Episode 1080 - Jay Roach
Marc:Lock the gates!
Marc:All right, let's do this.
Marc:How are you?
Marc:What the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fuck sticks?
Marc:What's happening?
Marc:I'm Mark Maron.
Marc:This is my podcast WTF.
Marc:Welcome to it.
Marc:I'm broadcasting from a hotel in Atlanta, Georgia.
Marc:I came down here Friday.
Marc:It's been a harrowing few days and I will tell you what's going on because I you're all part of it.
Marc:You're part of the story.
Marc:You're part of my life.
Marc:But before I kind of get into the thick of it, I'd like to promote my tour.
Marc:Is that okay?
Marc:The 2020 tour dates that are now on sale are these.
Marc:Thursday, January 30th in Cleveland, Ohio at the Agora Theater.
Marc:Friday, January 31st, Grand Rapids, Michigan at the Fountain Street Church.
Marc:Saturday, February 1st, Milwaukee, Wisconsin at the Turner Hall Ballroom.
Marc:Friday, February 14th, Orlando, Florida at Hard Rock Live.
Marc:Saturday, February 15th, Tampa, Florida at the Strass Center.
Marc:Thursday, February 20th, Portland, Maine State Theater.
Marc:Thursday, February 21st, Providence, Rhode Island, Columbus Theater.
Marc:Friday, February 22nd, New Haven, Connecticut at College Street Music Hall.
Marc:And Sunday, February 23rd, Huntington, New York at the Paramount.
Marc:You can go to wtfpod.com slash tour for links to all the venues.
Marc:That's going to be a freezing tour.
Marc:That's going to be exciting for me because I have a lot of winter clothes that I'm never able to wear because I don't ski really anymore and I don't live in a cold place.
Marc:It's a stretch to have to wear a fucking sweater in Los Angeles.
Marc:So now I'm going to have to pack big and get out the gear, get out the boots, the warm jacket, layer up.
Marc:I'm going to layer up.
Marc:That's what I'm going to do.
Marc:It'll be fun, except for Tampa and Orlando.
Marc:I'm assuming they're not going to be freezing.
Marc:Oddly a bit chilly down here in Atlanta, but I don't know the weather generally.
Marc:As I said, I've been here since Friday.
Marc:Today on the show, I talked to Jay Roach, whose new movie...
Marc:bombshell is playing uh in a limited release it opens this friday december 20th it's about fox news it's about roger ailes i remember talking to um to john lithgow when he was working on it and uh we had kind of a funny exchange about that about the depth of the monstrosity he did a great job with it uh but uh there's no question and we can make no exceptions uh roger ale was a fucking demonic fuck and
Marc:who ruined the world, did not bring good things, did not bring good things.
Marc:And he's the reason why we have a fairly well-oiled and functioning authoritarian state that is really taking over half the country.
Marc:And they're excited about it.
Marc:They're happy about their dictator.
Marc:Their tribalism is is is furious.
Marc:And they would like I would I really think they'd like Democrats dead or non-existent, not to mention other types of people.
Marc:But so, yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Right now, there's about a 47 percent of the country is living in a functioning authoritarian state with much thanks.
Marc:To Roger Ailes.
Marc:Now we'll see if it spreads.
Marc:We don't know yet.
Marc:And we don't know what that spreading will look like.
Marc:It's not just going to be people going like, I guess it's okay.
Marc:That'll be part of it.
Marc:But I assume like any other authoritarian virus, the other part will be bloody.
Marc:We'll see, right?
Marc:Don't want to freak anybody out.
Marc:Sorry, maybe I'm not in the right headspace.
Marc:So I'll talk to Jay about that, about his life and his other movies.
Marc:You know, he has been sort of doing more politically bent movies, but he also did the Meet the Parents movies.
Marc:And, you know, we'll talk about life, man.
Marc:That's what I do here.
Marc:So I imagine some of you know because...
Marc:um i kind of put it out there on social media a bit that uh i i um that la fonda my cat who i've been talking about for the last week or two uh is uh no longer with us i i
Marc:I put I put my cat down.
Marc:I put my buddy down.
Marc:I had to let go of my friend of, you know, 15 plus years.
Marc:I believe she was my estimate around 15 and a half years old.
Marc:I picked her up out of the garbage in Astoria.
Marc:I wouldn't say I picked her up.
Marc:But I found her and her siblings eating out of the garbage bins in Astoria, Queens in, I believe, I think it was probably around August of 2004.
Marc:I was working at Air America.
Marc:I remember it was the eve of or shortly before the Republican National Convention that we had to cover.
Marc:And I know many of you know this story, but I think it's important on some level in talking about
Marc:These particular cats in my life, they've obviously played a big part of my life.
Marc:But I don't know that some of you know the full depth of that in that the cats that I rescued from the alley behind my apartment in Astoria, Queens, really, I believe, helped define my...
Marc:My radio personality and my style of radio and provided me with an outlet or with a focus that really changed the nature of my voice on this type of mic and got me going.
Marc:It was really two specific events that shifted how I approached the radio mic.
Marc:And and what I offered of myself on that, Mike, which was the beginning of learning how to do it.
Marc:Those two events were the the trapping of four kittens behind my my apartment building in Astoria.
Marc:And it's so funny.
Marc:I've heard from so many people from my past and people who know me around La Fonda.
Marc:death and one of them was jody lennon who lived in the building and i believe still lives in the building with me and she was there the night that i decided to trap these cats and as some of you know i just really wanted to help them out i wanted some friends i thought kittens would be fun i had no idea that once they're eating on their own and they're and they're sort of uh
Marc:Doing that thing, you know, solo acts.
Marc:They were all together and around, but they were out there in the wild eating on their own, which means they were feral.
Marc:They were actively and essentially wild animals.
Marc:And La Fonda, who was the runt of that litter and a very small kind of beautiful Russian grayish tuxedo cat.
Marc:Somehow in her scramble wound up stuck to a glue trap and was flopping around a wild fucking animal flopping around on my kitchen floor in a frenzy stuck to a fucking glue trap that I had to remove from her.
Marc:And she was always to this day or to the day before I put her down.
Marc:Well, actually, it kind of had gone away, but she was a very reactive, defensive, you know, quick to pop you kind of tough cat.
Marc:A little fist of feline fury was that LaFonda.
Marc:And she was tweaked mentally.
Marc:They were all a little tweaked because they were feral.
Marc:But I believe that Fonda was a little extra tweaked because that was her Vietnam, folks.
Marc:That was her point of trauma.
Marc:That was when it went down.
Marc:That was what reconfigured her brain chemistry was happening.
Marc:getting stuck on that glue trap and reluctantly fighting every bit of the way, me having to take her off that and bloodying myself.
Marc:I can't tell you the number of times that that cat bloodied the fuck out of me, either trying to put her into a cage or trying to help her out, biting, scratching.
Marc:I wore leather gloves at the beginning.
Marc:But it was during that period where I had those four cats in my house.
Marc:I named them.
Marc:One was Hissy.
Marc:One was Meany.
Marc:One was Monkey.
Marc:And LaFonda's name, I think, came later.
Marc:But they were just wild animals.
Marc:I would go to sleep and I would hear them out there and I didn't know what they were doing.
Marc:And I'd wake up and my entire apartment was destroyed.
Marc:And I didn't know what to do.
Marc:So I started talking about them on the radio.
Guest:You know, I want to talk about the issues.
Guest:I want to talk about being here.
Guest:But I think it's important to let my listeners know that because of your coercion and your bullying tactics, I have taken four feral kittens into my apartment in Queens.
Guest:You understand?
Guest:I know this may not seem important.
Guest:It may not seem the issues, but this is the world I'm living in.
Guest:I was living in a world of order and a world of discipline where I would go to sleep and wake up and come to work.
Guest:No more.
Guest:Four feral kittens.
Guest:I don't even know what to do with Riley.
Guest:I think that you should hold on to them.
Guest:I think you should feed them solid white tuna.
Guest:And that they'll like me?
Guest:And they'll like you.
Guest:They will love you.
Guest:Remember now, they're feral.
Guest:They have seen nothing but abuse since the day they opened their eyes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So now you've taken them in.
Guest:They're going to be a little skittish at first.
Guest:I don't think they were abused.
Guest:They were living out there in the wilderness behind my apartment with their mother.
Guest:And I swear to God, this one orange cat, literally, I let it out of the box.
Guest:I trapped them.
Guest:I made a box.
Guest:I cut a hole in it out of food, and I trapped four of them.
Guest:There's apparently one more kitten out there.
Guest:I've got to get the mother into a cage and get her neutered.
Guest:That's the ultimate project.
Guest:But here, so I let this orange one out.
Guest:Literally, climbs up.
Guest:I had a window open about five inches.
Guest:Climbs up into the screen.
Guest:It's locked itself in between the screen and the window with its claws in the screen wedged in there.
Guest:And I realized something about me, Mark Riley.
Guest:I wanted to help the cats, but after three days, I'm realizing this was all about me being loved.
Guest:Because none of them.
Guest:They're behind the oven.
Guest:They're under the couch.
Guest:They will not love me.
Guest:There's no kitty celebration of love going on.
Guest:So what does that mean?
Guest:You're going to put them back out in the streets?
Guest:I can't do that.
Guest:I've now started making phone calls to figure out what to do with them.
Guest:And did you know there's a whole underground network of 50-year-old women with money who do nothing but rescue cats?
Guest:Really?
Guest:And three of them are calling me.
Guest:You know, that's rude.
Guest:Are they proposing marriage?
Guest:They're doing the right thing.
Guest:How do you know they're over 50?
Guest:I'm, again, making an assumption, okay?
Guest:But I appreciate their help, and I don't know what I'm going to do with the cats.
Guest:So let's move on to bigger things.
Marc:It is amazing that Brendan McDonald found that clip buried somewhere in his computer or files or a hard drive.
Marc:But that, what you just heard, that was me and my co-host Mark Reilly from the show Morning Sedition.
Marc:on Air America.
Marc:We were at Madison Square Garden for day one of the Republican National Convention, which we were covering.
Marc:And it's really something.
Marc:I think I had trapped the cats maybe a few days before because that was, I think, August 30th, 2004.
Marc:And I think I trapped them on the 27th because Brendan remembers me calling him
Marc:because he was out with friends and telling him that I did this.
Marc:And from that day on, I continued to give updates on the cats like every day.
Marc:And it was me sharing that narrative about those cats that really started to engage me in the medium of radio.
Marc:It was that and actually burning a pot of lentils that I described with a certain weird passion that really started me off in knowing that I was doing the right thing by being on this type of platform, on this type of microphone, in this type of medium.
Marc:It was thanks to those cats for sure, for sure, no doubt.
Marc:So eventually I tried to take Meany across the street to the bodega, but I think he just reentered the ecosystem.
Marc:He was a very mean and crazy cat, very wild.
Marc:Hissy was a black tuxedo long hair that actually I found a home for.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:If that cat is still alive.
Marc:And I took Monkey and LaFonda back to L.A.
Marc:with me.
Marc:And Monkey even made a trip back to New York with me once when I was back there again for work for a long period of time.
Marc:But LaFonda, the one trip to L.A.
Marc:was enough.
Marc:And I write a big piece about that in Attempting Normal.
Marc:I've had a lot of memories with this cat.
