BONUS The Friday Show - Where'd the Time Go?
Guest:the bigger mistake you made was to say, hey, why don't you come on the show and then give me five or six extra days to think about it?
Guest:That was a terrible idea on your part.
Marc:You're saying it's a terrible idea as though I think I'm going to rebut you.
Marc:I would not like to do that.
Guest:Hey, Chris.
Guest:Hey, Brendan.
Guest:It's so weird.
Guest:So, everyone, we're recording on a Tuesday.
Guest:I don't know if you want to tell everyone this.
Marc:Sure, yeah.
Marc:It's funny because we've never recorded on a Friday, even though this is the Friday show.
Marc:That's never happened.
Guest:I mean, it'd just be hard logistically to upload it.
Guest:But yeah, it feels weird to talk to you on a Tuesday.
Guest:I feel like the world hasn't beaten me down as much as it has by Thursday.
Guest:By Thursday, I am like...
Marc:This has been pretty accelerated, though.
Marc:I feel pretty beaten down by today.
Guest:I mean, man, I glanced at the news.
Guest:I was like, oh boy, this is not going great.
Guest:I think I have to fill up my gas tank right now because I think it's going to be jacked up in a minute.
Marc:I had a text to a buddy this morning and I said, this is one of those none of this looks promising days.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Don't look at the 401k.
Guest:Just be like, all right, I think I'm just going to find a movie theater to hide out in sort of thing.
Guest:But yeah, it feels, I don't know, I feel a little more invigorated than I normally do.
Guest:Like I always equate my life to a Superman movie.
Guest:And like usually the world is pounding me into the ground like nuclear man is to Superman into the moon.
Guest:That's usually how the world is.
Guest:But right now feel great.
Guest:Feel real good.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But then you're later on, you're going to find out that you're like, um, you're, you're red kryptonite Superman, like from Superman three.
Marc:And you're actually just being a total dick to everybody.
Marc:You're like flicking peanuts at guys in the bar.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:By the way, I had, I have to tell this story.
Guest:It's a short story.
Guest:I had dinner with a family friend recently.
Guest:This person, known me my whole life, knows my parents since, you know, they got met up and everything.
Guest:So we were having dinner at lovely time.
Guest:We're not talking about my parents at all.
Guest:And I happened to bring up my parents just in passing.
Guest:And this person looks me straight in the eye and is like, oh, your parents,
Guest:What a bunch of assholes.
Guest:And can I just say, my response to them was like, you know, I've been on that corner for a long time.
Guest:It's nice to have some company.
Guest:But it's like, I think that's at the core of why I think I am an asshole.
Guest:Because if...
Guest:If two assholes have a kid, that kid's just going to be an asshole, right?
Guest:That's how I think of all people.
Guest:So I think that's the root of why I think of I'm an asshole.
Guest:I like that we're getting down to brass tacks here.
Guest:Yes, yeah, yeah.
Guest:We're doing the heavy lifting, I gotta say.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And yeah, how was your weekend?
Guest:Did you watch the Oscars?
Marc:I did watch the Oscars.
Marc:I agreed with Mark wholeheartedly.
Marc:I really loved the show.
Marc:I loved that.
Marc:It was really, to me, it was a rebuke of the many years, many years of the show kind of being relaunched every year.
Marc:Oh, we got to do this.
Marc:Oh, the ratings went down.
Marc:We got to do this.
Marc:Oh, this, we're going to have, you know.
Marc:Very reactionary.
Marc:yeah this this this is bouncing from one idea to the next and we're they're going to change up this they're going to do this with the way they're going to present it differently and oh we won't we won't remember that year where they cut out the like important categories when they were like you know oh we do those during the commercial break it's like that's the whole reason i'm watching i'd like to know who won best sound please you know
Marc:This felt like a like you can make the show good if you just do the awards, have a funny person out there, have presenters that say some funny things every few times.
Marc:You have a couple of moments of entertainment, musicality, dance, whatever that are, you know, fine.
Marc:Like you don't have to belabor them.
Marc:You're like, OK, we just gave an award to the Broccolis.
Marc:So now here's James Bond songs.
Marc:fine you know like i don't have like it just was one of those things watching and going like you don't have to reinvent the wheel people just like i think that show probably you could go find one of the bob hope hosted oscars and it probably seemed a lot like that like conan's kind of like a bob hope type of guy uh more so than billy crystal and you know i i feel like it it had that old school feeling to it
Guest:Yeah, yeah, I agree.
Guest:And the presenters were great.
Guest:The acceptance speeches were great, especially one of Sean Baker's acceptance speeches, basically saying, just go to the theater.
Guest:He was saying what you say.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Basically like cribbing me, like just go, go take your kids, go to a movie theater.
Guest:Like I loved it.
Guest:I, I, I was, I was in love with the guy.
Guest:And so just rooting for him at that point.
Guest:And he swept the goddamn Oscars, which is a shock, but, uh, but yeah, really, really loved it.
Marc:I believe I read somewhere he's the first person since Walt Disney to win four Oscars, four different Oscars on the same night.
Marc:Crazy, right?
Guest:I mean, just absolutely.
Guest:And I don't even think Walt Disney won for the same thing.
Guest:I think it's just like a couple of different things.
Guest:I think this is the only time someone has won for four things that they did, which is...
Marc:It's gotta be because he's the editor of the film as well.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Like that's the, you know, I guess there's probably some guy who could have done it.
Marc:Who's also the DP, you know, but I can't think of any.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, so what he won for directing, editing, writing.
Guest:Oh, writing.
Guest:And then best picture.
Yeah.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Oh man.
Guest:And man, his editing acceptance speech was hilarious.
Guest:Like, oh, I saved this picture in editing.
Guest:Just great.
Guest:And Ben Stiller, man.
Marc:Ben Stiller.
Marc:He's so good at it.
Marc:It's so funny because I agree totally with Mark.
Marc:When I saw Ben Stiller was coming out, I was immediately like, oh, okay, this is going to be good.
Guest:Has Ben Stiller never been on WTF?
Marc:No, he was on a, like, in the first year.
Marc:Oh, no kidding.
Marc:Episode 80-something, yeah.
Marc:Oh, awesome.
Marc:And they talked a lot about Tropic Thunder, yeah.
Marc:Because it had only been out, like, you know, it was like a year and a half before it had come out.
Marc:No kidding.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:Yeah, and even back then, Mark was like, that's the greatest movie.
Guest:That's great.
Guest:That's excellent.
Marc:Well, Randy wrote in to say, congrats to Adrian Brody for winning best character actor.
Marc:I appreciated that joke.
Marc:And Laurie also said, just want to send a quick note on what I thought was the most incredible slash hilarious part of the ceremony.
Marc:Adrian Brody giving an incredibly long, passionate and often saccharine speech with Sebastian Stan as fake Donald Trump smirking in the background.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Every time the camera did a close up of Brody, it was also a close up of fake Trump made me genuinely laugh out loud.
Marc:I did not notice it.
Marc:I think I think I was busy texting you about Brody's speech while he was in it.
Marc:So I did not notice the fake Trump in the background, but I'm glad that happened.
Guest:Yeah, that was wonderful.
Marc:I also, I wanted to mention this.
Marc:Somebody wrote in about, remember a couple of weeks ago, I was bringing up, we were talking about the movie Stick, and I brought up that stuntman, Dar Robinson, and I said he did this.
Marc:this crazy stunt that i remember from stick and i had the detail of it slightly mixed up and jason wrote in to say i must have watched the same doc about dar robinson you did when i was a kid but i remember them doing the stunt with some sort of bungee cord i remember them doing it first with a thicker safe cord
Marc:Then for the actual shot, they used a much sketchier thin one that you wouldn't see on camera.
Marc:And I guess that's why they were so concerned about his safety.
Marc:And I went and hunted this documentary.
Marc:I said, this has to be something that exists out there.
Marc:And sure enough, it was.
Marc:And it was a special documentary.
Marc:called The Ultimate Stuntman, a tribute to Dar Robinson.
Marc:And I guess it probably just aired on, you know, UHF TV, which is what I often watched.
Marc:And the narrator was Chuck Norris.
Marc:And it was just all about this guy as a stuntman, what movies he did.
Marc:And they spend a good deal of time on stick because that was his, like, one time he actually played a role.
Marc:He wasn't just the stunt double.
Marc:He was the bad guy, one of the bad guys of the film, the henchman type.
Marc:And yes...
Marc:My memory was that he did a free fall off the thing with no restraint and fell onto a net or something.
