Yeah, if you keep one foot in exploitation, in some way, in genre, if you keep your foundation in genre, then you can do whatever you want. Like, my favorite filmmaker is Stanley Kubrick.

00:26:02 Speaker_06
I love Kubrick movies. OK. one can pretty much look at all of his films and say each and every one is a genre film. He's got his science fiction movie. He's got a horror movie. Even Barry Lyndon as a costume drama at the time.

00:26:15 Speaker_01
It's a costume genre.

00:26:15 Speaker_06
It's a genre. That was a solid bankable genre.

00:26:19 Speaker_01
The book is definitely a pulpy genre of its time.

00:26:22 Speaker_06
The book was serialized, wasn't it? It was like Thackeray wrote him in like an episode.

00:26:27 Speaker_01
It was like a soap opera. But that was a very popular, popular book at that time.

00:26:31 Speaker_06
Yeah. And so, yeah, it was all If you can, if you can, and I knew this making my first film, and I know, Quentin, you were talking about it.

00:26:41 Speaker_06
This was a conversation we were actively having of, we have to make sure that we make a movie people want to see, like a genre film, like, and I was calling them exploitation movies at the time, like, I want to keep one foot in exploitation.

00:26:52 Speaker_06
And then, but at the same time, I'm like, well, I kind of also want to make, like, you know, I want to elevate it as much as possible. And so when the time came for me to make my first, first film, Killing Zoe,

00:27:05 Speaker_06
You know, it was like I knew it was gonna be a bank robbery because I wrote it around a location You know, we we found this while they were scouting for reservoir dogs Lawrence Bender or maybe you also had scouted that location found this bank location and Lawrence called me up.

00:27:21 Speaker_06
He's like, hey, I'm calling all the writers I know I found this bank location and if you can if you have a script that takes place in a bank We can kick together a couple hundred thousand dollars and make a movie there.

00:27:31 Speaker_06
It's like this complete solid amazing location And I said, Oh my God, Lawrence, this is your lucky day. I happen to have a script that takes place in a bank. And then I just quickly wrote one based on the location.

00:27:44 Speaker_06
And as I was writing it, I was thinking, OK, you know, I know that it's going to be a bank robbery. It's a bank. And so I know it's going to be a bank robbery. And that's my solid bankable genre that I'm going to stick with.

00:27:57 Speaker_06
But I knew I wanted to do something more with it. And I had just traveled through Europe and I had been telling Quentin the stories of traveling through Europe. He's like, oh, you should do a movie called Roger Takes a Trip.

00:28:08 Speaker_06
And I still think it should have been called that. I think it's a different movie.

00:28:14 Speaker_01
I don't think it's a... No, you kind of made Roger Takes a Trip, just added bank robbers in it. But it's still Roger Takes a Trip.

00:28:20 Speaker_06
I had been in Paris, I had bumped into a guy that I knew from Los Angeles who was a French guy, and he was like, oh, I'll show you the real Paris. And I went out with he and his friends, Henrique, Jean, Claude, all the characters from the movie.

00:28:32 Speaker_06
I went out with him and his friends and we, you know, He drove me through Paris and next thing I know he's doing heroin and I'm like and and it started with you No, not with me.

00:28:42 Speaker_06
I Yeah, it was like no heroin hold my arm I did hold his arm and like I had no real yeah Yeah, I had never seen anything like that, but he tied his arm off.

00:28:52 Speaker_05
He's like hold my arm Hold my arm while I shoot up

00:28:59 Speaker_01
But he doesn't quite know that this is all gonna happen, that everything else has been a preamble to this.

00:29:05 Speaker_06
Yeah, suddenly that happens.

00:29:06 Speaker_05
He just needed a heroin partner.

00:29:08 Speaker_06
Yeah, and his friends are like, oh, doing it to the nose doesn't even affect me anymore. And I'm writing these lines down like, this is great shit.

00:29:18 Speaker_06
And so I get back and I tell Quentin about this whole story and about these guys and driving around the Champs-Elysees and, ah, this is where the fags sell themselves. Now we go into the into the nightclub down below and we do more heroin.

00:29:34 Speaker_06
I'm like, what about the cops? Aren't the police gonna say anything?

00:29:38 Speaker_06
It's safer here than you know, like you can do heroin anywhere in Paris and it was like No, I work at Lamont like all of it was like basically everything in that movie I you know was stuff that I'd actually seen and so when the time came to make it as a bank robbery film I

00:29:55 Speaker_06
I just, you know, I'm thinking about it. I'm like, well, it's a bank robbery movie, but it's going to be about these guys. And it just became a movie about a guy going someplace and everything that he thought he knew is wrong.

00:30:07 Speaker_06
You know, like you think, you know, you haven't seen your friend in a while. You go see him. Okay, it's all about that kind of friendship and misconception. He's downstairs at the bank. Jean-Igor Glaude, the bad guy, is upstairs.

00:30:23 Speaker_06
Chaos is going on upstairs. He has no idea what's going on upstairs. And so this kind of just became what the movie was about. And so I just quickly wrote the script, and then, you know, we ended up not even using that location to shoot the movie in.

00:30:37 Speaker_06
It came together. Later and I ended up shooting in downtown LA instead, but but it was seed was planted the seed was planted So the idea was okay.

00:30:47 Speaker_06
I'm gonna make a French film out of it because I I'm like in LA I'm making a film like what can I do that would be different like that would make this more than just a bank robbery movie and because of the Experience I had just had is like I'm gonna make a French film Okay, I had no business making a French movie and

00:31:04 Speaker_06
I didn't even really speak French. I just thought it would be kind of cool. I like, you know, a cool French girl and like greasy, dirty French guys, French criminals.

00:31:15 Speaker_06
And I always loved, you know, Alain Delon and Le Samurai, you know, the way he wears a suit and the way he carries a gun and the way he walks around. I just like, I, you know, just adored all of that.

00:31:26 Speaker_06
And so it was like, well, let's put all of that kind of, space that's in my brain into the movie. And then movies tend to take on a life of their own. They tend to be like children. You know, it starts off as a concept, as a conception.

00:31:39 Speaker_06
It has a conception and then it has an infancy. And then you're raising that child to become the movie.

00:31:45 Speaker_06
And along the way, you're really just kind of protecting it and trying to allow it to grow into what it's going to grow into without forcing it to become something that it's not. And it's a little bit of a balance.

00:31:56 Speaker_06
You have to be a good parent, which means you have to give it a little bit of freedom to grow into something that you don't know what it's going to be. But at the same time, you have to be willing to be strong with it as well.

00:32:06 Speaker_05
That's a very underappreciated movie. It's a fucking great.

00:32:10 Speaker_06
I think I'm I think I'm really good at making underappreciated movies I think I've had I've built a career without underappreciated.

00:32:16 Speaker_05
Those are the classics that you would look for in a video store Yeah, you look for the movies that were really good that no one knew about.

00:32:22 Speaker_06
Dark Day Afternoon's not in but we can get you Killing Zoe

00:32:27 Speaker_01
My favorite moment in the movie. Well, I like it when the guy gets burned alive. All right, you know the hamburger scene that was yeah They were trying to talk to you to cut out and they go. No. No, you can't cut that. I'll take my name off. Yeah.

00:32:39 Speaker_06
Yeah No Quinn did that actually Quentin was a great gorilla to have on my side at that time, but uh Why would they tell you to cut that out? Well, I don't know, it's too rough.

00:32:51 Speaker_01
Everyone's afraid. Everyone operates out of fear. If you take that out, I'm taking my name off the list.

00:32:54 Speaker_06
The only people that don't operate out of fear, I think, is the director and the actors. Those are the ones who, if everything's working right, you're fearless. It's always executives that fuck everything up.

00:33:03 Speaker_01
But it's the scene. My favorite scene is the scene with Hugh Anglon when he walks into the close-up. Oh yeah. And he's just like... Wait a minute.

00:33:14 Speaker_01
He's like remembering what he heard and he's and he realizes Okay, so that's a good example of because the movie was shot explain the scene better the scene was shot for Explain the scene.

00:33:26 Speaker_06
I will the movie was shot for for very little money.

00:33:29 Speaker_06
We had no money to make it So I had to shoot the entire upstairs first and then the downstairs Because it's like doing a company move, but I had kept I I knew that you know when writing and this is sort of a

00:33:42 Speaker_06
Kind of a rule that we had was I mean one make a genre movie to explain the scene. I'm going to The scene was a replacement for another scene that was in the movie that was too expensive to shoot That's the short.

00:34:01 Speaker_02
What does that have to do with what I like?

00:34:03 Speaker_06
What I replaced it with was, and I had to fight for it, was a single shot. Because originally he goes downstairs and he sees a bunch of guys coming in through the sewer. So he starts machine gunning people in the sewer.

00:34:14 Speaker_06
Because there was a little sewer manhole in the bottom of the bank. I was like, well, let's use that. And so I had this whole thing. And the bond company showed up. And you're behind schedule. And you've got to cut pages.

00:34:28 Speaker_06
Couldn't cut anything and I'm shooting upstairs downstairs stuff And so it's like I had to have something because he leaves the scene and then comes back angry And so I knew I knew I needed to have something and originally I had this whole scene where the cops are coming in and he reacts to that and so I said, okay, I just need one shot and Because it's all I could had time to do because the fucking bond company and so I set up that which were actually really cool to me They were actually film finances was great.

00:34:53 Speaker_06
They I just set up a single camera I asked for a kind of a cube Ricky and lens a nice wide like maybe a 14 millimeter lens and I just had John Hughes walk up into a close-up and I just had him do I said just Walk into a close-up and just start looking around and just start seeing things coming out of the walls And no, no, is that the shot you're talking about?

00:35:16 Speaker_06
He does like a little magic trick beforehand like oh No. That's not the one you're talking about? No. That's the great shot. That's a great shot.

00:35:24 Speaker_01
No, the scene I'm talking about is, but that's why I wanted you to explain it because I hadn't seen it in a long time, but it was. Here it is. Is that the shot? Well, that's the shot.

00:35:33 Speaker_06
That's the shot I'm talking about. Look, he's looking into the walls. He's looking around.

00:35:38 Speaker_01
But I thought the whole idea about it is the idea that

00:35:43 Speaker_06
I added those lines of dialogue in.

00:35:45 Speaker_01
I did some ADR. I thought the whole idea is he puts it all together. He realized that there's something going on, that the cops are doing this, or Eric Stoltz is dirty with him. And it all hits him.

00:35:59 Speaker_01
He's ready to do something else, and he walks into a close-up, and it all hits him. But now we, the audience, know what's going on. And then he's just like,

00:36:08 Speaker_06
Well, it just shows that sometimes if you can't do what you want to do, what you come up with is better. And this was an example of, it rained that day and I had to use the rain. That's sort of the example.

00:36:20 Speaker_01
The frustrating part for me about what you're telling is like, I don't care how the sausage was made. I like the sausage. I wanted you to talk about the sausage, not the factory.

00:36:33 Speaker_06
You don't want to know what's in that sausage.

00:36:34 Speaker_01
You have no interest in that. I wanted to hear about the Italian sweetness.

00:36:40 Speaker_06
Well, it was very sweet, but it started off sour. It started off sour because I couldn't do what I wanted to do. And so I just came up with something that was, well, he puts it together in his head.

00:36:48 Speaker_01
I mean, I still think that sequence is exhilarating because it all boils down to an actor's face.

00:36:55 Speaker_06
Well, I had Tom Savini on the set because and I couldn't afford Tom Savini But I found his number and before I shot and I called him up and in Pittsburgh And I said Tom Savini is a makeup effects artist who did dawn of the dead He did all the effects for dawn of the dead like and not to mention all the great Friday the 13th all the slasher movies like he's the superstar of Practical makeup effects of horror films of that era

00:37:17 Speaker_06
He was in Vietnam and saw some shit. And every time I'm talking to him about stuff like, he's like, oh yeah, well, you know, no, if you're bleeding from back here, you know, there's only two small veins and blah, blah.

00:37:28 Speaker_06
Cause when your head gets knocked off, like he's seen all this stuff. And so this is his way of processing it. But Tom came in and I couldn't afford him. I called him up on the phone. I was like, Hey, can you, do you think I'm a young filmmaker?

00:37:42 Speaker_06
I'm a, you know, I'm your biggest fan. I'd like you the makeup effects blah blah blah. Okay. He flew himself out. We had no money to pay him I think we paid him like some tiny amount.

00:37:55 Speaker_06
He flew himself to LA put himself up worked on the film and he made that burn makeup on that burned guard in the vault out of Vaseline paint and tissue paper and I watched him make it was the most unbelievable thing how he made blisters and burn effects and it was like watching

00:38:12 Speaker_06
One of the great artists work Tom is Incredible guy.

00:38:19 Speaker_01
He's an incredible incredible guy where you were asking earlier on about whoa You're working at a video store. Did you ever think you know, when did you start thinking about making your own stuff?

00:38:30 Speaker_01
Well, I was thinking about making my own stuff for like a long long long time, but these guys were actually doing it I

00:38:37 Speaker_01
But there is a truth while I thought about it for a long, long time and always figured I would do that eventually, I did fall asleep for a few years. Because working at that store, I just got caught up in the little life there.

00:38:52 Speaker_01
And it's interesting because you spent your 20s going to comedy clubs and building a career. So I'm spending my 20s there. And well, it's one of those things where it's like, well, This isn't my dream.

00:39:14 Speaker_01
This isn't what I wanted to do working at a video store for years. I wanted to actually make movies. It's not my dream, what I'm doing. But it's dream adjacent. It's close to my dream. It's close to my dream. I get to watch movies all fucking day.

00:39:31 Speaker_01
I get to talk about movies all fucking day. I don't have to work at a pizza parlor. I don't have to, I'm not delivering pizzas. I'm not busting ass as a bartender. I'm not busting ass doing menial jobs.

00:39:43 Speaker_01
I mean, this is the kind of job that, you know, I'd go to the store if I wasn't paid to go to the store. You know, so it's like, you know, but but for a couple of years, it did put me to sleep. It did kind of put me to sleep.

00:39:59 Speaker_01
It put my ambitions to sleep a little bit because I was happy enough. Yeah, I was happy. And just like one of these days, I'll. Right, but you didn't have the fire. I didn't have the fire.

00:40:11 Speaker_01
And when I got the fire, when I eventually got the fire back again, and it was a life-changing thing, it was a life-changing day, it was... We had a buddy of ours named steve-o.

00:40:26 Speaker_01
Yeah, and I he was one We had different living arrangements and at one point in time me and steve-o were living in the same house together renting it And the back of the towards the back of the store the dude house.

00:40:38 Speaker_01
Yeah, it was where everyone would hang out and um But now Stevo was older than the rest of us. So it's like he was about like almost five years older than us. But he didn't seem like it.

00:40:51 Speaker_06
He was a young guy, like five years younger mentally or emotionally.

00:40:57 Speaker_01
And but. So he hits 30, and he starts changing. He starts changing, like, drastically. I mean, he was, like, one of the funniest guys I ever knew, and he was this really, really funny stoner dude, and really cool.

00:41:15 Speaker_01
And all of a sudden, he's, like, angry about things, and now he's not quite as funny, and now he's got this issue. And so we're roommates, and there's this one night that he's kind of, like, all, he's kind of disgusted with his life.

00:41:31 Speaker_01
And he starts ranting, and he's describing a situation that was very common if you were a kid growing up without a degree or anything in the 80s, especially in California, where it's like, you can't get any really good jobs, but you can work at a licorice pizza.

00:41:53 Speaker_01
And if you're an okay employee, you could work at Licorice Pizza for a couple of years, and maybe you could even become assistant manager or a manager, and maybe they send you to another store.

00:42:01 Speaker_01
And maybe you work there for three years, and that's really great. But then, you know, all of a sudden, the district manager doesn't like you. You run afoul of somebody higher up in corporate.

00:42:13 Speaker_01
And all of a sudden, next thing you know, you're fired and you're out in the street.

00:42:15 Speaker_06
Again, it's management.

00:42:16 Speaker_01
Yeah. OK. And so now you've just spent three years at Licorice Pizza. Now you could get a job at TRW or some place that's like a real job job.

00:42:26 Speaker_01
Or, well, those are kind of hard to get, but you can work at Warehouse Records and Tapes tomorrow because you just had three years at Licorice Pizza. Same thing with Wild West Clothier. Same thing with Miller's Outpost.

00:42:36 Speaker_01
Same thing with any of these kind of stores. Next thing you know, you're 28 and the only jobs you've ever had are minimum wage jobs behind a counter that were designed for kids to pay for their gas.

00:42:50 Speaker_05
Right.

00:42:51 Speaker_01
And you've spent your entire 20s doing that.

00:42:54 Speaker_05
And then you start getting bitter.

00:42:55 Speaker_01
And you start getting bitter. But he was not just bitter about the job aspect of it. Oh my God, he's telling me the truth. I'm learning something here.

00:43:07 Speaker_01
Because he goes, you know, Quentin, you think that we're this really great team, we're this really great crew. Well, we are. I mean, you know, this is that time of your 20s where, like, you're a group of friends or your family, you know?

00:43:22 Speaker_01
And, like, well, we are. Quentin, at 20, I worked at South Bay Cinemas, and I hung out with a bunch of guys just like you. And some girls there, too. But it was a bunch of guys just like you. And then I stopped working at South Bay Cinema.

00:43:42 Speaker_01
Then I worked at Miller's Outpost. I hung out with a bunch of guys just like you, and we did everything just like we do. We went to movies together. We went out and we dated amongst the girls there, everything.

00:43:53 Speaker_01
Then I worked at Alicia Pizza for four years with a bunch of guys just like you. I've wasted my life hanging out with a bunch of guys just like you, and they all go away at a certain point. And I realized this guy's kind of telling the truth.

00:44:12 Speaker_01
He's showing me a truth about himself. This is coming from somewhere. And then all of a sudden, he still hung around us, he still liked us, but then he started making it a point to touch base with some of his high school friends that were still around.

00:44:28 Speaker_01
So he's not just hanging out with guys four years younger or five years younger than him. Anyway, I'm turning 25 around this time. So I'm having my own little, okay, well, what have I done with my life so far? So far, fucking nothing.

00:44:43 Speaker_01
So I'm having my own little anxiety hitting 25, but I'm seeing what it's like five years from now when you turn 30. A window to the future. When you're turning 30 and you're in this situation. And there was like one night,

00:45:03 Speaker_01
that I had what I used to call, I would do it every once in a while. I haven't done it in a long time, thankfully. I would have a Quentin Detest Fest where I'd stay up all night long and rather than give myself excuses,

00:45:16 Speaker_01
I would look at everything that I'm fucking up in my life or everything I'm not doing or whatever and just not give myself any fucking excuses out, just like nail it. And I would spend like all night laying out everything I'm doing that's wrong.

00:45:33 Speaker_01
And then I would spend the last two hours figuring out how I can change it. And as opposed to just doing it and then going to get some sleep And and then you forget about it and fall back into your you know your routine I Decided to change my life

00:45:50 Speaker_01
I was like, look, the problem is, is that I'm living in the South Bay. And even though I drive to Los Angeles, one, I got to not worry about this job anymore. I got to just move to Hollywood. I got to get involved there.

00:46:01 Speaker_01
I got to meet other people that are in the business. And if I have to work manpower jobs, you know, where you just work like four days at this place and four days at that place, well, then that's fine.

00:46:11 Speaker_01
And by the way, I shouldn't be making money until I'm making money doing what I want to do. And not that that was ever a danger. But then the next thing I knew, I moved out of the South Bay. And then I couldn't move into Hollywood.

00:46:27 Speaker_01
I couldn't afford Hollywood, but I could afford Koreatown. And I was close enough. And literally, the minute I kind of moved out there, I met a guy who wrote

00:46:39 Speaker_01
low-budget horror movies and then through him I met other guys that wrote low-budget horror movies and this guy who directs a few low-budget horror and this guy who produces a couple and well But yeah, you meet one person and that introduces you to three other people now all of a sudden I actually knew people who were actually making movies and the other thing about it was it was like

00:47:00 Speaker_01
Also, well if these guys can do what I can do Because they weren't too special, right?