Marc:These cats at my old house were once indoor-outdoor cats.
Marc:Fonda did a lot of traveling, used to hang out a few doors down, dodged coyotes somehow, always came when I called them.
Marc:There was just a lot of people I've come in and out of my life, a lot of women I've been with in the past, the relationships I've had, have known this cat, have had relationships with this cat.
Marc:When I told Jodi, when Jodi heard that I had to put her down, she said, so sorry to hear about LaFonda.
Marc:What a life you gave that kitty.
Marc:And I said, thanks, Jodi.
Marc:You were there when I trapped her with the shoeboxes.
Marc:And she said, totally.
Marc:You extended her life by at least 14.5 years.
Marc:And she said, extra hugs for Monkey and me.
Marc:But everybody, you know, I had a roommate at the house that was very close to LaFonda.
Marc:My friend Stosh, who some of you might remember from the beginning of the podcast, who used to live at the house with me and help me out during the early years.
Marc:She was very close to La Fonda.
Marc:And I told her and I hadn't talked to her in years.
Marc:And we sort of reconnected and we're going to have coffee.
Marc:But it was very difficult.
Marc:I'd never done it before.
Marc:And I was really dead set on not missing it in a weird way.
Marc:I remember I had a cat named Butch.
Marc:That was a gift to me by my second wife, Mishnah.
Marc:um you know who had a heart problem a congenital heart problem and and she died when i was in new york and i missed that i missed burying her you know mishina buried her with uh ernie the handyman out in back of the old house as some of you know boomer disappeared many years ago what a great cat boomer was deaf black cat got eaten by the coyotes and um
Marc:Scaredy cat.
Marc:Yeah, the other stray was hit by a car out in front of my house.
Marc:But I just didn't, I was, you know, Monkey and LaFonda are my old friends.
Marc:You know, it's been over 15 years.
Marc:And as you know, you know, Fonda was, got sick, you know, about a month or so ago.
Marc:She just, her health took a sharp turn.
Marc:She lost a lot of weight.
Marc:And I took her to the vet.
Marc:And the vet, you know, told me that she had a bladder infection, but her kidney numbers were horrible.
Marc:They were all in the red and she was sort of on her way.
Marc:And I said, well, what do we do?
Marc:He said, well, you know, she's not.
Marc:I don't think it's time, but, you know, this is not good.
Marc:And you can give her subcutaneous fluids and, you know, do what you can to make her comfortable, but it's not good.
Marc:And but, you know, when you hear that as an owner of a cat, you're like, well, maybe she could just level off.
Marc:I mean, I always knew she probably had bad kidneys.
Marc:She drank an awful lot of water.
Marc:And, you know, that had been going on for a while.
Marc:I noticed that she had been losing a little weight, but but he was like, just, you know, do what you can.
Marc:You know, sometimes you can get another year out of them.
Marc:You don't know.
Marc:But the doc said, you know, look, if she starts throwing up or starts getting diarrhea, then that's the time, you know.
Marc:And then I was like, I still wasn't clear.
Marc:you know, because I, you know, some people say, well, as long as she can, you know, accept love or give love or, you know, if she's conscious, you know, she doesn't seem to be in pain, you know, why not keep her around?
Marc:I thought, well, okay, she's getting a little loopy.
Marc:She's old and got this kidney sickness, but maybe this is just who she is now.
Marc:She lost most of her strength, most of her will.
Um,
Marc:you know but you hold on you know because she was still sleeping with me and you know we could touch her still and uh and she still seemed to like it but she was very weak and losing energy and and then like people a couple of people said you'll know you'll know when it's time because she'll tell you and i didn't really know what that meant and and sure enough like thursday you know she just um
Marc:She just really stopped eating and threw up a little bit.
Marc:But she was acting bizarre.
Marc:She was drinking an awful lot of water.
Marc:She couldn't get enough water.
Marc:And then she started to try to get in the toilet.
Marc:And she was acting weird.
Marc:And she tried to get in the bathtub.
Marc:And she shit in the shower.
Marc:And she was just crying and howling all the time.
Marc:And she was doing weird shit.
Marc:It was almost like when you're sick and you're just trying to make yourself feel better.
Marc:You're looking for something that'll make you feel better.
Marc:It felt like that.
Marc:just howling all the time and she wouldn't eat and she wouldn't drink.
Marc:And it was, you know, and, and, and I guess that's what I, what I thought she was telling me.
Marc:I thought she was telling me, you know, I was going to have the euthanasia at home stuff.
Marc:And, but I'm like, fuck it.
Marc:I'm just, I'm taking her to the vet because I want to know what's up.
Marc:You know, she's howling all the time.
Marc:She's in pain.
Marc:She's not eating.
Marc:She's not drinking.
Marc:She threw up and you know, but I knew what was going on.
Marc:Her kidneys were gone, you know, and, and, but I didn't want to accept it.
Marc:And I kind of knew when I took her to the vet that I was not going to leave with her, you know, and but I wanted him to see her.
Marc:I got a good vet over there at Gateway, this new guy over there, Dr. Modesto and Dr. Ram, too.
Marc:But Modesto, I just you know, he was the one that diagnosed her and I was glad he was there.
Marc:And I put her in the cage.
Marc:She didn't fight at all.
Marc:She was just limp, you know, and so fragile and so light.
Marc:There was nothing to her, you know, and I was sort of like I was just waking out of this haze of trying to save her and really knowing in my heart that there was no saving her, you know.
Marc:So I brought her in and he weighed her and she lost weight.
Marc:She was like five pounds.
Marc:And I said, should we do a kidney test?
Marc:Maybe she's got the UTI again or the bladder infection.
Marc:He's like, I don't know.
Marc:And he looked in her eyes and they were sunken.
Marc:He said she had anemia.
Marc:Her gums were white.
Marc:And I told him what was going on.
Marc:And I said, I was doing the...
Marc:the uh the subcutaneous three days a week and he's like how can she be this dehydrated if you're giving her that much and he conferred with the other doctors and he just said i think it's time and i'm like seriously really but i kind of knew you know i knew i knew that it was and i said okay okay and he goes well you know do you need a few minutes i'm like okay you know and lynn came and we were there and like you know
Marc:I took some time.
Marc:I talked to the cat.
Marc:I apologized to the cat.
Marc:And, you know, I said, you know, this is the right thing, you know.
Marc:I know, you know, some of you are like, it's a fucking cat.
Marc:It's a fucking cat.
Marc:But, you know, this cat and I, you know, it's... Whatever, man.
Marc:It's just, it was...
Marc:Had a lot of things with it.
Marc:A lot of memories with this cat.
Marc:And I knew it was the right thing to do.
Marc:And he came back in.
Marc:He said, you want to be here?
Marc:And I'm like, yes.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:This is what I'm doing.
Marc:I want to be here.
Marc:I don't want her to feel abandoned or more freaked out than she already is.
Marc:And he said, okay, we'll put a catheter on her and we'll come back in.
Marc:So they did that.
Marc:And they came back in.
Marc:and i was holding her you know like she was laying on the table and they had the catheter and then the doc it took him a long time to get the medicine because they have one guy in the back handing out medicine i guess and he's got these two syringes and i was just holding my cat you know and when it was kind of holding me but i i was holding the cat and um
Marc:you know, and I was just saying, it's okay, it's okay, I'm sorry, I love you, you know, and I was concerned that, you know, the tears wouldn't come, you know, and they...
Marc:They definitely did.
Marc:And he put the, um, the first one is a tranquilizer and it just shut her down, you know, just right.
Marc:Really, very quickly.
Marc:And I go, she, she's out.
Marc:Why are your eyes open?
Marc:Is she, she's just sleeping.
Marc:What's happening?
Marc:You know?
Marc:And I was kind of panicking and crying and telling the cat it's okay.
Marc:And,
Marc:And then I go, we'll do the other one.
Marc:Let's just do it.
Marc:Let's just do it.
Marc:And he did it.
Marc:And it was very quick and very painless.
Marc:And he just put this stethoscope on her and said, she's gone.
Marc:And I just was kind of crying and petting the cat.
Marc:And she was gone.
Marc:She was gone.
Marc:And that was that.
Marc:So we hung out with her for a few minutes.
Marc:And I told them I wanted the ashes.
Marc:And they took her away.
Marc:And that was that, you know, and I was, you know, I was the guy, you know, I was the crying man leaving the vet's office, you know, with an empty carrier, you know.
Marc:That was me.
Marc:And I tell you, you know, some people feel guilty or that they waited too long.
Marc:I just feel like it was the right thing to do at the right time, at the right moment.
Marc:And I was glad I could do it for her.
Marc:And I was glad to be there for it.
Marc:It was terrible and beautiful.
Marc:You know, it was really, you know, it really fucked me.
Marc:It fucked me up, but I just, you know, she was at peace.
Marc:You know, you know, I was at peace because at some point, you know, both of your quality of life, you know, the cats and yours are deteriorating when you're desperately trying to keep them alive.
Marc:And she didn't suffer too much.
Marc:Whatever the discomfort was, it was the beginning of it.
Marc:And the doc thinks that her kidneys just went and that was the end of it.
Marc:So, you know, RIP Lafonda.
Marc:And I was happy to be there.
Marc:And, you know, she had a good life.
Marc:So that's that.
Marc:And I thank all you for being supportive and for all the outreach and for the recommendations of how to handle this and, you know, how to do a home euthanasia and what to do and, you know, different approaches to the kidney.
Marc:Thanks for all of your input.
Marc:So Jay Roach.
Marc:Good guy.
Marc:He's made some funny movies.
Marc:But this bombshell movie is something.
Marc:It really is.
Marc:And some amazing acting.
Marc:And it's an amazing story.
Marc:And there's a scene in there where I think, you know, with Margot Robbie and John Lithgow, if you really wonder how...
Marc:abusive power affects somebody affects a woman in a situation where there's not even sexual contact there's a scene in this movie that will will hammer that point into you and it's it's really something else and the movie's good and this is me talking to Jay Roach back in the house
Marc:So Jay, you rode a bike over here.
Marc:How long have you ridden a bike?
Guest:I've been riding motorcycles since I was a kid.
Guest:Really?
Guest:I don't know if you... Your dad wet you?
Guest:He did, but only on the dirt.
Guest:I grew up in Albuquerque.
Guest:I know.
Guest:I mean, did I run into you and you tell me that?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I remember I was listening to you and Mike Judge talk about your youth and I was like, wait a second.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's my youth.
Guest:I was amazed how many similarities.
Guest:Are you older than me?
Guest:How old are you?
Guest:I'm 62.
Guest:So I'm 56.
Guest:Yeah, you went to Highland, right?
Guest:I went to Highland, graduated in 81.
Guest:Yeah, I graduated in 75 from El Dorado.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So you remember, man.
Guest:Oh, the whole thing.
Guest:Just the cruising around, nowhere to go.
Guest:McDonald's.
Guest:Doing donuts out in the dirt.
Guest:And my thing was the motorcycle.
Guest:I just had a dirt bike and it was in my garage being taken apart more than it was being ridden.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:But I would get out on that bike and my dad wouldn't let me run in the street.
Guest:So...
Guest:I got a street bike finally when I went away to college and I haven't stopped.
Guest:I did stop when I had kids and I kind of parked it for quite a while.