Marc:But no, the reality, which is what Jason pointed out, was that they used no net or crash pad.
Marc:So if the stunt went wrong, he would have fallen to his death.
Marc:He would have splatted on the ground.
Marc:And it was because they wanted to get this shot of him falling backwards off the building with nothing beneath him.
Guest:Hmm.
Marc:And he does.
Marc:And it's a great, if you go watch that doc, which is just sitting there on, on YouTube or whatever, it's a, it's funny.
Marc:Like I had this very distinct memory of him emptying the gun while he's falling.
Marc:And apparently there was the stunt man, Dar Robinson's idea.
Marc:Like he was not supposed to do that.
Marc:And he's talking to Burr Reynolds and it's like,
Marc:I think I should, should I shoot you?
Marc:Shoot at you?
Marc:While, while I'm falling?
Marc:And Burr Reynolds is like, dude, I want you to not die.
Marc:Like, I don't want you thinking about anything else.
Marc:Like, just do the stunt.
Marc:Focus on what?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And he's like...
Marc:I really feel like this guy would empty the clip.
Marc:Like, I feel like he just tried to get them all off so that maybe kill you while he's dying too.
Marc:And Burt Reynolds is like, you look, it's your stunt.
Marc:You do whatever you want.
Marc:And sure enough, this guy like empties the whole gun as he's falling and the stunt goes off successfully.
Marc:And then they go and they show the camera following Burt Reynolds, like down the hallway.
Marc:So he could go out and, you know, meet the guy and,
Marc:as he's coming up back up into the the base camp and he comes up and he hugs burt reynolds and he's like i got them all off that was the first thing he was excited to tell him is that he he shot all the rounds incredible yeah yeah so thank you jason thanks for jogging that memory and and i did go uh find that uh that that one hour television special on dar robinson
Marc:Um, speaking of, uh, of, of swarthy individuals, uh, we had Don Johnson on the show this week.
Marc:I know he has been a favorite of yours lately, Chris, cause you watched a rebel Ridge.
Marc:You, uh, you know, we both dip back into Django Unchained.
Marc:So yeah, we've had a lot of Don Johnson in our lives lately.
Guest:Uh, Don Johnson.
Guest:Can, can I just ask like how many like people do you, women do you think he has slept with?
Guest:Like, Oh,
Guest:I mean, I'm not sure that we would be able to count.
Guest:Just like, what a time to be alive.
Marc:Also, he was Don Johnson.
Guest:Right, exactly.
Guest:Just like the, like a charm, and he's also charming.
Guest:Like, just, what an incredible guy.
Guest:What an absolutely incredible guy.
Guest:Like, doing acid, and just like, man, the stories that guy has.
Marc:I saw somebody say, somebody say in reaction to the episode, uh,
Marc:They said, wow, man, Don Johnson, he's been there and back and bought all the T-shirts.
Marc:And I was like, yeah, that sounds about right.
Guest:Oh, man, what a guy.
Guest:And also him basically, you know, confirming that Dr. Odyssey is a dream.
Guest:I popped about that because I was like, oh, that was what Chris said.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Basically, he's saying it, too.
Marc:He's like, but I think a dream.
Guest:I know.
Guest:It's just like it's just a weird thing to keep saying about this show that is on ABC.
Guest:So, yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Basically.
Guest:Also, how about his story about bumping into Jimi Hendrix?
Guest:Like just like coming out of the bathroom, doing some coke and there's Jimi Hendrix.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Holy shit, man.
Marc:He's definitely one of those guys that has a lot of those.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:I feel like he only scratched the surface with what he told Mark.
Guest:I also, I find it fun when a guest doesn't know who Mark is.
Guest:Like, I don't know about you.
Guest:Like, I don't know if you were like, oh, I don't know.
Guest:I'm kind of put off about it.
Guest:But I think it's fun.
Guest:I think it's fun when someone doesn't really know who Mark is.
Guest:And they kind of just get, you know, below surface level stuff real quick.
Guest:And so I found that really enjoyable.
Marc:Oh, no, I always I always enjoy it because I mean, there's times where it could go pear shaped like with with our friend Sir Ben.
Marc:But but but to me, one of the things about it is then you're you're especially if you know right away.
Marc:Right.
Marc:If the person does, you know, if you get a sign right away that they don't really know much about him.
Marc:then that becomes part of the journey of it.
Marc:It's like, do they, does this wind up working for them as much as it typically does for Mark or the audience?
Marc:Like, can they come around to being like, oh, I totally get this guy now, which happens.
Marc:Like that's, that's the thing.
Marc:It's like, you can get to the end of an episode and be like, that guy, that guy was totally comfortable talking to Mark by that point.
Marc:He didn't think like, who is this guy?
Marc:What's his deal?
Marc:You know, he got him.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, look, I equate it to like, oh, you go for a walk with someone.
Guest:Is it just a loop around the park?
Guest:Or are you doing an eight mile really hard expedition and you get back to the parking lot and you're like, wow, I can't believe that happened.
Guest:That was great.
Guest:Let's do it again.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:also does if you know if he doesn't come around to it you know you can tell the guy at the beginning of the episode he's a little like you know feeling it's feeling out process he's trying to see who this guy is he's saying some things he's not really fully committing to things particularly like about like the buddhism and the meditation he's just kind of like simple surface level stuff like i do it and it works and then he gets really into it later like so that's part of like okay now i'm comfortable i'm 40 50 minutes in i could talk about this stuff but then also he starts like talking shit about people
Marc:Michael Mann.
Marc:He's like, yeah, that guy thinks he's a gift to everybody cinema wise.
Marc:And I'm like, oh, all right, here we go with some spicy stuff.
Marc:Yeah, for sure.
Marc:He's like, he's OK.
Marc:He made OK movies.
Marc:There was that.
Marc:There was James Caan.
Marc:And then Mark's like, who are your friends, Don?
Guest:Oh, just great.
Guest:I love Mark, like, trying to be like, hey, Frank Zappa, huh?
Guest:Like, nah, didn't hang out with us.
Guest:Yeah, right, right, right.
Guest:Loved it.
Guest:Loved it.
Guest:It was really just, I enjoy those sort of, those just expeditions that Mark does.
Guest:It's really a fun time, man.
Marc:Well, and it's also because Mark approaches it like, this is why I wanted to talk to this guy, right?
Marc:Like, you know, it is...
Marc:I have to I don't know I don't know that anybody would trust me on this because obviously like I produce the show I put you know put things together like I have a say in who the guests are and you know thumbs up thumbs down that kind of thing but like
Marc:I just can't assure you more clearly that the fact that Don Johnson was out there promoting Dr. Odyssey had anything to do with him being on our show.
Marc:Like, it's like, oh, great.
Marc:I'm glad that that's a thing that's happening out there.
Marc:But like Don Johnson has been a name on the list.
Marc:He's just like a guy.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Like, like, hey, when we can get like, you know, Mark and I every so often sit down and just kind of call a list like, hey, about these names, this person, you never talk to this person.
Marc:Don Johnson's just been on the list.
Marc:So, like, it's like, okay, this is the chance to talk to him?
Marc:Fine.
Marc:And, like, they talked about the show for 30 seconds or whatever.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:And like Mark said, I think if you think back to, you know, he and I recorded a bonus episode right after Don Johnson had left the garage.
Marc:And, you know, he said Don Johnson was like, ah, we didn't really...
Marc:talk about the show.
Marc:And he was like, he's, Mark said to him, he's like, we did a little, but like, what more are we going to say about it?
Marc:And Don Jones was like, yeah, I guess you're right.
Guest:Also like the, just the fact that, yeah, I get it.
Guest:He's doing probably press for this show, but,
Guest:the interview that you're getting with Mark is going to be completely fucking different than him being on any show ever.
Guest:Like, show me a show where Don Johnson talks about, you know...
Guest:all the things that he talked about.
Guest:Talk about Michael Mann having okay movies.
Guest:Talk about bumping into Jimi Hendrix after doing a bump of Coke.
Marc:Like, like there's no equivalent.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But that was, that was always the bigger fight I used to have about that with Mark was that he would get, you know, bummed out when other shows would get a guest that we had.
Marc:And I was always the thing that I had to say was like, sure, fine, but they're going to do their thing and you're doing yours.
Marc:And it's that never the twain shall meet.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I also loved just his turn of phrase where, hey, you know, look, after all these years, I'm still on the menu.
Guest:It's like, oh, look, look, look, people still want me in their show, want me in their movie, and like, I'll oblige them.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Just really great.
Marc:I love the thing, too, about his daughter that he was like, yeah, I used to think everything she did was great.
