Oh years show time. People pay good money to see this movie. When
they go out to a theater, they want cold sodas with a hot popcorn
and no monsters in the projection booth. Everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring. No,
no, nosh. A storm is brewing, my friends, someone has
to stop. Every Sunday for about a year now, we've been inviting a
guest over for dinner and discussion. But this is morth right. Far zu
damn liberals? Are you Nazi? Or I can part of the letter?
Can't marry have the right idea? Excuse me that this passed. We can
go on with the rest of our lives. What if you kill somebody whose
death makes the world a better place? Blue bottle is bad, the green
bottle is good. Everyone. This is Reverend Gerald Hutchins. Homosexuality is the
terrible disease, and age is the queer. When a woman cries, right,
it's usually because she's already concerned the sun. Really yeah, really,
I've never met anyone whose anti earth. We're not even giving people a decent
meal anymore. The fat basher had Hinese. Have you seen any of these
men ready for my life? Whether have you lost your mind serving me this
filthy stun. I think we're in the clear and we just kick off those
glasses and that homeboy hat. It's a secret Challas wouldn't know a guy gets
eason meal around here, which you yes, file this under amazing story in
my friends. Welcome to the projection booth. I'm your host. Mike White
joined me once again is mister Rob Saint Mary. You left wingers make me
want to puke. Also joining us as mister Martin Kessler. I'm I'm pro
earthling. We continue talking about comedic films this month with a look at Stacy
titles The Last Supper, released in nineteen ninety five. The film is a
dark comedy. We're in a handful of liberals decide to try and make the
world a better place by poisoning scuzz ball right wingers and planting them in their
garden. We will be spoiling this film as we go along, So if
you haven't seen The Last Supper before, go ahead and track it down and
come on back after you have watched it. We will still be here.
So, Rob, when was the first time you saw this film and what
did you think? Sir? I know that it didn't play locally. I
don't believe it played in local theater, and if it did, it came
and went so fast because it was a little indie film. Maybe it played
at the Main or something or the Maple around us here in Detroit. But
I think it was my dad who had rented it on VHS. Must have
been my senior year of high school was nineteen ninety six, so maybe I
saw it around then, and I don't think I had rewatched it since,
So for me, it was interesting to go back and rewatch it. I
have to say that there's aspects of it that still hold up in terms of
I had noted in my notes. I said, you know, it's amazing
that the film feels contemporary of political discourse and division that were so often sold
in this country. I'm sure we'll be talking a little bit about politics in
here, because you know, the movie has nothing to do with politics.
Rob. If my reviewers have one thing to say about that, there's no
such thing as politics and movies, you gotta be crazy. What are you
talking about out? Yeah, I know, and exactly like the first time
when I was on this show, oh twelve years ago, when I talked
about bloodsucking Freaks, and someone put a note that they said they didn't want
to lecture on what is it? Socialist feminist critique? And I was like,
okay, whatever, and Martin, now by yourself. I didn't see
it right away when it came out either. I think I saw it for
the first time on the IFC channel on television when that was still the thing.
I found it really captivating, and it's a film that I haven't watched
super often in the years since, but it's one I kept thinking of and
kept kind of coming back to, because, like you said, there's definitely
aspects that are still relevant, and you know, it's a film that's very
easy to think of when you're spending too much time on Twitter. This is
actually a new one for me. I stayed away from this film. I
think I was confusing it with the title being the Last Supper. I was
not confusing it with the Da Vinci Code, but I was confusing it with
another film. And I don't think it's Peter's Friends, though it has a
very similar plot to Peter's Friends. But basically, there were a couple of
movies in the nineties where people were holding dinner parties and they were saying goodbye
to their friends, usually because they had aids, and I remember walking out
of Peter's friends. I just couldn't stand that movie. So I think I
was confusing this with something like that with that title, but I was delighted
when I finally sat down and watched this movie. Though there are some interesting
politics and we'll definitely talk about that as we go along. And it's so
funny to think of this being a little indie film and I'm doing air quotes
just when you look at the cast of this and you just like Cameron Diaz,
Courtney b Vans, Ron Pearlman, Bill Paxton, Nor Dunne, Charles
Durning, Mark Herrman, Jason Alexander, It's like Wow. To have this
level of talent in one film was really very surprising. I got together over
the weekend with Paul Zimmerman, who you've had on the show, and I
was talking to Paul about that we were going to do this and he said,
oh, when he was editing film Threat, he said, they did
a big like set visit and they wrote about it. He goes, yeah,
he goes, that's the movie that came out where charmeron Diaz had been
in the mask, but she hadn't blown up yet, so it was kind
of in between. So you look at it and go, okay, not
you know something about Mary or whatever. You know that finally launched her huge.
So but yeah, the cast is just amazing. You're just like,
wow, it's a pretty simple plot. I don't think we're going to go
through this beat by beat because especially once we get to there's a couple extended
montage sequences. But really it's basically a group of friends all getting together having
dinner and the very first time this happens, one of the friends, Peter,
he brings home a guest. Basically he was having car trouble and this
guy picks him up. And that guy is Bill Paxton, who I had
to laugh out loud when he talked about being a former Marine because I was
thinking about him the Space Marines taking out Aliens. But always great to see
Bill Paxson show up and anything. Still sorely missed his presence and stuff,
and especially him playing trying to remember what his character's name was in Weird Science.
But he's really channeling a lot of that Chet energy. Yeah, big
Chet energy, big big Chet energy, and especially I mean he still reminds
me of people that I've known in real life, where he just starts talking
about, you know, Hitler really had some great ideas and you know,
you're just being very unfair to just label him as being so anti Semitic,
and you know, he had some really good things going on. And he
eventually shows even more of his true colors by pulling a knife or is it
a knife or a gun, It's a knife that he holds to Peter's throat,
and eventually Mark, and yes, there are a lot of biblical names
in this movie. Mark played by Jonathan Penner, who we've had on the
show before, and you'll hear a little bit later on, ends up stabbing
him in the back. And that's really what sets them on their path of
Hey, we're a whole bunch of bleeding heart liberals that talk of things to
death. Maybe it's time we start doing something about things. We've tried nothing
and we're all out of ideas. Well. It's all predicated on this scenario
that they have of if you found yourself in nineteen o nine sitting at a
table from across from Adolf Hitler, would you kill him? And you know
their answer is of course, yes you would. So let's basically kill these
potential future Adolf Hitler's before they have a chance to become Hitler. Once the
Bill Paxton character is stabbed, it's like, okay, well, what are
we going to do? I mean, do we go to the cops?
And what if we go to cops? Then what are they gonna you know,
you stabbed him, Like you really want to go to jail for this
guy? Do you really? Is there a better target? It's kind of
like, if you're going to do, if you're going to do a prison
sentence, you should at least have a better reason to go to jail.
I guess it's really the philosophy that they're thinking through their head, like why
throw yourself away on this guy? So at the same time, there's this
parallel story of the sheriff that's played by Nora Dunn, who you know,
she's in what is it The Weed to Southland Tales and which is the other
film that I was thinking of that we did. You haven't done anything else
with her in it? Because oh yeah, I am blues. Oh yeah,
that's right. You know, she's always great. I always thought she
was underappreciated, you know, in terms of the work that she could do.
So she's the sheriff and she's looking for this lost girl. So this
becomes this kind of guess the tension of being found out aspect for this group
of people as they continue on their path of hosting these dinner parties for people
they don't agree with. Yeah, I'm very kissed where they fi these people.
I mean, they do make a point a few times to say,
like Charles Journing, like oh I interviewed him. He was the counterpoint to
this argument about basically like compassionate care for AIDS patients, and he is just
vehemently against gay people and against AIDS patients, and he's very much this homosexuality
is the disease and AIDS is the cure type of person. And again I
love Charles Journing, and he plays a son of a bitch like nobody's business,
especially when he's there with papal collar on and just being so holier than
now. So when he bites it, I'm pretty happy about that. But
yeah, Jenny is the person that they're looking for, apparently played by Elizabeth
Moss or that's her in the photos. Do we ever see her in real
life? Do we ever see Elizabeth Moss moving around in here, and are
we supposed to think that Bill Paxon actually murdered her. That's what we're led
to believe, is that maybe he was the killer, and so maybe that's
supposed to the swash our guilt a bit as to are people killing off others.
I think it's interesting that it's this loose end that's never quite tied up
either. You sort of get the sense that maybe this is something that could
have been resolved, but because of these characters actions, it's left is this
loose thread which just kind of hangs by the end of the film. And
I don't know Norah Dunn's character, it reminds me a little bit of Farnsworth
in Misery, where there's this long build up of the tension waiting for them
to stumble onto the crime, stumble into the main plot, and then it
subverts that before the end by killing them off. That kind of comes out
of nowhere for me when she shows up and according to the Vans, is
back in the garden, because like I said, they do plan all these
corpses in the garden, and there's this whole thing where the tomato plants that
are above the corpses just take off, and I really think we're supposed to
see all of this tomato sauce is basically a stand in for blood and all
this blood that's on their hands. And after a while we see tomatoes everywhere
in the house and all these jars of sauce everywhere in the house. It's
like the blood is kind of closing in on them, and if anything,
it feels like the blood is poisoning them, because they get more and more
vicious as this movie goes on and kind of stray away from their own politics.
But I'd say of all the people at stray the most, it's courting
to be advance as Luke here where he ends up pretty much just going off
the deep end, especially when he takes a shovel to Norah Dunn's face and
it's like, oh, okay, so now we've gone from murdering right wing
nut jobs to just straight up gang and a police officer. Isn't that where
the title of the Cohen Brothers movie Blood Simple comes from that basically, like
you've gone kind of blood mad, like you've killed enough that it's like you've
lost your sanity kind of, And I think that's kind of what happens with
these characters. And they do have that conversation early on about sort of the
moral culpability. It's like, well, we're not, you know, if
you kill one person, it's like, kind of where does it end?
So it becomes this question of the sanctity of life, which, of course
is always the right to life crusaders always used. And that also reminded me
of George Carlin's whole thing about the sanctity of life in his stand up bit
from nineteen ninety two, a few years before this movie, Sanctity of Life?
You believe in it? Personally, I think it's a bunch of shit.
Well, I mean life is sacred. Who said so? God?
Hey, if you read history, you realize that God is one of the
leading causes of death, has been for thousands of years. Even if there
worth such a thing, I don't think it's something you can blame on God.
Now you know where the sanctity of life came from. We made it
up. You know why, because you're alive. It's pretty funny how it
progresses, and it feels like at a certain point they're going after smaller and
smaller fish instead of bigger and bigger fish. It does get into this question
of ad like, is this person really evil or are they just stupid?
Are they just a illiterate? Are they just a stupid teenager? You know,
it gets into that gray area of you know, are we really killing
somebody who's evil or are we just trying to satisfy our own stance. They
have this montage, so Mark Harman basically is very much male chauvinist, peg
very not necessarily women should only be in the kitchen type of thing, but
pretty darn close to it. You get the right to life crusader, so
that is that whole thing of you know, I will murder to protect the
sanctity of life. As you're talking about, You've got Jason Alexander coming in
as this anti environmentalists, eating cheeseburger and sa poking and drinking, I think,
all at the same time, kind of a George Costanza thing. It
reminded me of him when he's having sex with Susan and eating the Astramian stuff.