Guest:Out of fear or what?
Guest:Out of my wife's, the look on my wife's face every time I would come back.
Guest:She's like, what are you doing?
Guest:You're way too old and you should be responsible.
Guest:You have a family now.
Marc:That's coming from an old rocker.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Marc:You know what's your wife's name again?
Guest:Susannah Hoffs from the Bangles.
Marc:The Bangles.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:They didn't get as fucked up as the Go-Go's though, did they?
Guest:I don't think so.
Guest:She's pretty, she's got some stories.
Guest:Oh yeah, yeah?
Guest:She's got some good stories.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But I don't know.
Guest:Did she right walk like an Egyptian?
Guest:She did not.
Guest:She wrote Eternal Flame, and Prince wrote Manic Monday, and those are sort of their big three hits.
Marc:I like the song on the first album, Live.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:I love that song.
Guest:With the Pearsons mostly doing the singing, Vicky and Debbie.
Guest:I like the lick.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:It's a good lick in there, right?
Guest:Yeah, you would catch that.
Guest:Yeah, absolutely.
Guest:Vicky's a good guitar player.
Marc:All right, so Albuquerque, though, in the 70s,
Marc:The General Store.
Marc:Did you go to the General Store over by the university?
Guest:Yeah, down by the campus.
Guest:Yeah, the posters and everything.
Guest:The Frontier.
Guest:The Frontier, man.
Guest:We used to hang out there all the time.
Guest:My friend was later, while he was in college, would perform at Civic Light Opera all the time, Pope Joy Hall.
Guest:Yeah, doing what?
Guest:So we would go, he was a,
Guest:He was a song and dance man.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Now he's a lawyer there.
Marc:Do musicals and stuff?
Marc:Who was your friend?
Marc:He's a lawyer in Albuquerque?
Guest:Yeah, Chris Pierce.
Guest:I might have been gone by the time some of the stuff you guys went through, but I just sounded like it hadn't changed that much.
Guest:When did you get out of there?
Guest:75.
Marc:You were out by 75?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Where'd you go?
Guest:I went to Stanford.
Guest:I was born and raised in Albuquerque, lived there my whole life, never left until I got on a train and went to Stanford.
Marc:What part of town did you grow up in Albuquerque?
Guest:I grew up up by Lomas and Candelaria.
Guest:What'd your dad do?
Guest:What were you doing?
Guest:My dad worked for the defense department.
Guest:He worked at Sandia.
Guest:Sandia Labs.
Guest:A lot of people do at Sandia Labs, which was affiliated with Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore.
Guest:And he was a bomb builder.
Guest:No shit.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Like an engineer?
Marc:Mechanical engineer.
Guest:He was involved and he would go underground in Vegas in the Nevada test site, install a device that would read the force of the blasts and then go back in after the blast and then come back.
Guest:So was he up in Los Alamos a lot?
Guest:No, it was mostly just Sandia and the Nevada test site.
Guest:But he was radiated a bunch of times.
Guest:There's a whole story about what my dad went through to build hydrogen bombs.
Guest:Wait, like the original ones?
Guest:No, like in late 50s through the 60s and all.
Guest:I don't remember.
Guest:He sort of retired.
Marc:Did he go into the mountain?
Marc:Wasn't there a hollowed out mountain?
Guest:That hollowed out mountain is on the property of Sandia.
Guest:It's on the Federal Reserve there.
Guest:Right.
Marc:It's in Albuquerque, the right outside.
Guest:It's a big bunker full of nuclear stuff.
Guest:You fly over it.
Guest:It's real.
Guest:It's real.
Guest:And there's like three fences that my friends used to hunt around that mountain.
Guest:And once when I was a kid, we were sitting at one of those diners down along the freeway and looked up and a plane crashed into that mountain.
Guest:And everyone was afraid for a little while, like the whole place was just going to turn into a nuclear mushroom.
Guest:Oh, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And a fair number of soldiers died.
Guest:I think it was like a scene 130 or something that crashed.
Guest:And we saw the plane hit.
Guest:That mountain was such a mysterious, weird kind of monument to nuclear activity.
Marc:But this was all sort of like mythic.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But your old man told you about it eventually?
Guest:Well, he could talk a lot about some of it once it was declassified, once the Cold War was over, which he takes credit for ending.
Guest:Oh, does he?
Guest:With Ronald Reagan.
Guest:He and Reagan pretty much, what does he say?
Guest:We brought down the Russian bear or something.
Guest:Were they buddies?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, not really.
Guest:My dad worked his way up really from nothing.
Guest:He didn't go to college, and he just drew, and they hired him as a draftsman, and he taught himself to draw mechanical drawings, and then he actually turned himself into a full-fledged mechanical engineer without a college degree, which is pretty impressive.
Guest:That's crazy.
Guest:What did your mom do?
Guest:She was a housewife.
Guest:She had four little kids by the time she was very, like 24, 25.
Guest:She was a handful.
Guest:And then after I left, she became the administrative assistant at the high school where I went, El Dorado High School.
Guest:El Dorado High.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, I don't know anything about El Dorado.
Guest:It was a brand new school when I went there.
Guest:I kind of remember where it is.
Guest:It was brand new.
Guest:Highland had been around forever.
Guest:And Highland was always our big rival.
Guest:The Hornets.
Guest:Because Eldorado always had a good football team.
Guest:We had terrible basketball teams, but really good football teams.
Guest:And Highland was always there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:After a basketball game with Highland one time, my best friend Chris and I actually were standing around outside, and there used to be so many fights after games.
Guest:People knew what to do, and we got literally just knocked over and kicked for a while.
Guest:We weren't injured, but I was looking back.
Guest:There's a lot of stuff that went on that was vaguely traumatic, which we didn't probably even recognize.
Marc:I didn't get involved with sports much, but driving around, I mean, you got your driver's license when you were 15.
Marc:14, eight months.
Marc:14, eight months for the learner's permit.
Guest:That's when I got mine.
Marc:Yeah, and I mean, it's like, what are you going to do?
Marc:And then half of it, most of the people have guns out there, and they're just riding around, dicking off, drinking, getting people to buy you booze outside of a fucking liquor store.
Guest:You got the same fake ID we got.
Guest:That thing where you blow up a big picture and stand behind it and somebody takes a picture.
Guest:Takes a Polaroid and cuts it out.
Guest:Literally, I was listening to you guys talk about your experiences.
Guest:I was like, is that just like, it's just been going on there for decades and decades?
Marc:Well, I guess it's like they didn't make the, they didn't secure the,
Marc:How do you like that coffee?
Marc:It's all right?
Marc:That's excellent.
Marc:Thank you.
Marc:They didn't secure the identification.
Marc:They added all kinds of different things on it with the light.
Marc:But back in the old days, it was pretty easy to fake them.
Guest:Was your school good?
Guest:I was thinking about this the other day.
Guest:My public school was like...
Guest:good, you know, testament to the quality of public school.
Guest:The teachers were good, and I, you know, I feel like I lucked out for, because I talked to a lot of people in some of the other schools there.
Guest:In fact, one of my friends is a principal at an elementary school there now, and people don't see it as such a great school system in New Mexico, but I felt lucky.
Guest:I must have gotten...
Marc:I think if you're lucky, if you lock in with teachers, I don't know.
Marc:There was a couple of teachers that were pretty horrible.
Marc:I had a couple of drunks.
Marc:My electronics teacher, he was kind of a drunky guy.
Marc:And my English teacher was kind of a little off.
Marc:But then there was another English teacher that I really connected with and the history teacher I connected with.
Marc:And then when I didn't, it's really a crapshoot.
Marc:But they built this amazing state-of-the-art art department over at Highland in my last year.
Marc:and they had this full high-tech darkroom.
Marc:And it was like, I just was, it was crazy.
Marc:So I was really kind of in the darkroom the last year or so.
Guest:That's what happened to me at college.
Guest:It's funny you say that too.
Guest:I was pre-law studying economics, and I found out there was a darkroom in the basement of my dorm senior year, and that was it.
Guest:That was the end of pre-law.
Guest:I just started shooting pictures, decided I was going to be a camera person.
Guest:Well, that's interesting.
Marc:So, okay.
Guest:so wait are you the youngest of your siblings i'm the oldest oh you are yeah where's everybody else anyone still in albuquerque uh my dad's still there my still around and my mom's around too but she's in uh they're both in assisted living but different parts of my mom's in southern colorado and um so they weren't married they were married they've stayed married all this time and it just the health reasons and the doctors have ended up they just were in separate places and they are now and um my
Guest:That's difficult.
Guest:Are they both cognizant?
Guest:Yeah, and they're actually supportive of each other from afar.
Guest:They kind of have a funny long-distance correspondence.
Guest:I've never heard that before.
Guest:I know it's interesting.
Guest:My mom has a kind of specific type of immune system thing, and she just gets better care up there.
Guest:And your dad didn't want to leave Albuquerque?
Guest:He didn't want to leave.
Guest:He has this great house looking up at the Sandias up off of Tramway.
Guest:Did they FaceTime?
Guest:They FaceTime a lot.
Guest:They FaceTime accidentally a lot.
Guest:I'll get buzzed, you know.
Guest:That FaceTime is a really great thing for grandparents.
Marc:And your siblings, none of them's in Albuquerque?
Guest:None of them.
Guest:The other one is, my next brother down is a pack train guide in Wyoming, has always been like a wrangler of some sort up there.
Guest:He's a cowboy, and my other brother's a truck driver, and...
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah, we grew up in a kind of Texas rancher household.
Guest:My dad was in the suburbs, but had grown up out in the very rural Texas, you know, and still thought of himself as a cowboy.
Guest:And so all my, at least my two brothers became very, very outdoorsy.
Marc:Your brother rides horses?
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And outside of Yellowstone, he leads, you know, and now he's leading National Geographic scientists in to study wolves or something.
Guest:He's got a really cool life, you know, and- Like he's a tracker or something?
Guest:He's like, he tracks them and he knows, you know, I once went mount biking with him back in there.
Guest:He does that too, tours, and he like has to carry a 44 Magnum and bear spray.
Guest:Where's that documentary, Jay?
Guest:Yeah, that's what I should be working on.
Guest:Where's the doc about your brother?
Guest:Yeah, he's great.
Guest:He's amazing, actually.
Guest:And then the other one's a truck driver.
Guest:Truck driver.
Guest:And then there's another one?
Guest:My sister, she just moved to Southern Colorado to be closer to my mom, but she's been a paralegal and real estate lady.
Guest:She's done a bunch of different things.
Marc:It's crazy, and you're a film director.
Guest:Yeah, I was always the weird kid because my family were just working people.
Guest:As I said, my dad, we were sort of raised in a lower middle class class.
Guest:And I just had a, I don't know, I was sort of driven.
Guest:I was a little type A. Running around your motorcycle.
Guest:On my motorcycle to get away from it all.
Guest:But I was also a very focused student, a lot of student governments.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:In high school?
Guest:In high school, yeah.
Guest:I was trying to do everything.
Guest:It's been kind of a bit of a problem.
Guest:It's just been so scattered and interested and curious about everything.
Marc:You must have done well in school to get into Stanford.
Guest:I did okay, but when I got to Stanford, I realized I think they just let me in because no one else applied from New Mexico because they really actually have a map that seems like they represent all 50 states.