Marc:Now I watch him, I wouldn't have made that choice.
Guest:Ah!
Guest:love that just give so no fucks like i don't know dude how much would you like to watch madam webb with don johnson oh my god i think if i had to make a wish i think that's what it would be like hey don johnson can we watch in a theater uh madam webb and
Guest:Let's just talk through it.
Guest:I want to hear your thoughts.
Guest:I want to know if he watched it, if he went to the premiere of Madam Web, that would be great.
Marc:I think it would have to be like us, Don Johnson and Adam Scott, who's always the guest on those type of shows.
Marc:But then he's also in that movie.
Marc:So like, I think I think that would be the key.
Marc:If you had any reaction to the stuff you heard on the show this week, you can always send us a comment.
Marc:The link is in the episode description.
Marc:I have a lot of stuff from the listeners about, you know, the stuff we've been talking about on the show, one night movies, and then also the idea of movies that were one and done.
Marc:I got a lot of stuff from you, but I don't have time to get into it this week because I wanted to bring a guest on.
Marc:And this was in relation to something that we were talking about
Marc:Oh, a few weeks ago about the kind of the stuck culture.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And and the and I think this was in reference to Saturday Night Live's 50th anniversary, pointing out how far away we are from the 15th anniversary, which is 35 years.
Marc:versus how far the 15th anniversary was from the beginning of the show and how at the time that felt like a very large gap and now not so much.
Marc:I brought up the movie Back to the Future and how the 30 years Marty McFly travels back seems like so much more has changed in that period of time than the time Marty lived in until now.
Marc:And I got a response from someone and this person was writing to me because I had just been on
Marc:his podcast.
Marc:This is Steve Morris, who co-hosts the show The Cinephiles with John Rocha.
Marc:And Steve and John invited me on, as you heard me say, to do the three-part episode on Mad Max Fury Road.
Marc:And all three of those are posted.
Marc:You can go listen to those whenever you'd want.
Marc:But Steve wrote to me to thank me for coming on.
Marc:And in the end of the email, he said, I have to say this.
Marc:You are entirely wrong about Back to the Future.
Marc:The difference between today and the 80s is way bigger than the 80s are to the 50s.
Marc:And I got to tell you, this kind of blew my mind because I just...
Marc:Never thought of it.
Marc:I just always just assumed based on like lived experience.
Marc:Oh, well, it's just such a small gap from when we were kids to now.
Marc:My kid could easily survive in the 80s versus like going from the 80s back to the 50s.
Marc:It never occurred to me that that would be possible.
Marc:A thought.
Marc:And the fact that Steve was so adamant about it, I was like, oh, I'm going to I'm going to learn something here.
Marc:Like there's a take here to have.
Marc:I'd like to hear this take.
Marc:And so I just I stopped Steve cold.
Marc:I didn't want to hear what he had to say about it over email.
Marc:I said, will you come on the Friday show and explain this to both me and Chris?
Marc:And so Steve was gracious enough to do that.
Marc:And so right now we are going to be joined by Steve Morris of the Cinephiles podcast, who has his take on
Marc:on the 80s versus today and why that is such a bigger gap than going in the other direction.
Marc:so steve morris welcome to the friday show thank you very much it's good to be here i got that email from you and i just put the brakes on i said hang on can you do this on the show because i am i am legitimately it's like one of the more interesting ideas i would love to actually have my brain changed on this so i give you the stage right now to kind of
Marc:dig into the anthropology of time and space and why the 50s is a shorter jump to the 80s, which also, by the way, we should say, you have a little bit of a leg up here on your argument because-
Marc:It is technically less time like the 50s to the 80s is 30 years and the 80s to now is 40, which I thought was the big deal.
Marc:Like, oh, my gosh, this 40 years.
Marc:No, nothing has changed in 40 years relative to the previous eras.
Marc:But you're saying, no, flat out.
Marc:This is a crazy different world.
Marc:So let us know what your thought is on that.
Guest:So not only do I think it's a crazy different world if you go 40 years, I think it's just as crazy if you reduce it to 30 and make it in the mid-90s.
Guest:And here's the thing.
Guest:Not only do I think that you made a mistake in terms of this judgment about what's the bigger jump, but the bigger mistake you made was to say, hey, why don't you come on the show and then give me five or six extra days to think about it?
Guest:That was a terrible idea.
Marc:No, you're saying it's a terrible idea as though I think I'm going to rebut you.
Marc:I would not like to do that.
Marc:I think people mistake how this is how my brain actually works.
Marc:Like, I just say a thing.
Marc:I say like, yeah, hey, you know, horses shouldn't wear pants or something like that.
Marc:And then somebody...
Marc:says, no, this is actually why they should.
Marc:And I'm like, oh, tell me more.
Marc:So I really would like to get your full thesis on this.
Marc:And I'm already fascinated.
Marc:So I'd like to hear the details.
Guest:So here's the, I actually, the more I thought about this, the more I went, this is actually, there are profound changes in our world in terms of the way kids are growing up today, in terms of the way we interact with the universe around us, that I actually think this kind of thought experiment does a lot to illustrate.
Guest:And so here's where I started, is I went, okay,
Guest:I was born in 1968.
Guest:So in 1985, I was 17.
Guest:So I'm essentially Marty McFly age.
Guest:My dad was born in 1940.
Guest:So in 1955, he's 15 years old.
Guest:And my son is born in 2011.
Guest:So in 2025, he's 14.
Guest:So he's a couple of years younger, but he's heading in the direction.
Guest:So what we're really talking about is, is it easier for me to go back to my dad's era
Guest:and exist, or is it easier for my son to go back to the mid eighties or even the mid nineties and exist?
Guest:That's what we're really talking about.
Guest:And here's where I started.
Guest:It's like, okay, what was my dad doing when he was growing up?
Guest:What were his life experiences that he takes to the point where he gets to 1955?
Guest:Well, my dad after school was going out, he's playing with his friends.
Guest:He was riding his bike.
Guest:He went, maybe he had little league, he had to pick up baseball game, pick up touch football game.
Guest:What was I doing after school?
Guest:I was doing the exact same thing.
Guest:And just like my dad, I had to go home when the lights came on, when the streetlights came on, because that was time to go home.
Guest:And that is the experience of most kids for about 50, 60 years.
Guest:And yeah, my dad, when he was a little kid, only could listen to radio shows, didn't get a TV until the early 50s.
Guest:So that's maybe a little bit different, but a lot of the stuff is the same.
Guest:Compare that to my kid.
Guest:Today, kids spend almost zero time by themselves with other kids.
Guest:They are supervised the vast majority of the time.
Guest:And of course, this is different depending on which region you're growing up in.
Guest:I'm in Los Angeles and liberal California and like different communities have different stuff.
Guest:But the amount of time that kids spend unsupervised.
Guest:is way, way less.
Guest:So Marty McFly and me, by the time I was 17, had spent a lot of time alone.
Guest:And the biggest element of this for me is conflict resolution.
Guest:When we were kids, people would tell us, hey, if someone's being mean to you, find an adult.
Guest:Did you guys ever go find an adult?
Guest:He found a rock.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The lesson that we had was you are on your own.
Guest:Yeah, there is an adult.
Guest:But to go complain to an adult is to snitch.
Guest:It is actually to violate the kid code.
Guest:And a perfect example of this is another movie from 1985, which is The Breakfast Club, one of my favorite films of all time, where you have a bunch of high school kids who are at each other's throats for almost the entire movie until the teacher walks in.
Guest:As soon as the adult comes into the room, they all unite against the adult.
Guest:That is not the world our kids are in today.
Guest:And again, this varies culturally.
Guest:But my kid was taught a whole bunch of lessons about conflict resolution.
Guest:And one of the big ones was find an adult.
Guest:And do kids today go and find an adult?
Guest:They absolutely do.
Guest:They do.
Guest:Now, again, this could vary depending on the kid, depending on the school, depending on the parents and all that stuff.
Guest:But there are way fewer parents where the kid says, hey, this kid was mean to me.
Guest:And the dad goes, hey, you know what you gotta do, Junior?
Guest:You gotta punch that bully right in the kisser.
Guest:That's what you gotta do.
Guest:We don't have that.
Guest:That's not the advice kids are getting anymore.
Marc:Well, I was just thinking about that from Back to the Future.
Marc:Like, that's the conflict resolution in the film.
Guest:That is what, exactly.
Guest:Of the 80s.
Guest:You have to stand up to the bully.
Guest:Yeah.
Yeah.