You've got all of these folks and then you show up with like the
back black Muslim guy and I'm just like, Okay, I'm really sure what
the problem is with this black nationalist guy, and he's not even a black
nationalist who's not like, he doesn't express his politics at all for me,
and he's just coded as this kind of ferracon guy and like Farra Coon was
a piece of shit, But I'm not seeing the piece of shit in this
black Muslim. I'm just like, okay, yeah, he's got the boat
tie, all right, what you're trying to go for, but I'm not
seeing it. And then you get the one guy who apparently likes to go
out and beat homeless people, and he actually starts to have second thoughts and
he's just like, oh, like the light bulb goes off over his head
and they ended up murdering him anyway. And I'm like, oh, okay,
so yeah, like you said, they're going after petty crimes or petty
things. And then when they actually talk to one of these people and they
start to have second thoughts, they don't care. They're just going to murder
that person anyway. I mean, it's definitely understandable how somebody might find it
more satisfying to obliterate somebody then to change their mind. It's funny also to
me to how it's reflected in the quality of the meals that they're serving up
as the last sepparate to these people. It starts off as, Oh,
we're going to give them a nice last meal. We're going to be very
civil about this, and then gradually as it goes on, like you said,
you know, if there's the hamburger at a certain point, it's just
like white bread and macaroni and cheese, like they're not putting any effort to
these meals anymore. I almost wish there wasn't a line to draw attention to
it, because it just plays very funny, as like a small background detail
if you if you notice these meals getting worse and worse. Another thing that
I liked, and I know this is just by virtue of you have enough
people in the way the table is set. But there's at least one shot,
especially later into the montage that reminds me of the exact same set up
as in Texas Chainsaw Masaker, where the families like looking down the barrel of
the camera at you know, their dinner guest, and it looks exactly the
same staging in here as in Texas Chainsaw, and probably just as menacing because
they're all kind of like laughing and sneering and all of this. This is
great. It's almost the exact same visual nod. I was getting a lot
of Shallow Grave while I was watching at this time, and just that montage
of the three kind of pieces of shit main characters. Shellow Grave is a
great movie, and that I really care about these people who are just absolute
whankers. These folks, I don't know if I necessarily care about them as
much, but to see that same shot where they're interviewing all the potential housemates
and felt very much like when they're on that other side at the table looking
at their victim. But yeah, I can totally see that Texas chainsaw massacre
thing. I love shell Grave as well. I'm glad we got to do
that on the show because it's, you know, one of the underappreciated of
the Danny Boyle films early one. It also ruins me a little bit of
these Frederick Knought type one location murder plays like Dialing for Murder or Wipe until
Dark. It has a little bit of fat fuel to it, which I
like a lot. There's like a little bit of Hitchcock in this, I
think, but playfulness and a dark humor, a little bit of that.
I was seeing a lot of arsenic and old lace as well, especially the
choice of poisoning as their way to dispatch people. And I do have to
say, when things really come to ahead, it's really their own fault because
they invite this underage girl to come over, who's one of these like promise
rang no sex before marriage type girls, And I'm just like, she's not
good to drink poison wine. You guys really need to come up with an
alternative. Now there's there's your milk, your tea, you know, something
else, because this girl is definitely not going to have any wine at dinner.
Try the why aren't you drinking? I never drink? Why remember joking
many years ago because this takes place, I mean, we're led to believe
that it takes place, I guess in Iowa based on the license plates,
and they're checking the newspaper to see, oh is anyone missing in the newspapers
and things like that. And I remember joking many years ago about the show
Murder she wrote right, which takes place in a small town. I'm like,
that place has the highest murder rate per capita of any place in the
world. I'm like, that makes see you dad Warez, look like mister
Rogers neighborhood. You know, it's just like, what the hell's going on?
Look, at some point, all of these people that are disappearing,
you think that there would be a bigger outcry. You think that there would
be like a bunch of these flyers all over the place, like where's the
priest and where's this person? Where's that? You know, which would have
added I think a little bit more tension. But obviously, you know,
we're playing in a heightened reality in which these you know, it's not supposed
to be real, but there is just part of you just had to laugh.
Like if you look at it from a rational standpoint, it's like,
there's really no way you could get away with killing I think at least seven
to eight people, maybe eight within a summer and in a small town in
Iowa and people not know what you know, notice something funny? Well,
according to the one guy's cast, that's ten people. Though they argue about
that. Like you said, there's a lot of things that if you look
at this film as if it takes place in the rational world, it wouldn't
really hold up or makes sense. But like he said, as that heightened
reality. I always think of this movie is a little bit like a parable,
you know, with the paintings and something about all the fruit imagery and
the way the story unfolds. By the time you get to the end,
it feels like the punchline to this sort of dark political parable. Maybe.
Yeah, let's talk about the painting. So, the Jonathan Penner character Mark
is a painter. The whole movie starts off with a series of paintings and
it ends with the painting, and we get to see him paint through this
and it's kind of a trying to remember what the name of the actual painting
is, but it's basically where God is reaching out to Adam and giving them
the spark of life that's on the origin of Man. Yeah, thank you,
Right, he can't sleep, he's kind of possessed. He ends up
painting mess and we saw his paintings earlier in the movie. They're interesting paintings.
They're they're kind of outsider artish type of stuff. But yeah, I
like them, and I like that he's this painter. It's the only he's
the only character who really stands out for me as far as just being a
little bit different from the rest of them, because everybody else other than perhaps
Courtney b Vans, they'll feel like they're very much cut from the same cloth.
I wouldn't be able to tell you the difference between Cameron Diaz as Jude
versus Adambeth Gish as Pauli. They're the women characters, you know, there's
not a whole lot unique about them. But then you get Mark and he
and Lease got the paintings. You know, even when it comes to Pete,
it's like, Okay, he's got a cast on his arm. He
doesn't really have a lot of personality. I mean, this is very much
like you said, Martin, this is very much a parable. It's basically,
are these people get together and they murder these people? And are they
in the right? Are they in the wrong? And it's interesting because this
whole movie, you know, it begs the question are they right? Are
they wrong? And I would like to think, and this is going to
sound very sick and twisted, oruld like to think they're in the right,
but they're definitely painted as being in the wrong. And it's like, okay,
well do you feel for these characters or do you not feel for these
characters? And at the end of the movie. I mean, they are
not victorious. It's the biggest of all of the pieces of shit. Ron
Perlman as Norman Abernoff, he is basically a stand in for at the time,
Rush Limbaugh. I could see him being more of a Tucker Carlson these
days, where he sells his whole line of shit to his audiences but really
doesn't believe it himself and just is doing it for the ratings. And he's
the one who figures out everything and ends up poisoning all of them. So
it's like, okay, well they haven't vanquished evil. If anything, evil
just vanquished them. I think the irony is that after this debate about,
you know, is it right or wrong what they're doing, when they are
in fact sitting across the table from the next Edelf Hitler, that's when they
fail. Cortney Bevans is the only one who is maybe correct in that situation,
and he's outvoted because, like you said, he's the one who's most
over the edge and is perhaps killing for not the reasons that he supposes he
is. But I think, like it's interesting that they've been picking on these
or killing these people who are easy to argue against you know, their opinions
are a stupid and by the end when they run into Ron Roman's character,
he's smarter than they are. He's persuasive, he knows exactly how to drive
a wedge in between the lines of division in them, and you know,
he's completely capable of destroying them. You know, it's it's like, oh
no, never mind killing Hitler from the other end of the dinner table.
Hitler's going to kill me. But you know, he's so expert at talking
in circles around them and sowing doubt within them. I think Rob Prohn's really
fantastic in this also one of my favorite performances of his. And you know,
I like his work in Je Jocket though films and Shell Pierholt in his
movies. But I mean, he said rush Limba and I've heard like Pat
Bichannon kind of compared to this character. But he does something a little bit
different than them. His voice. He's got like, you know, a
little bit of a silky voice thing that I don't really associate with either of
those guys. How does he say it like I would reason with him?
You know, the way he says it, it's so devilish and when he
grins, it's that mouthful atif. That's wonderful. I really like his performance
here where you feel like he is the big dog in this film. In
a way, he's the one who can really flip the script and obliterate these
characters who've been killing all these speciople. You know, at the very beginning,
they set up this character where you know they're watching him on television and
saying, oh, he's he's so stupid, he's an idiot. And I
think a character, maybe it's Mark, says like, oh no, he's
a genius. I think Courtney Bevans's character says he's the devil, and I
think both of those things turn out to be true in the end. He
is the devil. He is the next Adolf Hitler. I think as that
final painting and the political speech that overlays it suggests. I've heard some people
kind of argue different interpretations at the ending. I know it's it's a little
ambiguous, and I've heard some people say, well, how can the painting
exist if Mark died so he couldn't paint it, But again, it's a
parable. I think the paintings are telling the story in a way. I
think one of the lessons is it's not really the believers that are the issue.
It's the those who understand how to manipulate the believers. It's those who
they're the real problem. But the thing is is that when you're so in
the ideology, you don't see that you focus more on the people who are
the believers as opposed to the people who are able to manipulate to get the
people to believe. And this is where I saw kind of talking about contemporary
for twenty twenty three to the connection to as Mike said, oh, maybe
he's a Tucker Carlson with the whole Fox News dominion lawsuit thing, which is
to me a perfect illustration where all the texts and emails come out and they're
like, oh, God Trump, and I can't stand him. I hate
this guy so fucking terrible, Like I can't wait for him to go away,
And they're saying that behind the scenes, but on camera they're constantly like,
Oh, he's our guy, and all of this so feeding the audience
what they want or what that person feels they need in order to raise their
own stature to make the money, but at the same time they really don't
believe in anything. So it becomes a question of how do you battle in
a moral figure really, because really that's what Ron Perlman's character is. I
mean, I think if he could see the value of control within being a
liberal, I think he would have been a liberal, or he would have
been a conservative. It just depends on where he could have seen the ability
to manipulate and control and to build his power base and the money and the
stature and all the other things he wants. So the point that they're trying
to make thematically is that you can't you can't battle someone who's immoral in that
way because there's really no way to kind of defend against them in this kind
of I guess you would say, this hardcore way of just you know,
we'll just kill him. I remember I saw they're warning me about white supremacists
and these types of people, and his advice to me was that, like,
most of these people are just stupid playing dress up, wearing jack boots
and getting sust cut tattoos. But if you run into somebody who's who knows
better and still embraces this idea legally anyway, somebody who's who's too smart for
he said that those are really dangerous people to stay away from them. I
don't know if you've seen the Daniel Redcliffe movie Imperium, whereas the FBI agent
going undercover, there's like the one character and Edge who's he's a white supremacist
who still listens to Leonard Bernstein, and I'm like, that's the guy.