Guest:So I think it was a regional affirmative action.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Because I didn't have great, I had really good grades and good sort of student resume or whatever, but my SAT scores were not good.
Guest:not great not strong and so when i got there and everybody was like perfect 800s and whatever and i was like oh man i i'm out of my league here and i had to hustle it's a good school man i mean it's like it seemed and so it's the mid 70s so things are pretty groovy still very groovy uh you know post-sexual liberation yeah pre-aid so it was that there was that was the pocket that was the pocket post-sexual revolutions pre-aids pocket
Guest:good times there was a lot of uh a lot of uh exploring uh going on for me as a kid from coming from albuquerque just into a big you know a sort of sophisticated coastal place like that uh was i was very out of my element for a long time there and i was always sort of trying to just catch up drug guy
Guest:I didn't, I smoked a fair amount of marijuana.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:But I didn't, I wasn't so much into much else.
Guest:You know, I would drink beer with my friends there.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But I was never, I was never, I just, I didn't love the, you know, I didn't join a frat or anything like that.
Guest:That's good.
Guest:And I wasn't, I didn't get caught up in that.
Marc:That doesn't end well for anybody.
Marc:It seems like most of the people you talk to, though, are in frats.
Marc:Almost always, 99% of the time, you go like, no, I can see that.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But I was tempted just because I love to play basketball and the sports part.
Guest:But what stopped you, Jay?
Guest:Living with dudes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I lived in a co-ed dorm.
Guest:They didn't let you think about it in freshman year.
Guest:And so living with just cool women.
Guest:It was also an interesting time for the women's liberation movement.
Guest:And I had a lot of very...
Guest:strong, cool women who were, you know, asking a lot of questions and pushing things.
Guest:And I, growing up the way I grew up in a pretty male, you know, be a strong man and all that stuff, you know, from the Texas ranter mentality, which is, you know, there's a certain nobility in it, but I
Guest:I started kind of drifting politically away from some of my dad's ideas.
Guest:And I'm actually working now on a Kent State thing to try to do a limited series about that week.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:With Tina Fey's company, actually, because her husband, Jeff Richmond, lived at Kent at the time.
Guest:But I remember that 1970, 13 years old.
Guest:At the time of the protests?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But was he... At the time of the shootings in 1970.
Guest:But his family was there?
Guest:He was a kid, yeah.
Guest:He goes to school later there too, I think, if I'm not mistaken.
Guest:But he definitely was there when he was 10 years old.
Guest:I talked to Mark Mothersbaugh about it.
Guest:Oh, that's so interesting.
Guest:I just met his wife the night before last and said, you got to talk to Mark.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He was like there, there.
Guest:He was there, there.
Guest:And so was Joe Walsh.
Guest:Yeah, I talked to Joe Walsh about it, too.
Guest:We talked to Joe, too, and it's a really compelling story.
Guest:There's so much more to it than you just know from the song or the photo.
Marc:Oh, yeah, no, like you don't get anything like that.
Marc:The whole town was, like they called in the fucking tanks.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:You know, it was a four-day process that led up to the Monday when they shot the kids.
Guest:Well, that sounds very compelling.
Guest:What do you think, in six episodes?
Guest:Five, six episodes.
Guest:You know what made me think?
Guest:We were trying to do it as a feature, and then I saw Chernobyl, and I was like, you could.
Guest:tell this story like a meltdown of a system, you know, and try to analyze all the different forces that end up with kids carrying rifles with live ammunition who are avoiding the war by being in the National Guard, shooting other kids who are, you know, protesting the war in just an inexplicable series of fuck-ups, you know, that led to this clash, you know.
Guest:And then what happens after they shoot them, and this is where the really compelling story goes,
Guest:is the whole campus has gone nuts and finds out about it and there's like suddenly went from like 300 or 400 protesters to thousands of them and the National Guard is reloading to go back in and clear them out.
Guest:And the story of this one professor who avoided, it could have,
Guest:As Simi Chalice is working on it with us, you said, the thing about this is not that it happened, but that there could have been a lot more people killed afterwards is really the powerful story.
Guest:I think the whole town got involved.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:It started in the town.
Guest:It started on Friday night after Nixon said they were going into Cambodia.
Guest:There was a riot in the town, and there was a town gown tension all the time anyway.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Anyway, it's a really compelling story.
Guest:But the reason I brought it up is that that's when I remember my dad saying, I feel like the students might have deserved that.
Guest:And that was 60% of America thought.
Guest:They did polls that blamed the students for what happened.
Guest:And it was the students that were indicted first, not the guard, until the more and more photo evidence came out.
Guest:And then there was a big thing.
Guest:Sounds like you're pretty deep into the process.
Guest:We've interviewed a ton of people.
Marc:And it's going to be like, oh, is it going to be a documentary type of situation?
Guest:No, no, more like a docudrama, more like Chernobyl.
Guest:Did you see that?
Guest:No, I didn't watch it yet.
Guest:Oh, it's so good.
Guest:Be careful with the costumes.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Good point.
Guest:It's the 70s clothes to not have them look goofy.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:I could show you pictures that would be from 1970.
Marc:I know.
Marc:I mean, they look so cool, but for some reason, it's so hard.
Guest:Some of them do.
Marc:It's so hard to get it right when you're fictionalizing it.
Marc:Absolutely.
Marc:So how do you get, you know, you start at Stanford in pre-law, and like, I mean, you know, you direct big movies.
Marc:I mean, it seemed like you kind of come out of nowhere in a way.
Marc:I was late.
Marc:I was late to that game.
Marc:What have you been doing, man?
Marc:So you're in college, but you said that you started doing photography out of nowhere.
Guest:Yeah, I started in photography and was working there right at the beginning of Silicon Valley, really, during the...
Guest:He graduated in 79?
Guest:Yeah, and worked there for two years running an instructional television thing for the School of Engineering at Stanford that was beaming out to Hewlett-Packard.
Marc:Wait, after you graduate?
Guest:Yeah, after I graduated.
Marc:But where did you have experience working in television?
Guest:I worked my way through school.
Guest:I had to have all these work-study jobs.
Guest:And one of them was running these little classrooms where you'd have three cameras in a booth and joysticks and a little switcher and just kind of capture and record the professor's class, but beam it out to these remote Silicon Valley companies so you could get a master's degree or a PhD in electrical engineering while you're being employed at Hewlett-Packard or Ampac.
Marc:Was that a service offered by the school, or was it something that Silicon Valley wired up?
Guest:School of Engineering set it up to sort of hub out.
Guest:So that's a huge part of how Silicon Valley- Got educated.
Guest:Networked itself, yeah, and got educated.
Guest:It was a big part of that, actually.
Guest:So I worked there, and they let me shoot some-
Guest:documentaries and I applied to USC film school.
Guest:You shot some documentaries and little tiny short films, you know, and, um, so this is after college for two years for two years in Palo Alto, you know, living in Palo Alto and, uh, but working on campus.
Guest:Um, and, uh, not really sure what I was going to do, but I got to, I was, I had so many work study jobs.
Guest:Like I was cleaning sound heads in the documentary program.
Guest:I met, I met some cool documentary, uh, camera people and, um,
Guest:I thought, I'm going to apply to film school.
Guest:So I applied to USC and got in there and then helped them run their... They had a similar kind of engineering school network.
Guest:And so I worked my way through USC doing more of that, which is a weird way to get... Setting up these... Classrooms and doing these engineering courses.
Marc:It's so weird because there's no internet.
Marc:This sounds like, why would anyone do that?
Marc:But back then it was sort of like...
Guest:An amazing thing, I would imagine.
Guest:Yeah, it was like a one-way FaceTime, actually, because you could see the professor, but then there was two-way audio, so you could push a button and get right into the classroom with a question.
Guest:Oh, I see.
Guest:So you'd always hear the off-campus people calling.
Guest:Wild, and this is your beginning?
Guest:Well, it was a job, but it had a camera component to it.
Marc:But it got you through USC, though?
Guest:Yeah, and then I started getting the directing bug at USC.
Guest:I went there to be a camera person, but it's a narrative thing.
Guest:storytelling thing because of George Lucas and John Milius and all those people who had been there.
Guest:And so I got the directing bug, directed a couple short films.
Guest:It's a three-year program.
Guest:It was an interesting five years of my life because I couldn't afford to keep going.
Guest:So I'd stop out, go back, stop out.
Guest:And then I didn't really get to direct for 10 more years after that.
Guest:What the fuck were you doing, Jay?
Guest:I was shooting documentaries, actually, and being a writing assistant and being an editor all around town.
Guest:And teaching.
Guest:I taught cinematography at SC for seven years part-time at USC.
Marc:You taught cinematography?
Guest:They hired me right out of school to teach, which was just- How did that happen?
Guest:Were you that good?
Guest:I was a TA for a long time, and I took over for a professor who needed some help.
Guest:And I liked shooting and showing other people how to shoot.
Guest:And that was a great prep for directing because I would-
Guest:ask the students to set up a little scenario and build a couple walls of sets and light them and shoot them and just edit in camera.
Guest:Every Wednesday night they would come into the little studio there and it actually helped me think more about how to shoot and edit by talking about it to kids.
Marc:And what were some of your first jobs in show business?
Guest:I was a writing assistant for a lot of that time through a company called Trilogy Entertainment.
Guest:So they made Blown Away and Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves and kind of mainstream action-y stuff.
Guest:And they started letting me write scenes.
Guest:I wrote the story for Blown Away, the bomb squad thing with Jeff Bridges and...
Guest:I wrote a pilot for a sci-fi show that was terrible, ultimately, sadly, but it had some promise at the time across Space Rangers.
Guest:And I started just getting permission to keep writing more and more, and I actually turned myself into a writer, and then...
Guest:I did some weird art films, including one film about the psychology of evil with Adolf Hitler as the weird stylized... I was watching Jojo Rabbit.
Guest:It's such a good film.
Guest:It is good.
Guest:And I was thinking back on this time, and I was doing a ton of...
Guest:research on the rise of Nazism, weirdly, and around this time, I met Mike Myers, and he is a history nut, and we started talking about that, and then he sent me, we also started talking about Monty Python, he sends me that script, and that's when I finally got to start, Austin Powers, and that's when I finally got to start directing.
Guest:What were these docs, though?
Guest:So I shot documentaries that were, I would shoot like industrial documentaries, even actually some for the Air Force.
Guest:I shot like footage of F-16s and A-10s and I would just get any job I could get.
Guest:I was just a working person.
Guest:I was always just, I lived in one room in a seven room house with six other people.
Guest:You know, I was...
Guest:I was like a grad student for 15 years, basically, until I met Mike and got to do Austin Powers.
Guest:So I had a weird, very weird, eclectic trend.
Marc:So you had all this stuff you did, but when you meet with Mike, how'd you meet Mike?
Guest:We started talking about... He had a guitar that was a signature Rickenbacker, Susanna Hoff's guitar.
Guest:He walked up to Susanna, got to know her.
Guest:She and his wife at the time, Robin Roseanne, got to be friends.
Guest:And Mike and I just started talking about history.
Guest:And you were just this guy?
Guest:I'm just this guy.
Guest:Literally just this guy.
Guest:Who does these weird little jobs, kind of in the show business.