Guest:And you think about like, what was Marty McFly?
Guest:Marty McFly is the child of a loser family who is out.
Guest:He's the coolest kid in the family.
Guest:He is out on his skateboard all the time.
Guest:If he got into trouble when he was seven, when he was 11, when he was 12.
Guest:Did his dad come and help him out?
Guest:Did George McFly come and resolve conflicts for his son?
Guest:Absolutely not.
Guest:Marty McFly had to deal with all that shit himself and he had done it his entire life because he was out on the street like I was and like my dad was all the time dealing with this.
Guest:One of the really basic things –
Guest:is that Marty McFly knew his neighborhood.
Guest:Like I knew every single little corner of my neighborhood.
Guest:I knew it was a good place to hide behind Matt Rosen's house down in that ditch because no one would come there.
Guest:Like the knowledge of where you live when we were kids was huge because that's where you spend all your time.
Guest:That is not where kids today spend all their time.
Guest:So even just getting around the neighborhood is tougher.
Yeah.
Marc:Well, Marty was born in, you're saying you're about the same age, so he's born in 68 or 69, depending on, I don't think we ever get how old he is.
Marc:What's interesting to me about what you're saying, what it's making me think, is that how much of this perception that I brought to this do you think is based on something faulty about Back to the Future?
Marc:A movie that I have praised to the heavens, but this is making me wonder, like, based on your own experience, like...
Marc:Being having the birth year is roughly around the same time.
Marc:If you had to go back to 1955 when you were 16 or 17, would you have thought it was as crazy as Marty thinks it is in the movie?
Marc:Like, I think that's one of the big things the movie communicates is that he doesn't understand why he can't order a Pepsi Ford.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I'm wondering if they just leaned on that harder for the comedy.
Marc:And that to me, as someone who wasn't born until the late seventies, that has set in my head as like, oh yeah, man, that night, mid fifties, it was a, it was a totally different world.
Guest:Well, first of all, I will hear no criticism of Back to the Future because it is damn near a perfect film in my opinion.
Guest:But what I do think is I actually think you missed the point a tiny bit, which is that it's not that Marty doesn't adapt well to be in the 50s.
Guest:It's that it takes him a while to accept that he's in the 50s.
Guest:Is that when he first shows up at the diner and orders a tab and then a Pepsi free and then something without caffeine, which is or something about whatever the line is, which is brilliant, a brilliant piece of writing.
Guest:It's that he doesn't realize he's in the past yet.
Guest:Right.
Marc:It's like it's like an astronaut.
Marc:He hasn't he hasn't decompressed and adjusted to the atmosphere.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Once he gets past, you know, the scene at his mom's, you know, at Lorraine's where he has to escape and goes to find Doc Brown, you don't see that same fish out of water.
Guest:I mean, there's a little bit of it, but mostly he pretty much adapts pretty well.
Guest:And this goes to like, when it is like, well, how well did I know the 50s when I was a kid?
Guest:And so what you had started with was you said, we're in this culture of regurgitated media.
Guest:Distort culture, yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, all we're seeing is just rehashes of things that have been around for a while.
Guest:Therefore, our kids or the Marty generation of today has seen all sorts of stuff, Star Wars and superheroes and all these things that are from the past.
Guest:But the difference is that the media environment is actually really different.
Guest:So like I took my kid to see the Fall Guy movie.
Guest:which I think is a really underrated film and was totally fun.
Guest:I really enjoyed, by the way.
Guest:He'd never seen an episode of The Fall Guy.
Guest:I had to explain what that was.
Guest:He knows what a bunch of things are, but he hasn't actually watched the source material.
Guest:Like he's seen a meme of, you know, like of an X-Files thing or some other thing from, or a Friends thing or a Seinfeld thing or some other thing from the 90s, but he hasn't actually watched the shows.
Guest:And here's the reason is that,
Guest:Marty McFly is 17 in 2025.
Guest:Then he was born in 2008.
Guest:The other thing that was born in 2008 is the iPhone.
Guest:The iPhone is the most transformational piece of technology possibly in the history of the world.
Guest:And it has totally transformed the way that we interact with media.
Guest:Is that what I did when I was a kid, I come home from school and as a TV addict, I would watch what was on.
Guest:When I took my son who was six years old to Hawaii and he woke up early because the time difference said, dad, I want to watch TV.
Guest:I said, let's see what's on.
Guest:He said, what do you mean what's on?
Guest:That concept of there's these things that are playing and you only have those choices to watch them does not exist anymore.
Guest:Today, people watch whatever they want, which is what all of us wanted.
Guest:Our entire lives, like I just want to be able to watch whatever I want.
Guest:And what I've realized, and this is the big kind of epiphany I had after you wrote back and said to come on the show, is like, oh, the idea of being able to choose what you watch is a completely transformative thing.
Guest:Because what I watched was what was on.
Guest:And what was on was I Love Lucy and Leave It to Beaver and Perry Mason and all of these shows that were from the 50s.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because that's what's on.
Guest:And the movies I watched were –
Guest:were Shirley Temple and Abbott and Costello and the Bowery Boys and Old Westerns and all of these things that were made in the 50s because that was what was on.
Guest:And what I realized, my son would never choose to watch an episode of Leave it to Beaver.
Guest:Like that would never occur to him because, and the fact is, is that particularly in the world of TikTok and YouTube and things like that, and my son has ADHD, which makes it even better, is that if something is not entertaining to him within about four seconds, it's gone.
Guest:As opposed to when I was a kid when I Love Lucy was what's on.
Guest:And so I watched every episode of I Love Lucy.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So I was so much more prepared to go to the 50s than my son is who's never seen an episode of Friends or Seinfeld to go to the 90s.
Guest:He doesn't know what that – and certainly not the 80s.
Guest:Like the whole way that we experience the world is different because we get to choose what we experience.
Marc:You're illuminating something about this stuck culture idea, though, with that as well, because if you're dealing with a majority of consumers, right, people of our generations and even those younger than us, I would say that, you know, targeting people even going back to their 20s.
Marc:That is still 20 years old, right?
Marc:Is still older than the point in which the iPhone was made, right?
Marc:And so you still have a consumer base that did spend a lot of time watching similar things.
Marc:It's not until you're in the under 20s where you get into that area you were just saying.
Marc:And so if you have people...
Marc:who have a strong memory of a communal viewing experience, or at least being on the same page to the point of, you know, like even something I would never, I never watched the show Boy Meets World in my life.
Marc:Never saw one episode, right?
Marc:This is younger than me, but it still possessed enough of a nostalgia pull that they rebooted it.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And I think that that's a lot of what you're seeing of this idea that, you know, people sit around and they have these scores of, you know, what's the recognition score, the Q score of something.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And then they go, OK, well, this we already have this property, the Munsters.
Marc:So let's give this to, you know, someone to redo it, update it.
Marc:And then we don't have to spend any additional time.
Marc:Educating people on this new idea, this new concept that's going to have to become normalized.
Marc:The idea of newer things when you get to this point where the majority of people you're feeding are the ones who have a scattered focus on something.
Guest:Yeah, I mean this is – I've been hearing a lot of talk about this.
Guest:Ezra Klein had a podcast about this recently of just – that what we're really talking about today is that we're in an attention economy, that people – that it is our attention both in terms of users on the internet where essentially the entire economy is based on them selling our attention to advertisers.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so what draws humans attention and Donald Trump being the perfect example of someone who is like an attention mega billionaire, you know, like he draws people's attention whether you like him or not.
Guest:And that's the economy that we're in right now and trying to figure out like, OK.
Guest:How do I create something for a broad audience?
Guest:What is that, as you said, the Q store score, what is going to bring that attention?
Guest:And what's interesting, again, because we used to watch what's on, is that something gained, like Boy Meets World didn't gain all of this
Guest:Love because of the first 30 seconds of Boy Meets World.
Guest:It didn't gain it because of the title.
Guest:It didn't gain it from the poster.
Guest:It gained it because people watched it over time and developed affection for it.
Guest:I mean, there's so many shows where the show didn't start off that great.
Guest:You know, Cheers being an example where it's like number 98 or something in the ratings.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And there was the opportunity like, well, should we cancel it?
Guest:And I forget who it was, the executive, but said like, well, do you have something in its place that you really wanna put on?
Guest:They went, no.
Guest:And so they kept it on the air.
Guest:And because they kept it on the air, slowly it developed that affection that takes time to develop.
Guest:Well, there is no time to develop affection anymore.