That's the guy who's going to do the ball. Maybe it's like in the
back of my head. So I think a little bit of that. Also,
these people who are who are smarter than their own politics and who use
it to their advantage to gain power to destroy opposition, you know, I
think it's It's something I definitely try to be aware of. A good friend
of mine actually was a drummer in the band I was in in high school
and we're still friends now, but there was a period in our early twenties
where he showed up at my house with a skinhead jacket and tattoos and all
of this, and I was like, what the fuck, dude, And
I'm like, I go, you're Polish man. I'm like, do you
have any idea what the fucking Nazis did to the Polish people? I mean,
come on, you know, and I kind of pushed his ass out
the door, and a few years later he came back to me and we
met up for dinner recently and he goes, you know what, I want
to thank you for doing that. I met these people at a time in
my life when I was very isolated, I was very lone. I was
very upset with the world. I didn't I was looking for answers. I
wasn't finding the answers that I wanted. And it was just comfort. It
was. It was friendship is what I found, really, And eventually what
happened was they kind of turned on me too. Like I thought it was
one thing, and it became something else, and I had to take a
hard look at myself and go, no, this is yeah, this is
wrong. You know. It took him a couple of years to kind of
snap out of it, but when he kind of came back to reality,
he was like, you know, it just didn't just didn't make any sense
because they were telling me that. You know, He goes, part of
it was he was a musician, and he was just like, you know,
all the music I love was created by black people. So he's like,
how am I supposed to hate black people? He goes, I love
jazz and I love blues. That you know, it's like, what the
fuck? But really, like I said, for him, it was that
it was finding community. And I think to this film some of these sort
of lesser people as we're talking about, not the Ron Perlman character, that
maybe it's much the same for them, Like obviously we don't get into their
backstories and things like that, but it could be you know, I found
community. I found community in a church, I found community in this I
found community, and that this just happens to be what I've been told and
I've come to believe as what I should be following. But it's really more
about about that kind of thing. So when you see people who you're just
like, no, this guy's Harvard educated. This guy wanted to Yale,
that is you know, like like you look at people in the GOP and
you're like, round to Santis went to Harvard and Yale. You know,
Ted Cruz went to Harvard and Yale. I'm like, these guys are educated
people, and so there's part of me that goes, they know what they're
doing, they know that they don't really believe this stuff. They've just found
a way to get people to back them and give them money and positions of
authority, and that's really what it's about, more than anything that's disturbing.
That's very disturbing. I think about a movie like Black Clansmen, where I
mean, yes, the White supremacists are very dangerous, there's the bomb that's
being set off, but they're portrayed as being just buffoonish, even all the
way up to David Duke, and I'm just like, I don't think that
these people are as stupid as you're portraying them. They're all comic relief and
Spike Lee he wants this cake and to eat it too. He wants to
make fun of the white supremacists and also show that they're evil but stupid at
the same time. And it's just like they're not always mutually exclusive in Illinois
Nazis. Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of skinheads, though there's a skinhead that's
credited in the credits Patrick Lawrence, I don't remember a scene with a skinhead
in this movie. There was another character I noticed when I was going through
the im tob like illegal alien haters something like that. That notice in the
film, so I assume maybe there were more vignettes that just didn't make it
into the final cut at a certain point of place, a little bit like
a montage, or it's going through these different characters who get killed quite quickly.
I don't think you see all ten or eleven, so presumably there's some
other cutting room floor. I guess it would make sense. Especially it would
be kind of more biblical too, if they had twelve people that they ended
up killing and then the thirteenth is the one that they can't kill. I
didn't really think about the whole painting can't be done if Mark is dead.
That's a really good point, Martin. I think I read this on an
im D message board like fifteen years ago. It's not my point, but
I've seen that some people have that. I actually wrote it down in my
notes why I rewatched it. So it's funny. Yeah. And the other
thing that I wanted to say real quick was that having Courtney b Vance be
the guy who starts to kill a little bit more for fun and as the
one that kills the sheriff and is just really adamant about killing people, it's
kind of a bad look. Since he's one of only two black characters in
this entire movie, and it's like, maybe you could make one of the
milktoast white guys be a little bit more murderous. I mean, give for
Ron Elder and something to do. You know, that might be the answer
to your question about the black Muslim that the idea was they had to bounce
that off a little bit. Oh, you know, he's not the only
black character. Ron Elder is an interesting guy because I've seen him in so
many movies, but I didn't realize that I was looking at him in so
many movies. When he showed up, I was just like, I know
this guy. I don't know where I know him from. And then I
realized that I watched every single episode of Blind Justice back in two thousand and
five, one of many blind detective shows. Actually, there's also a deft
detective from Canada, a woman, and I've watched all of her shows too,
So I don't know pa for the differently abled I suppose, but apparently
like differently abled detectives to me. There is several different readings that you can
have on this ending. One is is that they're all dead, and that
basically the idea that Martin said is that we'll just kind of divide and conquer.
You know that you can't all come together to figure out what it is
that you want, and that's why the left will always be as Bill Paxton
says, up the front, it's like, oh, you liberals, all
you do is talking, don't do anything, which also reminds me of the
line of Dark Helmet and spaceballs. Now you see that evil will all he's
triumph because good is dumb. I also saw it as the idea of,
well, why the tomatoes, Like you were saying, there's this great visual
with the idea of okay, it's a stand in for blood, but the
idea also of reaping what you sew, right, So if they're sowing this
death and they're sewing all this, then of course it's going to eventually come
back onto them. Those are the big ones that I kind of took away,
and then sort of the third was that maybe Norman let them live.
Maybe he didn't figure it out like we're led to believe that he figured it
out based on the editing and the way things are put together. But at
the same time, in order for someone like him to be a demagogue,
he needs someone to fight against. He needs people who have who hate his
guts, he needs people who who hold differing opinions. So therefore, yeah,
well, of course, you know if if there was a group of
liberals that got together and killed a bunch of right wingers, wouldn't that be
great fodder for your campaign. See, we can't trust these liberals. They're
all trying to kill us capitalists. If you think that you can play foot
seas with these people, you're wrong. They will come for you and drag
you into the streets and kill you. I always imagine, even though it's
not explicitly stated, that surviving his encounter with them is what propels his political
career at the very end that you know, the fame of that is what
would lead him to become president of the United States. And well, it
is nice that they've got that has shown a knife cover of Top of the
World, playing basically like, yeah, he is going to be at the
top of the world. He is that new Hitler as you're talking about.
So yeah, I think that's a really good reading of it, is that
this is what helps him out in his career. No matter what, he's
going to be able to spin it, whether all five of them die or
whether they don't. And he just continues on regardless, he always seems to
have the upper hand. All right, we're going to take a break and
play a pair of interviews for stuff. We'll hear from Mark himself Jonathan Penner,
and after that you'll hear from screenwriter Dan Rosen, and we'll be back
with both of those right after these brief messages. Hello everyone, this is
Malcolm McDowell. I just want to say that this is a request to listeners
of the Projection Booth podcast to become patrons of the show via patrion dot com
PA t r e o n dot com slash Projection Booth. That's pretty simple.
I think you can do that. It's a great show and Mike he
provides hours of great entertainment. So now it's time to give back my little
drugs. Settle down and take a listen and have a sip of the old
molocco and then you'll be ready for a little of the old in Out,
in out, real horror show. Bye bye, John Papenner's great having you
back on the show. We were talking about the Last Supper. Can you
tell me where were you at in your career around this time? My wife
Stacy title and I were just kind of getting started. I had done my
first TV series as an actor, the show called Grapevine, which was created
by David Frankl, who went on to win his own Oscar and have a
big career in the movies and on TV. We were so poor, How
poor were you? We were so poor that the tax refund that I got
from Dowey Grapevine was enough to pay for a short film that we made.
Made a short film called Down on the Waterfront that was nominated for an Academy
Award. And that's a whole other story. Because we'd been nominated and we're
feeling pretty great. We were at a backyard barbecue honestly and just talking,
you know, like what's going on, and somebody introduced like Lee just got
nominated for an Oscar and I'm like, yeah, it's incredible, you know,
And he said, really, we're looking for filmmakers to make this new
movie that we have a script, and we're not sure who's going to direct
it. They sent it over to Stacy and to me because I was producing.
They had seen the short at that point. They got to see the
short and they were like, you know, would you guys like to do
this Jonathan you should be in the movie, and Stacy, you should direct
the movie. And because we had written the short they wanted they asked us
to sit down and work with Dan Rosen, who had written the script,
to just tweak it a little bit and turn it into you know, the
movie that you see today. So we worked with him and got hired.
I don't know how many other people they met. I'm sure they met more
than just us, but that's where we were in our career. Was that
launched our feature career. So that was in the early nineties. What was
the state of the script when you guys started working with Dan, Well,
it was great. You know, there was there was an extra housemate.
If you've seen the film, there five of us living in the house,
and at that point were six, and it just sort of felt like there
was one character too many. We just wanted to strengthen all five characters by
taking the best lines of this sixth character and saying like, this is the
aggressive one, and this is the nerdy one, and this is the sexy
one, and this is the whatever, and just made five great characters instead
of six good characters, and just kind of punched everything up a little bit.
You know, but honestly, the script, you know, that's why
he gets soul screen credit was because it really is his script that we just
helped as a good set of producers and a director would do anyway, I
think, you know. So then we started to have to cast it,
and this is a real, you know, Hollywood story. Stacy and I
had a manager who's now a big agent, guy named Brian Schwartztrong was our
manager at the time, and he's like, well, I've got Annabeth Gish
and I've got Ron Eldard and we're like, very incredible. That's two of
them, you know, two of them. And he had Bill Paxton and
we worked with Bill. That was a whole Bill was really on the rise
at that point. He was shooting of Apollo thirteen and he really tested Stacy
to see if she was up for the task, and she of course passed
with flying color. So he signed on and that really helped, you know,
I mean, suddenly he got a really pretty serious cast. The last
one was a Cameron Diazt And so, you know, we had a manager
and we also had an attorney, and our attorney said, you know,
I've got this foot pull super talented young client who just dropped out of a
movie called The Phantom, a movie that was that got made with Billy Zane.
Aburn was going to be the female lead, or one of the female
leads, and she dropped out of it for whatever reason. She was looking
for a job, you know, and would we go and see her in
the Mask, which was the only job that she'd had, And we were
like, well, who is she? You know, we never heard of
her, not that we were any you know, you know, like louis
this person. And she had been like a copper tone model, and she
was quite a bit younger. I mean, she was younger at that point.
It seemed like a big age difference. You know. She was twenty
three and I was thirty or something or twenty nine with Stacey and I went
out that day and saw The Mask in the movies and of course what she
was asked to do in the Mask was look gorgeous and be vivacious, and
you know, but she's like a star, I mean, she's wonderful in
the movie. And we said, I don't know, we'll take a shot.
So we thought that she would play the kind of the sexier character and
she said, no, I want to play the more serious character, and
so they she had had Abeth Gish kind of flipped the characters that we would
have expected them to play, and she was fantastic. You know, we
had a ball working with her at that time. She was like, yeah,
I'm going to do this. For a couple of years. She was
engaged, I think, to be married or she was very arius lean ball
with somebody. You know, I'm gonna get married, I want to have
kids, and we're like, really, you should ride this thing because you're
going to be you know, you're great. And of course now she has
kids and she's married. But it took a long time. She had an
extraordinary as an extraordinary career. The other piece of the puzzle Courtney b Vans.
He is just amazing in this role. We did not audition him.