Guest:No promise whatsoever.
Guest:It's a pretty amazing story because he...
Guest:he we talked so much about and you're already married uh yeah had been just married for a couple years um and so she loved you even though you didn't look like you were going anywhere oh i was we met on a blind date i was a i had a old vw bus that would catch on fire about every third time wow man and i she just she had said i'm just i should dated a lot of
Guest:actors and you know musicians and uh somehow she said to the guy who was actually working with me on space rangers do you know anybody and he'd worked with her and so he he put us together and i literally thought it was a prank like i just was she already a big star she was huge she the bangles had already had you know all their that one record yeah this was in 91 they were biggest in the mid 80s you know yeah
Guest:Yeah, so she sort of helped get me together with Mike Myers, and he got me to write up some notes about the script, and after that said, we helped me look for directors, and I was combing through other people's directing reels, and I found a guy I liked and said, oh, you should go with this guy.
Guest:This is after...
Guest:Wayne's World, Axe and Murder, Wayne's World 2.
Guest:It was after all those films.
Guest:And he was sort of looking for someone that he could sort of just collaborate a little more closely with instead of just someone who would just kind of direct him and push him around.
Marc:But you didn't have any, you couldn't really show him any real directing experience.
Guest:Nothing.
Guest:In fact, when he took me into New Line Cinema, and Suzanne Todd, the producers that I had known since film school also were very involved in this.
Guest:He and my wife and the Todd sisters,
Guest:who had put me up for the job without telling me and said we what michael thinks this guy would do based on this 12 page notes document i wrote that had some a lot of jokes in it and yeah and um so i sat with the studio people because i said i said here's the guy he said well i put you up for i said what are you talking about i don't have any background and that's what the studio guy said he said who are you
Guest:We're not going to just hire Mike's buddy.
Guest:You're not funny.
Guest:You haven't directed anything.
Guest:And I said, Mr. Shea, Mr. Bob Shea at the time, I said, I totally get that.
Guest:But will you take a look at this storyboard sequence?
Guest:And I had worked out this whole thing with the fembots that hadn't been in the original script.
Guest:And it was really funny.
Guest:I must say, it was a great thing.
Guest:And I got a storyboard artist, and I was acting it all out.
Guest:And Mike kind of helped me perform it with him.
Guest:And they hired me to do it.
Guest:They actually didn't right away.
Guest:Mike had to say, they finally said, we're not going to hire this guy.
Guest:And he said, I tell you what, don't call me anymore unless you hire this guy.
Guest:And they were sending him like big time directors.
Guest:This is Mike.
Guest:This is Mike.
Guest:He went to bat for you?
Guest:He went to bat for me and it took a few more weeks.
Guest:And he called me.
Guest:He had just jumped into the swimming pool with his dogs.
Guest:You could hear with all his clothes on.
Guest:His wife told me the story.
Guest:and he called me, and I could hear this crazy racket in the background, dark, splashing and barking, and he said, you got the job, you got the job, and he, it was, you know, so him, plus the Todd sisters, I have to credit them too, because they really helped too, but Mike freaking fought like a crazy person, and at the time, with not the most power in the world, you know, the, those, the first film, the first Wayne's World was huge, but he was,
Guest:He was an actor and, you know, but just fighting like crazy for me.
Guest:And then he became his guy there for a while.
Marc:You're the Austin Powers guy.
Marc:Yeah, I did.
Marc:And he's like notoriously a control freak.
Marc:And I, you know, I've talked to him, but he's not easy, right?
Guest:He's...
Guest:He cares a lot about what he's doing, and I think that gets misunderstood sometimes as being difficult because he just fights like crazy for how to do it.
Guest:I don't know him to be difficult, but I mean, you must have learned a lot on some level because he wants it his way, right?
Guest:I feel like I learned comedy working with him.
Guest:I honestly didn't know that much about how to... I didn't know comedians.
Guest:I'd written screenplays by then, all serious, all either sci-fi or...
Guest:Were you a big sci-fi freak?
Guest:Not a freak, but I read Dune and all the Heinlein stuff.
Guest:But I wrote in science fiction.
Guest:I got to do some sci-fi adaptions for Bruce Willis.
Guest:What did you adapt for Bruce Willis?
Guest:Nothing that got made.
Guest:A weird book called Ambient.
Guest:And I adapted it for Bruce.
Guest:It was about a post-apocalyptic movie.
Guest:world Manhattan that's been flooded and you can only get to the different skyscrapers which are now like castles through bridges across the tops of them and Bruce would have played a bodyguard so whenever you went down into the no man's land he would be the guy who would
Guest:escort the warlords or the pharmaceutical control.
Guest:You need that guy.
Guest:It was a great concept.
Marc:So when you say you adapted it for him, you were hired by his company?
Guest:Yeah, through, again, Suzanne and Jennifer Todd, who I'd known in film school, were producers for him, and I'm pretty... I like telling stories, so I would go in and do this tap dance of pitching something, and I could often...
Guest:convince people I'm pretty gung-ho about those kinds of stories when it's something I really loved.
Guest:And he said, okay, I'll try it.
Guest:And he really liked the script, but it was expensive, and I never really, I don't think I nailed the third act, so I never got to make it.
Guest:But that's the kind of stuff I had been doing right before I met Mike.
Guest:And no comedy in it whatsoever.
Guest:And so I really learned.
Guest:Mike is kind of an encyclopedia of comedy.
Guest:I don't know if you've ever talked to him about how he's got a very worked out sense of what's funny, why it's funny.
Guest:From working with Lauren a lot, from working with Del Close.
Guest:Right.
Guest:really studying comedy.
Guest:He's a genuinely serious student of comedy.
Guest:I wish he would either do a master class or write a book about it because I don't think I've ever spoken to anybody who articulates just the considerations, the things that make something funny.
Guest:Usually you can kill comedy by talking about it too much.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:You know, some things like the power of clear setup, you know, making sure everything is not fuzzed or the camera's not moving at the wrong time and it's all, you know, just the power of making sure that by the time the comedy is to be delivered, that's too mechanical a way to say it, but that there's nothing that could get in its way.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So simplistic, but you'd be surprised how many, especially in previews, you'd find, oh, the reason this didn't work is because that sign somehow got in the way.
Guest:Muffled.
Guest:And also just the power of- Distracted.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:Things can kill jokes.
Guest:Music can kill jokes or whatever.
Guest:It could be anything.
Guest:It's really like the way to avoid messing.
Guest:And I'm sure it's partly just because he would know what was funny.
Guest:He's just like, don't have something as part of this that could sort of-
Guest:And those movies are sequences of jokes, really.
Guest:They are, but they are also, the other thing he taught me was that, you know, and this is from Lauren, is just that, you know, talk up to people.
Guest:Don't talk, try not to talk down.
Guest:Make it clear, but don't make it look like talking.
Guest:And that, talking down.
Guest:And he really cares about story.
Guest:He cares about the predicaments.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because a lot of times those things are the engines for comedy too.
Guest:What is at stake?
Guest:Why does this matter to this guy?
Guest:Why is the fact that he's completely not, in Austin Powers' case, the difference between how he sees himself and what his capabilities really are is so vast.
Guest:Did you have to watch the James Bond movies?
Guest:I did, but I actually was forced for him, or at least my influence, I think, was more to try to not parody as much as go for the style of pop art movies and old Italian heist movies.
Guest:Right.
Guest:the camp the 10th victim you know yeah yeah not that yet to not but to go for that style could be funny because it's i guess that is camp you know you push it a little bit that that can be sure and um he's you know he just there's just he just knows that stuff and i but then i got to go off and do other comedies you know meet the parents i mean but you did three of those now how did meet the parents come up
Marc:How did that happen?
Marc:Was it Austin Powers?
Marc:Did that help get you that job?
Guest:I saw that.
Guest:Actually, Austin Powers helped me not get that job at first because I found that script after Austin Powers, but Universal Studios and producer then Nancy Tenenbaum, who had it, said, we don't want it to be silly.
Guest:From their minds, Austin was just pure silliness.
Guest:We want this to be real.
Guest:So I lost Meet the Parents and went and did Mystery Alaska.
Guest:I had it for a while.
Guest:What was that movie about?
Guest:That's that hockey movie with Russell Crowe and Burt Reynolds.
Guest:Big cast.
Guest:It was a great cast.
Guest:Lolita Davidovich.
Guest:hank azaria and ron eldard and all this really uh cool people colmini he was an amazing guy it's actually probably my most personal film because it's about a kind of um small town sports the way sports can hold small towns together when i go around the state of new mexico and play you know play i was i was a terrible i was like the bench warmer on in my football team but i
Guest:We would go to those towns and experience the life of the town wrapped around a football game.
Guest:So very much like a Friday nights thing.
Guest:Then I saw that when I started doing the research for the hockey thing, that's how in Canada, you know, the soul of the town can be often the hockey rink.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So that's the essence of it is a challenge to that.
Guest:Anyway, it's a crazy, you know, cast, amazing experience with Russell Crowe and Burt Reynolds.
Guest:I think it's, I thought it was pretty funny.
Guest:It got bumped into
Guest:because beloved Oprah Winfrey's movie wanted the date we had, and by getting bumped, we were previewing really well.
Guest:In terms of a release date?
Guest:Yeah, and so people... It got lost?
Guest:It got lost.
Guest:No kidding.
Guest:It came out a year later, and nobody saw it.
Guest:So that was a good experience to have a nice experience.
Marc:I don't understand how you guys fucking shoulder that shit.
Marc:And obviously that's a pretty high level example of it where you put all this time in and you make this amazing thing.
Marc:And because of really forces out of your control, but nonetheless executive decisions, just they sideline you.
Marc:and literally it disappears the movie and someone would have to go out of their way maybe because we just talked about it in that cast to try to find Mystery Alaska on iTunes which is probably there oh yeah it's there hockey players find it that's because there's not many great but there's so many projects like that and people that put years into things
Guest:Yeah, it's happened to me a couple times where you were surprised something you work on a long time just kind of... How do you handle that shit?
Guest:In that case, I just got busy on the next Austin Powers.
Guest:I went right into the... But doesn't anyone go, what the fuck happened, Jay?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:They're coming at me and I'm coming at the studios, but at that time I had zero power.
Marc:You got Russell Crowe calling you?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:What happened, man?
Guest:Russell Crowe was probably calling the studio more than he could.
Guest:He knew he had more clout than I did at that point.
Guest:That was after L.A.
Guest:Confidential, but before Gladiator, but he still was already pretty influential.
Marc:How was Burt Reynolds?
Marc:Nice guy?
Guest:He was a great guy, but he was in a really interesting place where he had gotten the Golden Globe for Boogie Nights.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And then it had come out that he had fired his reps because he'd been embarrassed by Boogie Nights, and he didn't win the Oscar.
Guest:And the night before, he was flown down to the Oscars, and he was kind of figuring out that he wasn't going to win.
Guest:I think Robin Williams won that year for Good Will Hunting.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:We were shooting out on the ice at like 30 below and he was, oh, he got so, he got very cranky and he yelled at the line producer and then like a pretty, pretty rough bit of verbal abuse.
Guest:And then he felt so bad about it.
Guest:And it was all because he was, I think he just, you know, he'd had, this was a comeback for
Guest:This is a huge deal, Boogie Nights, right?
