Old he is, folks, it's show people fake good money to see this
movie. When they go out to a theater, they want cold SODA's corner
in No monsters in the Projection Booth Everyone for ten podcasting isn't boring? Shut
it off. Hey, folks, welcome to a special episode of The Projection
Booth. I'm your host Mike White. On this episode, I'm talking with
producer Adam Leipzig all about his career, well highlights from it, because he's
had one heck of a career and he's still going strong. It's great talking
with him, and I hope that you enjoyed this inner. How did you
start in the business. You've had such an incredible career. I've always wanted
to do something for audiences. From my earliest recollection. I started wanting to
be in theater and then actually was in theater. After I left college,
I became part of the company that was then called the Los Angeles Actors Theater,
now known as the Los Angeles Theater Center. I was one of the
people who built the Los Angeles Theater Center and had a great seven year run
in theater. I produced more than three hundred plays, shows, music events,
poetry events, dance events, performance art events back at the time when
performance art was a thing called performance art, and at a certain point I
just wanted to work for larger audiences. So in effect, I walked across
the street into movie studio land landed a job at Disney Studios, and thereby
hangs a tale. Tell me about your involved with the Olympics. I was
reading a little bit about that. That sounds fascinating. In nineteen eighty four,
Los Angeles hosted the Olympics, and part of the things that happens with
the Olympics each Olympic here is that there is also an arts component. There
is an Olympic Arts Festival. At the time, the gentleman who had been
appointed to run the Olympic Arts Festival was Robert Fitzpatrick, who was the dean
or president of cal Arts. And he did something pretty amazing for which we
should all always be grateful. He brought amazing international artists to Los Angeles,
including Pina Bausch and Georgia Strailer and Peter Brooke. And that's when search de
Sole first left Canada and came to the United States. So he did all
of those things, but he deliberately or just subconsciously fully excluded Los Angeles artists,
and this did not sit well with Los Angeles artists, and we had
a series of meetings and how I became the spokesperson for the Los Angeles Arts
Contingent to ensure that we were represented during the Olympic Arts Festival, which ended
up happening, and it was great. The mix of local and international was
fantastic. The international artists were able to experience Los Angeles creativity, and we
Los Angeles artists saw work we had never seen before and probably never would have
seen because we couldn't afford the international plane ticket. When you joined Disney in
late eighties, what was the state of the company back then? Because I
know they've gone through so many changes and just so many regime changes over the
years. This was really the first regime that we think of as contemporary Disney.
What was the state of the company. You would need a microscope.
There were eight people at the studio, Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg, five
people, and met I was at the far bottom of that totem pole.
And the company hadn't made an animated movie in forever. We hadn't made a
movie that grows more than one hundred million dollars. Ever, there haven't been
a Disney Live action movie forever, and under their leadership, we reinvented the
studio. We reinvented the Disney Live Action brand with one of my very first
films, which was called Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. This is also
the time that a Little Mermaid and Lion King were made, which reinvented the
Disney animated brand, and it was a pretty great time. Honey, I
Shrunk the Kids. I remember that was pretty subversive in its original tone,
but then got toned down a little bit to be more of a kid's movie.
Is that correct? Or am I completely off base? I don't think
that we really toned it down. I think it's about how old you were
when you saw it, at what you understood and read between the lines.