00:47:06 Speaker_01
Yeah, you know, that's the weird realization that you end up having yeah, and and then literally it wasn't like everything changed but like within a year and a half From moving out of the South Bay moving into the Hollywood area within a year and a half I was finally able to make a living as a as a writer and

00:47:28 Speaker_01
You know, getting $7,000 for this rewrite on this script over here, $4,000 for this polish over here, another $10,000 for this rewrite over here. Well, shit, I mean, I would make $10,000 a year through all my 20s before that point.

00:47:41 Speaker_01
So if I can make $15,000 from writing, oh my God, that was the greatest thing in the world.

00:47:49 Speaker_05
Wow, but it just takes being around people that are actually doing it.

00:47:53 Speaker_01
So you realize it's possible well, it's the realizing it's possible, but it's also but it's also a situation where it's like As opposed to talking to your buddies about comedy in Minnesota your buddies who like comedy.

00:48:10 Speaker_01
No, you're at the comedy store and you're dealing with comedians every fucking night. And you're in the place where the shit happens and you're hearing how the laughs work. But also, you know what's going on.

00:48:22 Speaker_01
Oh, Caroline's Comedy Hour is doing the tryouts for this. And Chuckles is doing this thing or that thing. Oh, and there's a sitcom going on. There's the funny neighbor guy.

00:48:34 Speaker_06
Yeah, at any moment, you're in the you're in the you're plugged in at any moment There's a circle of people rising in any industry.

00:48:41 Speaker_01
Yes, and It's just a matter of finding those people and those people will all gravitate towards the same things Yeah, they have the thing where it's or like, you know, like hey Benny we we have a spot for you That could be really you know, I can't do it, but my friend Joe could do it.

00:48:56 Speaker_01
Can you get a chance?

00:48:59 Speaker_05
Yeah, okay.

00:48:59 Speaker_01
Will you back Joe up? Yeah, I'll back Joe up. Okay. Yeah. Well, let's go. Let's call your friend Joe. Can he be down here at nine? Yeah, he can be down here at nine. Well, that's how you get a fucking gig.

00:49:08 Speaker_05
This is exactly what we tried to do when we built the mothership here. What we've done. We decided when we left LA, like we need a place where comics have a hub. And when we were all in Austin, we all just moved to Austin because of the pandemic.

00:49:21 Speaker_05
And all of a sudden we were allowed to perform indoors.

00:49:23 Speaker_00
It was crazy.

00:49:24 Speaker_05
In November of 2020, we were doing shows indoors. And you know, you couldn't go on Twitter because they would call you a super spreader, a fucking monster. But everybody started moving here.

00:49:34 Speaker_05
By the time 2020 rolls around, there's like 15, 16 world-class comedians that didn't used to live in Austin that are here now. And we were like, let's build a club. And so we bought the Ritz Theater, where some of your movies are played.

00:49:49 Speaker_05
This is fucking crazy. And when we put it together, the whole idea was like, have a place where people can come. We have two nights of open mic nights, Sunday and Monday night. So there's always a chance to get on stage.

00:50:03 Speaker_05
There's always a guy, there's a real talent, Adam Egate is a real talent coordinator. He's really gonna watch you. He's really gonna give you advice. And you're around the best comics in the world all the time. And everybody knows it's possible.

00:50:14 Speaker_05
And everybody treats you the way you would want to be treated if you were starting. So you're just one of us, you just started. But we're not better than you, there's nothing special about us, we're just telling you.

00:50:25 Speaker_05
We started walking and now we're 15 miles in, you're 15 feet in. Just keep walking.

00:50:30 Speaker_01
Okay, but let me ask you a question. When I watch some of the things on the comedy, because you know I really love going to the comedy. Yeah. And they treat me really great there, it's really cool.

00:50:47 Speaker_01
The mythology of the plays is you go down there on open mic night, and if you have something to offer, then you work your way up, and then you're the doorman, and then you work your way up. But it seems like that was then, that was a long time ago.

00:51:04 Speaker_01
Now it seems like people are almost paying 10 years, or eight years before they actually are getting up and getting paid.

00:51:13 Speaker_05
Not necessarily. Tony Hinchcliffe started at the Comedy Store. He started as a doorman, and he worked his way up to selling out Madison Square Garden two nights in a row. I mean, it is possible to still be a doorman.

00:51:26 Speaker_05
I met Tony when he was just starting out.

00:51:28 Speaker_01
I'm figuring that that's a spot, but it seems like if you have to wait five years,

00:51:33 Speaker_05
Well, you don't get good for 10 years. It takes forever. Comedy is like making a mountain out of layers of paint. It takes forever.

00:51:41 Speaker_06
You have to fail. You have to have the opportunities to fail.

00:51:44 Speaker_05
Well, there's also no one who can tell you how to do it. Writing a film, you have a protagonist, you have the antagonist, you have a plot, you have a bunch of stuff that you can kind of create and formulate.

00:51:55 Speaker_01
But would you really say... That it takes 10 years to be a solid comedian? It takes 10 years to be a real headliner.

00:52:02 Speaker_05
Well, a headliner, that's a little different. Well, that's when you're a real comic, when you can do an hour. You can do an hour, and then you can write another hour. You kind of know who you are. Because it takes years to build that.

00:52:15 Speaker_01
But also to be a headliner, you have to be enough of a name to actually draw an audience.

00:52:21 Speaker_05
Yes, yes, and you know you have to usually you go on the road with a headliner, and then the people get to see you Oh, I remember he was here when Tom Segura was in town. That guy's really good We saw him then and he did 15 minutes now.

00:52:33 Speaker_05
He's gonna do an hour This would be great, and it's sort of that kind of a deal But it's the same sort of situation where most people don't you like if you're in Pittsburgh? You don't know what to do. You know you go up.

00:52:43 Speaker_05
There's a couple open mic nights everybody sucks and And there's no inspiration.

00:52:47 Speaker_01
Is that set up for comedy and it's in a fucking pizza parlor? Exactly. And it's good on the weekends. And it doesn't work and you go, well, I guess this is not for me.

00:52:54 Speaker_05
Right. It's good on the weekends because they'll fly in, you know, Greg Fitzsimmons, some headliner, and you get to see a real comic for a weekend. So you get a little bit of an education from that.

00:53:02 Speaker_05
And maybe if you're lucky, the club owner will let you open for him or do 10 minutes on that show. And you kind of like get a feel what it's like to perform in front of a real audience that's there to see a real comic.

00:53:11 Speaker_05
But you gotta be around, like, comedy doesn't exist in a vacuum. There's no great comedian that lives in some small town by himself. Like, you could find some great blues artist. Or a great novelist.

00:53:24 Speaker_05
Yes, novelist is probably the best one because you kind of live in your own head. But you have to be around the other people that are doing it. Which is exactly why Quentin moved to Hollywood. Yeah, exactly.

00:53:34 Speaker_06
Got away from these losers. You had to do it, but you really do have to do it. Cut the dead weight. I recall living in Hollywood as well. Yeah, you did. Freaking Franklin. Yes, you did.

00:53:44 Speaker_05
Across from Plummer Park. Your bitter friend gave you a valuable little piece of information.

00:53:49 Speaker_01
Yeah, he did. No, very much so.

00:53:50 Speaker_05
You need those. You need those moments.

00:53:52 Speaker_01
Oh, I knew I was hearing the truth. And I knew I was hearing a coming attraction.

00:53:56 Speaker_05
Yes.

00:53:57 Speaker_01
Because I was already feeling at a 25. Right, right, right. Am I throwing my topsoil years away?

00:54:03 Speaker_05
Right. Right. The topsoil. Exactly. It doesn't come back.

00:54:07 Speaker_01
It doesn't come back.

00:54:08 Speaker_05
You never get to be 21 again. Let's hit reset. Yeah. Yeah. You get one weird march through this life. And if you don't, if you have it.

00:54:15 Speaker_01
You can throw it away until 23, but from 24 on, you need to be thinking about what you're doing for the rest of your life.

00:54:20 Speaker_05
Yeah. Get it going. Yeah, get it going.

00:54:23 Speaker_05
Yeah that what is the I think these conversations is so important for young people to hear Because there's a lot of people out there that do have ideas and sometimes they have a little bit of a fire and then maybe they have a job that's kind of cool like And they they get sedated Almost the worst thing that can happen is getting comfortable, which I think is what you were talking about.

00:54:39 Speaker_01
Yeah But you know, I mean, you know, it all worked out. Okay, it all worked out really really good And the thing about it was, you know I did get comfortable, but I got comfortable in a cool place.

00:54:50 Speaker_01
And ultimately I did have the energy and the wherewithal to ultimately get dissatisfied with it and want more. The alternative would have been me working at a department store for those four years. And then I would have been like really been miserable.

00:55:10 Speaker_01
Here I'm able to, I mean, You know, in this instance, I'm still involved with the part that the sedative part was the idea that it was close enough to what I want.

00:55:19 Speaker_05
Right. Right. Right. Right.

00:55:21 Speaker_01
It was close enough. I could get I could.

00:55:24 Speaker_05
There's guys like that at the Comedy Store. There's a friend of mine at the Comedy Store that was he was a bartender in the back bar. And he wanted to be a comic.

00:55:31 Speaker_05
But he was there, it was like five years after I met him, I'm like, hey man, you gotta quit this fucking job. Because you're here with all the greatest comics in the world, but you're not going on stage. And you're making good money.

00:55:42 Speaker_05
And that's the velvet curtain that's pulled over your eyes.

00:55:48 Speaker_06
I worked on Lords of Dogtown, the movie about Zephyr surfboards and skateboarding and polyurethane wheels and surfing. And I'm not like a surfer or anything, but my entry point into that movie was Zephyr surfboards was exactly like video archives.

00:56:05 Speaker_06
And I imagine that this is like this in a lot of places where, you know, you have a shop. They do skateboards, and they've got a shaper guy there, Skip Englom, who's a surfboard shaper. And he was sort of like Lance, the guy who owned Video Archives.

00:56:22 Speaker_06
And he started a shop, and he's selling to all the kids locally. And all the kids who love surfing, like Stacy Peralta, or Tony Alva, or guys like that, they would just go hang out there, just like we would go hang out at the video store.

00:56:35 Speaker_06
And so I looked at that, and I was like, OK, I don't really know anything about these guys other than

00:56:40 Speaker_06
Growing up in the beach community, but my real entry point was I understand gravitating towards what you love and wanting to Be close to it and that if a video store is the closest thing to Hollywood in your town That's where you go or if it's not a movie theater.

00:56:55 Speaker_01
And so well, you know, it was it was it was funny because I

00:57:00 Speaker_01
When I first started, when I started at the Video Star, I was like, it was great because, you know, like I said, I got to hang out in this place that I enjoyed and I'm surrounded by movies and talking about movies all the time.

00:57:12 Speaker_06
Access to all those titles.

00:57:14 Speaker_01
But then also, there was also the situation of, you know, I became like a little film critic in that town. You know, it was like, I was like, the story was my little village voice. And I was the Andrew Sarris there, I was the critic.

00:57:28 Speaker_01
And people would come in, And at a certain point, I'm like, oh, Quentin, what should I get? You know, and the thing is, I'm not just like holding court on my own personal taste. Pretty soon they got a really good idea about my my taste.

00:57:40 Speaker_01
But the thing is, I'm usually gearing it towards the people, you know, I'm not going to you know, get some housewife to watch some gonzo movie that I, gonzo violent movie that I really like. I'm gaming, I get to know her.

00:57:53 Speaker_06
You have to tailor it.

00:57:55 Speaker_01
And so I'm, you know, I'm putting something in her hand that I think she's gonna, she's gonna appreciate it. I kind of know what kind of comedy she likes. I know who she likes, stuff like that. And so I'm like, you know, really kind of,

00:58:06 Speaker_01
You know gearing it in a certain in a certain way and that's that that felt That felt really good. Yeah, it felt like I said, I felt like a film critic.

00:58:16 Speaker_05
Mmm. Yeah

00:58:18 Speaker_01
But one of the things that, I forgot I was gonna go somewhere with that and I forgot, I lost my train of thought.

00:58:26 Speaker_01
But one of the things that ended up happening, and I hope I didn't say it the last time I was here, that ended up happening is we became really famous in the neighborhood. We were the video guys.

00:58:39 Speaker_01
And our store was a little different than most of the businesses that were in Manhattan Beach.

00:58:46 Speaker_01
So everyone kind of knew us we were the video guys so in a strange way It it was a Precursor to what it would be like to be famous with the whole world kind of knows about you like that mmm in Manhattan Beach I'm like walking down the street and people like hey You know I'm like

00:59:09 Speaker_01
I'm working at the store and I'm walking to the Jack in the Box to get a Coke and come back. We'd walk into the man's movie theater that was by the theater.

00:59:20 Speaker_01
Me and two of the guys would walk in to go see a movie and we'd walk down the aisle and we'd hear,

00:59:27 Speaker_06
Oh yeah, I was in San Francisco once and the guys from Red Cross, the punk band, they were customers of ours. I was like, oh, they're doing a signing at this local record shop. I'll just go show up. I'll just show up there on Hey Dashberry.

00:59:41 Speaker_06
And I walk in and immediately the McDonald Brother guys were like, hey, it's the video store guy. Hey man, come back behind with us. I don't think they talk like that.

00:59:57 Speaker_05
It's good to get that slow drip get a little bit of a taste of it before you actually get famous It's like you know, oh, I'm just gonna smoke a little weed compared to I'm gonna mainline You know Was

01:00:19 Speaker_01
It made me feel part of a community which I had never felt with before. I actually felt part of the Manhattan Beach community. I felt part of the Manhattan Beach community. I was part of the Manhattan Beach community. The people knew me there.

01:00:31 Speaker_01
And I was an upstanding member inside of that community.

01:00:36 Speaker_05
Mmm.

01:00:36 Speaker_01
Yeah.

01:00:37 Speaker_05
Yeah, the fame thing is no one can teach you how to do that There's someone needs to be like a group of people to get together where people that are about to get famous and say hey listen We're famous already.

01:00:47 Speaker_05
Let me tell you how fucking weird this is. I don't know if you were prepared for this when

01:00:52 Speaker_06
We were first trying to make True Romance. You know, Quentin had this amazing screenplay, and it was like we were going to try to do it Cone Brothers style. We had just seen Blood Simple, and we were like, OK, I'm going to produce.

01:01:02 Speaker_06
Quentin's going to direct. We're going to go out and make this. Our first thought was, OK, we've got this database of doctors and lawyers and housewives in Manhattan Beach. We're going to go to the video store. You know, we ended up not doing that.

01:01:14 Speaker_03
You were going to ask them for money. We never had the balls to actually ask anybody for money.

01:01:22 Speaker_01
Thinking about getting money and actually getting money are two different things.

01:01:24 Speaker_06
We strategized about it a lot, but we never actually... I drew up full partnership papers before that whole dream failed, of doing it that way.

01:01:34 Speaker_05
Yeah, nobody knows what it's like to actually be successful until you are. But in the beginning, did you guys feel like pretenders? Did you feel fake? Did you have imposter syndrome?

01:01:44 Speaker_01
I didn't have imposter syndrome because I did a movie and I was really happy with the film. But the thing is, what I felt like, I'll tell you exactly how I felt. I didn't feel imposter syndrome. Well, I guess a little bit.

01:01:53 Speaker_01
There is all that, like, waiting for somebody to tap you on the shoulder. What the fuck are you doing? Get out of here.

01:01:59 Speaker_06
Who would let that guy in? Right.

01:02:01 Speaker_01
The fuck out. What I had was, I felt like I was a reporter deep undercover, all right, on the opposite side of the line. This isn't really me.

01:02:15 Speaker_03
I'm like those people over there, but I'm deep undercover. And I can give you reports from the front of what it's like here on the battle line. Right.

01:02:28 Speaker_05
Well maybe that was a good thing though.

01:02:29 Speaker_03
It was a really cool thing.

01:02:30 Speaker_05
Because I think that's one of the things you did with your films is you did shit that was very risky.

01:02:37 Speaker_05
Like we're talking about executives and all these different management people that are going to come in and fuck with your thing and don't do that and cut that out.

01:02:44 Speaker_05
But you you had a sensibility not of a person in management but of a person that I know what I'd like. I know what I like and I and I think I can think differently than these people do.

01:02:56 Speaker_01
Oh, no, no, no.

01:02:58 Speaker_01
One of the things we talked about, we had a little theory about it, was that gave us a bit of a superpower when we were first brought into, once we established ourselves, the people knew, they read our scripts, so you knew we were, we had something to offer.

01:03:14 Speaker_01
We would walk into rooms and we realized that, and look, I'm not here to make fun of Hollywood executives. Some of those guys, look, You don't know how bad some of these movies, these scripts are. Oftentimes they actually make them better.

01:03:31 Speaker_01
They're really, really terrible. When they go through the sausage factory, oftentimes they get better, believe it or not. But the thing is though, you'd walk in there and you don't become...

01:03:50 Speaker_01
This super successful executive by being doubling down on your own opinions. You kind of want to get the temperature and get a consensus going on. You're not the maverick. That's not how people establish themselves as executives. The D girl.

01:04:10 Speaker_01
doesn't become the head of the development process by, you know, being the punk rock person who's, you know, shooting for the Plimsoles. They're looking for a Rolling Stone.

01:04:23 Speaker_01
But film people, film geeks and film, you know, film buffs, the one thing they have is their opinion. And they have spent years defining their opinion.

01:04:40 Speaker_01
And they almost have nothing to show for their dedication to cinema other than their highly evolved opinion. So you put them in a room and say, well, what would you do? Well, it's about time you asked me.

01:04:54 Speaker_01
And then all of a sudden you take the strong point of view. And the term in Hollywood is, he who has the strongest point of view in the room wins. And executives don't have the strongest point of view.

01:05:12 Speaker_01
But the maverick artist who only can hear the sound of his own voice, he definitely has the strongest point of view. But it's refreshing to them.

01:05:19 Speaker_06
You know, invariably they hire you because you scare them a little. you're a little scary and they like that. They want to be like a little thrilled by that. But then, you know, like a girlfriend or something, they want to change you.

01:05:32 Speaker_06
They think they're going to make you normal. And then it falls on you to just stay true to that initial guy who was in the room.

01:05:40 Speaker_01
I had a really interesting situation where I had a guy who was an executive who actually directed a movie. And he was talking about like, oh, I've seen these jokers out there. And you know, what they do isn't so special. I think I could do it.

01:05:54 Speaker_01
And so he finds a book, and they adapt it, and now he's doing the movie. And he's getting through it. Everything's working fine. He's getting through it.

01:06:06 Speaker_01
And then he realizes the difference between himself and a director, because he's dealing with another director about something, because he's an executive. So he's dealing with another director about another movie.

01:06:19 Speaker_01
And he asks him a very important question about his movie. And the way he answers it, he realized the difference between him and that director. And he goes, I realized, oh. See, he's a real director because he sees the movie.

01:06:42 Speaker_01
He sees the movie in his head. The question I asked, he went into his head and he saw it. He saw it. And he could actually answer it. Oh, the flower pot is green because he sees the entire picture.

01:06:58 Speaker_04
Yeah.

01:07:00 Speaker_01
Don't see it. I'm just doing my best. I'm I see it written. All right, but I don't see the movie in my head I'm just doing my best with the with the written material.

01:07:09 Speaker_05
He's the Comedy Central executive that thinks they could be a comedian Yeah, right on and I don't get on stage in the eat shit. Yeah What you were saying is exactly what happened to Chappelle. I Oh, the Chappelle show. Yeah, like they loved him.

01:07:22 Speaker_05
He's this wild dude. And then all of a sudden this is too wild. This is becoming really successful.

01:07:27 Speaker_01
We can change you.

01:07:28 Speaker_05
They want to stop saying the n-word. They want to stop a bunch of different things on the show.

01:07:32 Speaker_01
And we'll give you all this money if you roll over.

01:07:34 Speaker_05
They gave him literally the devil's deal. We're going to give you 50 million dollars and this is what you're going to get. And he's like, no, I quit. I quit everything and I'm going to go to Africa.

01:07:45 Speaker_05
I'm gonna hang out in Africa for a while, and I'm gonna quit stand-up for 10 years and come back and still be the best.

01:07:49 Speaker_06
That is so the right move.

01:07:51 Speaker_05
Oh my God. Well, look, he's a legend now, but that's really him. If you're around him, he's an artist in the truest sense of the word. Yeah, absolutely he is.