Guest:So all you have is what people previously liked, which is not really the way to make great stuff all the time.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, you know, that also is applicable to like movies on like HBO because it was on like the movie Rounders, like found like a whole new, you know, audience because, oh, look, Rounders is on TBS or HBO.
Guest:I guess I'm just going to watch it because it is there, you know, and and now people, you know, it's found, found it to be beloved.
Marc:Think about movies that turned into whole franchises because of that.
Marc:Like the Austin Powers original film was a $50 million hit.
Marc:Like that's not like a massive blockbuster, but it wasn't, you know, it didn't fail.
Marc:It did like, okay, would you get a sequel greenlit on that?
Marc:Maybe, not necessarily, but it was cable and the advent of DVD.
Marc:DVD was just...
Marc:dawning around that time as well and so then that sequel comes out and it like shocks hollywood by making 250 million dollars right and and was positioned as a huge summer blockbuster that had that's that's one story that could be replicable many times over and it was because of television because of repeat viewership on things uh we just had a guest on recently talked about this oh uh ron livingston talked about it with office space which was a failure oh totally bomb
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, I mean, think about I mean, there are all sorts of movies like Shawshank and Princess Bride and The Thing.
Guest:And you can even go to Citizen Kane, a movie that was not financially successful and took decades for people to go.
Guest:This might be the greatest film ever made.
Guest:And this is I mean, I really think there's something so fundamentally different.
Guest:I mean part of it is like, as you know, you've been on my podcast.
Guest:My podcast is ridiculously long in terms of how much time we're going to spend on a film.
Guest:And so I am not a short-form person.
Guest:I've never been good at a great quip.
Guest:You've said, Steve, make an entertaining 35-second video.
Guest:I can't do it.
Guest:That's not my thing.
Guest:So I do have a bias here.
Guest:But I also go –
Guest:There is a fundamental difference between like the long form thing that you get deep love for and that fantastic Instagram video that gives you a little thrill before you move on to the next one.
Guest:They're just different in terms of the experience and in terms of I think who you are as a person, like what it means that you like that Instagram video versus what it means that you love office space.
Guest:That's different.
Right.
Guest:I also feel like the, you know, I've kind of come all the way around to, oh, I kind of miss, like, what was on.
Guest:And HBO now has an app, you know, their Max app, where they have channels.
Guest:And I can be like, oh, look, HBO 3...
Guest:has the dark night rises and there's 40 minutes left.
Guest:I'm going to watch the last, you know, a quarter of the dark night rises.
Guest:I don't really want to, but it's there.
Guest:So I'm going to check it out.
Guest:And, uh, I, I really hope that becomes the norm again.
Guest:Uh, and we kind of slingshot back to, uh, just what is on instead of, uh, I'm just going to play what, what dopamine hit I want and, uh, watch, you know, whatever boy meets world or whatever it is.
Marc:Well, because people get decision fatigue, you know, like that's what those that, you know, I mean, you are not alone.
Marc:It's like the it's and the HBO's decision or Max's decision, WBD's decision to do that on their app is is because of the success of services like Tubi and Pluto TV.
Marc:where they that's that's what they're designed to do they're designed to just replicate a television grid you know you look at the channel grid and go oh that's what's on that right now great i'm going to watch colombo or whatever on on pluto and uh you know i i i feel this way about music i'd much rather listen to my sirius xm
Marc:where it's curated for me, there's still a DJ who tells me what just played and what that band is up to or something.
Marc:That's such a more pleasurable experience to me than a discovery playlist on Spotify or Amazon or something.
Guest:So very quick Columbo digression.
Guest:I was writing a screenplay for a mystery and I went, I wanna go back and watch classic TV mysteries.
Guest:So I watched the pilot of Columbo and I'm watching it and I'm going, damn, this is really good.
Guest:Like, this is so good.
Guest:Man, this is so good.
Guest:Gets the end of the pilot of Columbo and I see written by Steven Bochco and directed up by Steven Spielberg.
Guest:Oh, no way.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's really well shot.
Guest:It's like-
Guest:Good.
Guest:Well, and I think too, it's funny.
Guest:So as you know, I'm a longtime fan of your show, Brendan.
Guest:I've listened to, I think I probably listened to every single episode.
Guest:And in that entire time, there were like five episodes where I skipped it.
Guest:Like I got into it a certain way and went, I'm not interested in this person.
Guest:That's five times out of your 1600 episodes is a lot.
Guest:But one of the things...
Guest:my philosophy about it, and I do the same thing because I listen to Terry Gross on Fresh Air, I listen to, is that I don't look at the title or the guest or the subject matter and decide whether or not I'm gonna watch it.
Guest:Because frequently, there are these people who I had no interest in and had never heard of that just blow my mind.
Guest:And if we only just follow our own choices, we deny ourselves the opportunity to have our mind blown by something we never expect.
Guest:And that's the best, that's what makes my brain grow.
Guest:You know, it isn't the stuff that when I get, when I watch the thing that I chose to watch and I get what I expect, I didn't change at all.
Guest:I got, I got very little from it.
Guest:When I watch the unexpected or listen to the unexpected, I gain something sometimes profound, you know?
Marc:Well, this was exactly why I wanted to have you on about this.
Marc:Cause I knew when I saw that you wrote that to me, I said, oh, this is going to be a conversation that expands.
Marc:And part of the reason I knew that was because now having spent like,
Marc:Wow.
Marc:I guess 10 hours in your presence, Steve, as we did episodes of your show about first about Total Recall, which was a scant four hours of time that we spent talking about that film.
Marc:And then six plus hours talking about Mad Max Fury Road, which you can now hear all three parts on the cinephiles.
Marc:And I guess also my question to you, you said it a little bit about, you know, being a person who thinks long form, wants to talk long form.
Marc:How
Marc:How did you and John Rocha, your co-host, decide that that was going to work as a podcast, especially in a world where increasingly people want shorter, faster, more digestible?
Marc:I mean, we're told that all the time in terms of what we do.
Marc:Granted, we don't change what we do.
Marc:But we're told all the time it would be much more desirable if our show was available in smaller bites, in digestible bites.
Marc:And your show is definitely not that.
Marc:You want to take the whole bite.
Guest:Yeah, it happened totally organically, honestly.
Guest:Like,
Guest:I was sad and depressed when we started the show.
Guest:And I was looking because I had had, you know, one shitty career thing after another.
Guest:And I was looking for something that I could control.
Guest:And we said, well, let's talk about classic films.
Guest:And when we started, it was an hour for the movie.
Guest:You know, just that an hour is a reasonable length of the show.
Guest:And then because I'm an editor and because I worked in documentaries, I started to want to – if you say a music cue is good, well, I want to hear the music cue.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:If you love the way this person delivered the line, well, we should hear the line.
Guest:And so that's sort of – I just started editing those things in.
Guest:And then as we went, I realized, oh, in order to keep track of this, we kind of probably should do it in some kind of order.
Guest:And then it started – became the order of the film.
Guest:And then –
Guest:Our one hour shows became an hour and a half and then they became two hour.
Guest:And when we did Citizen Kane was the first time we ever broke something into two parts.
Guest:And we went, okay, that was crazy.
Guest:We're never gonna do that again.
Guest:And then things kept getting longer and we kept essentially checking with our fans.
Guest:Like, is this cool with you?
Guest:And over and over again, the only comment we got was,
Guest:Make it longer.
Guest:And I think the big discovery was – because there are all sorts of places that people talk about movies, including you guys, is that in general when people talk about movies, they talk about it subject to subject.
Guest:So you go like, oh, let's talk about the score or isn't this scene amazing or this guy's performance.
Guest:What did you think of that or what did you – and that's how we talk.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And what happened, what I realized is we started to go more moment by moment, is it totally transforms the conversation, as you know, Brendan, from now doing it a few times.
Guest:Because instead of just talking about the score in general, you're talking about how the music hits in this particular moment.
Guest:And you've set the audience up the whole time because they're on the journey with you.
Guest:And so there's this feeling that on our good episodes –
Guest:That we're trying to create of like it should feel as if we're having a great natural conversation, but we're also watching the movie, which, you know, you know, we're not watching the movie when we're having the conversation, but I want it to feel that way.
Guest:And then when it's really good, the audience is sort of.
Guest:feeling the movie in the head their head they're in the story so they actually might be moved when they get to a particular moment if we've set it up well and so now when you're talking about this line you get our comments and our reaction to it you get the line and you get the audience to react to it and it's just a totally different experience in terms of and i don't think there's anyone else really doing it this way and i also go
Guest:Yes, there is obviously this pressure for things to be shorter, but there's a lot of long form stuff and podcasts.