Well, you know, we had David Bonnie Zane again. You know,
I went to college with Deb Zane, so you know, and this is
certainly how every kind of creative project comes together. It's like who do you
know? Who do you want to work with? Who do you love?
It makes it much easier to work with folks that you that you know and
love. I certainly knew of Courtney. I didn't, you know, I'd
never worked with him, none of us had. But deb was like Courtney
Vans and we're like, yeah, can you get him, that'd be amazing.
And it was like that, you know, he read the script,
loved it, and so it was it was really pretty easy, you know,
once a train and this is something that you know, we were spoiled
on our We were spoiled on our first short. You know, went to
the Oscars. Oh yeah, well that's how it goes, you know,
go to a dinner party and wind up with a with a movie, you
know, and with financing. It was financed by the brother of one of
the producers, who was like a dentist, you know, and he said,
yeah, you know, this was this was when video stores really were
and HBO would showtime and things like that. Were desperate for material, you
know, if you could make a viable independent movie. And this was in
the days of I guess we were at Sundance, like the year of Spank
the Monkey and a couple of other pictures like that. You know, this
was like the heyday of independent cinema in America. Quarter of a million dollars,
you know, if you can put it in the right place and put
together a decent movie. This movie, you know, ran for a year
literally in a Paris movie theater. You know, a lot of people made
a lot of money on this particular movie. Was the right right movie at
the right time. It wasn't particularly successful in the movie theater on its initial
you know run, which we you know, hoped it would be. But
it's forever and we're still talking about it thirty years later, which is amazing.
But you were asking me about Courtney Vans and he with no brainer,
he said yes, And so that made the five of us. We put
that together very very easily. How did all the cameos come about? Are
the victims? Stacy's cousin is married to Jason, and Jason and I met
on a movie called White Palace, which had predated this. He had a
great sized part and I had a small part. But we became good friends
because we were shooting in Saint Louis, and like you know, we didn't
know anybody in Saint Louis. We were in the hotel together and we just
started hanging out. He and his wife introduced me to Stacy, and we
fell in love very immediately, you know, and we're inseparable almost immediately.
So he was in the Shore film that we made, He and I and
Ed Asner and a guy named Mike Starr and a guy named Pete Adkins.
The were the actors in that. And then when we got the opportunity to
do the feature, we of course asked him, you know, if he'd
if he'd do a partner. He was hilarious. Some of the other parts
that see Rachel Chagall, who she does as she has she uses her finger.
I don't even remember what the hell she was talking about. She was
she was in White Palace with us. She was actually his wife. In
White Palace. There's a woman named Pamela Dean who was hilarious. She's like
the librarian who's talking about dirty books, and she's you know, she was
in an acting class with Jason and I wonderful actor Mark Harmon. And you
know, here's a funny thing like Mark Harmon. We were like, really
Mark Harmon, the guy from Summer School. You know, we didn't you
know here we were like snobby young gun actors and stuff, and and deb
Zane was like, are you fucking kidding me? If I can get you
Mark Harmon to play this part. Are you nuts? Shut the fuck up
and do it, you know, and we're like, okay, okay,
Mark Harmon. He was fabulous, right, and of course he went on
to be you know, mister Ncis and and you know is a huge,
huge stuttar and was just a joy to work with. He was so funny
and humble and wonderful. Bill Paxton, the course was great. Who plays
the Louis ferret Con character. He was a comic that we had worked with
done some improv with. The writer Dan Rosen was doing an improv show called
The Dysfunctional Show and he played a rush Limball like character named Whitey Fiord and
all of us wound up doing little cameos in this tiny theater in Hollywood and
did a lot of improv together at that time. We found him through there.
He was hilarious. Charles Derning, who kind of fell asleep at the
table and couldn't remember his lines. But you know, the movie was so
low budget and shot so fast that basically we just put them all in the
chair like one at a time, and you know, set the camera like
this. I guess Charles Journey, we probably booth the camera once or twice.
Bill Paxton, We certainly did, but most of those other ones were
just working in front of a locked off camera. We shot them in one
day or probably one afternoon, and they just killed I mean, you know,
they just cracked us up and it was it was great. There's at
least one person that's in the credits on IMDb, and I think there are
the credits in the movie that I don't think it's in the film. Frederick
Lawrence as a skinhead character. Yeah. Yeah, we shot him. He
was great. We just sort of stuff gets cut out. And I think
that because he was so funny and we liked him so much, we kept
him in the credit so that he would get his residuals. Like that's like
how my wife, who was literally an angel, would be like, oh
no, he was hilarious. If we cut him out, he still gets
paid. Put him in the credits and he'll get his he'll get his residuals.
You know. Is it true Elizabeth Moss was the girl in the photo
on the Missing Fire. I've been told that. I'm not going to say
it's not true. I don't know. I was not there when they shot
it, but I mean it probably is true. And let's let it be
true. Yeah, that's Elizabeth Moss and at first to parts I don't know.
I don't know, but I've been told that, what are some of
your favorite memories of working on the film. You know, we was we
were young and ambitious and hungry, and we tried all sorts of things.
There's a lot of footage that never made it into the picture. We were
trying to find the exact tone. One night, you know, Stacy had
shown everybody His Girl Friday, right, which is the classic screwball comedy.
It's Rosalind Russell and Carry Grant and they talk a mile a minute. Everybody
is funny is hell and just like the cues are picked up like this,
and she wanted she wanted it played like that and some of the books I
remember, you know, we all sat and we sort of bonded, and
we watched the TV and we got the videotape and saw that movie and camerons.
For one, I remember very clearly, she had never seen a movie
like this, you know, she was not even aware that these that a
movie like this existed, let alone that there was people like Stacy and I
who were you know, movie fanatics who would be like, oh, you
got to watch this, and you kind of watch this and it's like this
and and so she was quite moved. She was like, oh my god,
there's like a world of movies that I don't know about yet. So
that was really fun sort of bonding over that and realizing the movie could be
played in this. You know, these were college students and very witty,
almost to their own detriment. They were witty. Oh. Ron Perlman was
the other one that we cast. Stacy used to work out at Hollywood Why,
right, You know, she didn't she wasn't. She didn't care like
for a fancy gym. She went to the Why and Ron Perlman also went
to the Why, and the two of them would hang out and bullshit each
other, you know. And he saw her reading a script on the treadmill
and said, hey, Stacy, what do you read? You know?
And they would always do that with each other, and she said, it's
a movie and actually really really perfect for this. So he read it and
loved it. And he was at a point in his career where he was
saying to us, I just worked with this crazy young kid dad in Mexico,
and he's really talented, you know, and I really just want to
work with people like am and you young people who are ambitious, and I
don't want to do the old Hollywood bullshit. The stuff that people are offering
me in Hollywood is you know, the ugly guy, you know. And
so of course that was Diarmo del Toro, and he had just done a
Crow Knows and was you know, he came back and said, yeah,
he's fantastic, this kid, you know. And of course they've had a
really really long, long and positive collaboration and del Toro seems to be doing
pretty good. If he keeps it up, maybe he'll get it right eventually.
So we fought for Ron Pearlman, right. The producers who now saw
this cast coming together, said yeah, Ron Pearlman, we can do better
than that. And Stacy and I are like, we had the reaction that
deb Zin had to us about Mark Harman ncis. You know, there's like
we can do better, and we're like better than Ron Perlman, what does
that mean? Always that and they're like that maybe Bill Murray. And I'm
like, you're gonna get Bill Murray for this movie. You've got Ron Pearlman
and you're gonna try to get Bill Murray. Okay you want to, I'll
give you ten minutes to try to get Bill Murray and then you better lock
up Ron Pearlman. Honestly, we drove over to their office, Stacy and
I jumped in the car. We were like on the phone and we didn't
have zoom. Then we said we're coming over there, you know, and
we hung up the boat and literally drove across town and just gotten their faces
like, are you nuts? He's perfect? Cast him, cast him,
cast him, and we just made them cast run Erlman. And of course
he was. He's fantastic in the park and he's fantast Bill Murray's pretty good
too. But we weren't going to get Bill Murray no way. So that
was fun. I remember that now driving across town and Stacy and are just
going they gotta do it, They gotta do it. We gotta get him,
you know. So they responded to that, and people, you know,
respond to passion and enthusiasm. They really do. They want to be
a part of that. You know. He's something that I kind of say
to to people is is you know, if you build it, they will
come. If you give them something to do. People want to work and
if they see like, yeah, you're gonna do it, whether they help
you or not, then they want to help you. You know, if
you're not coming to them for help, it's very easy for them to say,
let me help you. We were able to put it together really pretty
quickly. Things came together. Alec Hammond who was our designer. That was
his first movie that he was the straight up designer. Renfields his movie,
so he's been doing fantastic for years, Mark Mother's Ball. I think we
were his first feature. He'd been working kind of for Nickelodeon and he had
this little band Devo, but he was trying to get into features and he
had done our short again a friend of a friend, and he said,
sure, I'll do it. So we were able to pull together some really
really wonderful, talented, talented people. Norah Dunn came on board. I
think she might have been a friend of Dan Rosen through the comedy world.
I'm not sure how he got her, but she was great. The movie
was an eighteen day shoot. You know. The last night, one of
the interns who was smoking way too much weed, accidentally knocked over a worklight
in the attic and set fire to the house. That was exciting. So
we were all evacuated and there's one shot that we got a really one take,
and that's what's in the movie because as we're as we're acting, we're
sort of aware that, like, you know, behind the camera, people
are starting to like run back and forth, and Stacy was just like,
keep going, you know, keep going. So we just talked, talk,
talk, cut everybody, get out of the house, Get out of
that. The house was on fire. The worst thing that could have happened,
you know, instead of having a big party that night. There was
the fire trumps, you know, and the house was brenched in water.
But then we were able to make an insurance claim and get two days of
reshoots using the insurance money. So you know, it turned out to be
a good thing. So it really taught us that, you know, what
seems to be a bad thing might actually be a good thing because we got
a bunch of extra shit that we could shoot. Oh I was saying that,
you know, the tone of the picture was not quite clear, and
we found it as as as we cut. But we did try some slapstick
stuff. We tried some really out there you know comedy that was two out
there didn't it didn't fit tonally, and so that all got cut out of
the picture. So the picture is right now, much more contained and what
you see. Honestly, the music helped immeasurably. When Sony came on board.
We had all this temp music. Again, we had no idea what
we were doing. You know, so when you make a movie, when
you do anything, I guess, you put the soundtrack that you want and
then and then you realize, like, well, we can't ever use any
of this music because it's all really expensive music. But you get the idea
of what should be here and there. And Sony picked up the movie and
said, you know what, the music's great. We'll just pay for all
the music. So that basically doubled the budget. It was, you know,
quarter of a million dollars in making the movie and then another couple of
hundred thousand dollars to get all that fantastic music. And then they put out
a pretty successful soundtrack using many of those songs and some of the Mark Mother's
Ball original music. A mite of Sony One Sony got their hands on the
picture and they you know, had a theatrical release. As I say it,
was not as successful at theatrical release as we all had hoped it would
be. When we can talk about why that might have been. But but
you know, once they got their hands on the picture and we're going to
turn it into a Sony movie, that extra two hundred thousand dollars, which
was, you know, an enormous amount of money for us. Was like,
oh, yeah, sure, we'll spend that's that makes sense to us.