So if you look at the movie, it's no different today. This is
one of the amazing things, Mike, right. We movies stay fixed,
they don't change, and we see them at an interval of a decade or
two decades and it seems like a different movie. But we changed, the
movie didn't change. So in Honey, I Strike the Kids, the husband
and wife have separated. Clearly the marriage is not working, the family is
falling apart, and the psychological representation of that is that dad has ignored the
kids so much they can't even see them. How do you represent that in
movies? They're the size of the fingernail on your little figure. So all
of that is there, and actually all that psychological truth is there. And
I know that as the adults working on the movie, these are things that
we talked about a lot. I know that as adults watching the movie,
adults got it. And I also know that a lot of that psychology is
embedded in the film and you don't really have to understand it to enjoy the
movie. Where was Disney had two when it came to the more adult fear
you were talking about, You're an adult, you understand it. But Disney,
I've read that line between adult and kids films and it feels like now
they have a pretty good balance for it. But how was it back then
for you? At that time, we add we had another label. We
had a label called Touchdone Pictures, So movies that did not fall under Family
Fair gave out under the Touchdown Moniker even though they were all made by the
same group of people. They were just branded in a somewhat different way,
so the audience would know. So the audience would that what the movie was
going to be, who was going to be for. And I think we
did something very successful in that we really relaunched the Disney brand because the Disney
brand to have great meeting. I think that the Disney brand is still the
only brand that means something to an audience that when you see that magic Castle
at the beginning of a trailer or the beginning of the movie, you know
that you're going to get a certain kind of entertainment. And I think that's
still the case from what I understand. You helped Shepherd through quite a few
projects and some things that we've even talked about on the show before, but
one that we haven't covered yet was that Poets Society. That was huge for
me when I was a young person. You were saying that that's one of
the movies that no matter where I go in the world and someone in Google
stocks me and sees that I was involved in that film, there's always somebody
who's seen that movie. And it doesn't matter what generation they're from. People
have seen that movie and it's really wonderful. Deadpost Society was the first script
that Tom Shulman wrote. He won the Academy Award for writing that script.
Based on that script, we ended up hiring Tom to write Honey, A
Strength the Kids. There's a direct connection between these films, and it was
the first time that I was able to work with Peter. I also worked
with Peter on his most recent film, which was now about a decade ago.
It was called The Way Back. Yeah, Deadposts. It still holds
up. It's a very significant movie and inspires a lot of people. I
know that there was already world according to carp but I think Dead Poet Society
really helps cement Robin Williams in people's minds as being a very versatile actor.
And then you even worked with him again with Good Morning Vietnam. Robin could
do anything. He was that smart, that fast, that witty, that
verbal, that great sense of play. He always had shining eyes. And
I was in New York when I got a text that he had died,
and I just went to the floor. I couldn't believe the very person was
very meaningful in my life. Are you still working for Disney when you're doing
things like roommates or the associate or I'm working sideways for Disney. Looked so
what had happened Those eight people that were part of the company when I joined.
When I was there were seven plus me at the very bottom of the
Dunam pole. Over the course of a period of time, the company got
bigger. Those seven people expand into one hundred to thirty people, into three
different divisions, and I got promoted up and up, and at a certain
point I wasn't making movies. I was supervised people who made movies, and
I had to stay out on the lot, and I was and I had
one of those those offices in the Disney building with the seven dwarves on it
and all of that. And when I would finally be able to go to
the set, which was occasionally, I would hear a PA calling down the
hall to warn people suit on the set, suit on the set. So
this was terrified for me because I'd come out of theater and I came into
movies because I wanted to make movies. I made a kind of lateral move.
I moved to a company called Introscope. I was owned and financed by
PolyGram. PolyGram at that point had put a bunch of money into the movie
business, and we had a distribution deal through Disney. So I was still
making movies that Disney distributed, but I was not working for Disney. I
was working for the company that produced movies, and that's where I did Roommates
and The Associate and several other movies. I have to tell you, I
love The Associate. Thank you me too. If anything, it's as relevant
now as it was back in Cashwell was at mid nineties, early nineties.