Guest:Like, I don't know if you know, the rest is history podcast.
Guest:So dude.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, he comes out every six months with a six hour long monologue on Alexander the Great or whatever.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Dan Carlin's hardcore history was like the one.
Guest:No, the hardcore history.
Guest:That's the one I meant.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's a great one.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The rest is history is the one I've just started listening to, which is the same thing.
Guest:They do multiple parts, long form.
Guest:I mean, that stuff does exist because there's, you know, you just can't get everything from a three minute clip on YouTube.
Guest:You know, there's a different stuff out there.
Guest:what's the longest time you spent on one movie?
Guest:That's Godfather II, I think.
Guest:How long?
Guest:And I think it was about eight hours.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:On Godfather II.
Guest:And totally worth it.
Guest:I bet, yeah.
Guest:Especially how you edit the music, the lines and everything.
Guest:It's a really fun listen.
Marc:Oh, that's great to hear.
Marc:Thanks, Chris.
Marc:When you're sitting there across from Steve on the computer, you just see him.
Marc:You get a little play because Steve acts all the parts out.
Marc:So you get to watch him do that.
Marc:And then when you're listening back, you hear what you heard, which is the actual lines.
Guest:Oh, that's great.
Guest:It's so embarrassing sometimes.
Guest:The worst, the most painful experience I ever had doing the show, and not because the episode was bad or the guest was bad, but we did Django Unchained.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And and there.
Guest:And so I'm having to say and then he says the N word.
Guest:I mean, I'm not going to say it, but like I have to say and then I have to describe.
Guest:And now they're whipping this person and torturing this person.
Guest:And I'm doing it.
Guest:And we had an African-American guest who's a friend who I like.
Guest:But I'm looking at this guy's face who I care about.
Guest:And I'm saying the most heinous thing.
Guest:Fucking awful thing.
Guest:I was sick to my stomach every day to prepare for doing this.
Guest:It was so painful to get through.
Guest:So the performance is not always the funnest part of the show.
Guest:Man, that is rough.
Guest:It was rough.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So wait, so let me get this straight.
Guest:So you're basically stage directing and acting the entire thing for your guest and your co-host.
Guest:Essentially, yeah.
Guest:I've written down – it's where AI has saved me because I used to basically have to type everything that happens in the movie.
Guest:And now I have the transcription software that transcribes the whole movie.
Guest:But yeah, I'm going through everything.
Guest:And the thing is – Man, the prep time.
Guest:It must be unbelievable though.
Yeah.
Guest:Well, Fury Road was brutal.
Guest:Literally every second something interesting is happening that I had to go like, wait, which hand, you know, he's throwing this punch while this other thing is happening.
Guest:There's an explosion in the background and the music is, I mean, it was really, really hard.
Marc:It's a lot of pressure.
Marc:Well, people who listen to this Friday show know at this point that basically like the patron saint of this show is Roger Ebert.
Marc:And that's not just about movies, just to kind of consider him the last great humanist.
Marc:And he, you know, just his ethos kind of filters down
Marc:through pretty much everything we talk about, including what I would say is like the ethos behind WTF.
Marc:But at the same time, like, I wonder how much you're consciously thinking, like, when you're doing the show, like, that, you know, I felt like it's the closest thing, doing your show is the closest thing I ever got to experiencing what Roger used to do, which was his frame-by-frame
Marc:Uh, analysis at the university of, uh, Illinois, I believe.
Marc:And he, you know, would do these, you know, they, they wouldn't put an end time on it.
Marc:They'd say, we're going to start, you know, citizen Kane on this date and we will go through and we will stop it whenever all you had to do was shout out, stop.
Marc:And then they, you had to, the rules, you had to stop and you had to talk about it at that point.
Marc:And I feel like I had the same freedom on your show.
Marc:You're just like, yeah, you're coming on.
Marc:We're going to talk about Fury Road.
Marc:And no one said how long it was going to be.
Marc:Like we could have been doing that for three more weeks as far as I knew.
Guest:I was honestly surprised we got it in three at a certain point because our first episode, I think we got through like 12 minutes.
Marc:Yeah, it was about 18 minutes, I think.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So the fact that we got in three, by the way, that is incredibly high.
Guest:Any comparison to Roger Ebert, I definitely appreciate.
Guest:And have you read the book, Opposable Thumbs?
Marc:Yeah, we had Matt Singer on the show and have become great friends with him since then.
Yeah.
Guest:That book is so nuts.
Guest:And all the ways they're fucking with each other throughout the whole thing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Hilarious.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, that is – part of it comes from – I taught film school for a decade.
Guest:And so I taught directing.
Guest:And I would do this a lot, which is I would have like whether it was a scene from Jaws or a scene from Die Hard or a scene from Crimson Tide.
Guest:There were all these scenes where I did exactly what you described, which is literally stopping at everything.
Guest:Because I think the thing that we –
Guest:Most movies and a lot of art, it's actually the little details that are the really – that's where it's all made.
Guest:And what people mainly talk about is the big details, which makes sense.
Guest:And so like going – I mean there was a moment we were talking about some hand gesture in Sound of Music where I was just like, look, it's totally unimportant.
Guest:But Julie Andrews does this little thing with her hand at that moment that makes that scene 2% better.
Guest:And it's all those little things that makes great films.
Guest:So that's how I want to talk about it.
Marc:Yeah, that was what we wound up talking about a lot.
Marc:Chris and I and our friends talking about last week with the passing of Gene Hackman was like, you know, that was that guy in spades was like, oh, look, did you see how he hiked up his pants?
Marc:Like, that was amazing.
Marc:And, you know, he just he just built whole worlds in gestures and in expressions in size in his, you know, furrowed brow.
Marc:You know, that's a sumptuous feast when when you got a guy like that.
Guest:So Gene Hackman is – I mean it's huge.
Guest:This is a huge loss and John and I are talking a lot about what we're going to do to honor him.
Guest:The intensity – what I love about him is he could be as scary and intense and powerful as anyone in history and then you watch him in the birdcage.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:Where he has like, there's this monologue he does where nobody stops him from talking.
Guest:And so he's like, the trees as we drove and you saw the snow.
Guest:And it just goes on and on.
Guest:And it is so fucking funny.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:One of the greatest of all time without question.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, I'll repeat what I said last week.
Marc:He had a year, one calendar year in 1995.
Marc:He makes The Quick and the Dead.
Marc:That's how he opens the year.
Marc:Then Summer Blockbuster, Crimson Tide.
Marc:And then by October...
Marc:uh get shorty comes out right and it's like it's everything you're talking about it's like it's like the most evil guy possible right just just a a cartoon villain almost has a mustache that he's twirling in the quick and the dead in crimson tide he is this indomitable force is he the good guy is he the bad guy you're not sure even by the end of the movie he could be both it's like kind of like tommy lee jones in the fugitive right
Guest:Well, I don't think he's, I think it's not good guy or bad guy in that particular movie.
Guest:He believes that this is what he is supposed to do.
Guest:Totally.
Guest:And so he is following his moral code perfectly.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And, and you're, and, and he is like maybe one of three people who you, who has the gravitas to, to make you believe in both sides of the coin on that.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And then by three months later, he's the biggest loser you've ever seen in your life.
Marc:And it's hilarious.
Marc:Like his, he is the comedy in that movie.
Guest:It's so amazing how good that guy is and how totally – like to me, I always put him with Duvall I think.
Guest:I mean maybe because they come up around the same time.
Guest:They both have that same level of intensity.
Guest:But Duvall doesn't have all those gears.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And Duvall has a lot of gears.
Guest:There's no disrespect to Mr. Duvall.
Guest:He could surely be funny, but it's not the same.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But not what Gene Hackman can do.
Guest:Like, yeah.
Guest:And what I always go to is like, I think he was roommates with Dustin Hoffman in New York.
Guest:Yeah, that seems right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so like him, and I know that they were buddies also with Robert Duvall.
Guest:And also there was another one who they all hung up with at the same time.
Guest:And I would love to be around him.
Guest:These two young theater actors occasionally doing work on live television and hanging out in the mid-60s before anybody's heard of them.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That would be fascinating.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I recently watched an interview where him and Dustin Hoffman are there, and Gene Hackman's telling a story about Dustin, and Dustin's like, God damn it, not this story again.
Guest:And just like how –
Guest:Dustin Hoffman put his money in all these jars, and he asked Gene Hackman for some money for rent.
Guest:And Gene Hackman was like, yeah, sure.
Guest:He's like, hey, wait, but what about all this money in all these mason jars?