01:08:01 Speaker_06
When I was young, one of my first jobs was actually given to me by one of our customers, this guy John Langley, who did that show Cops. And so he was getting his power turned off and stuff.

01:08:13 Speaker_06
Constantly and yeah, he was struggling to get by and he would do these little things with Geraldo Rivera that Quentin and I would work on his PAs every now and then and We worked on the Dolph Lundgren exercise video We were picking up dog shit in Venice Beach with our hands so that Dolph could do aerobics on that little grassy knoll hilarious

01:08:36 Speaker_06
And so, you know, I'm like the first I'm a PA working for him a driver I'm running around town. My car is like the transmission is going out. I'm trying to figure out what am I gonna do?

01:08:46 Speaker_06
This is not what I want to do I don't want to work on cops, but like I need the job and so I'm I go in and I meet with with John and he's been a customer of ours and fatherly like to me and I

01:09:00 Speaker_06
I go into his office and I sit down and Cops has just started. It started because of a Writers Guild strike. And, you know, there was a Writers Guild strike. And so Fox was like, well, that show has no writers. And so they ordered his thing.

01:09:11 Speaker_06
And he went from nothing to like, I'm buying yachts.

01:09:14 Speaker_01
Yeah.

01:09:15 Speaker_06
I'm collecting vineyards.

01:09:16 Speaker_01
That's not only that, though. I remember when he first came up with the idea with his partner, Malcolm Barber. Yeah. All right. So he comes in and he's like, hey, we've got a really good idea for a show.

01:09:26 Speaker_01
So he's he's he's he's describing cops before cops has ever been made.

01:09:30 Speaker_04
Yeah.

01:09:31 Speaker_01
And and his first idea was it wasn't called cops. It was called the real Miami Vice.

01:09:42 Speaker_05
The problem was it doesn't scale out to the whole country.

01:09:45 Speaker_01
The cops did. Well, they defined it. They refined it.

01:09:49 Speaker_06
I asked him, I said, John, you've worked in this business a long time. He was an AD for a long time. What kind of advice can you give to a guy like me who's trying to work my way up? He's like, well, what do you want to do ultimately?

01:10:01 Speaker_06
I said, well, I want to direct films. Well, then be a director. Don't work your way up the ladder. Don't try to be a grip and work your way in. Just be a director. And I heard that and he's like, start at the top. It's the best way to go.

01:10:17 Speaker_06
Just start at the top and you know, just tell people you're a director. Put yourself in that, otherwise people will just pigeonhole you. They'll just say, that's who he is. He's a grip or he's a PA or he's, you'll have to work your way up.

01:10:32 Speaker_06
Just tell people who you are. So I thought about it and I was like, okay, I quit.

01:10:41 Speaker_06
What I said I quit I'm a director and I left I walked out I mean I gave him notice and And I walked out and he sat there and he he later told me years later told me Man, I thought that was the most audacious ballsy thing That I gave you advice and you took it right away.

01:11:01 Speaker_06
I And okay, nevermind the fact that it took me years of love just telling people I'm a director. I directed Super 8 movies. I was not a director. I was a poser. I was faking it until I made it.

01:11:15 Speaker_06
But I told people what I was and what I was doing, and eventually it stuck.

01:11:20 Speaker_06
Eventually enough people hear it, and all those people who you end up going into a room and pitching your idea and they say no, eventually they see you at Cannes running around trying to do foreign sales, and they're like,

01:11:32 Speaker_06
Maybe that kid is a director. It was just believing in yourself when no one else believes what you believe.

01:11:39 Speaker_01
The guy he's talking about, John Langley, who created Cops, he was a really good customer and his wife Maggie was really lovely.

01:11:46 Speaker_06
Morgan, all of his kids.

01:11:48 Speaker_01
And I heard the story came back to me later that you know, when I got the deal to make Reservoir Dogs, you know, just little by little through the Manhattan Beach community, they started, you know, hearing, oh, hey, Quentin's making his movie. Yeah.

01:12:05 Speaker_01
Quentin got his movie off the ground. He's actually making his movie. He's not at the video store anymore. He's actually making a movie. Good for him. And who knows what's going to happen to it, but it's happening.

01:12:14 Speaker_01
And I think they were having a little dinner party at their house. And then Maggie mentions to John about what happened. Really? That's actually happened? It's actually happening? Yeah. No, they've got production offices and everything.

01:12:28 Speaker_01
They're making the movie. Everybody, raise your glass to Quentin. He did it. Good for Quentin. Raise your glass. I'm getting teary-eyed just even thinking about it.

01:12:42 Speaker_06
You know, I just have to say, John Langley, you know, cause I had some shit happen to me in my life. I spent some time in jail.

01:12:50 Speaker_06
I kind of screwed up my life, but when everything went down, when everyone in Hollywood dropped me like a hot rock, John Langley was there. Our customer, John Langley, because we lost everything. He loaned me some money.

01:13:04 Speaker_06
He gave me my first job when I got out of jail, writing something for very little money, but he wanted me back in the saddle.

01:13:12 Speaker_05
I love the things you wrote from jail.

01:13:14 Speaker_06
Oh, thanks.

01:13:15 Speaker_05
Thank you. They were really good. It was really interesting. It was like this super intelligent writer who's in jail, you know? It's a different sort of perspective.

01:13:25 Speaker_01
Roger's working on a book about his jail experiences that is, Fantastic.

01:13:31 Speaker_06
I kept a really detailed super detailed journal about like everything that's going on around me and you know, it became a really I mean that was an

01:13:43 Speaker_06
It was a very intense experience being placed into a room having the doors closed and you're just left with yourself. And everything all your things which define you get stripped away.

01:13:55 Speaker_06
Everything gets kind of dropped and you lose who you are and you're just left with your remorse and regret for why you're there. And you have a lot of time to think about things.

01:14:10 Speaker_06
But having said that, as a writer, there was a concrete bench that I could sit on. I had golf pencils. I could buy sheets of paper. And I've never in my life been more productive.

01:14:26 Speaker_06
I've never wanted to write more than when everything was taken away And I've never felt more about the world and I've never um, uh, yeah, I've It was a very monastic. I was telling quentin at one point.

01:14:41 Speaker_06
It was kind of monastic like, you know, you're you're in a you're in a secular kind of you're in a cell you're in a cell and you're

01:14:51 Speaker_06
You're with a bunch of guy dudes and you're writing, you know, it's like you're I became a scribe I started I mean I was a scribe beforehand but I really really it became my escape being able to write being able to fall into things and To be able to travel into another world and then also people find out you're a writer and they're like he man Would you write my yo essay?

01:15:10 Speaker_06
Would you write my girlfriend? Yeah. Yeah. I want to write her a love letter I need your help. So I wrote like a ton of love letters. I

01:15:19 Speaker_05
That's actually good practice for dialogue. Oh, yeah. No, totally totally. No, actually I heard some

01:15:24 Speaker_06
amazing dialogue.

01:15:26 Speaker_01
And you're writing your Robin Hood script, all right? So that's your way to get out of the cell is to write his Robin Hood script.

01:15:33 Speaker_06
Well, there's a book cart. And so every now and then you go through the book cart, and mostly it's like Tom Clancy novels. They love Tom Clancy and stuff like that. And Clive Barker novels and things like that.

01:15:44 Speaker_06
But lo and behold, I found this old Penguin paperback of an old, old version of Robin Hood written by E. Charles Vivian. And I'm like, oh man, this is gonna be great.

01:15:55 Speaker_06
And I start reading it and it's like, they get into Evil Hold, which is like this castle where, you know, Marion's father is being kept and nobody knows it and he's there and he's not away at Crusades, he's in this prison.

01:16:11 Speaker_06
And Robin Hood goes into the prison and in the moment when he's in the prison, how he sees the other prison, the wretches that he has to leave behind because they're too wretched to even come out.

01:16:24 Speaker_06
Like how bad the prison is and what he's seeing inside and his observations. I was shaking after reading it. I'm shaking thinking about the, I mean, the entire experience now, but you know, it was such a, um, a vivid depiction.

01:16:39 Speaker_06
I'm like, well, I'm, I'm adapting this cause I'm feeling it right now. I'm feeling like what it's like, I'm feeling what, It's like to have authority to have the boot on your on your neck.

01:16:50 Speaker_06
I mean rightfully so but I nevertheless and and so I started writing, you know my version of Robin Hood and with on you know pencil and paper and As I'm writing it like I was crying as I wrote it I was looking at the pages the other day and there's like teardrops like Wow all over it like on every page that's like holy crap it's like

01:17:13 Speaker_06
When you're writing like that and you're feeling that much It's not a bad thing to cry when you're writing. Yeah, it's like thank god.

01:17:19 Speaker_06
I'm i'm feeling Like i'm feeling something and it's traveling into the page And also because I had been a working writer in hollywood for a long time just by speed I had fallen into the very bad habit of composing at my computer at my laptop like one of those assholes who goes to starbucks and Since I was that guy and so i'm sitting and

01:17:42 Speaker_06
I had kind of become used to that. Well, writing by hand while incarcerated, it reconnected me with like pen to paper or pencil to paper. And it reminded me that when you write something down, you have a different relationship with the word.

01:18:02 Speaker_01
I consider the pen is the antenna to God.

01:18:05 Speaker_06
It is the antenna to god and also when you type it into the computer, that's a process of rewriting.

01:18:10 Speaker_05
Yeah, and so you're Losing an entire section and so it reconnected with you more Tell me explain this more to me This is fascinating to me because uh, i've heard many people say this about comedy that they they have to write on paper I don't I write on a laptop.

01:18:26 Speaker_05
I've always written on a laptop For me, it's what I like about writing even writing on paper is that it takes more time to write

01:18:34 Speaker_05
the word appreciate than it does to think about what it means to appreciate something like the word appreciate you know what it is instantly oh he appreciates this but to write appreciate it takes longer so there's more thinking and more thinking i feel like when you have more thinking there's more little different ways you might alternately branch off with your ideas i don't i don't think i

01:18:56 Speaker_01
That is not false. Not that I've ever written an hour-long stand-up comedy show, but I would think that your writing is different than my kind of writing. Sure.

01:19:09 Speaker_01
I would think as far as writing stuff down, it's like notes and ideas and funny word phrases or this and that and the other, but then you're working it out.

01:19:19 Speaker_01
You're saying it, you're saying it, you're saying it, you're saying it, and then you get your story.

01:19:23 Speaker_01
Right, and maybe you say it into a recorder, maybe you do this or you do that, but it probably doesn't even look right when you, even when you type it up on a thing, it doesn't look right. It's the way you tell the story.

01:19:34 Speaker_05
What I was gonna get to is that when I type, I can type quicker than I can write by hand, and the problem with comedy is it comes quick and slippery. And also you can edit.

01:19:44 Speaker_01
No, that makes a tremendous amount of sense. I mean, we're writing stuff that has to hold up on the page, that has to hold up as writing.

01:19:53 Speaker_05
I'll write a 1500 word essay and I'll use one line. There's one thing in there that might be a bit. But I'll write all this other shit on transportation.

01:20:03 Speaker_06
It's like strip mining. You just pull all that dirt out and just process it.

01:20:06 Speaker_05
That's exactly what it's like.

01:20:08 Speaker_01
I've tried to write... So you open up your mind about... 100%. Just let loose on public transportation. Yes.

01:20:15 Speaker_05
And I'm not even trying to be funny. I'm just trying to write. And then I'll find something funny in it. And then that's the starting point. Now I take that, cut it, copy it into a completely fresh document. Now, what is this? And how do I get to that?

01:20:32 Speaker_05
Ultimately, it's whatever works.

01:20:34 Speaker_06
Let me ask you a question.

01:20:35 Speaker_01
Is it you on either typing or whatever, is it you doing that an eight-page thing on transportation, or is it more likely that you're just pacing around, doing a running monologue on public transportation?

01:20:54 Speaker_05
Well, I'm sitting still, right? If that's what you mean. The thing about typing is I type good. So, not great, but I don't have to look at the keys, and I can type pretty quickly.

01:21:03 Speaker_05
And if I have a good laptop, like a ThinkPad that has a lot of finger travel, then you really feel it. And I get into like a zone. And then it's just about like... Yeah, so no, you actually do write your notes.

01:21:14 Speaker_05
Yeah, and then it's just about... But they don't always come out the same way, because sometimes when you bring them out on stage... The moment lets you know, this is not the way to go, it's this way.

01:21:23 Speaker_05
And then all of a sudden you're like, God, how did I not see that in front of the computer? Because you weren't in that vibe of the crowd. You don't do it on your own. You have to do it with them.

01:21:32 Speaker_05
It's like the one art form that literally cannot be practiced in solitary. You have to do it. So when I write, I write like that. But I also write things down on pieces of paper. If I have an idea, I gotta catch it.

01:21:46 Speaker_06
Well, they're not gonna give you that computer in jail. You're gonna be forced to write it on pencil and that's gonna be an okay experience.

01:21:56 Speaker_05
But what is it that it makes it to you like the the hand to God like what is it about writing on paper?

01:22:01 Speaker_01
Well my little my little analogy of it is you can't write poetry on a computer.

01:22:08 Speaker_05
Why not?

01:22:08 Speaker_01
Well, because we're it's we're I'm going for a rhythm, right?

01:22:13 Speaker_01
I'm going for I'm going for I'm going for a rhythm and then and and and there's like there's a connection between my chicken scratch and this paper and this pen as opposed to This other thing and and the more unintelligible and only I can read it the more legit it kind of is and the thing is and and it's it's vomit and

01:22:36 Speaker_01
It's absolutely vomit. When you write by hand, you overwrite. You way, way overwrite because you're just getting it out there. Then after all the vomit happens,

01:22:50 Speaker_01
Then you sit down with a typewriter or then you sit down with a thing and now you take the vomit and you tame it. And now you make the sentences work. And now you make it work like a writer. Now you make the page work. Now you make the sentences work.

01:23:12 Speaker_01
Can we stop for a second while we're in the restroom? Yeah, let's go. Pause. Hey, you have cigars, don't you?

01:23:15 Speaker_05
Yeah, you want a cigar? Yeah, I would love a cigar. Let's have some cigars.

01:23:17 Speaker_01
He doesn't do anything fun. I'll have a cigar.

01:23:20 Speaker_06
On Joe Rogan's show, I will have a cigar. He doesn't do anything fun.

01:23:26 Speaker_02
That is the truth. You don't do anything fun?

01:23:30 Speaker_06
Really?

01:23:31 Speaker_02
Nothing?

01:23:33 Speaker_06
Well, maybe I should talk about this.

01:23:35 Speaker_05
You should talk about it.

01:23:36 Speaker_06
Maybe I should talk about it. Are we on?

01:23:38 Speaker_05
Yeah. Can I go?

01:23:39 Speaker_06
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I don't do anything fun. Don't do anything fun. Making movies is fun. Where's the cutter?

01:23:49 Speaker_01
I thought that was a cutter. That looked cool. I was like, is that a cutter or is that brass knuckles?

01:23:54 Speaker_05
What were you saying about fun?

01:23:59 Speaker_06
I don't do anything fun. Well, after what happened to me, I should probably tell the whole story and maybe I eventually will here, but I went to jail.

01:24:15 Speaker_06
For a DUI related incident that caused Manslaughter and one of my passengers Died and You know after that and going to jail and whatnot I Got to get drunk with yeah, I don't I That's kind of what it is.

01:24:40 Speaker_06
If I go to a party or something like that, I don't want to be seen holding a drink, even with water in it.

01:24:48 Speaker_01
I'm teasing him, but I get it. Of course.

01:24:54 Speaker_05
Who wouldn't fucking get it?

01:24:57 Speaker_01
But then you add the fact that he's a vegetarian.

01:24:59 Speaker_05
All the punches. You're a vegetarian? Yeah. Why did you do that? Because his wife made him. That happens. That happened to a friend of mine. He sneaks out burgers every now and then.

01:25:13 Speaker_06
I also have a kind of, uh, it's kind of like, uh, an animal thing. I had a pig, um, as a, as a pet and man, when you look at those eyes, those are human eyes there. And I looked into it and it looked into my, I just, I had chickens before that.

01:25:32 Speaker_06
And you know what it's like, chickens are like cats, you know, they want back scratches and stuff. And I just couldn't like, after a while I just couldn't do it.

01:25:38 Speaker_05
Yeah. There's people that are feral. You ever met a feral person? You don't want to let them sleep in your house. You met a wild, crazy person? You're in jail. So push that thing up. You had it right. You had it right. Did I? This thing right here? Yeah.

01:25:51 Speaker_05
Push that up. It's an intelligence test. I'm sorry. Push it down. Pull it down. Yeah. Sorry. Pull it down. Sorry. Hey, I'm digging this. Yeah, they're great. Foundation Cigar, shout out. You've been around feral people, right?

01:26:03 Speaker_05
You don't want feral people living in your house. You don't want to take some murderer and give him your car and let him come and sleep in your room. It's different. I should take you around some wild pigs. Wild pigs are like little demons.

01:26:20 Speaker_05
They make like orc sounds. Wild pigs are wild pigs, I get it. You hear them fighting with each other.

01:26:25 Speaker_06
There are people who are like that also Domesticated people are awesome.

01:26:32 Speaker_05
Yeah domesticated people like yourself and myself. We're fun to be around. We're nice people We know you know, we're not gonna rob. You know, it's gonna kill you It's there's a difference with the wild I like the way you describe that. It's different.

01:26:46 Speaker_05
So I understand that you wouldn't want to eat animals, but they eat each other. And it's just this bizarre cycle of life. I think it's where you're getting your animals from.

01:26:56 Speaker_05
Are you getting your animals from these mass factory farming disgusting- Well, that's the other part of it.

01:27:03 Speaker_06
That's the other part of it is, I think there's a line in Highlander 2 where Sean Connery says, I don't eat anything that I cannot identify. And I kind of feel like that as well.

01:27:14 Speaker_06
Like I don't have a lot of trust for large Industrial you shouldn't but you can get meat from like a farm, you know Like you can get it from a ranch.

01:27:26 Speaker_05
You could go to one of those You know, they have those What are those farmers market type deals?

01:27:32 Speaker_06
Oh, yeah meet a rancher and I am not from them I am not like one of these people who are like, oh

01:27:38 Speaker_06
Never never like, you know, if I am in the right place in the right environment and the right Food is is there like if there's a like if I'm in On an island in Greece and the guy comes up from the boat with a basket of fish and which one would you like?

01:27:56 Speaker_06
That one, you know sure Like at least eat eggs.

01:28:00 Speaker_05
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Okay, so you digs like they're going out of style. I Yeah, that's good. So you're probably getting what you need. As long as you eat eggs, I tell people, like, eggs are free. No one's getting hurt, especially if you have your own chickens.

01:28:12 Speaker_05
That's the greatest thing in the world. We have 15 chickens.

01:28:13 Speaker_06
There's nothing like eggs straight from a chicken.

01:28:17 Speaker_05
Oh, it's great. But it's also, it's karma free. Like, the chickens are having a good time. No one's getting hurt. They're all treated like pets. Like, hey, girls.

01:28:25 Speaker_01
I love chickens. I actually really have, I've always actually thought that An exotic pet would be to have, like, a chicken. You know, it's like one chicken. Yeah. And just, like, treat it like a dog and treat it like, hey, that's my chicken.

01:28:42 Speaker_01
He hangs around.

01:28:43 Speaker_06
You got to get a couple of them. They need to have a pecking order.

01:28:45 Speaker_05
Yes. They like to hang out with each other.

01:28:48 Speaker_06
Gerbils figured that one out.

01:28:51 Speaker_05
Yeah. He was a chicken farmer.

01:28:52 Speaker_06
Was he really? Oh, yeah. Oh, no shit. Chicken farmer. That's how he.

01:28:56 Speaker_05
Worked out all of his policies in the camps is we shouldn't talk about that It's like this the name Adolf right you can't use it anymore. You can't have that That's how competitive that guy is like fuck that I can if I can wear that mustache I

01:29:17 Speaker_05
He had a Hitler for a while. I think I can make it happen. I'll make it happen. He just decided he was going to force it through.

01:29:23 Speaker_06
You know, as far as writing in jail, I'm just thinking about it right now. One of the other things I had to contend with was they would confiscate anything that I wrote. Oh. So, you know, like once a week or once every two weeks or so.

01:29:40 Speaker_06
Why would they do that? Was it illegal to write? I was considered a security threat by what I was writing. Oh, because you were telling the truth about what was going on.