I think it does it maybe even more relevant. What a great cast Whoopie
Goldberg, Diane Wees, directed by Donald Petrie. So much fun to make
with the great Eli Wallack. What a joy to work with actors of that
generation. Actually made two movies with Eli. We're shooting at New York,
obviously, and it was great to shoot in New York. We had every
world cast except for the person who was supposed to be Whoopie's assistant ended up
being played by Diane Wist. And I just wanted Diane Wist. I don't
know why. I just thought she would be perfect for And she was represented
at that time by a legendary agent named Sam Cohen, and Sam was famous
for representing almost everybody, for not returning phone calls, and when were in
his office taking tiny scraps of paper, putting them in his mouth, chewing
them and swallowing them. And so I offered the part to Diane and she
said no, and I call it Sam, and I said, I'm offering
her the part. And he said, first he didn't call me back,
and then finally what he called, And then I started calling him every hour
and finally he has stopped calling me. She said no. I found her
address and I sent her flowers, and the next day I called and said,
we're offering her the part. Sam said no. I sent her flowers
the next day, and I said her flowers the next day, and I
sent her flowers for five days and finally Sam says, okay, she'll do
it, and then she did it. It was great that period of time.
She was just on fire with hand and her sisters and the Lost Boys,
parenthood. There was just like there was nothing that she couldn't do.
Mike, I love how you love ad No movies so well, that's great
will be at that time too, there were so many great movies as she
was making. This was just yet another really great role, and I was
watching it again to last night, like I said, and there are so
many Missus Doubtfire connections or even having a drag queen making her up and everything,
but I have to say it's even better for me. Like I can
see why kids who watch Missus Doubtfire like that one. But for me,
the associate is really where it's at. And like I said, that business
acumen and all that, it just it really holds up listening audience, go
back a few decades. You heard it here. The associate is where it's
at. Go watch that movie. What are you really enjoying when you're there
as this producer role? The best part of being a producer is that you
get to work with amazing people and they're pretty much different people. Every time.
You're solving different problems, you're learning different things. You might be studying
open heart surgery for one movie and you might be walking on the stock exchange
for another movie. You're always finding your curiosity, intrigues, You're always learning.
And I love being a producer because you get to create an ecosystem where
creative people can do good work. And it's so important. And you're the
producer, You're not the writer. You're not the director, you're not the
actor, you're not the cinematographer. Hopefully you have made sure that you have
great people in all those roles. Your job is not to do those roles.
Your job is to make sure that they have the resources other people,
time, money, creative inspiration, the right locations, the right words to
say so they can actually execute what they want to execute. And I just
love it. Can you tell me about when you formed Tarabella Entertainment? That
was my first solo production company. It was after I had left Interscope.
At that point, I was out on my own. People like me,
I think people in our business in general, we rock and roll between having
someone employ us and employing ourselves. Times from other people give us a four
one kay, and we have to make our own for our one k.
If our company makes enough money to give us a four our one k.
And at that point I was out on my own. I was developing my
own projects and I just set up a company. I've always been a bit
of an Italian file and Terrabella means beautiful earth, and I thought it was
a beautiful name for a company, so I called it that and we did
some work. One of those films that you helped producer, helped to create
was Titus, which we've covered on the show. Absolutely loved that. It's
one of my favorite Shakespeare adaptations. What a movie me too, I agree,
one of my favorite Shakespeare adaptations also, And what a great opportunity and
what a great pleasure to work with Julie Taymore directing her first movie. Julie
and I had never worked together in theater, but we had known of each
other from theater and we respected each other. We had a common language.
It was my job as producer on that film was to get Julie's brain on
the screen, and I think we accomplished getting Julie's brain on the screen.
We had an extraordinary cast and Tony Hopkins, Jessica llang Alan Cumming, Harry
Lennox and on and armor and motorcycles at leather and tree stumps and wow,
yeah, pretty extraordinary. Was shot in Rome and a couple of weeks in
Croatia. The opening and closing scenes which take place in the coliseum are in
Pula, Croatia. We shot there a year after the war. The soldiers
in that scene our soldiers from the Croatian Army. It was freezing cold,
and somehow they followed their commander's orders to strip naked, put on a little
bit of armor, and they could covered in mud and march around at night
in the freezing cold. And it was a very hard movie to make,
Mike, it was just it was really difficult, and it was so hard.