You know, we're like, right, perfect, you play a painter
in the film, and I know these aren't your paintings, there's somebody else's.
But what was that like for you? And what do you take as
far as the symbolism of these paintings that's going on. The symbolism was that
I was a creative character who you know, wound up creating something way beyond
is controlled and he was sort of an intellectual character, as I say,
creative character who put some into the world that was tosic and disgusting. The
symbolism of the paintings themselves. We were in the hands of the painters who
made the work for us. We were able to talk a little bit,
and we talked to a couple of different painters who presented. You know,
we couldn't afford to buy too much original artwork. We'll talk about that in
a set. But but so there were two different painters I believe, who
showed us their work, you know, this work for you guys. I
guess we'd give them some nominal amount of money to use their paintings. And
then there were one or two pictures that I ostensibly was painting in the movie.
I think if you see the way it's cut, though I'm painting,
I'm not sure I'm ever actually painting in front of the cantling. You know.
The one painting that was commissioned Bill Paxton, who was a big art
collector actually in aficionado, and you'll forgive me, I don't remember the painter's
name. Um, he collected these paintings of this guy and he said,
let's use his work. So all of the paintings on the opening credits are
his. And there was one painting that he created for the movie, and
that's the that's the end painting, you know, with the bodies and all
that. So that I guess we paid him a thousand dollars or something to
make a painting for us. I wish I was smarter a bad symbolism.
Don't know how to answer it. Is your character prescient? Or do you
survive the evening with Ron Perelman because the last painting is him alive and it
looks like the rest of you dead. Right, What a great question.
I think that I'm dead, and I guess now that we're talking about it,
God must have made the Ron Pearlman painted the painting. I don't know.
It's a fake. It's like this fake said of Bascuiats that somebody you
know made a because the story was going to be the story was going to
be a hugely successful story. This is just a facile answer. The answer
is it was stupid of us. We didn't ever think of it. I
haven't thought of it until this second. That, of course, if I
was dead, how the hell could I paint that painting? So I'll say
I was prescient. I knew I had some idea that this was what was
going to happen, and I painted a painting of my own demise. That's
the answer. Terrible answer. Sara, tell me about the reception of the
film. You mentioned that before, the affection for the film has grown.
I think that the flaws in the filmmaking. These seems were pretty obvious.
You know when the picture was made. There's two musical interludes. You know,
there's two montages. That's probably one montage too many. If you have
to lean on a montage, boy, that's tough. And so that was
that was like the storytelling on our part was a little sloppy. The script
and again, you know, you don't know what you don't know. We
never made a feature, never any of us. So you know the fact
that the script structure probably could have been would have been different. There's no
regrets because the picture stands up. It's a very interesting kind of product of
its time, and I still think it works, you know today, it's
an interesting movie and a fun movie. But for whatever reason, it didn't
take off in the way that they hoped it would. And I don't know
if it wanted to have a slower rollout, I just don't know. Some
of the critics were like lukewarm on it. Yeah, this is kind of
funny, and this is kind of interesting, but what's it really saying?
What's it really about? And I think in time over time now as we're
talking about it, I think everyone can say what they think it's about it's
really open for interpretation, and that's a good thing and not a flaw to
the movie really as embraced. I think it's a liberal movie, but I
have conservative not too many conservative friends, but I know conservative folks who say,
like, oh, you know, it's totally anti liberal. They all
fucking die and deserve to die. And the one who's you know, his
left standing is rush Limbaugh Archie saying that the you know, the power is
in the is in the hands of the media, and you know that that
if you're too extreme in either end, you're going to get it in the
neck. And that's kind of the message I think, you know, Certainly,
Stacy and I would said that we were liberal, progressive people. Um
Dan Rosen certainly was, you know, but he also, more than any
of us, saw the absurdity in some of the extreme views on the right
and the left, and so he was able to kind of skewer the extreme
folks, and we were able to put some fun characters up there and really
try to make people laugh, you know, the picture. We saw it
as a straight up comedy that had some intelligence behind it, you know.
But again, we were moving so fast on such a low budget. You
know that mistakes like the painting mistake, which is clearly like we never even
thought about it got made. Thirty years of hindsight is a lot of time
to think about a movie that was made, you know, in a couple
of months. Really, there are theatrical versions of it. People have talked
about doing a musical of it. People have made plays of it. I
have nothing to do with them and haven't seen them, but I know that
once in a while it shows up, because it's basically five people sitting around
the table, you know, And the movie itself was shot all on one
location except for one or two days when we went outside, you know,
and so it's very, very contained. And the poster of the movie this
is this maybe one of the reasons it didn't succeed, or did succeed to
the degree it did. But you know, Tim Carey was at his absolute
ultra same at that point, and the distry eater put a guy in the
foreground dead on the table in front of us, and I said, he's
well, he's not in the movie. That's not a character that even shows
up in the movie. And the distributor was like, yeah, but maybe
people will think Jim Carrey is in it, and so you know the same
folks that were kind enough to buy it and put all that music in were
the folks who are responsible for trying to figure out how to get an audience
in front of it. And they marketed it in a way that I don't
think really heed into the power of the movie. But maybe they were right
in trying to go for a big broad comedy audience and not a more specific,
nuanced audience. I don't know anyway that happened. The team that produced
it in the company that produced it, and they called themselves the Vault.
I'm not sure why. Maybe they thought they'd get buried in the vault.
I think they only made one more movie after that. You know. So
Tony doesn't have a streaming service of their own. Unger for the picture just
may not be there until until people see this extraordinary podcast and then they demand
that it be made available on Bluebred. I can certainly reach out to some
folks, I know it's Sony and say, what do you guys think it
is the thirtieth anniversary this year? Is that right? Yeah? They should
do something. I mean, it's got it well of a cast. Oh
hell, yeah. Yeah, And that's the thing. It's just amazing to
list off the people that are in there and be like, this is all
one movie. All these people are in Yeah, crazy Charles, who was
so fun. I mean, you know, just just person after person that
we wield that. Yeah, that's great. Well, Jonathan, thank you
so much for your time. This is great talking with you as always my
pleasure though. Thanks everybody, go check it out, enjoy the movie.
Dan Rosen, thank you so much for joining me today. I'm so excited
to talk with you. You started a comedy club when you were eighteen years
old, technically one week before I was eighteen. Holy cow. It was
one of those things I was too young to know that I couldn't do it,
and it was basically just going into I had made a little bit of
a name of my summer that summer in Baltimore and seeing at a comedy club
called city Lights. You know, I thought, it's pretty simple to do
a comedy club. You bring in the comedians and you put them up and
you do the show. So I went to a place that was doing really
bad business nearby. I said, hey, give me your third floor.
I'll take the cover charge, you take the bar, and I'll bring in
comedians. And our first comedian with Paul Reiser, who had been in the
movie Diner, which had a big hit in Baltimore. Of course it was
filmed there and he drew a lot of people, and that gave us,
got us enough money for the next weekend, and we had Bill Maher.
This is all nineteen eighty I want to say eighty three lasted about seven or
eight years. That's amazing. So you both owned it, ran it,
and then were a comedian yourself. Yeah. Yeah. I was a stand
up as well for thirteen year. Yeah, and then stop when I had
written the last right when I was starting to think about, all right,
maybe I don't want to stand up anymore and I want to be a film
writer. And then I was on a not a great gig for two weeks
in Rino, Nevada. Had just down out. The day before that,
my girlfriend left me for my best friend back home, and I was supposed
to meet her in Lake Tahoe while I was working in Rino. So I
didn't want to leave my room anyway, and I thought, all right,
I'm just not going to leave my room until I write ten pages a day.
There was a book. I don't know if I was using it or
not, a book called Vicky King How to Write a Movie in twenty one
Days. I don't know if you ever heard of that book, and I
don't even know if I was doing it, but I was trying. My
goal was I'm going to write ten pages a day. I'm going to be
finish in nine days. And that's what I did, and that was the
last supper. That first script is pretty close to what became the shooting script,
although there were some changes, though if my math is correct, that
was probably around ninety two ninety three when you wrote that. There was a
ninety three spring of ninety three. Can you tell me your version of how
you ended up getting this thing made? So spring of ninety three, I
write this script again. I might have seasons off a little bit, and
I had read the whole movie took place in one room, in the dining
room, and I wrote it that way, specifically thinking, Okay, I
can either make this as a movie, like a cheap movie, or I
can make this as a play. And I got so. I was a
stand up comic. I have a lot of friends who were stand up comics,
and I put a group of comics together to do a table read.
In that table read was Bob oden Kirk, who was you know, nobody
back then, Janine Garoffalo Sarah's Silverman, my friend Warren Hutcherson who ended up
having a small part in the movie David Cross. And that was before odin
Kirk and Croft. That was way before they did their show together. And
I had a comedy improv show at the time called The Dysfunctional Show and all
these Guys, which was kind of like a improv Jerry Springer show. And
all these guys were in that show or had been in it, So that
was pretty much. There were some other people. I'm forgetting who else was
in that cast. I just invite everyone I know was that it was.
Back then it was called the Richard Pryor Theater. I don't think it's there
anymore in Hollywood, and I think I rented it for one hundred bucks,
which is a lot of money in me back then. And then one guy
came who was a my father said, oh, you should invite my friends
Larry Weinberg, who wants to be a movie producer. And then Larry came
and said, oh my god, this is really good. I have some
notes, but you know, I'd like to try and make this or whatever.
So he gave me some notes. I didn't think the notes were very
good. And then nothing really happened. And then a couple months during that
summer, Jeanine Garofolo people Forget dream Garofolo was on the cusp of being America's
sweetheart. She was she could have been the next Sandy Bullock. She had
been in I'm Trying of Reality Bites, and then she followed it up with
a great movie, The Truth about Katine Dogs. And we were we were
friends and we were talking once and she was saying how she's getting all these
scripts and they're all horrible. And she goes, whatever happened to that reading
that we did? And I said, oh, this producers involved gave me
some notes. I'm so figuring out or whatever, and she goes, because
I would love to do that. That's the kind of felon I want to
do. And I go really, and she goes yeah. And so then
I went back because she wasn't like famous when she was in the reading,
but like a couple months later she was. So I go back to Larry
and said, hey, Janine, wants to be in this, and by
the way, it was a part of Jude played by Cameron Diaz ultimately,
and Larry said, oh god, well that changes some things a little bit.
Did you make the changes to the script? And I paused for a
second. I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I made all your
changes. I didn't. I didn't do any of them. And then I
handed the script back to him and he read it and wrote me back or
called me back and goes, oh my god, my change is really worked.
The script reads so much better now. And that was because, you
know, he saw Janine in the part, probably so it's not quite as
idiotic as maybe I've made it up to do. But but I didn't make
any changes. So now Janine's gonna be in it. And then I don't
know their complete end of it, but he got this guy involved named Matt
Cooper's family had a lot of money somewhere, and they started putting things together
and they started sending it out to some directors. There was a guy named
Michael Addas, so I'm still friends with us to this day, Stacy.