Guest:And he didn't realize it.
Guest:He didn't realize it.
Guest:He's on our set and he wants to be let go.
Guest:And I'm shooting a huge scene in a locker room with Russell Crowe and all these hockey players.
Guest:and it's the coaching scene.
Guest:It's the scene where Bert's supposed to be the judge who then gives Russell the strength to keep going.
Guest:It's a really kind of funny, trope-y moment, but he gets so bent out of shape, and I actually step between them.
Guest:I feel like it might get violent.
Guest:I step between him and the line producer, and he feels so bad, and he walks back on the mark where he had been
Guest:giving that speech and, and we weren't filming, but he starts to do a, like a, a long apology that gives his whole history of how he grew up with how you treat directors.
Guest:And we used to, Robert Mitchum used to hang the director off the balcony by his ankles.
Guest:And, and I, you know, I've been, I've been in so many, I've been injured so many times and I've flatlined, you know, from Percodine and like, I was like this whole, it was the most unbelievable,
Guest:I think it was like 20 minutes long.
Guest:It's like a mea culpa?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:And what I didn't know is the video tap guy hit record on that.
Guest:And somewhere there's a tape of it.
Guest:But Hank Azaria, to this day, can deliver that whole speech because it was so unbelievable.
Guest:It was one of those moments when you're on a set.
Guest:Was it good and moving?
Guest:It was so good, but so...
Guest:So much about, you know, the sort of damage an actor has to go through, you know, and the complicated psychology of being such a huge star as Burt was.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then having this chance at a huge comeback and then having it be so fragile, you know, and it was just an incredible old school moment.
Marc:And then he kind of knew he blew it somehow.
Guest:I think so.
Guest:That was us all trying to figure out what's going on.
Guest:But it was such a heartbreaking moment.
Guest:It was sort of a breakdown.
Guest:Yeah, but it was also, we loved it.
Guest:I remember the guy who was a hockey player and a kid actor.
Guest:And he just said this to the whole set.
Guest:To the whole set.
Guest:And all of us, now he's had us all come out.
Guest:Now it's a big deal.
Guest:And he's actually now on that mark, lit, just like he was when he was giving this other big speech.
Guest:The locker room speech.
Guest:And it was just the most surreal and kind of amazing and moving moment.
Guest:But it was an apology.
Guest:But it was an apology.
Guest:To the whole crew.
Guest:To everybody.
Guest:For making a scene.
Guest:For losing his shit.
Guest:For losing his shit in front of all, you know, in front of the whole crew.
Guest:And we all loved, the tension was broken by some, you know, one of the kid hockey players said something like, at the very end, he said something like,
Guest:I think you'll be all right, Bert, or something.
Guest:The place just went crazy, just shit house laughing.
Guest:It was really a amazing moment.
Marc:And that was the movie before Meet the Parents.
Marc:So that was the movie before the second Austin.
Guest:Oh, because they took it away from you.
Guest:And then while I was gone,
Guest:I got a call saying, hey, from a guy at Spielberg's company, he said, you know, we slipped that script that you told us about to Steven Spielberg.
Guest:He's going to direct it now, and Jim Carrey's going to be in it, and meet the parents.
Guest:Spielberg was going to direct it?
Guest:Suddenly Spielberg was going to direct it.
Guest:He had it for about two months and then he decided that maybe he'd done 1941.
Guest:He was a little nervous about doing just a straight up comedy.
Marc:Still a little tender about 1941.
Guest:I never quite get over that.
Guest:So he kind of gave it back.
Guest:So many years later.
Guest:i know but he said that's how he explained it to me and that because he stayed involved even just for saying he was going to direct it for a little while when i got when i did get back on it jim jim carrey actually through jimmy miller who i think you know yeah was jim's jimmy's man jim's manager and my manager too and so jimmy's your guy yeah jimmy's my manager i didn't know that for a long time and uh since then actually since before since the first austin
Guest:And because he could put me with Jim Carrey, then I got to get back on it.
Guest:And then Jim Carrey fell off.
Guest:And I always wanted Ben Stiller.
Guest:So we got Ben.
Guest:And then your acting buddy, De Niro, came on.
Guest:And then that made it go.
Guest:And that was my second series of comedies that meet the parents.
Marc:Who played his wife Gwyneth's mom?
Guest:Blythe Danner.
Guest:Amazing Blythe Danner.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:And then it wasn't until the second movie where you got Hoffman and Streisand.
Marc:It's crazy.
Guest:You got big cast with your movies.
Guest:That one nearly killed me because they set the release date before we had a locked script.
Guest:For Meet the Fockers?
Guest:For Meet the Fockers.
Guest:And the money on that, the budget on that was so big.
Guest:Just for paying those actors.
Guest:Just paying all those actors who all, of course, deserve to pay.
Guest:The first one did really well.
Guest:And the second one, you know.
Guest:It did?
Guest:The first one did well.
Guest:And once we had the idea that we could get Dustin and Barbara as a counter to De Niro.
Guest:As a couple.
Guest:It's so crazy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Then we knew we could get going, but we started it without a third act.
Guest:We started it with 70 pages, and I had to walk on the set every day saying, don't worry, Academy Award winners of various.
Guest:We'll figure it out, but I did not think we were going to figure it out, and we just kept shooting and finally did figure it out.
Guest:Who hires Randy Newman for those things?
Guest:I did.
Marc:I think he just did the music for Noah Baumbach.
Guest:He did.
Guest:He did.
Guest:And it's extraordinary.
Guest:I have to watch that movie.
Guest:I heard someone say that music elevated that movie.
Guest:And it really and it does.
Guest:I mean, I like the story anyway, but the music really is a big part of it.
Guest:If you watch Meet the Parents and you see how great that the kind of just normal, almost sitcom plot and really good acting in Meet the Parents, I'm really proud of the acting and the story.
Guest:But it works at a level.
Guest:And then add Randy Newman's these beautiful choral arrangements and this kind of whenever Ben Stiller screws up these, I always say the angels would sing because he's so doomed.
Guest:He's like completely...
Guest:engineering his own humiliation and that's when this great Randy Newman music would kick in and suddenly make it seem.
Marc:Now when you work with him do you give Randy notes or you just let him have a pass on his own?
Marc:How does that work?
Guest:So Randy works a really specific way.
Guest:First he just came and watched the film and it was
Guest:laughing really hard that was i didn't think he i was like really he might actually do this and uh he liked it and then he yeah he just said when you're finished let me know and he didn't a lot of composers now will be working with you along the way and mocking things up
Guest:I just delivered the film.
Guest:We talked a little bit.
Guest:We did a spotting session.
Guest:We did a lot of temps.
Guest:We actually do a pretty great soundtrack with other people's music.
Guest:And he said a lot of composers don't like that because then it seems to steer them.
Guest:They feel steered that we're trying to impose this vibe.
Guest:And some composers are asked to knock off whatever you've used in the temps.
Guest:And he actually said, no, I'd like to hear it.
Guest:And then he heard all the music we'd put in.
Guest:Some of it was Tommy Newman stuff.
Guest:Some of it was, you know, other.
Guest:His brother?
Guest:No, I think he's his cousin, Tommy Newman.
Guest:I can't remember the direct.
Guest:He's a composer, right?
Guest:There's a whole family.
Guest:The Newmans are all in David Newman and Alfred Newman.
Guest:Yeah, it was Alfred.
Guest:Or the uncle.
Guest:I actually lost track of their family tree, but.
Guest:The fact that his father was a tough guy is what he loved about this movie was the De Niro, you know, hard-ass thing that Stiller has to... And also Stiller, you know, typically, I mean, he's playing himself as a kind of bullshit artist and a guy who's trying to just wiggle way through and when he's with his girls out of his league and blah, blah, blah.
Guest:But he...
Guest:Randy took it really seriously, and you just give him the film.
Guest:He saw the temp.
Guest:He says, I love it.
Guest:I'm not going to do anything like that, which is awesome.
Guest:Like the music you had.
Guest:Like the music we had.
Guest:And he took it away, and he just sits at a piano.
Guest:He called me one day.
Guest:I'll never forget.
Guest:He called and started playing this melody for the song that became The Fool in Love, which actually got nominated for an Academy Award.
Guest:And he's just playing it on the phone.
Guest:I'm like,
Guest:Sue, listen, Randy Newman's playing this song on the phone to me right now.
Guest:And in the end credits, Susanna, my wife, and Randy sing a duet in French of the song.
Guest:And they ended up doing it together on the Academy Awards as well.
Guest:Oh, that's sweet.
Guest:It's really cool.
Guest:But he elevated it in every way, and the movie just seemed smarter for that music.
Marc:He's the best.
Guest:I love that guy.
Guest:He's the best.
Guest:I'm going to do a musical with him.
Guest:I pitched him a musical recently, a political, a big political musical, and I haven't gotten back to- Well, his last record was kind of a political musical.
Guest:You know, all his, yeah, the Putin song.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And great, what's the other record he did that had a great nations of Europe?
Marc:Yeah, no, I love him.
Marc:I got to watch this new Noah movie.
Marc:I haven't watched it yet.
Marc:It's good.
Guest:It's really good.
Guest:There's a lot of good films out now.
Guest:It's crazy, yeah.
Marc:So like you do, like Dinner with Schmucks,
Marc:I don't remember, I don't think I saw it, I'm sorry.
Guest:Yeah, no, that was another one of those films that not a lot of people saw, so you wouldn't be alone.
Guest:I'm not sure why.
Guest:I'm not sure either.
Guest:It was a great cast, Steve Carell and Paul Rudd, and Zach Galifianakis was really funny.
Guest:It tested as well as Meet the Parents.
Guest:It was like, we were like, it's a great example of falling for the testing.
Guest:The title is what killed us in the reviews.
Guest:And it was a remake of a French film, a beloved French film called Le Deneur de Comte or something, I think is the title, a Weber film.
Guest:And we got people, the critics really hated that we were remaking this French film.
Marc:And then, oh, really?
Guest:So in between, though, you started the... You started the political things, Recount.
Marc:That was a big show.
Guest:Game Change.
Guest:Those were big for me.
Guest:Sidney Pollack brought me in to do Recount because he got sick.
Guest:He got the cancer?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Oh, did you get to spend time with him?
Guest:I did.
Guest:And I'd known him before.
Guest:He'd kind of been a mentor figure for me.
Guest:And we talked about serious films, but I hadn't done any serious films.
Guest:So once again, he said, just come in.
Guest:He's a guy that I admired for just serve the story.
Guest:Don't feel driven to...
Guest:and you see this in all he had such a wide variety of films you don't have to impose some signature style just you know I just admired that he his style fit the story and and he also loved actors so much as an actor himself I love I love him as an actor yeah he's great you know and so and Tootsie I mean it's just that's a fantastic performance he was your buddy and he
Guest:He was a buddy and just, he liked the comedies, but he said, you know, I always talked about politics with him and he was going to do that film and a guy named Danny Strong wrote it and they started working on it.
Guest:Recount?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And he got sick and he just, all he had done in prep was cast Kevin Spacey and, you know, picked a- That's a big show.