Guest:He's like, well—
Guest:don't that all those, those, uh, mason jars, that's for something else.
Guest:Like it's for food and that's for movies.
Guest:That's for books.
Guest:I can't, I can't take money out of there to pay for rent.
Guest:Like, cause then I would just, you know, I'll need more money.
Guest:So, uh, so yeah, it's delightful.
Guest:I love that these guys were just starving artists, just trying to make a buck.
Guest:It's wild.
Guest:Dustin Hoffman's so crazy.
Guest:There's so many good stories.
Guest:Genius.
Guest:Crazy person.
Marc:You still haven't seen Megalopolis, I'm guessing, Steve.
Marc:I have not.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:There's some choice Dustin Hoffman moments in that movie.
Guest:I was literally looking today, like, when is it going to be streaming?
Guest:And it is still not.
Guest:At some point, I will watch it and I will check back in with you.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I feel like that movie is going to get a hell of a reception when it's on streaming.
Marc:It will be like a midnight movie.
Marc:There would be many.
Marc:It was the movie that launched many riff tracks.
Marc:Let's put it that way.
Marc:Listen, Steve, I've gotten plenty of feedback from full Marin listeners here that they are now listening to the cinephile.
Marc:So I know you have new cinephile listeners out there.
Marc:And if they want more, where can they go?
Marc:They go to your Patreon page.
Marc:What do you guys do for Patreon that would be similar to what, you know, this is the full Marin tier on on WTF?
Guest:Well, there's nothing like the full Marin.
Guest:I would not invite any comparisons.
Guest:We do shorts every week, which is us talking about everything from movies and movie topics that are suggested by our patrons to politics and food and culture and anything else that's kind of up John and Mai's head at the time.
Guest:Wait, so when you talk about politics, do you have to do the voices too?
Guest:Like, do you do clips?
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:No, it's so funny.
Guest:Like, I'm sure, Brendan, there is an infinite amount of editing I could do.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But there's a certain point where I go, no, I'm not editing this.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I will cut out – There's a volume issue.
Guest:I will cut out anything egregious.
Guest:Yeah, but I'm not going to actually spend time on it.
Guest:So, no, I don't edit the shorts.
Guest:We also do monthly watch-alongs.
Guest:So, we're going to be about to watch Wrath of Khan, which I can't wait for.
Guest:Nice.
Guest:you know, which is just basically doing a commentary track.
Guest:Um, and we have other stuff like we had, we actually have an advisory board, which is sort of the high level patrons.
Guest:And we meet every month and talk about what's, so for instance, we're not, we know we want to honor Gene Hackman by doing some other movies.
Guest:We haven't decided whether we're doing Crimson Tide or where we're doing the package or the conversation, which would be an amazing film to do.
Guest:And so we discussed that with our advisory board who are really smart people, stuff like that.
Guest:Um, yeah.
Guest:And other than that, you know, the,
Guest:You can subscribe to the podcast feed.
Guest:Obviously, your listeners don't do that.
Guest:And I also if if your listeners are Star Trek fans, I don't do it anymore.
Guest:But I did the original series basically like the cinephiles with my partner, Scott Mance.
Guest:And so I'm a huge original series Star Trek guy.
Guest:And it is just as a ridiculous deep dive into every episode of Star Trek as we did for movies on the cinephiles.
Guest:So that's it.
Guest:That's called Enterprise Incidents.
Guest:And you can go check that out, too.
Marc:And we will put the one-stop shop link to The Cinephiles in the episode description of this show so you can go there and check everything out.
Marc:And I would recommend doing just what I did when The Cinephiles first came on my radar.
Marc:It's like, go look at that list of movies that they've done.
Marc:It's extensive.
Marc:And then just pick one because that was my entry point.
Marc:I was like, oh, let me see what these guys said about Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Marc:And I'm like, okay, good.
Guest:Was Raiders where you started?
Guest:Yep, yep, sure was.
Guest:Because we did – what's funny because we did Raiders twice.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because Raiders is the very first movie we did and it was an hour.
Guest:And then as things got into what the cinephiles became, we started going back and redoing our earlier episodes.
Guest:So Raiders is the very first one we redid.
Guest:We also redid like It's a Wonderful Life and Reservoir Dogs and some other – and the natural – some other classic films that we're – we're still going back.
Guest:We might go back and redo the original Superman because of Gene Hackman.
Guest:So that's one that's coming.
Marc:That's right up your alley there, Kalo.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:That's my guy.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Well, Steve, as has been the occasion every time I've had the chance to speak to you, it's been a pleasure.
Marc:Sometime we will have to do it in person over at the Tam O'Shanter in Atwater Village.
Marc:We could sit at Walt Disney's table, have a few whiskeys.
Marc:But otherwise, please keep doing your good work.
Marc:And thanks again for joining us here on The Friday Show.
Guest:Thank you.
Guest:And right back at you.
Guest:Keep doing the good work.
Marc:So, Chris, I think, you know, my biggest takeaway from that with Steve is that, like, both Steve and I are very similar in that, like, you can take something that's just relatively non-important and we could spend, you know, an hour just discussing the complete ins and outs of it and how basically the fabric of human existence hinges on that thing at that given moment.
Guest:What I might take away is kids today are soft.
Guest:Like they need to, they need to find more bullies.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Apparently like, yeah, he's right.
Guest:Like kids will just like ask for an adult.
Guest:Like, yeah, they, their kids are soft.
Marc:Well, yes.
Marc:Although I think the idea that the, the conflict resolution now I think is, is mainly playing out in a completely negative way across the board throughout the whole world.
Marc:So we may very soon find what it's like to go back to the era when, you know, conflict resolution was not finding the adult.
Guest:If only people could find an adult, if the adults in the room can find the adults.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:We do need a lot more adults.
Marc:I did want to mention that, you know, I said that it began responses from people saying that they listened to the cinephiles.
Marc:I like this comment, though, that came in from Terry.
Marc:He said, just checked out the cinephiles for the first time.
Marc:Great show and surprisingly engaging given the episode length.
Marc:That's something we talked about with Steve.
Marc:Mm-hmm.
Marc:It did make me realize how many small details I had missed in Fury Road, despite multiple viewings and the one sentence plot synopsis.
Marc:I first saw it in 3D on opening weekend in Bangkok, which was almost overwhelming.
Marc:The combination of practical effects, giant screen, pounding soundtrack and the Doof Warriors guitar, followed by a steering wheel flying out of the screen, bordered on sensory overload.
Marc:I got to say, I never was a big fan of 3D when that was a fad in the mid-2000s.
Marc:But that's one movie that I probably would... If they did a re-release of it this year, it's its 10th anniversary, and they did 3D screenings, I would go see a 3D screening.
Guest:Yeah, I would as well.
Guest:And that steering wheel shooting out at you is definitely... When I clocked that, I was like, I'm pretty sure this was supposed to be 3D.
Yeah.
Guest:Well, I don't know if you read that book about it.
Guest:The Bloodsuit and Chrome.
Marc:Well, they were developing it as a 3D film and they were going to build their own 3D cameras because the thing they worried about was the existing 3D cameras.
Marc:They wouldn't be able to fit them inside the vehicles.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So they like basically in their own in their garage, you know, made these 3D cameras that could work.
Marc:But then when they met with like the guy whose like job would be to to make the whole movie work as 3D, he was like, these aren't going to cut it.
Marc:Like you need the better cameras.
Marc:And at that point, he scrapped the idea and they decided no, no, no shooting in 3D.
Marc:I'm sure there are some effects because of the way they're shot.
Marc:They look great in 3D, like, you know, Max jumping off that cliff to that hook, things like that.
Marc:You know, that probably really worked in 3D, but the movie was not meant to be in 3D.
Guest:By the way, George Miller came out recently and said, you know, they do have a script for a new Mad Max movie.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:I mean, it's called The Wasteland and they totally intended to make it.
Marc:But I wonder if they ever will.
Marc:They got, you know, 165 million dollars to make Furiosa and it made five cents.
Marc:So I'm not sure they're getting to go back to the playground.
Marc:Katie wrote in because when we talked about Mad Max, you know, I had mentioned I thought it's the pound for pound greatest movie franchise because, you know, there's always some other bad movie in a series.
Marc:And, you know, we had some feedback saying that the Chris Nolan Batmans, which I think that's a valid one.
Marc:But she had another idea that dovetails with what we've been talking about this whole episode.
Marc:She said, I know you were canvassing for other potential competitors in the space.
Marc:And while I agree with you about Mad Max, I also think that Back to the Future is similar and has the same level of dissenters with the third film, which I also think is great.