01:29:48 Speaker_06
And then when they sent me in, I was placed in this like solitary confinement thing, like in the hole. And, you know, you're in there and like, I'd never been in anything like that before in my life.

01:29:58 Speaker_06
I was thinking, this is like fucking Guantanamo, except it made me think about it. I've got due process at least. And so I'm in this like crazy Kafka-esque mechanized totalitarian environment.

01:30:15 Speaker_06
You're in a room where you have no window and the lights are on 24-7. And, you know, I don't care what anybody says. You go into a room three days deprived of sound and the understanding of time. You go crazy after two days. You're insane.

01:30:33 Speaker_06
They broke me after two days. I was like, oh, I'll do some yoga. I'll meditate. No problem. No, after a while, if the lights are on 24-7 and you can't hear anything, it's like being inside of a seashell, you go slowly nuts. Is that by design? Oh, yeah.

01:30:48 Speaker_06
Yeah, for sure. It's by design. It's like you're placed into a...

01:30:57 Speaker_06
About once a week like in when I was in population about once a week the middle of the night or you know The lights are down and suddenly the lights come on bright lights are always on but let's come on bright and suddenly a bunch of guards come rushing in through the doors, you know, they just storm into the the tank into the the section and They pull everybody out of their cells and they strip everybody naked and they put you up against a wall So you're up there with like, you know Sancho and

01:31:26 Speaker_06
And, you know, Leroy and like everybody's suddenly you're all, you know, one moment you're being kept separate and next thing you know, you're all naked together standing up against the wall and they're going through everybody's cell and they're just ripping your cell apart, looking for anything.

01:31:41 Speaker_06
And usually they're looking for tar heroin or a shank or a weapon of some kind or works or cell phones, anything like they're looking for anything that's considered contraband.

01:31:51 Speaker_06
Okay, for me, they were looking at my writing, because when I was in solitary at that time, like literally on kites, a kite is like a requisition form that you send out to the guards. You're not allowed to talk to the guards.

01:32:03 Speaker_06
They don't want to talk to you. You tell them what you want on a kite, and then you give them the kite, and then they take it off, and maybe it gets answered. I never had one answered in my life.

01:32:18 Speaker_06
They come in, they strip everybody naked, they take all your clothes, and they're under the guise of we're, you know, we're doing a laundry exchange.

01:32:26 Speaker_06
And so everybody gets new clothes and you end up with like these big baggy pants or something too small for you. And they would... Look for contraband for everybody.

01:32:35 Speaker_06
Well with me they would look for whatever I was writing because when I was in solitary I was writing You know like maps I would map the place like a fucking idiot. Like I still was You know, I'm writing about Oh Eisenhardt the guard.

01:32:49 Speaker_06
I saw him watching, you know Literally saw him watching on a little TV Nazi propaganda like triumph of the will is playing on his TV and he's watching it I'm gonna write that down So they didn't want me writing all my stuff.

01:33:02 Speaker_06
They were like, that guy is a fucking threat. You get whatever he's written. And so I noticed that whenever I was taken out of my cell to shower, to go to yard, to do whatever, that they would come in and just take whatever I had written.

01:33:15 Speaker_06
So I learned that they couldn't take or open letters to my attorney.

01:33:21 Speaker_06
And so because it's privileged and so what I would do is I would just write and then whenever I had to leave my cell like to go to yard or if they were rating the cells and taking everybody out and looking for contraband, I would just quickly seal the envelope.

01:33:37 Speaker_06
My writing would go in, you know, I always left it when I was working in the letter to my attorney. And then as soon as they would rate it, I would just seal the envelope and then that would go out. Then he would send that letter to my daughter.

01:33:49 Speaker_06
Who would then type up the pages that I was writing. So that's how I wrote several scripts was like that. Wow and Yeah, because Little what did you what did you said you read some of Rogers writing when he was in prison?

01:34:05 Speaker_01
What did you read you?

01:34:07 Speaker_05
Where did you publish it? I don't remember where I was reading it.

01:34:10 Speaker_06
Well, was it I had several things Okay, so first of all, I was placed I was sentenced to go to a low security, like a country club facility. I went to a low security facility and I went in there and, you know, you have access to stuff.

01:34:28 Speaker_06
It's, you know, it's more like a like a camp almost. And you're there and you're. incarcerated, but it's a light incarceration almost. And I had access to a cell phone. And so I started tweeting. And these were the early days of Twitter.

01:34:46 Speaker_06
And so I started tweeting, oh, they found tar heroin in Pudgy's cell and they dragged him off. And oh, they, you know, this happened over here. Oh, the so-and-so shakes so-and-so. Oh, they've rolled up so-and-so and taken him away.

01:35:00 Speaker_06
I was like tweeting this stuff. And this is the early days of Twitter. And Roger Ebert, who was at that time the biggest on Twitter, was following me. And he put me on blast. He suddenly decided that he would tell everybody.

01:35:17 Speaker_06
And all of a sudden, one day overnight, the story kind of went everywhere in the world. He put you on blast in a positive way? Well, he just told everybody that, oh, this is happening.

01:35:29 Speaker_06
Roger Avery, Academy Award winning writer, is tweeting from jail and tweeting from behind bars. Did you but do you have the time now? It's like nothing people do it all the time people like I've got nights doing podcast.

01:35:43 Speaker_06
I've got a friend who's one of those January six guys, and he's he's sends me like tweets all the time like Yeah, you got a friend who was a January six guy well, he's still there he's like hundreds of days in jail without trial.

01:36:05 Speaker_06
I mean, tell me if I'm wrong, but that's not how it's supposed to be. It's not how it's supposed to be. You're supposed to have a due process of some kind.

01:36:11 Speaker_05
Well, especially when you watch the actual footage of how it went down.

01:36:14 Speaker_06
Oh, I watched it live, and there was that guy, that Antifa guy, waving people in, moving them in. They were moving the blockade things, they were moving them out, and cops were waving people in, they were opening the doors for people.

01:36:31 Speaker_05
I want you to think about it this way. In the most heavily armed nation the world has ever known, why would you have an insurrection with no guns? You gotta have guns. Machine guns. Those guys weren't planning on an insurrection. No.

01:36:44 Speaker_05
And then you have the factor that there was agents in the crowd. And we don't know how many. There's government agents in the crowd that were inciting people to go in. That's what they do.

01:36:53 Speaker_06
And I want to know who that cop was who shot that woman.

01:36:56 Speaker_05
Yeah. What about that? Yeah. The whole thing's crazy. The whole thing's crazy. And then there's this thing that cops died. No cops died that day. That's not true. No. The cop who died, he died of a stroke. And I believe it was a stroke.

01:37:08 Speaker_05
A stroke or a heart attack.

01:37:10 Speaker_06
Well, like everything, there's a lot of misinformation being given to us by the mainstream media.

01:37:13 Speaker_05
But it gets attributed to it. You know, sort of like when anything happens to anyone four years after the vaccine, they attribute it to the vaccine. Oh, it was probably the vaccine. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:37:22 Speaker_05
Could have been the guy just had a fucking heart attack. But this guy who was a cop, he did not die. He was not killed by the protesters. And you watch the video of the shaman dude with the fucking buffalo hat. They're walking him around.

01:37:34 Speaker_05
The cops are guiding him. How would you ever think that that is going to let you wind up in jail? How would you ever think that if you're an unsophisticated guy who was wearing fucking face paint,

01:37:46 Speaker_05
And you're kind of a kook, and you think you're part of a movement, which is really scary. People get a part of a movement, and they go, yeah, we're all doing it.

01:37:56 Speaker_05
And then you've got literal government agents encouraging you to do it, moving barriers, letting you in. They were playing chess, and these idiots were playing checkers, and they all got locked up. That makes a lot of sense.

01:38:09 Speaker_06
Because nobody was doing an insurrection. It wasn't an insurrection.

01:38:13 Speaker_05
You don't do an insurrection without weapons. It's the whole idea is crazy.

01:38:16 Speaker_06
There was no presumption that there was going to be any kind of like that you were going to get thrown in jail for a thousand days. And so my pal Jake Lang, he's been there forever.

01:38:25 Speaker_06
And every now and then I get a like a picture of him like he's been in like. Look, I deserve to go to jail. That guy doesn't. And most of those guys don't.

01:38:36 Speaker_05
Yeah, I think it was a bad decision, certainly, to go into the Capitol. It was a bad decision to smash windows. But I want to know who was doing it.

01:38:42 Speaker_06
People had been smashing things for a whole year before that.

01:38:45 Speaker_05
Right. That's a very good point. It's like we were a culture of smashing things at that point. It's also, as soon as you find out that there were government agents that may or may not have incited people to go in, the whole thing fucking changes.

01:38:55 Speaker_05
Like, what are you trying to do? Are you there to serve and protect? Or is there some other weird shit going on? Because it seems like there is, and no one wants to talk about it because you don't want to be that guy.

01:39:05 Speaker_05
But at a certain point in time, you should be that guy. You should go, what's going on, man?

01:39:13 Speaker_06
There comes a point where men of good conscience must stand up and speak out against things that are obviously wrong. And that is one of them.

01:39:24 Speaker_05
Yeah, that is one of them. It's a big one. It's a weird one. And, you know, there's all this pushback about Trump getting into office. He said one of the first things he said was he was going to release all the January 6 prisoners.

01:39:36 Speaker_05
How long do you think they should be in there for? Who's opposing this?

01:39:39 Speaker_06
They should at least be going to trial. Yes. You should at least be going to trial. It is unconscionable to hold somebody for over a year, two years.

01:39:48 Speaker_01
Well, the thing, the government has always had a situation where, and we talked about when we did our episode on the Andersonville trial, you know, is

01:40:01 Speaker_01
The one charge that the government can put against you where they don't need direct evidence is conspiracy. If they arrest you for conspiracy, that means they don't have direct evidence, but they don't need direct evidence for conspiracy.

01:40:14 Speaker_01
By the way, when I was like just one thing, that's how they got Manson.

01:40:18 Speaker_05
Right. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's true. Right.

01:40:20 Speaker_01
All right.

01:40:21 Speaker_05
Well, they knew what Manson had done because they were helping them.

01:40:24 Speaker_01
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I believe that, too, because you read chaos. Oh, that book's one of the best. Well, believe me, I read every Manson book that there possibly could read. And then I read that when I throw the rest of them away. Yeah. Fucking trash.

01:40:36 Speaker_01
Chaos is chaos is just fantastic. And he helped me too, because my first AD is a friend of his, Bill Clark. And when I was writing the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood book, I go deeper into the Manson stuff.

01:40:51 Speaker_01
And so I had a couple of little questions in my head that I always kind of wanted to know the answer to. So I got Tom's number and I called him up and I was able to ask him some really super direct questions that can really help my book.

01:41:04 Speaker_06
It's a crazy fucking story. You know, when I was in jail, I found out they record everything. They're just constantly recording. And so somebody's in there and they're like, man, I'd like to kill that DA. Well, that's conspiracy.

01:41:19 Speaker_06
And so they'll wait and like, oh, you're about to get out. And like, they'll literally start walking around like, ah, stop.

01:41:24 Speaker_04
Yeah. Oh, God.

01:41:25 Speaker_06
Remember that thing you said about conspiracy? Let's play that back for you. Oh, God. Or what you said about killing the DA. Well, that's, you're going away again. You're going back to trial. That happened a lot. But it's also- Don't ever talk.

01:41:38 Speaker_01
They put guys in your cell to get you talking about shit.

01:41:41 Speaker_06
Oh yeah, that happened right away. That happened right away. They're trying to get you to incriminate yourself deeper constantly. It's like a fun game.

01:41:50 Speaker_05
What a fun game. What a fun game. To serve and protect. Incriminate you deeper.

01:41:55 Speaker_06
Well, as Quentin will confirm, I have my authority issues. I always have. I always have I'm suspicious of anyone in power and Should be yeah, it's intoxicating like this.

01:42:11 Speaker_01
Okay, so when Roger could get part of the thing on our show I'm getting back to what Roger's saying.

01:42:16 Speaker_01
I'm not changing the subject When we do our show you the thing is when we do our show we talk about three movies So I pick three video cassettes the show we're talking about is the video archives podcast.

01:42:30 Speaker_06
Yes, it was our second season patreon.com slash video archives

01:42:34 Speaker_01
But the thing is, all right, so it's like there's like the main movie, then there's that second movie that's like kind of like the main movie, but probably you don't know that much about some wild exploitation thing that I, you know, this is what the fuck is this?

01:42:45 Speaker_01
Let's watch it and find out. And one of the things is about our show is. I don't say, hey, Roger, so find these movies and you watch them and I'll watch them and we'll get together and we'll do it on the phone too.

01:42:56 Speaker_01
Well, no, no, no, we don't do that shit. All right. You know, we get together to watch the movies together.

01:43:02 Speaker_06
Part of it is the experience of being together and watching the movie together, watching it through his eyes.

01:43:06 Speaker_01
The reason we came up with the idea of the show is like when we reconnected, we started doing what we used to do.

01:43:13 Speaker_06
During the pandemic.

01:43:14 Speaker_01
Yeah. And then we were sort of like, well, hey, let's come up with a way we can get paid to do this.

01:43:18 Speaker_01
All right, you know, so me and Roger will get together and we'll watch three movies and sometimes even four and then we'll get together then we have a day off and then we get together on another day and then we record and we're always in the room when we do it.

01:43:31 Speaker_01
But the thing is when Roger comes over to watch the film, I've kind of learned. That's like, Roger, I'm starting, it's three movies we're gonna watch. I am starting the first movie 20 minutes after you get here.

01:43:45 Speaker_01
Because Roger will just get off on some archaic piece of thing. The earth is flat!

01:43:51 Speaker_02
The earth is flat!

01:43:52 Speaker_01
And the next thing you know, all right, it's been an hour and 15 minutes later, and you're getting further and further and further away, all right, from the, The alchemy we're trying to create with the first movie So now it's a little in 20 minutes.

01:44:07 Speaker_01
I'm hitting play So wrap it up.

01:44:10 Speaker_05
That's a problem with podcasts when people come over. Sometimes we have some of the best conversations before the podcast Yeah, so now I have to be rude. I'll be like stop stop.

01:44:18 Speaker_01
Stop.

01:44:18 Speaker_05
Let's not do It's catch that man, yeah, cuz you got to catch it cuz it is weird.

01:44:24 Speaker_05
It's a it's a weird thing, you know It's it's a beautiful thing though, because it's so open, you know, there's no one telling like there's no studio people Yeah, no even the idea.

01:44:36 Speaker_01
I mean one the fact the idea The idea that This has replaced the talk show, the talk shows that we grew up watching and like those guys were the kings.

01:44:51 Speaker_01
The fact that podcasting, and you're the king of it, but the fact that that podcasting has replaced that, but also the fact that Anybody that it's got something intelligent. It's got a cool little setup.

01:45:05 Speaker_05
It's got an interesting personality and it can They can sell it so interesting conversation Theoretically can start a podcast 100% Yeah, yeah, there's the barrier to entry so low I think about the barrier to entry when you wanted to be a director It's fucking crazy.

01:45:20 Speaker_06
Not only not only that You know like the old days of television, you know, like Desilu. Yeah, we own our content like you own your content. Yeah, and Never mind that it's a podcast.

01:45:32 Speaker_06
I'm okay with that I like the the fact that this is something where for the first time in my life At least I'm involved with something where there is nobody else.

01:45:42 Speaker_06
It's me and Quentin who decide everything Yeah, and you know if if Quentin wants to do it we go there if I want to do it we go there Well, I talked to Quentin if Quentin allows it we go there I

01:45:54 Speaker_06
I mean, basically what we're doing is the same thing we used to do. That's true. At the video store. We do what we used to do at the video store. We're talking about movies.

01:46:02 Speaker_02
When your idea is completely terrible, I have the kill switch. But other than that... No, no, no. I didn't mean it like that. I never use the kill switch.

01:46:13 Speaker_05
But the kill switch is always there.

01:46:15 Speaker_03
No! Not really, not really. Well, I guess.

01:46:20 Speaker_06
But you know what?

01:46:20 Speaker_03
But you want a theoretical sort of Damoclean thing over your head.

01:46:24 Speaker_06
Most times when you've used the kill switch, you've used it on your own.

01:46:27 Speaker_03
I've used it on myself.

01:46:28 Speaker_06
You used it on yourself. You actually haven't used it like on any of my things that I've wanted to do, which is really cool. But basically we're doing the same thing we used to do. We used to sit around and talk about movies.

01:46:40 Speaker_06
And so during the pandemic, you know, Quentin called me up and we hadn't talked for, I mean, we had bumped into each other.

01:46:47 Speaker_04
We bumped into each other a few times.

01:46:48 Speaker_06
But we hadn't really, we had had a little bit of a, we had a falling out. And I call it a sort of a business related falling out.

01:46:58 Speaker_06
And maybe if I had been a little more mature, I was young as a filmmaker and probably unprepared to deal with the complexities of agents and attorneys and Hollywood and money and fame and the press and the press's agenda and all of that.

01:47:14 Speaker_06
I was just approaching it like I'm a, So Cal Gen X punk Filmmaker that was how I approached it.

01:47:22 Speaker_06
I'm gonna do whatever the fuck I want to do I'm gonna make the movie that I want to make and I with that attitude of you know I know what I want I know what's right and nobody can tell me I'm wrong because you have to be a little bit of a maniac to be a director you have to be willing to say no I'm right even when everyone is telling you you're wrong and Is that a joke or two got made?

01:47:43 Speaker_03
I like Joker 2. I like Joker 2. I know you do. I haven't seen it. I'm just fucking around.

01:47:50 Speaker_01
I will defend Joker 2. I'll defend the movie as well. Not that I need more fucking press on that.

01:47:55 Speaker_05
I can't wait to watch it and then talk to you about it afterwards.

01:47:59 Speaker_05
Tim Dillon said is the worst fucking movie that's ever been made and he's in it You know I can well that may have colored his perception though, but Tim make thinks everything sucks No matter what everybody's saying is amazing like Tim loves to talk shit The funniest thing that I've heard for a while on YouTube what I was listening to you guys talk is I

01:48:23 Speaker_01
He's a guy, I never really listened to his show or anything like that.

01:48:25 Speaker_05
He's fucking brilliant.

01:48:26 Speaker_01
But when he was on your thing talking about the election and when he described Tim Waltz as like, well, that guy's a goofball who just should be at a county fair eating hot dogs.

01:48:42 Speaker_01
I laughed for 15 minutes and played it back about three different times because I thought that was such a funny comment.

01:48:49 Speaker_05
He's always funny. He said it sounds like Kamala Harris is doing voodoo curses. She's doing gypsy curses, he said. She speaks in gypsy curses.

01:49:00 Speaker_05
He does this show with these fucking crazy glasses on like that's this new thing if you ever watch his show it's the best because it's literally just him ranting and a producer and That rant the ability to rant as a singleton operator It's a fucking lone person out there without anybody to bounce ideas off of is a rare type

01:49:21 Speaker_05
And he's the best at it. I've ever seen Bill Burr's really good at as well.

01:49:24 Speaker_05
Yeah, but Tim Dillon is the best at it I've ever seen he's so fucking good at it, and he's just basically performing to one person who's his producer Yeah, he's just ranting and so because that he's got this crazy muscle that he's developed from years of doing that well He just rants about all these different things, but it's fucking brilliant

01:49:44 Speaker_05
I like ranting. Oh, yeah, clearly. As you know. Well, that's the great thing about you guys doing a podcast together. What I was going to get to is like, in the beginning, you were talking about replacing the talk show.

01:49:54 Speaker_05
Well, fucking, you guys replaced Siskel and Ebert, right? Because Siskel and Ebert- Well, that's what we wanted to do.

01:49:59 Speaker_03
Thank you. They're gone.

01:50:00 Speaker_05
That was actually the agenda that Quentin proposed to me. Well, both those guys are gone. You know what I love watching is videos of outtakes of those guys bitching at each other?

01:50:08 Speaker_03
Oh, bitching at each other. Yeah, yeah. They fucking hated each other. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:50:10 Speaker_05
They were so shitty to each other. And then they had to be smiley and what a bullshit way to live.

01:50:16 Speaker_06
Do you remember when Vincent Gallo wished testicular cancer on Roger Ebert and then he got it?