Of course, there was one other person, and then, to their credit,
I met with each of them to discuss like the film or whatever,
and we all decided on Stacy. Then at some point the cast just started
coming in and I realized Courty Evans with the first actor I met with.
He said to me like, oh my god, you know I love your
script. And I go, what do you like so much? Because my
first script? Like, what do you like so much about it? And
he just flips through the script and goes, look at all this dialogue.
He goes, this is every any actor's dream. He goes, any actor
would love the script. And then I realized, oh, of course,
actor, it was like the act after the to talk whatever, and this
was him coming off of John Legar's sixties of separation, so that was like
the biggest compliment ever. So I think he signed on board. And then
at some point Jeanine got Sarenette Live and couldn't do it and wasn't available,
and Stacy's lawyer, Patty, I forget her last name, his Patty.
She represented young Cameron Diaz who had just been in The Mask and they'd given
the script of her. She'd liked it. We did a reading for her.
She came to the reading and really she did read. She watched and
really liked it and said she wanted to do it. And then at that
point, I think for budgetary reasons, we had six roommates. David Cross
was the sixth one, playing a character named Daniel. There. I don't
know if you notice, they're all named from the Bible, and Daniel was
the part I wrote for myself, of course, being Daniel and David was
great. And I had to call him and tell I couldn't get him on
the phone and left the message saying, sorry, the director cut you out
down to five roommates. And he has never spoken to me since. Oh,
out the nineteen ninety three as if, by the way, as if
the writer has anything to do. And then I found years later a friend
of mine was dating him and she said I told her that story. She's
like, oh, let's let's hang out with David or whatever, and I
go, I don't think he likes me. And I was friends with him,
and I said, no, and are you kidding me? That's ten
years ago. He or whatever, he knows he makes movies. He knows
that that's not that's not your decision. And she called me the next day
she goes, oh, he really is still mad at you about that again,
like I had anything to do with this. I mean, it all
about made. So I wrote it springing ninety three. We were shooting like
fall of ninety four, so that was I got very spoiled. That was
really fast, and then we made it. There was a very mysterious fire.
We got to do a little bit of reshoots. Then we had a
screening at Paramount. Again, I want to say that was the summer,
and I thought that was a little premature. They sold the film. This
was like a ninety four ninety five before like Sundance's obviously like very prestigious,
but they had not had those like movie deals like you hear about now.
And I really think if we would have waited, certainly, if we would
have waited, we screened it to Toronto Film Festival first, then we did
London, then we did Sundance, and I think we're one of the only
films to ever do Toronto and Sundance because they don't they don't allow that anymore.
I think we would have probably sold and had a bigger profile. So
you said that the script that you wrote was very close to what we end
up seeing. Yes, do you remember any of the differences between the two.
Well, the big one was The Roommates. We opened up the script
a little bit. Actually, the original idea was that they I never finished
that version of it. The original idea was that they would kill the person
and then they would eat them in the next meal. I was influenced by
that movie, Diva. But there was another movie that was kind of like
that. Forgot who was That came out around the time, but I dismissed
that I had pretty quick. But it was The Roommates, and it was
same beginning, same ending. Jenny Tyler was still in there. Actually,
ironically, the person that wasn't in there was a character played by me,
Deputy Harford, And I think that was because Stacy said, oh you because
Stacy at that point was coming to see and Jonathan and Jonathan was in it
this dysfunctional show, and she's like, oh, you're really funny. You
need to be in the film. And so we wrote this part of the
deputy, who's kind of like the backstory was he's kind of in love with
Nora Dunne, the sheriff. And there was one version this was not in
my original script. There was one version of the film that we actually filmed
where the roommates are killed and then it's Deputy Hartford that finds Jenny Tyler and
they find her alive. And Stacy had me write that, and but we
never we film We did film it because I have these strange pictures with me
and oh my god, I always forget her name who played Jenny Moss,
that was her Eliza's boss for film. I have her like on my shoulder,
like I saved her from like she was tied up in a shack or
something like that. And there was also a scene where we walk in and
we see all the roommates dead in the house, but we ended up not
using any of that, so we pretty much stuck to the original scrip it.
Now, if the roommates are dead, who paints the picture of them
with Ron Pearland walking away? I don't know, because that wasn't in my
script. Yeah, I think that's just supposed to be, Like, I
don't think anyone was to us to have painted that. The use of the
tomatoes is fantastic. Everyone everyone talks about that, Oh the tomatoes. It's
a metaphor because they're they're blood red or whatever. It literally was just because
I have this weird thing where I love com catch up, I love tomato
sauce. I don't like tomatoes, and I'm sure when I was writing it,
I probably ordered a club sandwich that came with a tomato and I'm like,
God, I hate what kind of tomato. And then I put in
the script this being your first movie that you were able to make where you
ultimately satisfied with what ended up happening with it. I thought Sony made a
big mistake. They released it like in the spring of ninety six, there
was like a big presidential election going on, and they definitely shied away.
It was so crazy. The reason people loved it was because of the Paul
politics of it. And you could tell right away Sony was completely scared of
the politics of it, even though they bought it. And you know,
I had this suggestion and was like, oh my god, we need to
do like a fundraiser for some bipartisan group or something for debates or somehow tie
it in, and they just kind of like buried it. And it didn't
really it didn't really do anything in the States. It became a giant hit
in France. So I was like the Jerry Lewis of independent screenwriters there for
a while. It played in one theater for two years, and that's how
I got to direct right and direct my next film because the producers of that
made so much money off The Last Supper in France. They came to me
and said, well, anything you want to do, will we'll finance.
Yeah. The one thing that I really admired about The Last Supper was just
the level of talent and the cast, you know, and even you're talking
about the table raid and just the level there, but then who actually gets
casts. It's just fantastic. I'm a huge Tron Perlman fan. Of course
Bill Paxton, I mean all the way down, like Mark Harman and Charles
Diurning was in the film. Yes, Oh my god, it's just amazing.
So Bill Paxson, the late grade Bill Paxson sadly, so this is
kind of crazy. I had just moved, wasn't even really living in LA
I was kind of commuting between New York and la as a stand up as
working on that early Comedy Central show writing for it. Somehow, I'm at
a Thanksgiving party and Bill Paxton is there. Not famous Bill Paxton. This
is like nineteen ninety. I want's say nine it's comin two and maybe nine
day actually, but we can figure this out because I'm going to mention a
film. You can probably look it up. And we start talking. Recognized
him from some film, maybe it was Weird Science or something, and I
said, hey, aren't you in that Predator sequel that came out today?
It was Thanksgiving Day? And he goes, I am. He goes,
man, Man, I really want to see it too, or whatever.
I'm like, well, if you're as bored as I am here, why
because we didn't know anybody, why don't we go Neither one of us drove
either. Why don't we take a taxi and go to it's playing at Westwood
And back then Westwood was not like a nice neighborhood. And he's like really,
and I'm like, yeah, let's do it. So we get in
a taxi, we go and there next to Bill Paxson watching Predators and he
gets his I don't even remember he gets his head decapitated. And near the
end of the screening or the film, people started noticing him and like,
wait a minutum, Hey, that's the guy that you know. And so
we get out of the movie theater and then I don't see him again for
years, and then he was in a movie called One False Move. Do
you ever see One False Move? Oh? Yeah, that was huge in
the indie scene. Yeah right. He plays a guy named named Wes,
a sheriff named West. So I write the script. When I wrote that,
you were telling about to change his script earlier. The original script,
the sheriff is a guy and his name is West. West Stanley completely based
on that sheriff because I'd love that character and I want to see another movie
with him, so I wrote him into my script. Then by some miracle,
Bill Paxon ends up in the Last Supper and he's perfect as that because
he was shooting Apollo thirteen at the time, so he had the you know,
the crew cut thing. And he comes up to me and he says,
you know, I'm introduced to the writer. He doesn't remember that this
whole thanksgiven thing. He goes, hey, man, before anything, I
got to ask you a question. I read the whole script. And by
the way, by this time, the sheriff is a woman played by Nora,
and he goes, I read the script. The sheriff was the sheriff
supposed to be a man, and I go, yeah, and he goes,
it's me, right, it's me. It's Wes, and I go,
yes, it is. And then I told him, like, you
know, we're in this thing together. And he's a great guy. He
it's so sad. He they were doing like a twentieth anniversary screening of The
Last Supper at the Film Festival and it was in November. No, it
was at the end of October, and he was gonna come. And then
I got an email like the night before, Dan Man, so sorry,
buddy, can't make it. But we had a mutual friend, my friend
Kevin Roth who lived in oh Hi, who lived next door to Bill,
and he goes, hey, but man, when you come back to La
let's let's all get together. And then he passed away like a month later.
But he was a great oh. And then I remember once I ran
into Courtney Vance in line getting into Dodgers Stadium and he was there with his
kids and Angela Bassett and Courney, and Angela asked if they could but in
line and I'm like, your Angela Bassett, why are you inn't there a
VIPs not wearing you could go? But the greatest story, and I hope
I get this right, is the Ron Pearlman story. This is crazy.
It's ninth it's two thousand and one. Then Proud, it's like four in
the morning. I am in. I don't know if you're been a prog,
but I'm in like this. A lot of the nightclubs are like in
the basement because the city's so old, like the street just been built on
top of things, so it's like four flight sounds. So I'm in this
weird cavernous like bar, like a cake. I walk out of the bathroom
and I bumped into a guy, a big guy who's wearing I just remember
it's an FBI hat on it, and I say excuse me. He says
excuse me in English, which is a little strange for Prague. At that
time. I look up. It's Ron Perlman. Unbeknown to me, he
was there shooting Blade two. We've run into each other. Ron's drunk.
He looks at me and he goes, don't fucking say a word until I
tell you ju. I'm like what. He like drags me his big guy
drags me about the shoulder to this table. At the table it is I
recognize it later. It's the cast of the Johnny Depp Jack the Ripper movie
from Hell. I now forget I should look at I forget who all the
actors were. I think Heather Graham was sitting at the table and some British
actors. And I'm telling you this in real time as it happens. They
clearly Ron is sitting with these people, and I quickly figure out he just
left the table and quickly just came back with me, right, And so
they're a little confused, and the Ron, drunk again, points to this
guy, British guy, and says, tell this guy what you just said
to me? Oh about the movie? Yes, oh well, I was
just telling row On here that he happens to be the star of my favorite
American film. It's a little independent film called The Last Supper. And Ron
said, and then, what did you say? Oh? Well, I
was asking Ron, I've always been confused about the ending of the movie.
So I was asking Ron, I've always been curious about what the writer meant
by the end of the movie. And Ron says, so, then,
what did I tell you? Will you tell me to be right back with
the answer, And Ron goes, here's the writer, And what Ron med
was I'm going to go to the bathroom right now, take a piss,
come back and tell you what I think. And he runs into me in
the bathroom in Prague at three am in two thousand and one, Ron Roma,
lady the gentleman. What a small world and also just a little bit
extra thing. So last year these actually a couple of years ago during COVID,
these two very talented writer people, musical theater writer people, came to
me, Jeremy and Jeff, and said they had the idea to do The
Last Supper as a musical. Now, I had held on to the playwrights
to the Last Supper all this time. And I don't know if you know
this, but it's been done to the play around the world. It was
in Buenos Aires and one best New Play at the Marta Plata play Festival.