Thought I was going to be in movie jail after no one ever let
me make a movie again. But sometimes the tension of the most difficult movies
creates a crucible of quality that you get at the other side. What was
so difficult about it just all of the moving pieces, or it's a big
movie and for what it was low budget and it was done independently. We
ultimately Searchlight distributed it, but we did it without studio backing. But the
biggest problem was that, as so many independent movies, the financing didn't come
together until about five weeks before it started. And that means we made that
movie with five weeks of prep. If you've seen that movie, it is
insane to make that movie with five weeks of prep. But we had to
do it then because of actor availabilities, locations, whether all those other exigencies
that you cannot control. So we were never caught up. We were always
running behind, and it was nutty and it was the director's first movie.
Now, one of the interesting things about Julie is that she does not draw.
That seems like a shocker because everything she does is so visual, so
how could she not draw? Like she sees something, and of course she
draws it and says to the art director or the production designer or costume designer,
here make this, but no, that's not what happens. She sees
something in her head and then needs to express it with words or sometimes with
gestures, but she doesn't draw. Part of the role that I played was
finding ways that the other creative people on the show could understand and make visual
what Julie saw in her head and expressed without visual cues. You need tell
me the story of March of the Penguins and how you bring that to the
United States. At that time, I am running National Geographic films, and
I had not made feature documentaries before I joined National Geographic. But once I
was at National Geographic, the docs are so much part of Geo's DNA that
we started doing documentaries. The first film that I released at Natchio was called
The Story of the Weeping Camel film. I remained super proud of also a
first film by the directors beyond Bassura Dava and Luigi Folorti. But when you're
running nat you hear about people who are making movies about nature and wildlife.
I heard three insanely committed frenchmen who had wintered over in at Artica with sixteen
millimeter cameras. Decided this is a movie that we have to have, and
I actually made an offer to buy the film sight Unseen while they were I
think, while the footage was still coming out of the lab, because I
figured, we got one hundred hours of penguins and Antarctica, we've got to
be able to cut something out of it somehow. But as I was doing,
the filmmakers got their movie into Sundance, so I was not able to
do buy it preemptively and went to Sundance with some arrangements with some distribution companies
that would work with us, because at that point Natchio did not have a
distribution company. And the English speaking audience doesn't know this. The French speaking
audience does know this that the film that was unspooled at Sundance consisted of French
speaking penguins who spoke in French telepathically to each other, and also a kind
of Euro edm techno score which really didn't play. It played in France,
and that was the most version that was released in France. So if any
one of the audiences French speaking and you saw it in Quebec or you saw
it in France, you saw that movie. But if you saw it anywhere
else, you saw another movie. And Mark Gill, who was running Warner
Independent at the time, saw the same thing that I did, which is
that the visuals were amazing, but what you heard did not work for the
US and the rest of the global audience. We bought the film in at
the end of January, and very quickly we hired a beautiful poetic writer,
Jordan Roberts, who wrote poetic words, asked Morgan Premant to speak those words.
We hired a gorgeous orchestral composer, Alix Warman to write an orchestral score,
recorded the score, and at the end of June, very very soon
after buying that movie, we released it under the title March of the Penguins,
and you know what happened. It remains the highest grossing nature documentary of
all time, and it remains the second highest grossing documentary of all time,
and it won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. And it was great.
It was one of the great moments of my life. And you started
the whole Penguin franchise and even to the point where Robin Williams comes back and
does a voice and Happy Feet. Yeah, Orders didn't green light Happy Feet
until March of the Penguins, did, Okay. I think Natchio should get
royalties from Happy Feet, and I think I asked, but I think they
said no. Tell me a little bit about the other documentary that you were
behind, Plastic Ocean. I'm super proud of that movie. Plastic Ocean came
to me because the filmmakers had shot a bunch of footage and they did not
know what to do with it. It was incepted by a woman named Joe
Ruxton, who was running the natural history unit for BBC at that time.