01:50:25 Speaker_03
Oh, wow. Do you remember that? Okay, I do. Well, he had cancer of the mouth.

01:50:28 Speaker_06
Now that you bring it up, yeah.

01:50:29 Speaker_05
Right, like he lost his jaw, like they had to remove his jawbone.

01:50:32 Speaker_06
That was Vincent Gallo cursing it onto him.

01:50:34 Speaker_05
Oh, voodoo's real.

01:50:35 Speaker_06
And he apologized after he, oh my God, I didn't, I think he got it. That's exactly what happened and then he went me he cursed him and then the curse came true And then he regretted I talked to me.

01:50:50 Speaker_05
He was like, I wish I had never done that It's crazy if it really worked that movie Brown Bunny. I want to talk about that because I I've always thought it's so strange that we can show violence but we can't show sex.

01:51:06 Speaker_05
And I know they tried to do that with like, you ever see the lines outside the movie theater when Deep Throat came out? Carson was in line. Johnny Carson went to see Deep Throat in a public theater.

01:51:17 Speaker_01
Bing Crosby arrived at midnight.

01:51:19 Speaker_05
People didn't know what they were seeing yet. It hadn't been defined as a genre. There was nudie movies that people watched at stag parties.

01:51:26 Speaker_01
And there was that little moment in 73 where there was porno chic.

01:51:31 Speaker_06
Yeah. Well, Stallone did Italian Stallion.

01:51:34 Speaker_01
Yeah, but that wasn't a popular thing. This was. And everyone had to kind of see it. And like, oh, hey, maybe this will be a thing. Right, right.

01:51:43 Speaker_01
Maybe this will be a thing now that like, you know, you know, you know, one or three or four porno movies will come out every year. That'll be like kind of considered like real movies, you know, couples will go see.

01:51:54 Speaker_00
Yeah.

01:51:54 Speaker_01
And that was a whole thing was. Promoting the idea of couples going to see a porn film either porno films or just heavenly erotic movies Right, you know like for sexy for sexy nights.

01:52:10 Speaker_01
Yeah, not like Travis Bickle does it We're gonna have a sexy night we're gonna go and see and then we'll go home and we'll take care of business, right Yeah, but it didn't really happen. But there was this hope in the early 70s that that could happen.

01:52:26 Speaker_05
But it's fascinating that it didn't happen because what I was going to get to is like violence we don't have any problem with. But we all agree that consensual sex is way better than someone getting shot in the face.

01:52:37 Speaker_05
But people get shot in the face in movies constantly. You see heads explode and arms getting lopped off in Game of Thrones. Bread and butter. It's constant.

01:52:47 Speaker_06
I think it's actually gone too far. I think I mean this could be for me Well, it's not that violence has gone too far.

01:52:53 Speaker_06
It's the meaningless violence has gone violence without purpose almost and I started to recognize this during walking dead but really game of thrones though you mentioned game of thrones and

01:53:06 Speaker_06
Like, I loved Game of Thrones at first, and then I started realizing, wait a minute, like, they're getting off on me falling in love with characters, and then the moment I've fallen in love with a character, suddenly they're vivisecting their genitals.

01:53:20 Speaker_06
You know, it's like... And then the cycle begins again. You fall in love with a different character. And then they're killing them. And they're just doing it, like, sadistically because there's nowhere to go other than that.

01:53:32 Speaker_05
They're just pushing the ceiling higher and higher. Sort of. But also, if you were living in that world, that would be reality. Nobody lived forever and became the hero of the fucking movie. There's no heroes back then everybody's getting gutted.

01:53:44 Speaker_05
There's they're getting usurped They're like into a dungeon, you know, yeah people getting fed the lions It's just you're getting eaten by dogs.

01:53:52 Speaker_01
This is real and now you have to fight for the next five years against the rats They're in the fucking dungeon with you, but

01:53:57 Speaker_06
Television at least the television I grew up with was all about like the familiarity of returning to the characters you love Yeah, but there was plenty of characters.

01:54:06 Speaker_01
Yeah, and you did get to return to the ones that stuck around didn't get their head I just wish I killed other characters Let me give you another let me give you another example my Everyone talks about how great television is now, and it's it's pretty good.

01:54:22 Speaker_01
I gotta say it's pretty good, but I It's still television to me. And what's the difference between television and a good movie? Because a lot of the TV now has the patina of a movie. They're using cinematic language to get you caught up in it.

01:54:45 Speaker_01
And obviously I'm talking about good shows. We're talking about shows that you're- Ozark. Shows that you're compelled to watch. Right, right, right. All right. And so, okay, so I'll use an example of a show. I'll use Yellowstone.

01:55:02 Speaker_01
I didn't really get around to watching Yellowstone the first three years or so. And then I watched the first season, and I go, wow, this is fucking great. I've always been a big Kevin Costner fan. He's fucking wonderful in this, all right?

01:55:11 Speaker_01
And I got really caught up in the show and everything, and all of a sudden I'm having a good time, and I've got a couple seasons I haven't seen, so I'm watching it. And in the first season, I'm kind of talking, like, this is like a movie.

01:55:24 Speaker_01
This is like a big movie. It's like a big movie. And the guy who writes that is a good writer. There's good, like, punchy monologues and stuff. So then I end up watching, like, three seasons of it.

01:55:37 Speaker_01
And then I even watched that, like, 1883, where it was, oh, this is a good Western show. I like Westerns. After I've watched like two or three seasons or one season of 1883, look, while I'm watching it, I am compelled. I'm caught up in it.

01:55:56 Speaker_01
But at the end of the day, it's all just a soap opera. They've introduced you to a bunch of characters. You actually kind of know all their backstories. You know everybody's connection with everybody else. And they spend some time selling that out.

01:56:08 Speaker_01
And then everything is just the compellingness of the soap opera of what's happening to this character.

01:56:16 Speaker_05
And what's different between that and a film?

01:56:17 Speaker_01
Well, I'll tell you. I'll tell you. Because the thing is, If you watch Edge of Night, Monday through Friday, you get caught up in the dramas of the family and everything. But you don't remember it five years from now.

01:56:31 Speaker_01
You're caught up into the minutia of it at the moment. All right. So the difference between is is I'll see a good Western movie and I'll remember it for the rest of my life. I'll remember the story. I'll remember this scene or that scene.

01:56:45 Speaker_01
And it built it built to an emotional climax of some degree. And, you know, one, the story is good. It's not just about the interpersonal relationships. The story is good itself. But but but there's a payoff to it. But there's not a payoff on this stuff.

01:57:00 Speaker_01
It's just more interconnectional drama. And while I'm watching it, that's good enough. But when it's over, I couldn't tell you. I can remember who the bad guy was in the first season of Yellowstone because it was Danny Houston. I remember him in it.

01:57:16 Speaker_01
But I don't remember any of the details of it. And I don't remember any of the bad guys for season two or season three. It's out of my head.

01:57:23 Speaker_01
It's just completely out of, and same thing with 1883, when I watched the whole thing and that was like a, that seemed like a movie, except I don't remember, Sam Elliott's about the only thing I really remember of it when it was finished.

01:57:37 Speaker_01
But now, Red River, I remember for the rest of my life.

01:57:41 Speaker_05
Isn't that, though, because it's a different thing, right? Because when you go to a film, film is designed for one sitting. You sit down in the theater, you're going to get the entire encapsulation of what happens to these characters in three hours.

01:57:54 Speaker_01
Okay, I'll give you an example of one that is more than a soap opera, and here's the difference. Here's the difference. Okay. Yeah, you could say that. Look, they're in the soap opera business, but I'll tell you one that's not, okay?

01:58:06 Speaker_01
If you watch that first season of, now here's one that really works like a movie. If you watch the first season of Homeland. Oh, yeah. That first season of Homeland. First season is incredible. OK.

01:58:17 Speaker_05
Yeah, very good.

01:58:19 Speaker_01
When it gets to that final episode of the first season and he's got the suicide vest on and he's in the room, he can kill the guys that he's been waiting for to do it for the whole movie.

01:58:34 Speaker_01
And you don't want him to die, but you're kind of into him and you kind of want him to pull it off. And then his daughter calls him on the phone. before he does it.

01:58:44 Speaker_01
She doesn't know what he's gonna do, but she gets that little sense from him that something's weird. She goes, Daddy, you need to tell me that you're gonna come home right now. You need to tell me right now that I will see you later tonight.

01:58:57 Speaker_01
And the entire series has been built to this scene. And it's one of the most emotional scenes I've ever seen in a movie, in a TV show, I've ever seen dramatized. I've ever seen dramatized. Now that was a movie. That was not a soap opera.

01:59:12 Speaker_01
That built to this moment of him being in that fucking room with the suicide vest on. And there was complexity. She doesn't know what she's asking. But we do.

01:59:24 Speaker_02
Right.

01:59:25 Speaker_01
She's stopping this major thing and she'll never know that.

01:59:28 Speaker_04
But we do. Right. Right. Right.

01:59:32 Speaker_01
And he's still committed. But he's more committed to her. And we know that. That's just great shit. That's a movie.

01:59:40 Speaker_05
Right. And you can't.

01:59:41 Speaker_01
Can you do that every week? Now, I didn't say you can do it every week, but I'm saying, when the season's over, I need to walk away with more than just the soap opera. An impactful moment. Exactly.

01:59:54 Speaker_01
Now, I don't expect you to do that every week, but at the end of the arc, if you're telling a continuing story, at the end of that fucking season, you need to, bam, drop the mic. You need to tell me a fucking story, not just dot, dot, dot, dot, dot.

02:00:11 Speaker_04
I see what you're saying.

02:00:12 Speaker_01
And look, while I'm watching it, I'm not asking for that. But the fact that it all just disappears once it's over, and it's just sand on the beach.

02:00:23 Speaker_05
It's a different thing though, right? I mean, this is the weirdness of the theater experience versus home.

02:00:29 Speaker_01
Here's where it's not a different thing. Part of the thing that makes it different is the fact that everyone's watching these continuing stories, continuing stories, continuing stories. If it were Bonanza, where it's just a setup story,

02:00:42 Speaker_01
Charles Bronson shows up, he's a half-breed Indian, and he's working at the Ponderosa for a while, and he gets involved in an adventure, and then at the end, it's done.

02:00:54 Speaker_01
Well, on that show, you have the episodes that are maybe not so good, or the episodes that are, whatever, they're treading water. That's not one continual story. But then you'll have this great episode with Charles Bronson.

02:01:07 Speaker_01
Or they have a great episode with James Coburn. Well, they're almost stand-alones. That could have been a movie. Yeah, they could have expanded that to a movie, right?

02:01:16 Speaker_05
They're standalones instead of just a long ongoing story.

02:01:18 Speaker_06
Well, the difference is that that's episodic.

02:01:21 Speaker_01
It's a long ongoing story that leads to the soap opera aspect.

02:01:25 Speaker_06
Well, it's episodic and television now has become completely serialized.

02:01:29 Speaker_01
Yeah, yeah.

02:01:30 Speaker_06
And so, you know, somebody's going in and they're pitching their show, even a really, really good show like Deadwood.

02:01:36 Speaker_06
Okay, Deadwood, I know what they, they probably went in, they pitched, and what they knew that they were going to make was the, was it Wild Bill? The Wild Bill story. And they've got Carradine and like, and they know that story.

02:01:47 Speaker_06
And that show is fantastic as long as they're telling that story, which is like six to eight episodes. Once he's gone, I don't think they had a plan.

02:01:57 Speaker_06
They that was what they pitched and it was like they pitched a movie spread out over a number of episodes But it wasn't even the full season.

02:02:05 Speaker_06
Yeah, but by that point in time they have now they have all the town characters Well, they've got everybody but uh, but I would maintain that for the rest of Deadwood after Carradine's gone. It's just things are happening stuff is happening

02:02:17 Speaker_06
But I don't remember anything about that show other than the town and you know the the various actors that I liked and on the show and But really all they had was those first six to eight episodes.

02:02:28 Speaker_01
I can't remember what exactly what it was and the thing and the thing about it is I'm not I don't say all this and the sum up of it all is it's useless. It is very compelling while I'm watching it.

02:02:43 Speaker_01
But it just doesn't compare to a movie, real story that stays with me for the rest of my life in some cases. Right. I know what you're saying. I try to watch at least one movie every episode that I haven't seen.

02:02:59 Speaker_01
And sometimes it's like, well, I haven't seen it since I was 12.

02:03:03 Speaker_01
You know, uh, or I haven't seen it since those are actually the scariest ones to watch because if you loved something when you were young, it's almost like I'm expecting not to I'm tougher on stuff now than I used to be. All right.

02:03:13 Speaker_01
Uh, I, I, you know, it was a big champion about stuff. Now I'm not such a champion. Now I see all the problems with it. All right. But I will watch something that I haven't seen since I was 22. And I saw it like the day it opened.

02:03:22 Speaker_01
Um, and I, you know, and I, uh, I watch, you know, I, I watch it again. I think I just lost my train of thought. Okay.

02:03:30 Speaker_06
Well actually I can jump in really quick if you want.

02:03:33 Speaker_01
I'm talking like I'm stoned and I'm not.

02:03:37 Speaker_06
Strong cigars. Yeah, strong cigars. One of the movies we saw that we had seen a million times, and we didn't even think that it was going to be anything, was Dressed to Kill. Yeah.

02:03:47 Speaker_01
OK, let me set this up a little bit. Yeah, set it up. And then you can take it. Yeah, yeah. All right. It was one of those things where we were doing a thing, a special episode with Eli Roth.

02:03:54 Speaker_01
We were taking the Italian Jallo thrillers and saying, OK, where are the American versions of Jallo thrillers? And we figured out there was like four of them. And one of them was Dressed to Kill.

02:04:03 Speaker_05
Michael Caine.

02:04:04 Speaker_01
Yeah. And so we get together with Eli. And we're gonna watch these four movies. And then it comes down to Dress to Kill. And I was like, God, I can't even think about how many times I've seen Dress to Kill. I can't even think how many times he's seen it.

02:04:17 Speaker_01
And how many times Eli's seen it. I mean, we're just huge Brian De Palma fans and Nancy Allen fans and everything. So it was like, how many fucking times? And so I almost, almost brought up, I mean, do we even need to watch Dress to Kill?

02:04:31 Speaker_01
I mean, we've got- We had a little congress about it. We've got three movies. No, okay, let's just watch it. We'll just watch it. That ended up being one of the greatest screenings of Dressed to Kill I've ever seen, all right?

02:04:44 Speaker_01
In our living room, in my living room, watching it with Roger. On VHS. On VHS, pan and scan, all right? The old Warner Brothers video, because we watch them on the actual video cassettes of video archives, all right?

02:04:58 Speaker_06
Literally the tape that we used to rent and handle and shuffle and put back and forth into the drawers and then rent to customers And that has been sitting on the shelves with the number on it and everything for the we've seen the movie a bunch of times But something about watching it with the three of us and then just sitting there and it's so good But but but but it was Roger who was adding to it.

02:05:16 Speaker_01
It was Eli that was adding to them. Yeah, I

02:05:20 Speaker_06
You know and like we just had this like appreciation for the movie watching it with the three of us in this situation the fact that we even Considered not even watching it was just like sacrilege and we saw things in it that we had never seen before that was the other thing it's like I saw things in during that screening because of because of feeling Watching the movie with you guys that I had never thought about before and so it opened up all sorts of avenues and you know

02:05:51 Speaker_06
Most frequently, you watch a movie and it doesn't live up. I'm afraid to watch movies again a lot of the time. That was just one of those happy incidences where the movie really lived up. It stayed strong, even when we'd seen it hundreds of times.

02:06:09 Speaker_01
I know. I mean, you could not, it'd be hard to pick a movie that I've seen as much as Jessica.

02:06:14 Speaker_05
See, this is the better version of Siskel and Ebert.

02:06:18 Speaker_01
This is exactly what I'm talking about.

02:06:21 Speaker_05
The completely unproduced, uninfluenced version.

02:06:24 Speaker_01
Well, I told Roger when we finished the first season, and I go, you know, Roger, if we do this the right way, in three or four years' time, we could be considered like Siskalini.

02:06:34 Speaker_05
A hundred percent, yeah. It's just a matter of getting it out there. I think there's just a bunch of people that aren't aware of it yet.

02:06:42 Speaker_06
They will come. Build it and they will come. But what I love about the way we're doing it now, because our first season, we just put it out. And we had a partner with SiriusXM back then. And this season, you know.

02:06:55 Speaker_01
Yeah, they kind of went out of business in their own, for their podcasting thing a little bit. Oh, did they?

02:07:01 Speaker_05
Pandora now, right?

02:07:02 Speaker_01
Yeah, yeah. They kind of turned into a different thing.

02:07:03 Speaker_05
They just signed a big podcast deal with the Call Her Daddy chick. Yeah, I think they did, yeah. So I guess they're trying to get back into it.

02:07:10 Speaker_01
And I think some other people as well. They paid us a lot of money to do it and like we actually did pretty good for like our little archaic little movie Yeah, mm-hmm show that goes on about two hours a real niche and niche type.

02:07:22 Speaker_01
Yeah, and we Can you guys do jaws?

02:07:25 Speaker_05
No, we don't do jaws But that's the best part of it. Do whatever the fuck you want to do.

02:07:29 Speaker_01
That's exactly it. But the thing is they were like So we actually had about two million listeners, which was like, hey, that was pretty good for us doing our little stupid movie show about VHS. And it's all about VHS. It's about the VHS.

02:07:45 Speaker_06
We're talking about the box art of VHS tapes.

02:07:48 Speaker_01
We watch the film, we talk about the trailers that are in front of the movie, all right? We talk about the transfer.

02:07:54 Speaker_05
By the way, the movie VHS is one of my guilty pleasures. That's a good film, yeah, yeah. The one with the devil lady? Yeah, yeah, yeah. She turns into a devil?

02:08:01 Speaker_01
The four different stories, the three different stories, yeah.

02:08:03 Speaker_05
But that one is worth it. Just sit through the other three for that one. The devil lady was fucking amazing.

02:08:08 Speaker_01
But I think they were expecting us to do like... John, Citizen Kane. They were expecting us to do like Dax Shepard kind of numbers. Right, right, right.

02:08:16 Speaker_03
We're never going to do that with what we're doing.

02:08:19 Speaker_05
Right, right, right. Yeah. And so we're talking... But you could though. People want to see it. They want to listen to it. It's just a matter of just it bidding They'll realize they wanted it once they hear it. That's what it is.

02:08:33 Speaker_05
It's like oh we want them to only talk about Citizen Kane No, no, no.

02:08:37 Speaker_05
No, it's got to be whatever the fuck they actually want to talk about But then you'll learn about that movie that you never heard about maybe you go see it and then you'll have a deeper Appreciation of why these guys love movies, but one of the things that was interesting when we did it Okay, so

02:08:50 Speaker_01
When we made our deal, we were thinking, okay, well, maybe we'll do it here for two years, and we own the show, and then we want to take it to Patreon so we don't have to do commercials.

02:09:00 Speaker_01
And then when I did commercials, I did it with a 70s DJ announcer voice, all right? Because I felt like such a sellout that I'm not going to do it in my voice. The Dotson 750 is coming, and it's coming soon! Like the real Don Steele.

02:09:21 Speaker_01
That was my whole thing. Doing it like the real Don Steele.

02:09:24 Speaker_06
I just did those readings like myself and people started commenting on Twitter.

02:09:28 Speaker_03
They were like, man, Roger Avery. Zip recruiter!

02:09:31 Speaker_02
Can fill your placement in a week. Some people even get, in the first week, they get qualified candidates only on ziprecruiter.com.

02:09:45 Speaker_06
I like solo stoves, they're great, but I found myself doing stainless steel ads, basically, and talking about solo stoves, and suddenly people on Twitter were saying, Roger Avery will sell you sour milk from a sick cow.

02:10:01 Speaker_06
I don't know if I want to be shilling stuff like that anymore.

02:10:06 Speaker_05
You just have to only approve the ads that you want to do. I approve ads. I don't just let them give me every ad. I'm like, I can't do this one.

02:10:14 Speaker_06
And I say it all the time. We're not even under that kind of pressure.

02:10:17 Speaker_01
The thing about it that I thought would be kind of cool is, we go to Patreon, we'll lose a whole bunch of listeners. We'll put a 40-minute version of the show out there for free. But if you want to get the whole show, then you've got to subscribe.