It's played in the Netherlands, it's played a couple of times in Australia.
There were a couple attempts at getting a London West End production, and these
guys came to me and said, we've always thought it should be a musical
and I always had that idea too, that be musical. And then they
they wrote up the music and they did a great job and then we optioned
it to this big producer and they paid for last summer, they did a
two week preview in New Jersey like workshop production, and it was great.
And they're currently now working on I don't know if it's finding a theater or
fundraising whatever, but soon there will be the Last Supper Musical and it's pretty
freaking great. Like I'm it's hard when you're like the original author and you're
seeing them taking your stuff, but they stick very close to what I already
wrote, and they just wrote some great songs. So I'll let you know
when that happens. I'm sure it was very relevant when it came out,
and it feels even more relevant today. So hitting while the iron's hot with
a musical that's great. Yeah. And also it's fascinating to me is that
every couple of years people come and say, oh, we want to do
the play version. I'm like, again, I've wrote this stroying the Clinton
Ears when things were not that bad, and it's just gotten worse, and
I would always go, oh, Obama one, no one's gonna want to
do this anymore. Kumba. Yeah, America's can be more united than ever
before, and it just gets more and more divided. We did a production
in New York off off off Broadway production, and there was a review in
Breitbart, remember Breitbart, Oh yeah, said they loved it. So that's
the other crazy thing there's I've met all kinds of people. Conservatives love The
Last Supper because they think they're the hero, and then liberals love it because
they think they're the hero. And Breitbart wrote a preview saying Dan Rosen is
the next great conservative genius because he've managed to convince this gay liberal theater company
in New York to put on this play that they think makes fun of conservatives,
but really makes fun of that. So why did Man's Curve heard that
that was actually part of your stand up back? Yeah, it's part of
my stand up back and sidebar. There was a film that came out around
the same time called dead Man on Campus and same premise, but they did
it more of a slapstick version. And I had done that bit on MTV
and it was a staple part of my act about oh your roomate kills and
stuff. You get it four point er, it's like giving you a license
to kill jokes. Follow after that, I was in a meeting with producer
who told me, again, this is hearsay, but she said, oh,
I met with the people they wrote dead Man on campus. They came
up with the idea in a very interesting way. And I'm like, oh,
what was that. And she didn't know I had written dead Man's Curve.
She said, oh, they saw comedian on MTV doing a joke about
it and that's where they got the idea. So from that, yeah,
not great, but then that film, So we were kind of a big
deal at sun Dance. We were like on the cover of Variety, and
unfortunately we had a bunch of infighting between our French producers because a couple of
them owned the foreign rights, some of them the domestic rights, and there's
just a lot of shady dealings going back and forth. So we ended up
with Trimark. And then Trimark was like, oh, we're going to be
this big thing. And they had bought like the about Billy's Hollywood screen Kiss
and this other I think they bought the film Cube that sun Dance and they
were like, oh my god, this is good. We're going to do
great. And then we did a test screening, these test screening that showed
if you know, if they put fifteen million into marketing. The movie's going
to do the same as that movie Wild Things, So we're gonna make like
seventy million dollars. That would make it like one of the most successful and
have been in films of all time. And then Trimark just went belly up.
Basically they sold it to Blockbuster and we were Blockbusters first straight to DVD
like Premiere. They called it. I got to be he's passed away.
Now, this guy Dean Wilson, who owned block Buff, It was very
nice and friendly, and he called me after three weeks and he goes,
We've made seventeen million dollars renting your film. And he goes, it's renting
like a film that would have made seventy seven million dollars. And then when
I went to meet with Dean and have lunch with him, and I was
working on another film that I was in development, a new line with a
guy named Lloyd Segan. Another guy that passed away unfortune named Chris Brinker this
little film, Little film History for you, and we were meeting, and
also Adam Fogelson, who's now head of lions Gate, was head of Sticks
and he loved the movie. He was doing promotions for it. He was
really trying to get trimarked to, like, you know, you got to
release his film and you have a deal with paramount or whatever, and we
were trying to make that happen. Ultimately it didn't happen, only because USA
Television would not push back the premiere dates. They were premiering it. I
forget when over the summer and we were trying to get them they could push
it back by three months. We get at theatrical release, they refused to
do it, and I got on the phone with the head of USA and
everything, like I was very vocal about it. But while we're having lent
with Dean, I said to Dean, I said, hey, I'm going
to a screening of a friend's movie. Would you like to come? And
he goes, oh my god. Yeah. Dean was so you know,
it was a very wealthy guy or whatever, but never got to go to
Hollywood things or whatever. So I took to a film which he saw and
liked and ultimately put money behind. And that film was The Boondock Saints.
And that's where Boondock Saints got their distribution. They got bought that night or
they he saw it that night and then made the deal soon after. And
it was interesting because he even said the Boondock Saints to him was very reminiscent
of the Last Supper because think about it, people killing bad people, trying
to make the world a better place kind of thing. Soon after I got
a well, a couple of things happen. Here's a funny story that I've
never told anybody. I went to Sundance without an agent. I had a
manager, so it was pretty exciting. Well, you go to Sundance,
you have a movie that does well, and you don't have an agent.
You get all these free lunches and dinners and people taking you out or whatever.
And in fact, one of them my agent. I did have an
agent called the Gersh Agency and the Girsh Agency. My agent had moved to
New York, so I was kind of picked up grudgingly by someone else.
And I had told them I was going to go make this movie in Baltimore
Deavan's Curves and they were like, I don't know why you're doing this.
It's I don't think it's going to do anything. And they're like, all
right, well I'm going to do it. And then six seven months later
we premiered the Sundance Film Festival, and the Guerche agen See called my manager
and they say, hey, we want to meet with want to meet with
Dan to talk about representing them. She didn't tell them, well, actually
you currently do represent So we sat across to them and heard their pitch and
then my manager said, do you guys realize Dan is your client already?
And so that was very embarrassing to them, but they deserved it. But
then so a couple of months later, not a couple of months later,
very soon after this is nineteen ninety eight. I was in I think it
was ninety and I might get the year wrong. I'd met with all these
different agencies and one of them was ICN and there was a guy named Nick
I want to say Nick Stein, who I think has gone on to like
produce Academy Award winning films. He was super smart and I really wanted to
side with him. And his big thing was the next big thing's going to
be scary movies for like the pre team, And his big idea was,
we want to go get the Goosebumps franchise for you, and you're going to
write the movies and direct them and stuff, like that, Oh my god,
sounds great. And then my manager is like, well, I already
set up all these meetings with c A and all these other agencies, and
you gotta you can't pick anyone because you'll make me look bad, which is
not the way manager should work. But I was too young to do better,
and I was just like, all right, well I'll wait. So
meanwhile, literally the next day, I go to London to meet with the
people that bought the film for London. Guy named Hamish Macauby, great guy.
And while I'm there, I'm in a bookstore and they see a book
that had just come out like that week, not pick no one knew about
it, hadn't been picked up for film rights or whatever. And it was
a little book called Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. And I read the
back of it, and I remember going back to my hotel and calling Julie,
my manager, and I said, hey, Julie, I think this
is what I see him was talking about. And a reader the back and
she says to me, Dan, nobody wants to see a movie about a
boy wizard, So I let it. Goot. Did it anything ever happened
in that book. I soon to remember a story about it an NPR back
in the nineties, and that's about it. Yeah, it never began a
movie or anything. No, and that's that I'm aware of. So I'm
not bitter at all. Yeah, No, I totally understand. Yeah.
So I did get a two picture deal from New Line out of it,
but then all of a sudden, It's funny, I made like two movies
in like three years without any studio or Hollywood help or anything, and then
all of a sudden, I'm in Hollywood and I get this two picture deal
and then I don't make another movie for ten years. You just get stuck
in this development hell where you're spending a year or two working on something and
then it doesn't get greenlit or drama happens. I had a lot of drama
on those some of those projects, and then like ten years later, I
end up making this film Freeloaders, and then that just become that became the
biggest nightmare ever. Loud story. That's a whole other podcast. So what
have you been up too lately? I worked on a television show for Byron
Allen called First Family. It was kind of a kid sitcom with my friend
Chris Turner Towner that was really fun. And then you know, occasionally sell
a script here and there. And then lately I've been doing two main things.
I now have a writing partner named Tess Garrison. You might know her
name. She writes the mystery novels that Rizzolian Aisles are based on. Oh
okay, yeah, I love that show. So we sold a series a
Lifetime about a year ago that we got paid, but it didn't go forward.
And now we're working on a pitch for another show that seems very promising.
And then the last five almost five years, I've been a professor of
dramatic writing at the Savannah College of Art and Design here in Atlanta and absolutely
love it. I've just been working on screenplays. I just recently won a
fellowship I just got back from Rome. I won the fellowship to the American
Academy in Row for a proposal to write a screenplay about I don't know if
you know who Bruno Leski is, but famous architect and a famous rivalry that
led to the Renaissance. So that's I'm currently working on that. That's like
by merchant Ivory scripts that the only only idea I've ever had where I'm like,
oh, you could if if everything went right, you'd get nominated for
Best Screenplay. You know, it's about art and artists set in Renaissance times.
Like it's either Academy Award winning movie or it doesn't get made. It's
one of the other. Thank you so much, mister Rosen. This has
been so good talking with you. Oh you're welcome. This has been great.
All right, we are back and we are talking about The Last Supper
and we mentioned a few films that this movie reminds us of upfront, But
Rob, I know you that you've made it this far in the episode without
talking about Louis Bunwell, So that's got a change. That's right, because
it's such a cliche with me. But you know, as I was rewatching
it, I was thinking about how dinner party films because there's a lot of
either it's just a one set kind of play, or it's a movie that
it's set around people getting together to have dinner, and then that becomes sort
of you know, comedy airs or you know, some sort of satire.
It's all sort of centered around this kind of ritual of getting together and having
dinner. And I was thinking about it how it was used in reference to
least two of my favorite Bunwell films, Serminini Angel and Discreet Charm with Bourgeoisie
both have dinner party setups, And then I was also thinking of another filmmaker
also made movies in France, Frances Barber, who seems to be more well
known for his movies being remade in the United States than the actual originals over
here in the US. I don't know why that is, because I think
the originals are actually quite good. But if you're not familiar with him,
I mean, go look at his filmography. There's probably about a dozen movies
that he's either written and directed or written that became remade in the United States
as comedies. And his movie The Dinner Game, which actually played at the
main when I worked there in late nineties, was remade into Dinner for Schmucks.
So that's a whole thing about this guy who's a businessman and him and
his friends get together to have these dinners in which they try to find like
the most ridiculous person that they can find to invite them, and kind of
they humiliate them because they're weird, and it becomes this you know, learning
more or lesson for the people who judge others. So I really liked the
Dinner Game. I thought the Dinner Game is really good. I did not
see Dinner for Schmucks because I figured why bother because I liked the Verber original.
Yeah, we talked a little bit about Verber. We talked about Buddy
Buddy actually, because he did the original film that Buddy Buddy was based on.