She had gotten fired up about plastic in the ocean. And I had shot
and ran out of money, and shot and ran out of money, as
happens with documentary films. And then this gentleman named Craig Leeson, who was
a director and also appeared in the movie, joined and also shot and appeared
in a couple of scenes, many scenes, and they didn't know what to
do with it, and I think they'd been through a couple of iterations trying
to figure it out and they weren't able to. I was really interested in
the film because I care about the issue. I never really thought a lot
of people would see the movie because I think if you have the choice between
a movie about plastic in the ocean where you know it's not going to be
a good time, or I don't know, Mike like top Gun, Maverick
Black Panther, Wakonda Forever Ill like we're going there right. But instead it
happened. And the way it happened was that I asked them to sent all
the footage they had and they put it into a giant of giant crates,
which is the size of a grand piano. They had a a plywood There
were two hundred hard drives that had been in storage in Bristol, England.
They brought them over to a post house in West Los Angeles. We opened
up the crate, we pull out the straw. There's all these hard drives
that they bought in different parts of the world over about a period of eighteen
months. No cables, no connectors. First month was spent finding cables and
connectors to extract the footage. And there were two key things about tying the
story. First, there are these two characters. Craig, who is a
man who's a fish. He grew up in the ocean and loves the ocean,
and we follow him on this journey. And the other character is a
woman who actually is a fish. Her name is Tanyu Streeter. She is
a free diver. She dives below the crushing depth of World War two submarines.
I don't know how she does that. She's like a real life Marvel
superhero character. She's amazing. So the idea of the movie became to take
two characters that you can relate to and follow them on this journey around the
world. There had been other documentaries about plastic in the ocean. I wanted
to create the definitive global movie about plastics in the ocean, and I did
not want it to be partisan. I did not want it to be anti
business. I wanted us to be something where it was like we were simply
laying the evidence before the jury, journing our cards over one by one,
trusting the audience to be smart and make and render its own verdict. And
the value of that is that the film became the primary advocacy tool for changing
processes and businesses and laws it chade. It has changed more than one hundred
and fifty laws around the world, including the national laws in India and Australia.
If anyone in the listening audience lives in a state or a province where
there has been a plastic bag or straw ban or limitation, it's because that
movie was used as an advocacy tool with the legislators. We were invited to
the United Nations. We screened it at the UN. It was placed in
every US embassy in the world, so a lot of people saw it.
It's had an amazing impact. It continues to have an impact. In fact,
I was just interviewed by someone who is about to go to college.
She is a senior in high school. She was interviewing me for a local
publication on the East Coast, and she told me that she saw the film
first in middle school biology class and it made her want to become an environmental
Scientist's seriously, Mike, that's as deep and meaningful as it gets. It's
just amazing. It's amazing to be able to make anything to make you know,
I make movies, but to write a book or to write a song
or any kind of creative work that then it touches people that you would not
normally be in the room with. But you can touch people at scale.
Yeah, I can't even imagine the difference of that feeling. Here. I
am telling you how important something like Dead Poet Society was to me. And
then you've got other films and this film that actually makes a difference to the
world and to your kids' grandkids, etc. Yeah, it's a good thing.
It's a good thing. I knew if you've written a couple of books
and one of them was Ash ten years ago. Now insidetrack for independent filmmakers.
Do you think there are still a pretty good intention of independent filmmakers in
twenty twenty three? There is a good contingence. The business sucks. The
spirit to make independent films has not died, It has only expanded, But
the business has really changed. It was already changing pre pandemic. The pandemic
accelerated the change independent film or art film or whatever we want to call it.
A quality cinema is down more than thirty percent from pre pandemic levels,
and the question is will it recover or will it not recover. I think
that people really became quite used to watching those films at home. The quality
of what you can watch at home, the size of the screens, the
quality of the sound increased. A lot of people just got there, and
that became a tradition. I don't think it ever goes away. I think
it goes through surges. Like the ocean. It accelerates and it decelerates.
I think we are still in a decelerating time. I see in other parts
of the world greater excitement and interest about independent cinema that exists right than exists
right now in the United States. I don't see the number of submissions to
festivals like Sundance or slam Dance really reducing that much. It means that the
movies are there, and that's still the universe that I'm in. I enjoy
big studio movies, I personally do not want to spend three or four years
of my life on one of them. To me, I'm doing something else
now. Anywhere I've titrated myself away from producing films to launch a new company.