02:10:39 Speaker_01
And if you just subscribe, you get the show. If you pay $5, you get our show. Boom. Boom. And if you pay $8, then you get an extra special show that we do.

02:10:48 Speaker_06
There's still a truncated version of it available for everybody to listen to. You like the first part of it? Come for the rest.

02:10:54 Speaker_01
But the thing is, though, is what I like, and some people are sort of like, fuck those guys, and I'm like, well, okay, fine. And look, I get it.

02:11:02 Speaker_01
I'm the guy that, I'm the guy, in my 20s, would go to happy hour at the bar, all right, and nurse a beer while I ate all the pizza and the chicken wings, and that was my dinner. So I get that.

02:11:14 Speaker_01
And by the way, if you want to wait to the end of our season and then join for a month and listen to all of our shows that way, you can. That's an easy way to do it. You can get everything for free for a month.

02:11:24 Speaker_01
You can get everything you want in a month. That's not who we're doing it for. We're doing it for the people who care about the show and are subscribing to it. And those people, those are our audience.

02:11:37 Speaker_01
And then they write on the message board and we write them back. So we're doing it for those people. And as long as we can make enough to just do the show, we're cool.

02:11:46 Speaker_06
And the general feeling is, wow, this is like a $5 film school because you've got a couple of guys talking about movies and talking about how to watch movies, how to appreciate films, how to read a film.

02:11:58 Speaker_06
Hopefully just genuinely compelling discussions and using our experience as filmmakers to discuss even you know deeper into the movies and to better understand them and you know, it's Largely something has happened in culture where People

02:12:20 Speaker_06
They don't know how to argue anymore, politely. They don't know how to, like, enjoy an argument with each other before. And so Quentin and I, we don't have to like the same movie, just like Siskel and Ebert didn't have to like it.

02:12:32 Speaker_06
But, you know, we can argue about something. And then afterwards, it's like, OK, let's go do karaoke now.

02:12:38 Speaker_01
You know, it's not it's not it's not a recommend show. We want to pick three movies and we want to discuss them. Yeah, and you don't have to like it even if you don't like the movie if there's an interesting point of discussion about it.

02:12:51 Speaker_01
Well, that's good. That's all we need. We just need an interesting conversation. It's not about we recommend you watch this movie.

02:13:02 Speaker_01
Personally, I don't care if anybody watches any of the movies that we talked about I want them to listen to the show and enjoy Enjoy our back-and-forth and get to understand how you appreciate movies.

02:13:11 Speaker_06
Yes, you want to go out and check the movies out afterwards fine Go ahead, but I don't care if you do or not and we have a really like dedicated group of people who have come and they've signed up and they like

02:13:24 Speaker_06
Like I really what's funny is I really care about these people now. It's like they're there and they're like in the club It's like a clubhouse.

02:13:30 Speaker_06
Yeah, and the people who want to be there want to be there and they're talking and they're talking they're on a message board with Quentin and you know, Eli is Eli Roth is there and Edgar Wright and like everybody's like and so it's a we wanted to create a

02:13:45 Speaker_01
Something that was like video archives and that people could come in and talk and I want at least one of the three movies Not every week, but at least I want to they're not easy to find I want to come up with like well That's not streaming anywhere.

02:13:59 Speaker_01
How am I supposed to get this? Well, it's on VHS, you know, I can get a VHS recorder and buy it on eBay and now all of a sudden that little group is like

02:14:08 Speaker_01
well, maybe we can buy a, hey, maybe if we buy a VHS and then we can, we'll burn it and we can trade it with everybody else. And now they're all doing the work to do that. Well, good.

02:14:19 Speaker_06
My daughter Gala is one of our producers on the show. And, uh, and she's on the show with us.

02:14:24 Speaker_06
And one of her things is like, we get together and we watch the movies at video archives and then we know the films and then she has to, she doesn't have that access.

02:14:33 Speaker_01
She's not there with us, and she doesn't have access to the collection.

02:14:36 Speaker_06
She represents one of the people out there. She's got to find it. So if Quentin finds something that's pretty difficult to find, she's got to track it down. And she usually has a little timetable to do it on.

02:14:48 Speaker_06
And she kind of is doing her proof of concept on, you can get these. You can find these. She'll find it on VHS. She'll find it however.

02:14:54 Speaker_01
Yeah, she explains how she tracked it down. And you can follow her guide.

02:14:57 Speaker_06
If it's on YouTube, she'll tell you it's on YouTube.

02:15:00 Speaker_01
When she goes, Quentin, I just couldn't track this one down. I'm like, yes!

02:15:08 Speaker_06
I think that's the real reason he likes to do the show.

02:15:13 Speaker_05
Is everything on YouTube now a Lot of things a lot of things a lot of things.

02:15:25 Speaker_06
Yeah, there's some certain things you can't find on YouTube still and If it's up there and it's not there, it'll be up again somewhere. It's like whack-a-mole

02:15:33 Speaker_05
Right, right. It's like Whack-A-Mole. There was the Gore Vidal film, the transsexual movie with Raquel Welch.

02:15:39 Speaker_01
Oh, we watched that. We didn't do an episode on it, but I have the video of that. We watch it. Myra Breckinridge, I like that movie.

02:15:46 Speaker_03
It's a crazy movie. When she fucks the guy in the ass, that's the best fucking scene.

02:15:49 Speaker_01
When she fucks the guy in the ass, that is the best fucking scene. It's pretty wild. I like that movie so much, I read the book afterwards, because I thought it was so cool.

02:16:00 Speaker_06
I never liked Rex Reed, and I am not gay, but I was actually like, wow, Rex Reed's kind of hot in this.

02:16:08 Speaker_05
Well, that's what he was trying to do. That was the whole movie. You did it. Gore Vidal was trying to turn you gay. Can you give me that lighter? Yeah, sure. That's one of those weird ones that's difficult to find. I had to buy a DVD to get it.

02:16:22 Speaker_01
I like that light she has that keeps building up to it. When she asked, are you going to finally show her pussy? She goes, well, it looks like the moment of truth has finally arrived. It's just fantastic in that movie.

02:16:41 Speaker_05
Did you ever see those debates that Gore Vidal did with William F. Buckley? Those are legendary. Incredible. Gore Vidal always won though. Oh yeah. He was right and he was better.

02:16:55 Speaker_06
He's right and he's better.

02:16:56 Speaker_01
But then you have Gore Vidal fighting with fucking Norman Mailer.

02:16:59 Speaker_05
Yeah, what were they fighting about?

02:17:01 Speaker_01
Oh, they'd get on the Dick Cavett show together. He would talk to him like a poncy bastard and the other one would talk to him like a Neanderthal.

02:17:11 Speaker_06
I'm sure they had dinner afterwards.

02:17:12 Speaker_05
You used to be able to have those kind of conversations on television, which is really fascinating. It's like now they exist in podcasts. The Siskel and Ebert thing, which I was talking about, you can't manufacture a friendship

02:17:28 Speaker_05
And you can't manufacture a real interest. You can't be a guy who was a local news reporter who auditioned for the role of the guy who reviews movies. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, I know exactly what you mean.

02:17:38 Speaker_05
It's like this thing that you guys have is what, this is the whole new media movement is based on authenticity, right? And this is like the whole thing. You want people to not be able to find these movies.

02:17:50 Speaker_05
You want to just review movies that you want to review. And that's the beautiful thing about it. It's like the perfect show. In that regard, like for a film review show or a film discussion show, it's the perfect show.

02:18:02 Speaker_06
And also when a customer used to come into the store, they had basically three requirements. I want something that's new. That was always the first one that's good that I haven't seen yet.

02:18:12 Speaker_06
And I was like, well, if it's if you haven't seen it yet, it's new to you. So that takes care of two of those. And no, we don't have that new one. But let's show you something interesting. And so it was always a matter of, you know,

02:18:26 Speaker_01
Well, the thing is, one of the things that, like, and there's a lot of movie, there's a lot of movie shows out there on podcasts and they talk about stuff. And the idea isn't for me to just say, oh, we're better than all those guys.

02:18:38 Speaker_01
We're not coming from that place. But I'll tell you what bugs me about a lot of the other shows is the fact that the people are sincere. They're completely sincere. But. Their film knowledge is fucking abysmal.

02:18:53 Speaker_01
They really don't know what the fuck they're talking about. And especially when they're trying to talk about movies from the 70s or something.

02:19:02 Speaker_01
They were usually born in the 80s, so they don't know what something was like when it opened up, and they don't really have any context. They definitely don't have context. That's what they don't have. They don't have context.

02:19:14 Speaker_01
They just know whatever they've learned along the way, and so they just yank stuff out of their ass and say stuff that's just wrong a lot. They're just misinformation a lot. We actually fact-check our shit. All right. You know, we rerecord it. All right.

02:19:29 Speaker_01
To make sure that we just don't yank shit out of it. And we there is a little bit of yanking stuff out of your ass. The one I'm not sure about it. We look it up. And then if I'm wrong, then we change it. Well, then also there's the fact that.

02:19:41 Speaker_01
You can count on what we're saying that we're telling you the true fucking shit. We're giving you- I consider it as a film expert that I would be- My show wouldn't be worth listening to if I don't give- if I don't tell you the truth.

02:19:56 Speaker_01
If I don't give you factual information that you can count on.

02:19:58 Speaker_01
Well, so because you were there during the opening of the film and you know, we're just because we were yeah Yeah, we we have the context to talk about a lot of these people they maybe didn't see these movies and in theaters and the thing is, you know, it's like you know, my my writing guru as far as like film writing, but I think writing in general was the New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael and she had one

02:20:24 Speaker_01
One rule for film criticism, and I think this could apply to all writing, you have to give the reader a compelling reason to read your writing. It's that fucking simple. There has to be a compelling reason for you to engage in reading analysis.

02:20:49 Speaker_01
And the same thing about talking about cinema. You have to give a compelling reason. Now, yeah, I like the guys. That's a good start. I like their personality. I think they're kind of funny. That's a good start. But there has to be something more than that.

02:21:03 Speaker_05
Hmm Well, that's what's more than that what you just did this passion for it, right? That's what's more than that It's just this like severe commitment to it.

02:21:13 Speaker_01
That's that's what's exciting And then when we talk about the movies, you know, we talk about everything that's good about him We talk about the things that that aren't good, right? Honest. Yeah, very honest.

02:21:21 Speaker_01
Yeah, and and and and I can be wrong I don't have to be right about it.

02:21:26 Speaker_05
You might be wrong about the Joker. I'm not sure.

02:21:28 Speaker_01
Yeah

02:21:30 Speaker_02
I'm just trying to wind you up. I'm just trying to wind you up. Sorry What's like an example of a film that you love that other people hate other than the Joker I don't know if I loved it, but okay.

02:21:38 Speaker_05
I liked it a lot I have a ton of those as a matter of fact

02:22:00 Speaker_01
I have so many, but when I was younger particularly, I was the champion of the movie that all the critics put down and said was the fiasco.

02:22:14 Speaker_04
Is it because you're contrarian? Can I guess? Is it Ishtar? You liked Ishtar?

02:22:22 Speaker_01
What? He was like one of the champions of Ishtar.

02:22:26 Speaker_06
Pushing that tape on so many customers.

02:22:30 Speaker_05
How many of them came back angry?

02:22:35 Speaker_06
Is it really? Well, the problem with Ishtar, and we were talking about this a little bit earlier, the problem with Ishtar is that it suddenly became not about the movie, but about the production.

02:22:46 Speaker_06
And so people had formed an opinion about whether they liked it or not.

02:22:49 Speaker_05
Because it was so expensive. Because it was expensive. It doesn't change your ticket price. No, but that is the kiss of death. If you feel like a film is over budgeted.

02:22:58 Speaker_01
Especially comedies. It's like critics. Critics have a this have a thing about like, you know spending a lot of money on comedies. It seems obscene to them.

02:23:07 Speaker_05
Mm-hmm What happened with this film like what where'd the budget go south?

02:23:11 Speaker_01
Well bear that where the budget kind of went south for the most part was the fact that like Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman kind of like had their full freight on the movie.

02:23:22 Speaker_01
So Dustin Hoffman got his high big salary, Warren Beatty got his high big salary, and so now- And all the accoutrements that go with it. And everything that goes with it. Right.

02:23:31 Speaker_06
I need a plane to fly me back from Morocco to New York every weekend.

02:23:35 Speaker_01
Oh, really? I'm sure. No, no, he's just making that up.

02:23:37 Speaker_06
I'm making that up, but that's not unrealistic.

02:23:39 Speaker_01
It's not unrealistic. It would be like if when they did, during the time when they did Ishar, Tom Hanks was famous, but he wasn't the superstar that he is now.

02:23:49 Speaker_01
So if that had starred Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari, like the two guys from Bosom Buddies, well then that movie would have cost a lot less and would have been just as funny.

02:23:58 Speaker_01
Those guys were terrific together and they would have been really good in that role and the film would have been seen for what it is.

02:24:06 Speaker_05
Mmm When a film does get labeled as a bloated film though, that that's that is the kiss of death Because the general public will turn on it then.

02:24:15 Speaker_06
Yeah, they want to fail You know what you generally you give those movies a couple of years and something they're like these amazing movies like oh my well Waterworld's a pretty fun film.

02:24:24 Speaker_05
Shut the fuck up.

02:24:26 Speaker_06
I Have a great time watching what waterworld was the first laser disc I ever bought that in days of thunder I bought one. I bet you can't defend Kevin Costner's The Postman

02:24:35 Speaker_01
I never saw The Postman.

02:24:37 Speaker_06
I like the idea of The Postman. I remember the screenplay for The Postman was great.

02:24:40 Speaker_01
I never saw The Postman, but I actually like Kevin Costner. I love Kevin Costner. I think Dancing with the Wolves is one of the best movies. Kevin Costner is fucking awesome.

02:24:48 Speaker_05
I love that dude. But you're right about The Postman.

02:24:50 Speaker_01
It's hard to defend. I'm not saying he's right about it because I've never seen it. But now that says something that I've never seen it. Yeah, but I wouldn't mind seeing it. I'll bet you I like it.

02:25:00 Speaker_05
But then there's films that are so bad. They're great like showgirls.

02:25:03 Speaker_03
I love showgirls showgirls There's nothing wrong with I can defend it as an entertainment piece I am NOT a so bad. It's good guy. Okay?

02:25:14 Speaker_01
I'm not a sex scene in the pool. That's a little ridiculous, but Yes, the sex scene in the pool is a little ridiculous, but actually the fact that it's going for a Hollywood movie that it's going there was actually interesting to me.

02:25:31 Speaker_01
But what I really liked, what I really liked her in it, but when she beats the shit out of that guy, that's so fucking cool.

02:25:37 Speaker_01
When she beats the shit out of the guy at the end, the guy who fucked over her girlfriend and like beat up his girlfriend, and then she does these spinning roundhouse kicks and beats the fucking shit out of the guy, I was like,

02:25:51 Speaker_02
Yeah! Elizabeth Berkley, go!

02:25:54 Speaker_06
What I love about Showgirls is normally a movie like Showgirls would be made for under a million, go straight to video, star Robert Davi, and just be this little exploitation movie.

02:26:05 Speaker_06
And here was an example of that being made for $60 million with Paul Verhoeven directing. Doing whatever he wants making it as big as possible.

02:26:14 Speaker_06
It's basically the same as one of those sub-million-dollar Exploitation films it still has Robert Davi in it.

02:26:24 Speaker_06
He's still playing the same part He would normally play and so it's this opportunity to see one of those weird little, you know Exploitation movies made in this grand Fashion in this huge fashion show girl doesn't sit on a special shelf in my

02:26:41 Speaker_01
in my heart. All right. All right. But I really liked it when I saw it. I saw it at the theaters. I enjoyed it.

02:26:47 Speaker_06
I love how Elizabeth Bertley pushes Gina Gerson down the stairs. Is it Gina Gerson she pushes down the stairs? Like everything about that movie is awesome. I think it's great. I love the film. I love the film.

02:27:00 Speaker_06
I brought it up to all the... I had a dinner once with Verhoeven and a bunch of the producers that filmed it. I started going off on it. They all sat there at the dinner watching me go crazy over their film.

02:27:10 Speaker_06
And then at the end of it, one of the producers said, well, yeah, that's all nice to hear, but really that movie was just about us doing a lot of cocaine.

02:27:17 Speaker_05
That's exactly what I was just going to say. I'm so glad you just said that, because I always described that movie as a cocaine movie, and I was just casting aspersions with no evidence. But it seems like a cocaine movie.

02:27:29 Speaker_05
Because it seems like they thought it was great while they were doing it, but it's like, what are you doing? You know, it's one of those things where you think it's great because you're on coke.

02:27:38 Speaker_06
I have a place in my heart for those big movies like that.

02:27:41 Speaker_01
Like I said, that's not the one I would make my case on, but I still like it. That's not my chest case.

02:27:49 Speaker_05
Isn't that sort of an example of what happened when the 80s were a cocaine culture? The world kind of shifted from a psychedelic thing from the 60s and 70s to a cocaine thing in the 80s, and you get movies like that.

02:28:03 Speaker_06
Yeah, you get a little bit more edgy, a little less trippy.

02:28:06 Speaker_05
An actress dedicated to her role. No, this is where you're losing me. This is where you losing me. Yeah, cuz how are you keeping a heart on? Yeah People

02:28:21 Speaker_01
But just watching Alouise with Berkley's tits, all right, in a big studio movie like this, flopping up and down, I'm getting my money's worth. Well, that was huge.

02:28:29 Speaker_05
Because it was from Saved by the Bell.

02:28:30 Speaker_01
Actually, I'm not thinking about it from his point of view. I'm thinking about it from the water hitting her face. I'm thinking from her point of view, that's the unrealistic part. That true.

02:28:44 Speaker_05
True. Cocaine movies are fun, though. There's quite a few of those that were just like, what is this? Like how much coke was going around the 80s? A lot. A lot. It was actually coke too.

02:28:58 Speaker_06
It was actually real cocaine. It was like proper cocaine.

02:29:01 Speaker_01
It's actually really interesting because it's like one of those things where

02:29:08 Speaker_06
Remember that customer who used to come in and he would bring in like a rock of cocaine?

02:29:12 Speaker_01
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:29:12 Speaker_06
Drop it on the counter, like a rock of cocaine. Tuttle.

02:29:17 Speaker_01
The guy's name was Tuttle.

02:29:19 Speaker_06
Yeah, Tuttle. Tuttle. The size of a coffee mug. And he would bring us these things.

02:29:24 Speaker_01
It was a cocaine dealer and the thing is he would rent, you know, we'd let him take the movies out and come back whenever he wanted.

02:29:31 Speaker_06
Whenever you want.

02:29:32 Speaker_01
Yeah. And he would come in and he'd get his films and then he would like either open up a little like a Skullcan, skullcan. Yeah. All right.

02:29:44 Speaker_04
I remember that skullcan. Boom.

02:29:46 Speaker_01
All right. There you go boys. Have fun. Jesus Christ.

02:29:52 Speaker_03
BAM! I throw it on the counter and it bounces off of you. There you go, boy. See you later. See you in two weeks.

02:29:57 Speaker_06
Like a baseball. Like a baseball and you take a colander and just grind it up. Pure.

02:30:05 Speaker_01
Pure coke. And for the first time, because we're minimum wage kids, for the first time, we actually had Fuck you coke.

02:30:13 Speaker_01
All right, we actually had access to coke in a way that we could never afford Like for about a few months because those relationships don't last that long. No, no, no cocaine relationships never last But for a few months we're like, holy shit.

02:30:26 Speaker_06
We're we're in the fucking you know, we're we're in the powder Well, he there was a party once that he came to and he brought a again a rock of cocaine and a live hand grenade You put them both down.

02:30:38 Speaker_03
They usually go together.

02:30:39 Speaker_06
Yeah, and it was like, okay, that's a dangerous combination.

02:30:43 Speaker_05
That's a fun party.

02:30:46 Speaker_01
And his name was Tuttle, and we always described XS as Tuttle.

02:30:49 Speaker_03
Okay, we're going to get into a Tuttle situation.

02:30:52 Speaker_06
Dude, I'm so Tuttled.