Marc:Was that HBO?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:yeah it was a big big thing and i i just i he told me listen i've got some weird news i'm fighting this disease and i think i can beat it but i need you to take it over and i was like no kidding all right so i um i did and he he died the day after it opened uh on hbo the day after it came out on hbo um but he he watched cuts and gave me some interesting you know feedback all along the way he was amazing he's a
Marc:But you also did a political comedy around the same time.
Guest:I did the campaign a couple years after Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis.
Marc:I think I remember seeing that.
Marc:It was goofy.
Guest:Goofy.
Guest:Goofy, but it was Will.
Guest:It was just great Will stuff and Will Ferrell.
Guest:And Zach was really funny too.
Marc:Those are funny people.
Marc:And then you did Game Change.
Marc:Yeah, the Sarah Palin movie, yeah.
Marc:Yeah, and she's Julianne Moore, come on, man.
Marc:I know, I know.
Marc:It's a great movie.
Marc:And both Game Change and Recount won a bunch of Emmys.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:So they're well-received.
Marc:So now you're sort of in, that's your wheelhouse.
Marc:And then you do Trumbo.
Marc:Now, what happened with Trumbo?
Guest:Another film that a lot of people didn't see, but it was a great experience.
Marc:Yeah, with Cranston.
Marc:How did you feel about the final cut?
Guest:I was okay with it.
Guest:It was the film we were trying to make.
Guest:There was two scenes that I have to this day tortured myself.
Guest:One that I left in and one that I took out.
Guest:But I don't know if they would have made a huge difference...
Guest:One I took out was this great scene with Hedda Hopper where she sees a soldier, you know, with a one-armed guy, and you start to understand why she was such a right-wing nut, you know, because she was so military, you know, soldier-driven.
Guest:And then the other one was one with Trumbo teaching his daughter about communism, which I left in.
Guest:I cut out the...
Guest:the one-armed soldier one, and I left in the... Now, in retrospect, I might have flipped those.
Guest:Like, it was two scenes that just dog you for a long time.
Guest:And how many people did you talk to that knew Trumbo?
Guest:His daughters were the main people I talked to.
Guest:There wasn't really...
Guest:anybody else and just as you didn't I mean as as just a director you know what are you looking for when you when you ask because like I mean it's on the page right you had this yeah I was the script is there but uh for example they told us a story John McNamara wrote it they told John and I the story about once Trumbo started writing under other names he had a pretty organized racket where he would
Guest:go and pitch his take on a story to get work, sometimes original, but sometimes he would pitch to be a script doctor, but he couldn't be working because he was blacklisted.
Guest:And so he would use somebody else's name and wrote Roman Holiday and The Brave One, but huge, big, award-winning films.
Guest:And then he would also, to help his other writer friends,
Guest:offer to rewrite anything they screwed up.
Guest:He would say, you pay this guy just something to get him by, and I guarantee the results will be good.
Guest:It may not be as good as something I would write, because he was the most highly paid screenwriter of his time.
Guest:He said, but I'll...
Guest:I promise you I'll vouch for them and I'll back them up and rewrite it for you if they don't come through.
Guest:So he had his daughters handling that whole, he became a market for kind of, I don't know what you'd call it, like a go-between between the blacklisted writers and our studios.
Guest:The daughters told us all about that and it wasn't in the script and it was really high pressure and high stakes and there was always, he had supposedly like six different phones and the daughters would pick them up under different names.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:Wow, it's crazy.
Guest:And the details of that, that's the kind of stuff I always push.
Guest:The writers are always a little afraid to go and speak to the real people because it blows whatever concept or structure they- Oh, yeah.
Marc:And then also, then they're going to be bothering you.
Guest:Yeah, and you have to get approval.
Guest:But it's always been worth it.
Guest:Just on this film, we just did Bombshell to talk to the women at Fox.
Guest:It would never have been as good as it turned out, whatever you think of it.
Guest:And also all of them talked.
Guest:They talked to us when they weren't supposed to.
Guest:But that was what the movie was about.
Guest:That's what the movie was about.
Marc:Yeah, I thought it was great.
Marc:And it had good pace to it, and I didn't know the whole story, and it's got powerhouse actors in it.
Marc:So how did that story come together for you?
Marc:Were you attached from the beginning to this?
Marc:It's basically the fall of Roger Ailes, but unfortunately it didn't shut the studio network down.
Marc:But it was a big shift in culture over there.
Guest:It was a big shift.
Guest:It takes place in a year from 2015, summer 2015 to summer 2016.
Guest:It starts with Megyn Kelly taking on Trump in the primaries.
Guest:Recent history.
Guest:Yeah, real recent.
Guest:And pointing out all the horrible things he said about women.
Guest:And it goes through to when Gretchen Carlson, who's been recording all this abuse for that whole year, ends up
Guest:getting fired and then sues him and then it's a Megan Gretchen overlap because it's not until Megan Kelly steps up that they're able to to take down Roger and talk the Murdochs into into firing him but along the way there's a lot of
Guest:A very interesting twist and turns on what I liked about it was just that you think you might know something about what the people at Fox are like, what those women might be like, and what everything we found out was like, oh, there's so much more to what got presented in the press and how they portray themselves.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Part of it came from interviewing a lot of real people to try to get the essence of what went down.
Guest:Charles Randolph wrote it.
Guest:He wrote the big short.
Guest:It came to me through Charlize.
Guest:She had been offered it and wasn't sure she was going to do it.
Guest:much like the mike myers thing she just sent it to me i gave her some notes how'd you know her i knew her from working with her on a tv um pilot idea that a guy had brought her and she wanted help with it and it was a comedic mixed tone sort of thing and we've been trying to get that off the ground we hadn't but we enjoyed the process and so she just sent it as a friend and uh i gave her notes and then she's
Guest:i don't think she was thinking about hiring me to direct until she she's a producer on it she's a producer and it was yeah the you know the the real active producer on it like she was we fell apart she acted the out of megan kelly oh she's she's an amazing actor and she transforms herself entirely both physically with a lot of makeup prosthetic stuff going on but her
Guest:The accent, the attitude, she really went for it.
Guest:But she was also just an incredibly good producing partner on it as well.
Guest:So she brought it to you, and you don't think she had the intention of you directing?
Guest:Not until she read these notes.
Guest:I did another... What was the thrust of it?
Guest:The main note was she was not sure she should do it.
Guest:You know, she just wasn't sure that she could connect with Megyn Kelly.
Guest:And I said, here's why I think you should try, because it's a way of talking about this issue of sexual harassment to people who are Fox News watchers who may not think of themselves as feminists or may even resent being gay.
Guest:asked to think about this sort of progressive idea of women standing up to power, speaking truth to power.
Guest:And I said, that might be a way to, I don't know, just connect this conversation across a much wider audience than people might have expected was possible.
Guest:And maybe that's a way to...
Guest:be a force for change, you know, in some weird way, or at least be a bigger conversation.
Guest:And so that's how I pitched it to her.
Guest:And she said, that sounds pretty interesting.
Guest:Would you direct it?
Guest:Honestly, I was totally stunned.
Guest:I thought she might see me as a comedy person, but I never thought she had seen me as someone who could direct her in a drama.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:But also, I think this, you know, doing the political stuff you did to balance the sort of politics, this is really about politics within a corporate structure.
Guest:It is, but it is trying actually to be about, it's from the women's point of view, and it's actually about what is it, what's it like to be harassed by, in a corporate culture that sort of seems to be part of it, but it turns out, and this happened a year before the Harvey Weinstein news broke, this whole story.
Marc:And Ailes had been doing it for
Marc:Decades.
Guest:And decades.
Guest:But it turns out, obviously, that pattern is not just a right-wing or a left-wing thing.
Guest:Right.
Guest:There's abuse.
Guest:It's a man thing.
Guest:And that's a cross-political thing.
Guest:And we tried to emphasize that.
Guest:But all that said, there is a singularity with Trump and his misogynistic bullshit and Roger Ailes' and the fact that Roger's promoting Trump that whole time.
Marc:The shamelessness.
Guest:of it and the unforgiving the egocentric power addicted entitlement to it you know entitlement to loyalty and even in the film we say in his mind sometimes loyalty meant sexual favors you know but it's also entitled to bully people or just be you know a sort of vaguely culty kind of person who wants to impose their world view on and make you have to reflect back that world view
Marc:And they're such fucking liars.
Marc:And what they'll do to protect their lives is destroy so much.
Guest:And some of that is used to trash the women who in this story is what happens.
Guest:As soon as someone speaks up, there's a smear campaign.
Guest:Yeah, there's that.
Marc:And then there's just this commitment.
Marc:Like those scenes where he's with his wife and the stuff's coming at him.
Marc:And she's going to side with him.
Marc:That codependency, that turn a blind eye or the sort of like
Marc:Not knowing, but knowing business.
Marc:And then just the defending the lie to the point of ruining people is really kind of a, it's malignant and horrible, but it's so human.
Marc:That's the fucked up thing about it.
Marc:And I think that Lithgow plays him with a certain amount of vulnerability.
Guest:I'm just going to say, the way John goes at it, to not just vulnerability, but also even sense of humor.
Guest:He was a very charismatic guy.
Guest:He could even be a sort of father figure to a lot of these people.
Guest:Megyn Kelly was harassed 10 years before our story, and she keeps working and keeps getting promoted that whole time.
Guest:gets out of his eyeline and just stays away from him.
Guest:And then he stops harassing her and she stays and, you know, becomes a star under his guidance.
Guest:But meanwhile, he's harassing other women, you know.
Guest:Right.
Marc:But there was like that weird, interesting little part of the script where you get a quick sort of summation of his backstory and why he, you know, it did kind of give him a human foundation.
Marc:You know, as much of a monster as he was and as much, you know, that you wanted him to get what he got.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:There was an element of sort of like, well, he's a damaged fucking person.
Guest:Well, and that's what we hoped would happen is that you would see that he's an actually much better villain because he's so human.
Guest:And because that's what we're all surrounded by.
Guest:You look at how many of these people rise to power and control a lot of our lives, you know, and politics or anything.
Guest:because they're so egocentric that they become super charismatic and fearless, like kind of entitled so much shameless, and that we as a species, I guess, are attracted to these alpha male kind of things.
Guest:And I really think it is, some of it is...
Guest:a male issue.
Guest:There are certainly women who get to some of those places and are abusive potentially, but it's pretty rare compared to the number of men who are, and how much that overlaps them with the politics.
Marc:And the scene with Margot Robbie, all of it was really good.
Marc:Now, was the Margot Robbie character a real person?
Guest:No, she's a composite representing a lot of the women who had spoken to Paul Weiss or had told women their stories but had not come out in public.
Guest:And they're anonymous.
Guest:And the only way to tell their stories was using a composite.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Well, I mean, I thought it was very compelling.
Marc:And I love seeing the work and, you know, and learning about the stuff.
Marc:And it was...
Guest:I think it's good for men to see it.
Guest:I actually talk about how some men come up and say, I kind of thought I understood what this is.
Guest:And there's an empathy factor.
Marc:Well, we're lacking empathy because we don't live that life.
Marc:And I think that when you see a scene like...
Marc:I think the scene with Margot and John, where he's interviewing her, and the way that unfolds, where you see even this sort of, just the power dynamic, the abuse of the power dynamic can shatter a woman.
Marc:And you can see...
Marc:It happened.