But I enjoy working on independent films, maybe because it's harder. It's
harder to make a movie with fifty people than five thousand people. It's harder
to make a movie for two million dollars than two hundred million dollars. And
maybe I just enjoy that challenge. And I think I also enjoy the spirit
of independent filmmakers and the creative ideas that come from the limitations that we face.
You can't just throw money off the problem, and you don't have enough
time, right you should be moving in twenty four days instead of one hundred
and four days. It's a really different situation. How did the pandemic affect
you? Pre pandemic, I had started a new company, and the company
that I've started is called Media U mediau dot com. And the concept of
MEDIAU is that we need to put tools of storytelling, media making, filmmaking,
streaming series, anything that happens on a screen. We need to put
those skills and those tools into the hands of as many people as possible because
the world gets better when more people have the capacity to authentically tell their stories
and whether they are storytellers in front of the camera, behind the camera,
in the back office, doing data analytics on the streaming platform. It just
makes it better when there are more voices that have those skills. And the
media business has remained something that feels really impenetrable, really hard to get into.
It seems like a giant wall without a door. How do you get
in? And film school costs I don't know, but two hundred and fifty
three, three hundred fifty thousand dollars, who's gotten that money, who wants
to take out those student loans? Who's got four years? How do we
make that change? So we had started MEDIAU before the pandemic. The concept
had always been that we were going to be a virtual remote training mentoring experience.
We just tried to do a few things. Then the pandemic hit and
the barriers that people had to learning online evaporated. And so now as we
have more things, more things, more courses, more opportunities for people those
that disbelief that you can't do an online, you can do it online.
Everybody learned how to do an online on faculty at the Business School at UC
Berkeley, where are teaching the NBA program and a couple of other things.
Because I had started MEDIAU when we went to the pandemic, I immediately turned
my courses into online experiences, not power points with narration, not somebody staring
uncomfortably at the camera, try to read write experiences. And it was they
were so good that the Business School sent many other faculty members to meet to
say, here's how you do it, so you do it. And so
the thing about MEDIAU is that when you take a course at MEDIAU, it's
not somebody with elbow patches lecturing at you. It is an experience. We
are filmmakers. We make it exciting, we make it entertaining. We find
that people binge watch our courses the same way they've binge watched the latest show
on Netflix, because they're just fun and they're good, and they're all very
practical. Everything that we do is practically focused. It's not film theory,
although I love film theory. I'll go with anybody eyeball to eyeball, But
that's not what media does. MEDIAU believes that creative people who are motivated and
work hard should be able to pay the rent with their creativity. That shouldn't
be so hard. In the year twenty twenty three, it shouldn't be,
and there is a global idea here. There's a lot of talk now about
sustainability. We think about sustainability a lot. We think about social equity.
We think about the quality of the society that we're living in. Why is
the world unsustainable right now? Why is their social injustice? Why is our
society not of the quality that we wanted to be. It's because the stories
that we have been told that resident in our heads, that form the patterns
of the behavior that we follow without even thinking about it. Because those stories
are unsustainable, because those stories are unjust, because those stories are about socially
uncomfortable and inequitable situations. We change. We have to change the stories,
We have to change the narrative. Because the walls that we face as people,
as creative people, socially, culturally seem to be so tall, so
impenetrable, so thick, so dense of a kind of concrete that they cannot
be broken down. But what does break them down? Empathy? And how
do you scale empathy with story? And in fact it is a kind of
asymmetrical combat where we're the ewoks, but the ewoks can win. Yeah,
it was very interesting going back and watching your head talk from thirteen years ago
about the real culture wars and everything that you're saying at that time is still
as relevant in twenty twenty three. Yeah, that was before I even had
the idea for media you, but clearly I was thinking along the lines right.