Marc:Also interesting that both franchises are very protected by George Miller and Robert Zemeckis.
Marc:I think that's fascinating.
Marc:And, you know, Katie was writing in to us to also talk about James Bond and, you know, Bond, the broccolis just sold the Bond rights to Amazon.
Marc:And that is like historically probably the most protected film franchise.
Marc:You know, they have spent...
Marc:their entire existence, owning that franchise, the broccoli family from keeping James Bond TV series from being made, you know, not allowing, you know, multiple, uh, uh, spinoffs to happen at the same time.
Marc:They were very instrumental in picking all the James Bonds.
Marc:And now it's like, it's like, uh, you know, going to be by a committee, uh,
Marc:And I don't know, man, that has not worked out too well.
Marc:Like if you think about like Star Wars, where the same thing happened.
Marc:So I don't know why that's going to fare for for James Bond.
Marc:But but absolutely both Back to the Future and Mad Max as franchises benefit from the fact that the the creator retains total control.
Marc:I mean, also Nolan too.
Marc:I should just add the Nolan Batmans were also his total control.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Although the character has been, you know, rebooted and everything, but that's right.
Marc:But they haven't done it with the dark night casts.
Marc:Oh, right.
Marc:You know, those characters, they were the Nolan ones and done like no one else.
Marc:Then when and made the Robin movie with Joseph Gordon, Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Although, I mean, look, Back to the Future, I feel like it could get a reboot and be fine.
Guest:Like, can you – what do you think?
Guest:If they gave a billion dollars to Robin Zemeckis and his partner there, like –
Guest:wouldn't you say a back to the future reboot isn't okay hands?
Guest:Like depending on, I mean, I guess variables, like whatever conglomerate takes it, you know, I'm guessing universal, but like, I think we're okay with another back to the future after all this time.
Guest:Don't you think?
Marc:Here's what I would say.
Marc:Having seen that Broadway musical.
Hmm.
Marc:A remake is useless.
Marc:It's pointless to do a remake or a reboot.
Marc:Cause you're just, everything is just the first one and you're just comparing it.
Marc:And it's, it's, it's not like it's a movie that has, has aged poorly or something.
Marc:Kids still watch it today for the first time and they love it.
Marc:You know, it would be like remaking the wizard of Oz, right?
Marc:Like nobody's done that.
Marc:Right.
Marc:They've made, you know, offshoots of the wizard of Oz.
Marc:You just had, you know, wicked nominated for Academy Awards and stuff.
Marc:So what I think could work is,
Marc:is if you made a series about the DeLorean, right?
Marc:Time travel series always work.
Marc:Like you can, you just have a million opportunities to do something like that.
Marc:And it doesn't have to be even be Marty then.
Marc:Could be, could be dozens of different things.
Marc:It could be, you know, it could be just like a Doc Brown character or, you know, another, you know, Marty, but it's not, he's not playing it the way Michael J. Fox played it.
Marc:And now you're dealing with the idea of going through time travel and paradoxes and all that.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Make the car be the recurring character, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Don't, don't, don't need another Marty McFly.
Guest:Don't need another Doc Brown.
Guest:Just have the car.
Marc:Or also don't fall into that trap that the star Wars franchise has fallen into where everything has to revolve around the Skywalker family.
Guest:Right.
Marc:So like if you are going to, if, if Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale decided tomorrow, they're going to give up the, the, the back to the future, uh,
Marc:rights to yeah that IP their best thing would be to insist though that you can't do anything with the existing characters maybe you make a deal on like one or two but like no Biff no you know Marty's family like you gotta rule out revisiting the things playing the hits because you're just not gonna get anywhere with that stuff and then it just becomes useless fan service oh that guy's Biff's
Marc:grandson or whatever like who cares take them fun places and do fun shit with the time machine right that's that that's the thing is that the delorean is the coolest time travel device yes so just just do that and the fact that it's rooted in the 80s you'll always go back to the 80s right that's always your home base so you always have that as the hook of the show this nostalgic pull of it being in the 80s
Marc:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And like, you can go to the seventies, you can go, you know, to, to the forties, you can go to the future.
Guest:Like it's, it's real.
Guest:Like I think of back to the future, see, or, you know, whatever it would be great with the proper, yeah.
Marc:With the proper parameters on it for sure.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:So that, that's my feeling.
Marc:Well, one more thing about that nostalgia loop idea and how we're in a stuck culture.
Marc:Ramon wrote in to say, when we think of something like smashing pumpkins in 1995, holding up and still feeling fresh today, which it does.
Marc:I can't figure out if that's our late 30s, early 40s minds wanting comfort or not.
Marc:Thank you, Ramon, for thinking that we're in our early 40s.
Marc:but there were real budgets for well-directed music videos, well-recorded records in the 1990s that gave these cultural touchstones lasting power and allowed many artists of the time to thrive.
Marc:I think this nostalgia loop is preventing kids today from being able to find their shit, but I would have to be a kid to really know.
Marc:And I think, you know, as Steve pointed out to us, they are finding their shit.
Marc:They just are increasingly kind of private about it, right?
Marc:It's their thing.
Marc:It's not a shared thing.
Marc:Uh, streaming culture also exacerbates this with everyone always wanting to listen to what they know.
Marc:I guess he means like on Spotify or something like that.
Marc:And I was talking about that too, about how you get tired of the decision process or the algorithm feeding you stuff and you just go back and find your old favorites.
Marc:A recent example that my brother and I have been cracking up over lately is say if in the 1990s, I wanted to dress like Bret Hart or Stone Cold Steve Austin for Halloween.
Marc:And our dad came home with a Bruno San Martino costume.
Marc:And the funny thing about that is that like that does play off the stuck culture idea, because I feel like you could go to a Halloween party today and
Marc:Or later this year, it's March.
Marc:But you could go to a Halloween party as Stone Cold Steve Austin and people would get it.
Marc:They'd be like, oh, you're that wrestler Stone Cold Steve Austin.
Marc:If even in the 90s, you went to a party as Bruno San Martino, people would be like, why are you a hairy muscle man?
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I'm sorry, if Ramon is not dressing like the Razor Ramon that I know, that is a missed opportunity, Ramon.
Guest:Okay.
Marc:And I don't mean for Halloween either.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I'm talking about like going to the supermarket.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:Like, oh, Ramon, it's dressed down Fridays.
Marc:You wore a vest and teal colored underpants.
Guest:And you're throwing a toothpick at people.
Yeah.
Marc:Ryan also brought this up.
Marc:He said that the Dark Knight Returns was closer to the debut of Batman than we are now to the publication of the Dark Knight Returns.
Guest:Wait.
Guest:Oh, the comic book.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Dark Knight Returns.
Guest:Oh, wow.
Yeah.
Marc:So, so basically like, right.
Marc:Like if you think of like the dark night returns, Frank Miller's dark night returns, it's like a kind of start of a new era of Batman.
Marc:Really?
Marc:It gave rise to every Batman movie that came out since the Tim Burton, Tim Burton movies.
Marc:Um, it,
Marc:That is a much farther origin point than even the creation of Batman was until the 80s.
Marc:Like that's a pretty startling thing.
Marc:Like you've had way more of a lifetime with that Dark Knight Returns.
Guest:Goddamn, that is wild.
Guest:It reminds me of these intellectual properties, they become part of the public domain at some point.
Guest:And I know that in two years or something, Superman, the original iteration of Superman is going to be in the public domain and people can start making their own Superman movies.
Guest:Just like there's like a Winnie the Pooh movie that's a horror movie.
Guest:That's right, yeah.
Guest:And I think this year there's going to be a Popeye movie.
Marc:Right, well, Mickey Mouse last year, the original Mickey Mouse entered public domain.
Guest:And that's wild to me that The Dark Knight Returns is, man, that is something.
Guest:Time is a son of a bitch.
Marc:Well, we will be here for you next week, so that's a very short amount of time.
Marc:And when we are back, I want to go over some of these one-night movies, some of these one-and-done films.
Marc:You guys have been great sending in your suggestions of that stuff, so please... Thank you.
Marc:Yeah, keep sending it in.
Marc:I've got a whole collection of them here, and it's worth doing an episode on.
Marc:There's a link in the episode description if you want to send us your ideas on those things.
Marc:Also, anything else you want to talk about that we've had on the show, Gene Hackman or our conversation with Steve Morris from earlier.
Marc:And as always, we'll stay here for you on Fridays.
Marc:And until then, I'm Brendan and that's Chris.
Marc:Peace.