Marc:Like, I think that's the larger disconnect for men is that, you know, the woman's in a situation.
Marc:She's being asked to do something that may not be sexually, you know, contact or even, you know, it's devious.
Marc:It's more of a power control thing.
Marc:But they don't know, you know, if you don't choose to not do it and you just sort of, I think the pace you gave that, the time you gave that to happen was great because,
Marc:you can see her spirit get crushed.
Guest:That's exactly right.
Marc:By the compromise she decided to make because she didn't know how to say no and she felt that.
Marc:If she did, it would be detrimental to her career.
Guest:And it's exactly what we heard from women we talked to, that he would push them a little bit and a little bit more and a little bit more until they've crossed a line they never thought they would cross.
Guest:And then you see it in her face.
Guest:oh man, I was just kind of, he would do this thing like make women, they called it beware of the spin.
Guest:He would make them stand up and give them a spin and he'd check out their wardrobe or whatever.
Guest:And she thought that's what it was about and then it slowly gets worse and worse until it's so far.
Guest:And then it's like, oh my God, I've gotten to this,
Guest:And now he has a secret, you know, he knows you'll keep because you won't.
Guest:She's not going to she's not going to want to talk about this.
Guest:Now there's shame involved.
Guest:And he it's an incredibly weird, creepy, crafty manipulation to sort of groom someone into now being in his cult.
Marc:And not so much not that uncommon within the range of toxic masculinity.
Guest:I feel like it's surprisingly common and it's, you know, our film is not going to, there's so much more to talk about in terms of how widely problematic this really is.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:It's the tip of the iceberg, you know, this is just one thing.
Guest:And this is interesting because it was a year before, again, before Harvey Weinstein.
Guest:These women came out.
Guest:Gretchen Carlson is pretty amazing for coming out with no expectation of a public support system.
Guest:Not that every woman's going to feel supported by the Me Too movement now, but back then, no chance of that, especially against such a powerful guy.
Guest:In fact, the opposite of the chance that everyone's just going to attack you.
Guest:And a powerful smear campaign hit squad that will come at you.
Marc:Still.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, I was working on a bit about that, that how there is a toxic masculinity spectrum that I think most men are on really where you like that at the at the far end of it is like just basic insensitivity and lack of conscious respect.
Marc:And that and then the other side of it is murder.
Guest:Well, it's not wrong.
Guest:I've been reading a lot of literature in this field, and that's exactly right, that in sense of entitlement, there's nothing more dangerous than a wounded ego of a person who felt they were entitled to the woman's attention.
Guest:And men, in this case, he was punishing women in a purely severe way, but unfortunately, other men punished them in much way.
Marc:A generalized sense of that with a certain contingency.
Guest:Yeah, I think so.
Marc:With the NCEL community or these younger people that sort of communally feel rejected by women and use that to power their hatred.
Guest:That is spot on.
Guest:And listen, we're men.
Guest:I always feel like I'm glad I'm talking about it.
Guest:And it definitely has changed me going at it.
Guest:But women know this stuff.
Guest:I think women that talk to us about our film are glad we're making it.
Guest:But it's also like I'm always...
Guest:nervous about trying to explain any of that.
Guest:I can sort of talk about my own position about this stuff.
Marc:I was a huge asshole.
Marc:I don't think you were.
Guest:No, I definitely was not sensitive enough to what women deal with.
Guest:I definitely remember as a young person just...
Guest:I don't know, just not getting what we do, how we behave towards women.
Guest:It's an empathy deficit.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, I think that's... And particularly once it goes up the spectrum towards more narcissistic behavior, which is almost by definition...
Guest:Less empathetic.
Guest:Conscience at deficit.
Marc:There's a big shift from the empathy deficit to the conscience deficit.
Marc:To pure evil.
Marc:But that's the narcissistic trip into the psychotic trip.
Marc:You're making a lot of political films now and they are dealing with
Marc:Well, there's tribalism, but there's also, like, here's what fascinates me is that how can they be so detached from the actual, like, the idea of democracy and tolerance and equality and all that stuff, and now it's just about, like, winning.
Marc:And it's about, like, it's not about, like, it's sort of, like, do they know what most people want?
Guest:That's a good question.
Guest:I think they're...
Guest:There is an addiction to power.
Guest:There's an addiction to being relevant.
Guest:There's addiction to feeling like you have your hands on the levers of things.
Guest:And I think it's I think that there starts to be this rationale that, OK, we're.
Guest:We may not be serving some liberal, not necessarily specifically lefty liberal, but the idea of liberal democracy, but we'll get back there once we win the power to make the world we want it to be.
Guest:It will be an American democratic founding father.
Guest:This is the right thinking.
Guest:The right thinking is that it's a means, the end justifying the means.
Guest:But in the meantime, they've gotten so good at stoking fear and playing off of fear and demonizing people on the left that to them, it seems like an existential battle for how then shall we move forward?
Guest:Who's going to be in charge of how it all goes?
Guest:And let's not let those socialist, communist, subhuman lefties...
Guest:So when we were doing recounts, we interviewed a lot of the real people who were involved in that story.
Guest:And one of them was this guy, Brad Blakeman, who had taken credit for engineering the Brooks Brothers riot, which was that was the nickname for what they pretended was a grassroots thing where local Floridians were banging on the glass while they were hand counting the votes to decide if, you know, in Miami-Dade to decide who, you know, whether whether the election had been fair or not.
Guest:It shut down the vote.
Guest:The vote never got to happen because the local election people decided that it was unsafe all of a sudden.
Guest:And the guy who took credit for it, you know, was this guy, Brad Blankman, but the guy who wanted credit for it was Roger Stone.
Guest:In the movie, we have Tom Wilkinson playing James Baker walk into the room when he's first sent down there saying, get me Roger Stone, who was already a famous dark arts dude since Nixon.
Guest:He was part of the creep world, all those guys.
Guest:And when we talked to Roger later and we interviewed both, I got to talk to Roger Stone a couple years ago, but when we interviewed Blakeman, we said, why do you want credit for this?
Guest:This is like...
Guest:actual unconstitutional behavior.
Guest:These people are trying to get to the essence of making this election feel like it has integrity.
Guest:You're trying to diminish that.
Guest:What's the upside of that?
Guest:And he said, dude, we won.
Guest:We like winning.
Guest:And if we don't lie, cheat, and steal before the left does, because that's all the left does is lie, cheat, and steal, we'll lose.
Guest:So they believe that.
Guest:So they believe that.
Guest:They believe they've taught themselves that they've demonized
Guest:in their minds, this vast left-wing conspiracy to subvert what they think is American, at least in these dark arts dudes' minds.
Guest:And I think it's now, these used to be the fringe guys.
Guest:Roger Stone used to be seen as a fringe guy.
Guest:But now, a lot of them have risen.
Marc:With the advent of internet communities.
Marc:Absolutely.
Marc:You know, the fringe is now the mainstream.
Guest:The fringe is the mainstream.
Guest:And Donald Trump was in the, and do you remember when I was growing up, there were the John Birchers, you know, who were always seen as the crazy people.
Guest:Well, that's, Donald Trump now makes that sort of approach.
Guest:Yeah, the John Birchers and the LaRouches.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:And now they're, now they have the, it's like, it's like Clockwork Orange going back and finding out, oh, now they're the policemen.
Marc:Well, it's like, it's dismantling the, they're sort of,
Marc:Dismantling any real barometer of truth or fact through sort of the persistence of conspiratorial thinking and then kind of throwing into question any sort of documentation of anything.
Marc:And because the internet moves so quickly and because so many people only take in a fraction of the facts, it's enough to mobilize brains.
Marc:People are volunteering for a pretty good brain fucking that they're not gonna recover from.
Guest:All you need to spread is a little doubt, a little confusion, and a little fear as a propagandist.
Guest:If you really want to delegitimize anything, and it's so easy to do that.
Guest:What's hard, there's actually even a quote in All the Way, the Bryan Cranston thing from an old congressman.
Guest:The LBJ thing?
Guest:Yeah, the LBJ thing.
Guest:You directed that, right?
Guest:Any jackass can kick a barn down, but it takes a carpenter to build one.
Guest:Anybody can kick down the legitimacy of something, but to build it up takes years of statecraft and diplomacy and commitment to the ideals that all are held together with just...
Guest:you know, bits of faith in the system.
Guest:They're often not stamped in stone anywhere.
Guest:And once you start delegitimizing that, and it's pretty easy to do that.
Guest:And I've been fascinated with the Roger Stones of the world, the sort of wandering dark samurai killers of institutions is the way I look at it.
Guest:And this is why I want to do Kent State, because Kent State was the the result of just very negative fear based rhetoric to demonize kids who were not.
Guest:They were called communists, local outside agitators, subhuman, you know, brown shirt.
Guest:They were like using, you know, they would call these progressive people Nazis to dehumanize them.
Guest:And they were local Ohio kids.
Guest:None of the people who were killed or wounded that day were anything other than just commuter kids from Ohio.
Guest:It wasn't Columbia or Berkeley.
Guest:It was people that Nixon had called bums and the local governor called brown shirt communists, whatever, mixing all his metaphors.
Guest:And so dehumanized those kids that these other kids thought, oh, I'm just going to aim and pull the trigger 67 times.
Guest:The name of our thing is 67 shots in 13 seconds and killed four kids and shot a total of 13.
Guest:So that's the ultimate conclusion of this kind of dehumanization is people start to look at other people as worthy of destruction.
Guest:And that's...
Guest:I think it's worth talking about all this stuff, so I appreciate you asking me.
Marc:Yeah, man.
Marc:So that's the core of your curiosity.
Guest:I'm really interested in how bad ideas spread.
Guest:There's people just walking around shooting Jews.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Whose idea was that?
Guest:Guess what?
Guest:That's been a bad idea that's been spread for centuries.
Marc:But the dehumanization is part of it.
Marc:Absolutely.
Marc:Through rhetoric that enables the worst kind of fascism and genocide to happen.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:That's what I love about Jojo Rabbit.
Guest:I don't know why that film just got to me.
Guest:It's all about that.
Guest:It's all about the way this little kid is taught to see Jews.
Guest:He even keeps a book of all the dehumanizing terminology and stuff.
Marc:And humans are so susceptible to it when somebody leads them that way.
Guest:We're gullible.
Guest:Again, if you play to our fears or insecurities about the truth, you can sow a lot of dark.
Guest:Well, keep doing the good work, the big work there, Jay.
Guest:Thank you, Mark.
Guest:Thank you, man.
Marc:Okay, folks.
Marc:The movie is Bombshell.
Marc:That was a nice conversation I had with that guy.
Marc:He's a very decent man.
Marc:No music.
Marc:I'm on the road.
Marc:And I'm just hanging out because I don't start shooting Respect until Wednesday.
Marc:I was supposed to start on Monday, but I didn't.
Marc:But the prop guy gave me a little Fender Strat to fuck around with in my hotel room.
Marc:But I don't have to hook up to him now.
Marc:But I think better.
Marc:Yeah, it's a moment of silence.
Marc:For all the sick and suffering cats everywhere.
Marc:And a moment of appreciation to all the people that take care of those cats.
Marc:And also a moment of reflection for people that have to, you know, follow through and do what's right to end a cat's suffering and to people who lost cats.
Marc:I say, La Fonda lives!