And yeah, to your point, he also wrote The Toy, which
then became the Richard Pryor film. He wrote Lakaja Fall, which was then
remade with Nathan Lane and Robert Williams in there, of the Bird Cage,
even that movie, the Three Fugitives from the late eighties, even Pure Luck.
I mean, yeah there, It's amazing to look at this guy's filmography
and be like, Okay, in this year he makes the French version and
then the next year or the American version comes out. Yeah. I'm just
completely amazed by the fact of how many of his movies got remain in the
United States. I can't think of another comedic filmmaker from a foreign country whose
stuff it has basically been redune at the United States. How many times,
well even a pain in the ass, which is what Buddy Buddy is based
off of. That was remade twice, and I think he remade the second
version and then it was even done in India as well. So yeah,
he's he's just basically a fountain of talent over here and we can just cash
in on that. But I haven't seen Dinner for Schmucks or a Dinner Da
Cone either. I've been wanting to, So with your recommendation, I think
I will definitely check that out. It was fun, you know, I
really appreciate it, and like I said, it's it's kind of a moral
kind of like this. It's a parable Salem. It's you know, it's
got a good message in there in certain ways. But it's also interesting because
I was reading the synopsis between the two and the differences that there's certain aspects
in the French film about the character having a mistress and all of this stuff
that it's like, well, we're not going to put that in the American
movie. And you know, there's certain there's certain kind of moralistic aspects that
they've rewritten in. You know, when it came to one of these some
of the characters, I'm sure you could do the same thing if you were
to go through all of Verber's originals and put them up against the American remakes
and look at, you know, what they decided to change, because well,
that won't play in Omaha. When thinking about other dinner party or things
like that in reference to comedy or satire, can you think of any any
other ones offhand? Just this film had me thinking a little bit of this
television movie, HBO movie Conspiracy with Kenneth Brana and Stanley Tucci, about the
Bonza Conference, the conference where they decided to commit the Holocaust basically, and
it's I think it's script is taken pretty much directly from the real transcripts,
and you know, it's a bunch of people sitting around over a nice meal
and brandy and cigars and just talking and it's like the biggest crime in human
history, you know. And I think like there's something about that juxtaposition between
the stability of sitting around the dinner table or a table and having a discussion.
You know, it's very civil, We're just talking. Nothing bad can
come out of this. It's just a conversation. And then I think the
flip side of that is, oh, like the worst things can come out
of that, so it might be an interesting film to pair with Last Supper,
even though it's I would say it's really not a funny movie. I
was talking about that whole thing about the tomatoes and the blood and the infection,
and I forgot that right before Courtney b Vans takes that shovel to nor
Dunn's face that he's eating a red popsicle. I'm wondering if that's just a
regular popsicle or if that's made out of that tomato choose as well. And
I did notice too in that garden. I think it's Cameron d I was
just trying to plant flowers out there instead, like trying to reclaim the ground.
But it's still just all tomatoes by the end of the film. And
then even the poster for it is I thought, originally looking at it that
it was a flaming heart, but it's actually a flaming tomato with basically a
crown of thorns around the tomato. Yeah, it uses the Catholic imagery of
the sacred heart that you'll see in some paintings of our imagery of Jesus.
Yeah, it's funny. I told a friend of mine that I would be
talking about the spielp and they had never seen it, and I mentioned that
it was a dark comedy, and right away they said, oh, is
there cannibalism in Bold? And at first I was going to be like no,
and then I thought about it for a moment, and I'm like,
well, they do eat those tomatoes. It's kind of like second degree cannibalism.
I don't know. Yeah, when they started planting people in the garden,
I actually had a real quick vibe of Motel Hell and just thinking of
all those people that are planted for the sausage that you just keep them,
you know, you cut the vocal cords, plant them in the ground,
they put the bags over their heads, and you play music to them.
I almost thought that they were going to go to that extreme, especially because
I don't know how quickly arsenic works. So when Charles Darning starts keeling over,
I was like, Oh, he's that dead. He's going to come
back and scer the shit out of them and really make them rethink what they're
doing. But no, they poison pretty effectively in this movie. Other than,
like I said, bringing an underage girl who is very uptight to dinner
she's not about to drink that poisoned wine. Arsenic poisoning effects at least one
hundred forty million people worldwide. This is due to contaminated drinking water. People
in fifty countries are exposed to water that contains potentially dangerous levels of arsenic.
You can show signs of arsenic poisoning within thirty minutes of high levels of exposure.
I think arsenic it usually takes a couple hours if you have a large
amount of poison. I don't think it's quite as instantaneous, but it wouldn't
be as much of a comedy. It was like a listic depiction of ar
snake poisoning. I think it's more just the you know, it's like chaplain
in monsieur or like something like that, like if it's more playful that our
snake and old place like you mentioned. And of course, you know,
you can just use a little bit of ar snake and the tea to slowly
poison your significant other over a protracted period of time if you really wanted to.
Not that, I recommended the Young Poisoner's Handbook over here. The writer
of this, Dan Rosen, I didn't realize that I had actually seen another
one of his films. He also wrote the film dead Man's Curve, which
is not the Jan and Dean's story, It is the whole idea of the
I think it's an urban legend about if one of your housemates or roommates dies
in college, that they give you stree days and it's I don't remember who
all of us is in there, but I know for sure that Matthew Lillard
is in there. I was a favorite, and I remember watching that because
they were like two or three movies that were all based on that same legend.
So watch that. There was even a Turkish film. I guess I'm
obsessed with Turkish films tonight. No, that was Indian, I said earlier,
But there was a Turkish film that does that exact same thing and has
a cameo by Sean Claude van Dam and I don't remember how that worked out.
I'm tilting my head like Mike is mixing up the idea of the kids
with dead roommate getting all a's with a movie where kids steal the answers to
their college entrance exam. This is called The Exam from two thousand and six
and does indeed feature a cameo from Jean Claude van Dam when you started talking
about dinner and dinner parties. Of course, my mind immediately went to another
famous last supper, which is when Eddie is dead and a coffin basically as
Rocky and Frankenfurter and all of them from Rocky Horror Picture Show are eating.
And there's that great thing from Charles Gray as the narrator talking about the place
of food and meals in popular cultures. Food has always played a vital role
in life's rituals, the breaking of bread, the last meal of the condemned
man, and now this meal, calling this the last supper, having all
of these biblical names in here, you know, showing WWJD. Right,
Like, would Jesus be poisoning these people? Maybe maybe he's a little bit
easier for him unless he had, like I think he Jesus ended up killing
somebody. I think when he was younger, right, he had somebody laughed
at him and he ended up murdering them. So like he wasn't above doing
that. Who wasn't expecting a pull from the Egancy Gospels. Heresy, heresy.
I only know of that because of the video isn't it the Danzig video
where he talks about that. Oh, there's a good video of Danzig showing
his book collection. He's like, he's my book collection. He's like,
shown all this. He goes, this has a thing about Jesus killing someone
and all this. Welcome to my book collection. There's the Lost Books of
the Bible. Tells you a lot of stuff not be omitted from a Bible.
Here we go, infancy. He told you about Jesus's childhood, stuff
that I guess most churches wouldn't want you to know about because doesn't fit in
with their ideology Christ. And let me see. There's one passage in here
where Jesus and a little kid are playing on the Sabbath and Jesus is making
these clay statues he's formed come to life. And the child says it's a
sabbath, he shouldn't be do that, and blah blah blah blah blah,
and so anyway, Jesus kills the kid. Another time, when Lord Jesus
was coming home in the evening with Joseph, he met a boy who ran
so hard against him that he threw him down, to whom the Lord Jesus
said, as thou hast thrown me down social voutfall nor ever rise, and
at that moment the boy fell down and died. Do you see Glenn Danzi
goes shopping and the person just sing out different items and a glunt Danzi voice
channel logo. That's good. That's pretty good. All right, guys,
let's go ahead and take another break and play a preview for next week's show.
Yes, there's a lovely rosy glow in the valley Indians base. I
was just looking for your friend oil rich Indians in space. The facts regarding
the situation remain the same state the authorities, lionel I said, Back up,
the facts regarding the situation remain the same state authorities. Don't you know
what that means. I'm proud of you boys. I'm proud of the job
that you're doing for your country. Go with the globe, boys, go
with the globe. Good gas, it's bird gas. It's the best you
might get yourself. Not I'm bird. You know how to puck her up,
don't you? Huh? Just put your lips together? What's up?
Huh? How what's is this gonna cost? Yeahs back again? Yeah,
how do you feel about that I don't feel I'm the executive quite did I
go for a big crip? I hate music? That's right. We'll be
back next week with a look at a very strange film, Neil Young's Human
Highway. Until then, I want to think by co host Martin and Rob.
So Rob, what has been keeping you busy lately, sir? In
the home stretch finishing off this master's degree and then we'll figure out what we're
going to do after that. But it's always nice to come on and get
a chance to watch a couple of movies with you and do a couple of
episodes. I think I'm been more episodes in the past six months than I
haven't last few years. Paid off your debt to society, so I'm allowing
you back on. Speaking of dinner parties, you and I need to get
together and have dinner, so you know, we'll make sure to bring two
bottles or it sounds good. And Martin, what's the latest with you,
sir? I've been working on a few articles and things. I have a
three part series about the cinematic legacy at King Kong out on tilm eighty nine
dot UK. I'm on part two right now, but I think part three
might be out by the time people listen to this, so they're welcome to
to that out Stacy title. One of the last things she worked on was
a King Call television show, so weirdly there might be a connection that comes
up in the third part. I also have a series on the Way that's
about architecture in science fiction, but really it's more about economics and politics,
so maybe people will find that interesting and that should be out on the Pinksmoke
dot com. I also appear on various podcasts, Wrong Reel and bunch of
other places, and best way to find me is usually on Twitter at movie
Kessler, where I post all my updates and stuff like that. There you
go, trying to inject politics in the movies and stuff. Again, jeez,
when people are like, like, get these politics out of my movies,
I want them to be entertaining, and this has got very entertaining politics,
so it can coexist. It's fine. Well, thank you so much
guys for being on the show. Thanks everybody for listening. If you want
to hear more of me shooting off my mouth, check out some of the
other shows I work on. They are all available at Weirdingwaymedia dot com.
Thanks especially to our Patreon community. If you want to join the community,
visit patreon dot com slash Projection Booth. Every donation we get helps the Projection
Booth take over the world. Some coming, no one, there is one
in the side. Now they got my time be mind night, wont be
surprised to be if we mean I wonder word. He's coming to his mishap
farm and the read be dose that heaven riding. I suppose the one shut
shut and deal with it, and they shall. I got fine. He's
a love that far. I should be around the loves on the top,
bather, the water, the bar, the bunk, water in the winds
mind name gave me the things and say if the breathing the bed symptom happy
water. And he's only one mind any days like my mind mind that the
bore you. And before I will be mind you, I want the blo
the word shine only that they shall get mine tells you bend your under the
further word, the bother, the bar, the bunder world, the bunder
ward, the bother, war, the mod, the war, the bo
the water, the feeling calming over me down yea the bu the wall,
everything that one. I want to be down yea about the water home,
the one, the bo the wall. I'm on John Down, I'm on
the jong Cow, Yeah, the bough, the Wall. I'm time time
back the boar,