02:30:53 Speaker_05
Oh, that's hilarious. It became like your Fugazi. Yeah. Oh, that's so funny. When I worked in Boston at Nick's Comedy Stop, they would offer to pay you in cocaine or cash. There's guys who just took the cocaine there's certain comics.

02:31:09 Speaker_01
They just wanted to get paid in coke Yeah wild times you know that's the 80s it was the 80s That was actually even kind of an interesting situation cuz like

02:31:23 Speaker_01
It was also one of those things where like I was actually really kind of proud of us because we all kind of like whoo We all kind of went nutty for like a little bit mm-hmm with this kind of like more access to coke than we normally More access to coke than we ever had You know I'd like because we can't afford that shit all right and so we all kind of went nuts for like a little bit about it and

02:31:46 Speaker_01
And then we all kind of like, okay, let's yeah enough of that. Yeah, let's bring it together. Well, that's great Let's bring it out and we are and we'd also saw some other people who were like who let it get Let it get the best of them.

02:31:59 Speaker_01
Yeah, and they got really kind of like your friend with the story about being bitter.

02:32:03 Speaker_05
Yeah Yeah, exactly the same sort of thing you go. I know where this is going and

02:32:08 Speaker_01
So we all like, okay, let's let's pull back. Let's get let's let's let's get control of this and then we all did it Yeah, we don't know collectively. We all kind of just got our shit together and put it in the rear-view mirror.

02:32:18 Speaker_01
Right, right They mean we didn't do it. But we just it was We controlled it contrary to your goals.

02:32:26 Speaker_02
We'll stay with pot. We'll stay with pot. Yeah I

02:32:34 Speaker_05
When I was growing up a bunch of people that I knew got hooked on coke, and that's what kept me from ever doing coke I would stop.

02:32:41 Speaker_06
I mean I had children and Suddenly it was like oh my god like I have to be on call 24-7 right like coked up. Yeah, I like That's not gonna last anymore.

02:32:52 Speaker_05
It gets in the way of mushroom trips.

02:32:55 Speaker_06
And pretty soon my Saturday mornings became more important than my Friday nights. It's pretty simple.

02:33:00 Speaker_01
My thing about Coke was I wanted to have excess or I wasn't that interested in it.

02:33:06 Speaker_04
Yeah, you want to take it to 12.

02:33:07 Speaker_01
No, I wanted to have a big pile of it and we're doing it all fucking night. Until this is gone. Until the straw is bloody.

02:33:18 Speaker_05
It's like some people don't have the ability to only do that once like for whatever reason Some people they have that thing and they do coke a little bit and then they just want to keep doing coke. Yeah Well, that's scary when it is scary.

02:33:33 Speaker_05
That's scary when that happens because you're captured by a demon Yeah, you know and it's literally and I think it's literally a demon.

02:33:39 Speaker_06
Yeah No, I think in the classic gin sense.

02:33:41 Speaker_05
Sure word where it's whispering into your ear. I Well, in a sense, it does all the things a demon would do. You could say the demons aren't real, but they might be real.

02:33:51 Speaker_06
I think there's pretty good evidence.

02:33:55 Speaker_05
There's a lot of legitimate evil in the world. Where is that coming from? What's that energy? What begets that? What is the reason why people are willing You know mass murder like what is it? What is it people willing to launch missiles in the cities?

02:34:10 Speaker_05
What is that? Where where's that coming from? there's got to be like that would be evil if you defined it in the classic sense of the word, you know when a Invading army comes to a village and hacks people. That's not demonic.

02:34:24 Speaker_05
That's not evil You're lighting children on fire and throwing them on thatched roofs. That's not demonic. I

02:34:29 Speaker_05
Seems pretty demonic like a demon would do that whether the did the physical demon exists is almost like not even important It's like demonic behavior is 100% documented. What would Jesus do? Yeah, right, right.

02:34:42 Speaker_05
Just ask yourself, but it's It's gonna raise a fist

02:34:46 Speaker_05
Everybody wants to be smart and you want to be secular and you never want to say that you believe in something that's superstitious or ridiculous So you don't believe religion you're either agnostic or atheist That's how you get respect and it's like this weird thing where you're not willing to consider like, okay, but what are the actions?

02:35:02 Speaker_05
What are the actions of good and the actions of evil? The actions are real, right? And we all know in our heart, in our soul, when you do a good thing, how you feel, versus when you do a bad thing, how you feel. So what are those forces?

02:35:17 Speaker_01
Well, there's a whole speech in Apocalypse Now when Brando's Kurt tells the story of going into the village and inoculating all the children in the village, shooting their arms with flu shots or something like that, inoculating them.

02:35:40 Speaker_01
And then the soldiers came in and then hacked off all the kid's arms. And then there's like a little pile of arms. And Kurt says, you know, so we did all that.

02:35:50 Speaker_01
And then we came back in the village the next day and we saw the little pile of all the little arms in there where they hacked them off. And I cried like a baby. Then I started thinking, the genius of that, the genius of that, because

02:36:09 Speaker_01
These are not monsters. They're not demons. These are men doing a job. And they had the force of will to take the job and take it to its logical conclusion of what they had to do. I'm not condoning what Kurtz is saying. Kurtz is a fucking crazy person.

02:36:35 Speaker_01
But I'm interested in his perspective. Of course that would be Kurtz's perspective.

02:36:39 Speaker_06
He's speaking about true power.

02:36:41 Speaker_01
Where he's a god. He's a god worshipped by these natives.

02:36:47 Speaker_05
He's clearly lost his fucking mind in the fog of war.

02:36:50 Speaker_01
He's completely lost his mind in the fog of war. But he's talking like Genghis Khan.

02:36:54 Speaker_05
Yes, exactly. Like they all talk. Yeah, but this is the thing where you're suspicious of power, right? Like why? Well, you should be because you see where it ultimately leads.

02:37:05 Speaker_05
It ultimately leads to a curse or it ultimately leads to the way to really be in control of people. Like you have to use violence. You can only use words for so long.

02:37:13 Speaker_06
Strong men hold civilizations together. That's just a fact of things. Both of us have become friends over the years with John Milius, who wrote Apocalypse Now.

02:37:25 Speaker_06
And, you know, John is the kind of guy who's like, you know, conquerors, conquerors, you know, and he wrote a script about Genghis Khan. And that you worked on. Yeah, that I worked on with him to help turn it into a series.

02:37:40 Speaker_06
My daughter and I helped him with it after he had a stroke.

02:37:43 Speaker_06
And, you know, you look at his Genghis Khan script and he's, you know, he's realistically talking about these horrific atrocities that just, you know, sewing people up in felt and lighting it on fire and throwing them in river.

02:37:58 Speaker_06
Just however you can kill somebody, he figured out a way to do it better. But at the same time, he invented paper money, and he invented the Silk Road, and he pulled that whole region of the world together under one empire.

02:38:17 Speaker_06
And over the course of it, you start out as Almost like Conan, Conan the Warrior, Conan the Conqueror, Conan the King. Eventually- King by his own hand. Yeah, king by your own hand.

02:38:32 Speaker_06
And eventually you start realizing- And John Malice also wrote and directed Conan the Barbarian. And so he rightly recognizes that it's strong men who conquer but also who hold together and maintain order.

02:38:46 Speaker_06
And there's a balance to be had between force and strength and, you know, and compassion as well. Too much compassion, you know, countries fall apart. Too much introspection, countries fall apart.

02:38:58 Speaker_05
Right. And when things are too good.

02:39:01 Speaker_06
When things are too good.

02:39:02 Speaker_05
Things are too easy and you think they're supposed to be easy. You don't understand how they became easy and what keeps them easy. Yeah. Yeah. And that's kind of where we are right now.

02:39:12 Speaker_06
It's weird times right now.

02:39:14 Speaker_05
As we are. We're in a Conan movie.

02:39:17 Speaker_06
It does feel a little like we're in kind of neo feudalistic times where there's highwaymen and that you have to contend with when you go out and everything's a little more fragile and

02:39:29 Speaker_05
Well, there's also this new thing, which is the internet and social media. And there's this new thing that has overcome our minds. And it's affecting everyone in this very bizarre way.

02:39:39 Speaker_05
And it's making people more tribal and more inclined towards echo chambers, more antagonistic against opposing beliefs and views.

02:39:48 Speaker_05
So you were saying about being able to sit and have a conversation with someone and completely disagree, but not take it personally, just disagree about the points. We've lost that. in our society.

02:39:58 Speaker_06
It's really important to be able to engage with other people, to disagree with them, and then to know that that's just that. We can still have dinner together. We can still be friends.

02:40:09 Speaker_01
Okay, so I go on a show and I said that I like Joker 2. Well, I say I like Joker 2, and now there's 150 articles that come out, all these cannibalized articles.

02:40:21 Speaker_01
One person listens to the thing and writes an article about it, and then there's 150 rip-off articles.

02:40:27 Speaker_00
on that, and then you read the comments, it's like, man, Quinn's a fuckin' asshole, that movie's fuckin' sucked, man, he's a fuckin' asshole. Why am I a fuckin' asshole?

02:40:37 Speaker_01
I like the fuckin' movie, all right? That makes me a fuckin' asshole? You either like the movie or you don't, all right? And I'm not plugging the movie, I'm not doing anything, all right? I'm just saying I like it. Who gives a fuck what I like?

02:40:51 Speaker_01
What do you care what the fuck I like? But then they'll say I didn't see something.

02:40:57 Speaker_05
But there's no one in front of him to say that he's an idiot alone with his phone If he just said it out loud amongst reasonable people they would turn to him What the fuck are you talking about?

02:41:14 Speaker_01
But he doesn't get that check which is also part of the problem with social media Well, I think he's fucking missing out Well, I'm sure there's a lot of shit I can say that you're missing out on, and I don't care if you miss out.

02:41:27 Speaker_05
Also, you have to be missing out. Otherwise, you don't have a life. How much information do you think you can absorb in a day? How much things do you watch and listen to?

02:41:35 Speaker_06
Four movies a day, apparently.

02:41:39 Speaker_05
That's a lot of time, man. You have to miss out. There's gonna be shit you miss out on. Well, the other thing is if you're a film fan today, you're not just dealing with today's films You're dealing with this insane Archive that goes back to Rocky.

02:41:54 Speaker_05
Yeah, you know goes back to you know on the waterfront goes back to the 20 good lord Yeah, there's so many films to watch a film that I saw that was like very meaningful to me this year.

02:42:05 Speaker_01
I is I really like the story of Beau Geste, the French Foreign Legion story. I like French Foreign Legion movies any old way, but that's a really cool story and I really like the whole story of the three brothers in there.

02:42:19 Speaker_01
I was familiar with the Gary Cooper version, the 1939 version, put it on a stamp, but I'd never seen the silent version and it starred Ronald Coleman and I watched the silent version recently And I was blown away by it.

02:42:32 Speaker_01
The storytelling was so epic, and was so visually just beautiful. And we have a little micro-cinema in the theater I have, one of the theaters I have in Los Angeles, the Vista, and it's like a little 20-seat cinema that we just show VHS and 16mm.

02:42:50 Speaker_06
It's our video archives.

02:42:51 Speaker_01
Yeah, it's like the Video Archives Cinema Club, and it's like, literally, it's like the brick-and-mortar version of Video Archives, but like a little Paris. Back out back Avenue.

02:43:00 Speaker_06
It's like a little clubhouse.

02:43:01 Speaker_01
I mean, it's open to everybody but for our core fans and the thing is and we we showed last week we showed the the silent version of Bo jest in it and And I wasn't there at that screening, but I asked the guy who was our manager.

02:43:15 Speaker_01
They're mad I go I said, how did it go? He goes? Quentin, you would have really loved to have been there for that screening. And I go, well, what? And he goes, it was so moving. The end of it, and it is really moving.

02:43:27 Speaker_01
And it's just like, nobody was talking. It was just, it was silent. Emotional.

02:43:31 Speaker_01
You could hear a pin drop, and then it was over, and everyone was still kind of in this collective emotional state, and they just all kind of left the theater, and they'd just seen something emotional.

02:43:42 Speaker_01
And they all kind of just moved out into the lobby and in this emotional state. And it was like, that sounds fucking fantastic.

02:43:50 Speaker_06
That's amazing. I mean, I think one of the most magical things about movies is that it can speak to you at different times of your life, you know, at the different windows of opportunity in your life. So you might see a movie and not like it. And then

02:44:03 Speaker_06
You know, people might see Joker 2 today and not really care for it. And then five years from now, revisit it and watch it again. And you're in a different place. Culture is in a different place. Everything's in a different place.

02:44:13 Speaker_06
And you have a different perspective on the movie. And maybe you like the movie. I hated Blade Runner when it first came out. Did not like the film. I thought it was awful. Really? Awful. Like boring, muddled, everything that was wrong.

02:44:28 Speaker_06
Suddenly I'm seeing Kubrick shots in the end from The Shining.

02:44:33 Speaker_00
Roger would say, Blade Runner should be called Blade Crawler.

02:44:38 Speaker_06
No, I was really hard. I was really hard on movies. I was a really angry young guy.

02:44:43 Speaker_01
He was such a prick about shit. He's a completely different guy. All right. Now he's like bends over backwards to be nice about somebody. Who the fuck is this guy?

02:44:56 Speaker_05
Humbled by life.

02:44:57 Speaker_06
Well, I now look at having, you know, been a filmmaker and, you know, and knowing the struggle that goes into getting something on screen. Look, I know how hard it is sometimes to get what you have up here on the screen and doesn't always work.

02:45:13 Speaker_06
And sometimes you're faking it by the time it gets to the cut. But, you know, it's not an easy thing. It's not. So when I watch a movie now, I'm applying my life experience to it.

02:45:27 Speaker_06
And I'm like, okay, this movie may not be the greatest movie, but this is somebody's, you know, vision. And I'm gonna give that, you know, I'm gonna value that and give myself to it and try to find in it what I like about it.

02:45:42 Speaker_06
And so I always give every movie a shake, you know, a good shake.

02:45:45 Speaker_01
What's happened with our show that I think is really cool, again, for the fans that follow it and everything is, In our first season, we ended up covering about 70 movies. you know, all together.

02:45:58 Speaker_01
And we mentioned a zillion movies in the course of a show, but like, you know, we covered about 70 movies all together, between the three movies that we did over the course of like 26 episodes.

02:46:10 Speaker_01
And we kind of created new classics, at least amongst the people who followed the show. Because they followed it and they liked it, and they watched some old Mexican horror movie like Demono, and they, hey, that was pretty cool.

02:46:23 Speaker_06
Demonoid is amazing.

02:46:26 Speaker_01
Put it down if you try to look at anything about it It would all be shitty reviews about it and everything but then we talked about it with passion And then we gave the right context in which to appreciate the movie It's a killer hand movie and we gave the right context in which to appreciate the movie and then the people appreciated it under that right context

02:46:43 Speaker_06
Like, because the movie is old and because maybe they didn't have the money to do it, like, super clean or perfect, you know.

02:46:51 Speaker_01
Actually, that actually has the most best hand effects I've ever seen in my life.

02:46:54 Speaker_06
That movie in particular is actually a tough one to, because it's, is this demon?

02:46:58 Speaker_01
Yeah, that's demon right there.

02:47:00 Speaker_05
So it's a killer hand that fucks everybody up?

02:47:02 Speaker_06
Is this the best like hand on the loose movie?

02:47:06 Speaker_01
It's a Mexploitation movie. Okay with a Mexican exploitation movie, but the one that's great about it won't she's fantastic in a Samantha Egger. Samantha Egger has become one of our heroes from the show.

02:47:16 Speaker_04
I love Samantha Egger.

02:47:18 Speaker_05
This movie looks hilarious.

02:47:22 Speaker_01
But what's really cool about the Mexican horror genre is they take their tacky horror very seriously. It's tacky horror, but they take it really seriously. And you appreciate the seriousness that they're delivering their payload with.

02:47:43 Speaker_06
And I know how hard it is to do some of the things that they're doing on there. This is like, it's pre-computer graphics, they have a limited budget.

02:47:51 Speaker_06
But their vision is so big, and you're watching it and you're like, oh my god, this is, if you just, like if you try not to judge it on what a movie looks like today.

02:48:01 Speaker_01
But not only just that, what's interesting is when you see some of the effects that they do, there's a couple of the effects, well how did they do that? Because it's all done practical. And then some of it is like, oh well, I can see how they did that.

02:48:12 Speaker_01
Oh my god, that's so fucking clever They figure it out how to do it in such a clever way.

02:48:17 Speaker_01
I can see how they did it But that's so neat because they just figure it out how to do it on camera in a way that that that sells it Yeah, and and and it's a crazy movie.

02:48:28 Speaker_06
Also, it's crazy. It's like you're inside of some sort of crazy mexican's head Making a horror movie. It's fantastic.

02:48:35 Speaker_05
Well, the horror genre is hard to do to not make ridiculous yeah, although the

02:48:41 Speaker_06
best thing about the horror genre and science fiction is that they're the best vehicles to kind of study culture and sociological issues because you have that abstraction layer that makes people think, oh, I'm just watching a science fiction film, or I'm just watching a horror movie.

02:48:56 Speaker_06
Like you watch Dawn of the Dead, and yeah, you're watching a movie about zombies in a shopping mall, or are you watching a movie about the vanishing middle class being drawn to the consumer temple because it's what they remembered from their lives that was an important place to them?

02:49:09 Speaker_06
Like literally quoting the movie I'm actually quoting my liner notes that I wrote for the DVD way back when The coffee is making me take a pill no worries go for it we can keep going okay, so when you

02:49:27 Speaker_05
First got into this like did you have? like a film that you aspired to create something like Like when you first did you say I got you know, it's a compositions would be like I want to be the next Eddie Murphy Yeah, it's it was a composite.

02:49:41 Speaker_06
It was a composite. I have like a kind of a top three filmmaker, you know When you're a young filmmaker and when you're a young child you look to your parents to learn how to behave and

02:49:54 Speaker_06
You're a child, and you look to them, and you're like, they teach you how to be. And so at the beginning of your life, you're copying your parents, because that's who you love, and that's what you're copying. When you're a young filmmaker,

02:50:08 Speaker_06
very frequently you kind of copy your parents, your cinematic parents.

02:50:13 Speaker_06
And so in my case, in many filmmakers, like for instance, Stanley Kubrick, who is one of my favorite filmmakers, who I'm always thinking about his zero point perspective, his reverse tracking shots.

02:50:27 Speaker_06
I just love the intention of his shots and how he assembles his movies. I like everything about his work. I do too. I'm a huge fan. Kubrick, if you love Fritz Lang, you can see that, oh, Kubrick was, that's how he felt about Fritz Lang.

02:50:47 Speaker_06
Like when I watch M, I can see the Kubrick shots. Is Fritz Lang Metropolis? Yeah, he did Metropolis. He did, I mean, like some of the greatest. Metropolis is wild.

02:50:58 Speaker_06
Metropolis is a super, super powerful and kind of important movie that's exactly talking about everything that's going on today that people should see. The movie I was thinking about was M, which is his movie with Peter Lorre about the pedophile.

02:51:13 Speaker_06
And the movie's made just before the Nazis took power. Oh, wow. And so he's making a movie that's really about the rise of

02:51:24 Speaker_06
the rise of Hitlerian fascism in Europe, but he's doing it through this movie about a pedophile, and it's, it's, and Peter Lorre is fantastic in it, and it's actually his first sound movie.

02:51:37 Speaker_06
Like, Fritz Lang hadn't made a sound movie, and so every single shot in the film is based on sound. So he'll have shadows talking, and the backs of people's heads talking, or even the device of the movie is Peter Lorre whistling Peter Giant, you know,

02:51:56 Speaker_06
that becomes like the device by which they find the killer. So the whole movie is about sound. So as a young filmmaker, if you want to learn how to use sound in a movie, that's the movie to see.

02:52:07 Speaker_06
Because every single shot, like it used to be, you would show an empty frame and it would just be a shot of nothing. But you know, now Fritz Lang is able to juxtapose like a woman has lost her daughter. She's calling for her daughter.

02:52:22 Speaker_06
And so she's looking for her daughter and she's looking for her and Elsa! Elsa! And they cut to an empty shot of a stairwell and you hear her. Elsa! And they cut to like, you know, an empty playground. Elsa!

02:52:38 Speaker_06
And then you see the balloon that she was carrying trapped in something, like whipping in the wind. Elsa! And it's super, super intense. And, but all he's doing is he's using sound juxtaposed with images, which he couldn't do before.