Yeah, that was remarkable. And your other ted talk how to know
your life purpose in five minutes, that was wonderful as well. I get
emails every week from people. It's now what like years ago, nine years
ago? It's back, but I get emails every week from people who have
seen it. It's like you put forward five questions that people can answer,
and they send me their answers. It's amazing. So you're running media you,
you're working at the business school. You still writing a lot. I
write business plans, I write decks, I write emails. You've got your
hands pretty darnful these days. I am. Yes. Are you still doing
any producing? I actually just finished producing a movie we shot in Sicily in
the fall. I really was stopping. I wasn't going to produce anything because
MEDIAU demands time, and I know that I won't produce anything for at least
another year. Just producing more MEDIAU content which I am producing, but one
of Media U's trusted counselors and advisors, a woman named MICHAELI Scolari, who
was a producer herself, whom I've known for about a decade, wrote a
script and about a year ago she gave it to me, and I'd really
do not like to read scripts from friends, because usually they're terrible, and
then I have to say, I really, you're a nice person, but
please don't write any more scripts. I'm sorry, or maybe it's just not
for me. It's not you, it's me. I just didn't get it.
But Michaela's script was brilliant, it was so good, and then she
asked if I would produce it. Michael has never directed before. I like
producing movies for first time directors like MICHAELA, like Julie Tamoor, like Joe
Johnston, like John Turtle, tab like etc. Etc. And I said,
yeah, I'd be happy too. So we just finished shooting it in
Sicily at the end of last year the end of twenty twenty two. We
are finishing it now or starting our final mix in about two weeks, and
I'm really happy with it. It's going to be a beautiful movie. It's
called Sicilian Holiday. Are you on social media? Do you do a lot
of updating? I have been off social media for the longest time because I
don't know. I just Twitter is weird. Now Twitter is really weird.
I saw that Elon must just declared NPR state sponsored propaganda media. So NPR
has stopped posting on Twitter. But in the past few months, I found
TikTok and I'm loving TikTok. I think TikTok is really great. And what
I've been doing recently is I did a you can do wet on TikTok where
you look at someone else's video and you make some reaction to it. Someone
had done a list of their favorite movies. They were top ten, and
I didn't I liked some, I didn't link some, and I made this
offan comment like you've got ten I don't know, like I got three hundred
favorite movies. And then I actually press send, and there was what happened
in the comments, Hey Adam, what are your three hundred top movies?
So I am in the middle of doing my top three hundred movies on TikTok.
I'm backwards counting. I started number three hundred, which was Yellow Submarine
and then moving all the way up to I will get to the top ten
sometime in the next month. And no, I will not reveal now what
they are. You have to wait. But that's been pretty great. That's
awesome. I don't tend to look at TikTok, but I will look at
your TikTok. Check out my TikTok. And I've not put the top those
top three hundred videos in a playlist. I'm doing ten per videos. It's
going to be a total of thirty videos to get up to all the way
through the top three hundred. And here's the crazy thing, Mike, and
you would it would be the same for you because you're such a movie buff.
I've left out movies I like three hundred, Like I couldn't even have
a hundred because that's crazy talk. There's so many more than one hundred movie
I'm leaving out movies. I'm gonna have to videos about, well, I
didn't put in that movie because you know, I don't know. I just
doesn't resonate with for me that much now. But it's still a good movie.
There's so many good movies because movies have been in existence for twenty one
hundred thirty years. There's a lot of content. It's not as you and
your audience knows. It's not just the US, it's all around the world.
Every country has a tradition of cinema, and my list is idiots more
weighted towards English language movies and particularly in the earlier days, the Hollywood movies.
But it's global because I love movies from all over the world and they
teach me things and they give me windows on perspectives that I wouldn't otherwise see,
which is one of the reasons that I love them. Mister Leipzig,
thank you so much for your time. This was so great talking with you.
Mike, Thank you so much. It's been great talking with you.
What a pleasure to talk with someone who loves movies and culture in the way
that you do, and the generosity with which you ask your questions. And
I know your audience can't see you, but the brightness in your eyes when
you ask them the off