02:52:53 Speaker_06
Crazy that he just called it M. Yeah, for Murderer. And this is an amazing, amazing movie. So Kubrick, see that's a Kubrickian shot. This is where he's like, Elsa! Or Elsie. I seem to remember more Elsies.

02:53:29 Speaker_05
I think I got the wrong part.

02:53:32 Speaker_06
It's okay. So Kubrick had his forefathers who he used to watch and that he used to look to. And so those would be like my grandparents in a way.

02:53:43 Speaker_06
And so there's this like lineage of cinematic grammar and vernacular that gets carried on from filmmaker to filmmaker. And eventually, after you've made enough films, you start walking on your own, you start coming up with new ideas.

02:53:58 Speaker_06
But for me, it was Stanley Kubrick, John Borman. He's the guy who directed Excalibur and Hope and Glory and Point Blank and Hell in the Pacific. I mean, a number of movies. I don't think Quentin's such a big fan of John Borman. Some of his films.

02:54:13 Speaker_06
I think you're a fan of his writing more than you are his films.

02:54:15 Speaker_01
No, I have nothing but respect for John.

02:54:18 Speaker_06
Yeah. And John Borman and then Roman Polanski. I think those three guys for me and their work, not the guys, but mostly their work, Like, I am a composite. If you watch my movies, I'm a composite of those guys and other people as well.

02:54:33 Speaker_06
And those are the filmmakers who are important to me. Those were my parents, so to speak.

02:54:38 Speaker_05
Kubrick was such an odd one. Like, his films are so different. And he was a weird guy, too. He did, like, complex mathematics in his spare time. I do complex mathematics in my spare time.

02:54:52 Speaker_06
Nothing wrong with that. Yeah, he's a weird guy, but he was also I think thinking three steps ahead of everybody at any kind of given moment I mean I mean, to be honest, I was just thinking, I just pulled my script from Eyes Wide Shut.

02:55:10 Speaker_06
I had a script that was from set and I was reading it over the weekend and I saw that it has this, I mean, I've known this for a long time, but I started really thinking about it over the weekend. It's missing a narration.

02:55:23 Speaker_06
It's missing a third person narration that was originally in the movie. That's because the movie was recut and changed after his death. And they will deny it.

02:55:38 Speaker_06
But as a student of Kubrick, I'm watching the movie and I'm like, well, Kubrick wouldn't do that. Kubrick wouldn't do that either. Kubrick would have trimmed this scene. I didn't know they recut it after his death.

02:55:48 Speaker_01
OK, so apparently they finished it.

02:55:51 Speaker_06
Well, that's the party line. That's the party line. But I think that they changed the notes, the close-ups, the inserts of the notes. I think those are changed. It's missing a narration. It's definitely missing a narration, a third-person narration.

02:56:06 Speaker_06
Like that scene where he sees the prostitute who's died. He's at the morgue, and he's looking at her, and he's leaning over her. It's a bed for narration. There's this whole thing.

02:56:15 Speaker_06
What they do instead, because they couldn't say that Kubrick finished the movie, because they hadn't done the recording of the narrator yet. And so maybe they just kind of kludged it together, except there's an entire thread that's kind of been.

02:56:30 Speaker_06
Squashed squashed in that film and that's the the two men that are throughout the movie that are Constantly in the background of the film who eventually in the final shots of the film you see like Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in that final scene in the toy store when she's looking at the Rosemary's baby bassinet which is totally Kubrick saying something and

02:56:50 Speaker_06
And they never take their eyes off their daughter until the moment they take their eyes off and the final line of the movie is coming up. You see those two guys walking off with the daughter. They're taking her away.

02:57:03 Speaker_06
They've given their daughter to the pedo cult. That's what's happened at the end of the movie. And there's an incident where when they first screened the movie in England, Uh, people who were outside apparent. This is all secondhand, by the way.

02:57:19 Speaker_06
There were people who were outside of the theater who could hear inside of the theater, Kubrick yelling at all the executives and saying, it's my movie. You can't cut it. I can't fucking cut my film. Big argument going on.

02:57:29 Speaker_06
Then he dies like four days later. So somebody went in and finished the movie. But I think when they finished the movie, they hid the film. The movie got changed into something else. And I would love to finish that film. Have you ever made an attempt?

02:57:50 Speaker_06
I've thought about it. And reading the script over the weekend, I started seriously thinking about it. Well, somebody should recut this. Or somebody should. So it would just be a matter of recutting it with narration? Well, yes and no.

02:58:04 Speaker_06
There's obviously missing. There would be missing footage now. Things have been removed and taken down.

02:58:09 Speaker_05
And is that accessible?

02:58:12 Speaker_06
Unless you crack it open and there's no way in anybody's thing. They would never but hold on.

02:58:15 Speaker_06
Here's the thing now we have AI well, I know that's I've actually been experimenting a lot with with AI the newer versions are pretty stunning I've been working on runway lately, which is the curve is insane like the exponential curve of improvement

02:58:35 Speaker_06
I'm literally, as I'm working on things, I'll be talking to the guys and, you know, I'll be saying, well, it'd be nice to be able to move the camera. OK, we got that tool on Tuesday. We're going to give that to you.

02:58:46 Speaker_06
And so it's like literally whatever you think you can't do, ask us, because we probably will be able to do it in a couple of days.

02:58:53 Speaker_06
And so it's advancing so fast and so rapidly that I, without telling you, Quentin, I made a little claymation version of you.

02:59:03 Speaker_05
It's a claymation version of both you and me How bizarre that something that would have cost like hundreds of millions of dollars Like if you wanted to do a film like a pixel type, you know One of those crazy movies where you have all this like insane animation that shit took forever

02:59:26 Speaker_06
The best work that I've seen of it lately is the first time I've been kind of ignoring AI and like, I know what it is. It's like form completion with visuals and I get it. I understand what it is and we'll see. We'll see. But I like tactile.

02:59:39 Speaker_06
I like tactile. And I do. But I worked on Beowulf. I made Beowulf with Robert Zemeckis. And like that was a big, you know, video.

02:59:48 Speaker_06
Puppet CGI thing my original movie motion capture my original plan for that movie because I was gonna direct it myself was to make it leak You know in Iceland, you know under ten million dollars, you know, just really dirty I wanted it to be like, you know, like an early Terry Gilliam film like Jabberwocky.

03:00:05 Speaker_06
That was actually the one Neil and I were thinking about when yeah, Neil Gaiman when my co-writer on that film and And the movie ended up getting made much bigger. Suddenly, it was like whatever budget I had was probably our craft service budget.

03:00:23 Speaker_06
There's nothing like making a $100 million movie. It's like sushi every day, champagne, fly the plane to England, whatever you want. It's crazy, but that was definitely not the movie I had planned on making. However,

03:00:42 Speaker_06
um when we made it like and it turned into this big performance capture thing it was fun like working with Zemeckis and and he's such a like an excitable like creative genius like he's and even before you were able to do stuff like what he was doing in that film

03:01:02 Speaker_06
He was like constantly taking, you know, like when he made contact, oh, we'll take that eyebrow off of Jodie Foster. And I like that eyebrow thing she does. And so put that on this take.

03:01:12 Speaker_06
And so he was like messing with her face and doing all sorts of performance stuff. Even when you go back to his earliest film, I want to hold, I want to hold your hand.

03:01:21 Speaker_06
I want to hold your hand is almost a visual, uh, uh, trick, you know, having the Beatles there, but not be there. And even though he's not using computer graphics, I think he's just a really super inventive guy.

03:01:33 Speaker_06
And it was so much fun making the movie with him because we were inventing technologies that was. 2010 that I think a movie came out.

03:01:41 Speaker_05
Jamie, pull up Beowulf. Let's watch some of that. I want to remember what it looks like.

03:01:45 Speaker_06
It looks probably like a video game pre-cut scene at this point.

03:01:48 Speaker_05
That's what's crazy, right?

03:01:50 Speaker_06
I thought about taking Beowulf, importing it into my system, and then just painting over it. Let's fucking go, Roger.

03:01:58 Speaker_05
Let's fucking go.

03:01:59 Speaker_06
Which, by the way, you can do easily.

03:02:02 Speaker_05
Yeah.

03:02:02 Speaker_06
Easily.

03:02:02 Speaker_05
I thought about fixing... So let me see what this looks like with the Beowulf. Oh, geez.

03:02:06 Speaker_06
Yeah. I mean, it looks like a video game cutscene at this point.

03:02:10 Speaker_05
Yeah. But it was kind of cool because everybody looked like that, not just the monster. Yeah. That was kind of cool about it.

03:02:16 Speaker_06
I mean, the difference is that this was actual, like, performances. And so we could take, you know, Ray Winstone and have him... Ray Winstone doesn't look like that. He looks a little heftier. And, uh...

03:02:40 Speaker_06
It's funny cuz My original script was much more modest than this, but then Zemeckis was like, okay boys It costs a million dollars a minute do whatever you want He stabs a dragon in the heart oh no This movie is kind of a I mean, it's a little

03:03:02 Speaker_06
It's an interesting experience what happened to me on this film if you don't mind so I So I was gonna make this movie myself I had I had set it up initially at image movers with Zemeckis producing and Then it fell out and the rights kind of reverted back to me I had to cover the turnaround on it, but the rights reverted back to me and I was gonna go make the movie myself and

03:03:25 Speaker_06
for nothing, and I was trying to set it up, and it was really, I was broke at the time, and I was not gonna make money, and I had to cover the turnaround expenses myself on the film, which were considerable.

03:03:37 Speaker_06
But I wanted to make the movie really bad, and I was working on Silent Hill, this other movie I wrote, and I suddenly started getting calls. And it was like, the producer of Polar Express, this guy Steve Bing, wanted to buy the script.

03:03:54 Speaker_06
He's like, I want to buy it for Zemeckis. And I said, ah, too little, too late. I'm making it now. And I kept saying no. And I was working on this film in Canada, and I'm just trying to finish it.

03:04:05 Speaker_06
And every hour, I'm getting a call from agents at CA, and they're like- Jack Rapti, right? Yeah. Actually, yeah, it was Jack. How did you know it was Jack? Did I tell you that?

03:04:14 Speaker_01
Well, no, because he was Zemeckis' agent and became Zemeckis' producing partner.

03:04:19 Speaker_06
And he's the guy that gets shit done. Yeah, he is a guy who gets shit done. Well, I was like, you know, no, no, no. And, you know, no, I won't. I'm doing it myself. No, no. And Steve Bing, and I said, if another agent calls me, I'm firing the agency.

03:04:35 Speaker_06
And they're like, will you at least meet with the producer? And so I went ahead and I meet with them. And he says, listen, if I don't make this film with Zemeckis, with Bob, I'm going to miss the moment. I'm going to lose the movie.

03:04:46 Speaker_06
It's going to be over. Just what's your price? Just tell me what's your price. And I said, I don't have a price. I don't work like that. He said, listen, everybody's got a price. I said, well. I may have one but I'm not going to tell you.

03:04:59 Speaker_06
Why don't you just tell me? Just discourage me." So I said, OK. You want me to discourage you? And so I started like making shit up. I need this. I want that. I want this. I want this.

03:05:10 Speaker_06
I tried to come up with how much money had anybody ever made on a script and let's add some money to that. I went over the top.

03:05:20 Speaker_06
Well, Roger, that is, and I had grown a beard to make the movie and like grew my hair long, like a Viking to learn about, you know, why Vikings had beards, et cetera, all that kind of stuff. I'm making the movie. I'm a Viking.

03:05:32 Speaker_06
He said, well, Roger, that is a really discouraging, but we have a deal. And I was like, well, And I start driving home and I started like I'd never done anything. I'd never done something for money before. I'd always done it because I for passion.

03:05:49 Speaker_06
And then the money came. And this is the first time in my life that I'd ever made a choice based on money. This titanic amount of money. And I was understand broke. And I went home and I cried. And then the check came and nothing dries tears like money.

03:06:04 Speaker_06
And then Zemeckis invited me into the process, which was really great of him. He really wanted me and Neil to be at his side and collaborate with him. And it was a fabulous experience. But to be honest, I was like, who am I now? What does it all mean?

03:06:20 Speaker_06
I just gave away something I'd wanted to do my entire life. I've always been chasing this John Borman film, Excalibur. I think it's one of the most beautiful movies ever made about the Arthurian legends.

03:06:30 Speaker_06
And if you watch Beowulf and Excalibur, they're very similar, actually, thematically. And so I was like, who am I now? What does it all mean? I don't even care. I don't even know if I want to make a movie anymore.

03:06:45 Speaker_06
What do I have to tell now, now that I've just completely sold out? And then I was at a dinner, a big dinner, and I was driving home that night. And I was giving somebody who was at the dinner a lift. My wife was in the backseat of the car.

03:07:08 Speaker_06
And I had told my daughter I was going to be home by midnight. We lived in Ojai, and it was dark. So I was speeding. I have a lead foot. And I was speeding to get there. Without getting into the details of what happened, I lost control of the car.

03:07:32 Speaker_06
There was another vehicle, but they fled the scene. I lost control of the vehicle. I think my tire blew, but I was going into a ditch, and I knew I was going into this deep, ditch because it was right near my house, full of rocks and stuff.

03:07:48 Speaker_06
And I knew if I go in there, we'll die. And so I turned into the thing and then I turned away from it to try to, the car spun out and I ended up on the other side of the street where I knew there was like a cow pasture.

03:07:59 Speaker_06
And I was like, well, what's the worst thing that can happen there? Well, it was pretty bad. There was a telephone pole and I hit the telephone pole. My passenger took the impact and my wife was thrown from the car.

03:08:13 Speaker_06
When I came to, all I could hear was the horn. My hearing's gone. I have glass in my mouth and I'm injured as well. I climb out of the car and it's dark. It's really dark.

03:08:25 Speaker_06
But somebody's already arrived, the ex-DA from Ventura County who did all the drunk driving laws and put those on the books. And he was the first person on the scene. I was right near the fire department. They showed up shortly afterwards.

03:08:39 Speaker_06
But when I jumped out of the car, I came running around to see what happened. And I saw my wife on the asphalt. She'd been thrown from the vehicle. And I threw myself onto my knees on the pavement. And I found myself in that moment

03:09:06 Speaker_06
asking for the one thing that mattered, which was just life. She looked dead. And I just, in that moment, I dug down, I begged her to come back to life. And I just said, I will give anything for life, just in any form, I'll take it.

03:09:25 Speaker_06
And in that moment, she came back to life. It was like, the life came back into her. Okay. It was a completely fucked up scene. My other, my other passenger is dying in the car, um, or dead.

03:09:39 Speaker_06
And my, uh, the, the, the police are suddenly there and next thing I know I'm in jail. And, um, uh, and suddenly you like, suddenly I found myself in jail.

03:09:52 Speaker_06
I found myself guilty of manslaughter and something that is absolutely irreversible happening, which is, you know, someone lost their life at my hand.

03:10:08 Speaker_06
And so after that, I, you know, I ended up, I found myself in jail and doing time and suddenly everything that had come was gone. Like, everything that I had made, gone. It all went, you know, out.

03:10:24 Speaker_01
All that money you made, gone.

03:10:26 Speaker_06
To the settlement. I didn't even have time to spend it. I didn't even have time to register that it was there. And it was gone. Because it was like it was not real. And then you find yourself in jail. And suddenly everything is gone.

03:10:47 Speaker_06
Career is gone Everybody stops calling. It's over Q number two hit films doesn't matter. It's all over.

03:10:56 Speaker_06
In fact, it was right in the middle of the publicity on Beowulf it was just toward the end of it and It was It's the most horrible thing that that has ever happened to me and I

03:11:12 Speaker_06
And I found myself then alone in jail, incarcerated, alone with my remorse and regret, and really getting existential about things. Really, like, coming to appreciate you know, simple existence is the best thing there is.

03:11:43 Speaker_06
It's, people don't appreciate what we have. You don't appreciate it until it's gone. And it is, can go like, first of all, we live in bodies of glass.

03:11:52 Speaker_06
My wife was horribly injured and, uh, you know, and it has been a decade to, you know, to not just rebuild our lives, but to, you know, for her to come back to health even.

03:12:11 Speaker_06
What it did though, because I would do anything to reverse that, to reverse what happened. I would give anything to do it. And I don't say this lightly, but having said that, I'm kind of grateful as well because I was like asleep walking through life.

03:12:38 Speaker_06
And it wasn't until that happened that I completely, like, it changed how I see everything. It was like my third eye opened up. I don't view anything the same way.

03:12:55 Speaker_06
Once you've been incarcerated and you've been deprived of everything and you have a lot of time to think and be existential,

03:13:07 Speaker_06
You come out of that, at least I came out of that experience, and I looked at a tree and I was like, okay, that's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my life. I hope I never not feel this way, this appreciation for a cloud.

03:13:24 Speaker_06
When you're imprisoned, to be able to pet a cat, for example, it's so simple, it's such a nothing thing, you think. Okay, to be able to pet an animal is like a gift. The simplest things are gifts.

03:13:39 Speaker_06
When I was in jail, it was also a little bit like a comedy. You know, you have people walking in circles and, you know, everybody's trying to control the outside. And so you start really seeing human behavior up front.

03:13:51 Speaker_06
I mean, when I was in jail, you know, there Literally, during the Academy Awards, it's on the TV in the tank, and I'm watching him win, like, for Django.

03:14:05 Speaker_01
Win the Oscar for Django.

03:14:07 Speaker_06
So while Quentin is, like, at the height of things, I'm pretty much at the bottom.

03:14:12 Speaker_03
Watching through bars.

03:14:15 Speaker_06
And not only that but Greg Shapiro who produced the rules of attraction for me my producer Who came and visited me with Robert Robin Wright in the days that followed he won for zero dark 30. Yeah, and so I'm like they're like like

03:14:32 Speaker_06
To be taken from one point where you feel like you're at the top and you're like, oh, you think you understand things. No, I'm gonna take you and put you at the bottom.

03:14:44 Speaker_06
But let me tell you something, in that moment I was sitting on the asphalt and my wife came back to life, I immediately knew what I had to say as a filmmaker after that.

03:14:52 Speaker_06
It was like whatever cynicism I'd had about the movie and not making it, it just went away.

03:15:05 Speaker_01
It evaporated.

03:15:06 Speaker_06
It evaporated. And the ecstatic experiences, and they were ecstatic that I had in jail, were like, I mean, you see things kind of for real. When you see somebody, you know, get hanged by their cellie in a cell, or when you see, when you know that

03:15:32 Speaker_06
you know, oh, that El Salvadorian MS-13 hitman guy, he's gonna kill that gay dude. He's gonna kill him in the yard. I'll go lock myself in my cell. Literally, I'll go lock myself in. You shut the door, because you know shit is gonna go down.

03:15:53 Speaker_06
And so, like, that was like every day. And so suddenly it was like, you know, And also, you really know who stands with you after something horrible happens.

03:16:06 Speaker_06
And like John Langley, our customer from Video Archives, ended up being like, like I said, when I was in jail, he loaned me money and he gave me my first job when I got out. That was our customer who did that. And so, Like, I value our customers.

03:16:30 Speaker_06
And especially John and his family. And Maggie, who I, like, it really is, I talk about John a lot, but really Maggie, she was really my big champion, I think. And so, anyhow, I, you know, what it taught me, actually,

03:16:52 Speaker_06
because I was a filmmaker and I was up my own ass most of the time. But what it kind of taught me was, you know, Be compassionate to other people, because you might not know it, but they might be going through shit in their lives.

03:17:06 Speaker_06
And God forbid it be something health-related, which is almost out of your control. But people are suffering, and people are struggling.

03:17:15 Speaker_06
And I used to be a lot more cavalier about people, and kind of fuck with people, and be forceful with people, and not really care as much. Now I'm acutely aware of people and what they may be going through.

03:17:32 Speaker_05
I think this is the best way to wrap this up. Perfect. Gentlemen, thank you very much. This was an awesome conversation. Really, really appreciate it.

03:17:40 Speaker_01
This has been really great. Thank you for letting us come by.

03:17:42 Speaker_05
Three and a half hours just flew by. Thank you so much.

03:17:45 Speaker_01
Oh my God. I actually thought, oh, I guess he's wrapping it up quick. There it is the video archives podcast on on patreon If you just look up video podcast calm Thank you