Speaker 1: Oh is boots. It's showed.
Speaker 2: People say good money to see this movie. When they
Speaker 2: go out to a theater, they want clothed sodas, hot popcorn,
Speaker 2: and no monsters in the protection booth. Everyone pretend podcasting
Speaker 2: isn't boring, none at all.
Speaker 1: After all these years, I thought I knew you, but
Speaker 1: you turned out to be a stranger.
Speaker 2: We are fighting for our lives there.
Speaker 3: My family must survive.
Speaker 4: Yes, the most shocking experience of their lives. Doubly shocking
Speaker 4: because it can happen to you.
Speaker 2: Still, right my trailer, what are you gonna do?
Speaker 5: Cola cops, they're busy with the new highway petroth corect.
Speaker 4: The lawless are on the loose, making it necessary for
Speaker 4: law abiding citizens to make their own law.
Speaker 5: I could going fire as shadow of the heads. Maybe
Speaker 5: that'll upset them. Right, there are no civilians. We are
Speaker 5: all at war.
Speaker 4: Give me a gun.
Speaker 1: I'm good with a gun. We'll stay here and I'll
Speaker 1: kill them.
Speaker 4: This is civilization's jungle after the jackals of society have
Speaker 4: ruthlessly ravaged it, ending the world of decency.
Speaker 2: Hm. I killed two men.
Speaker 1: I tried to kill them too, but I missed. I
Speaker 1: just wasn't a good enough shot.
Speaker 3: Welcome to the projection booth. I'm your host. Mike White
Speaker 3: joined me once again as Ms. Emily and Travia hey
Speaker 3: Hey also back in the booth after far too long
Speaker 3: as mister Howard A. Rodman.
Speaker 2: Hello.
Speaker 3: We conclude Sci Fi July with a look at Ray
Speaker 3: Milland's Nick in Year Zero, based on the stories Lot
Speaker 3: and Lot's Daughter by Ward Moore. The film also stars
Speaker 3: Miland as Henry Baldwin, the patriarch of the Baldwin Family,
Speaker 3: a Los Angeles family on a camping trip that turns
Speaker 3: into a desperate fight for survival. Along with Miland, the
Speaker 3: film stars Gene Hagen, Mary Mitchell, and Frankie Avalant. It's
Speaker 3: an early entry in the nuclear apocalypse subgenre, released in
Speaker 3: the height of the Cold War anxiety. We will be
Speaker 3: spoiling this film as we go forward, so if you
Speaker 3: don't want anything ruined, turn off the podcast and come
Speaker 3: back after you've seen it. We will still be here. So, Emily,
Speaker 3: when was the first time you saw Panic in the
Speaker 3: Year Zero?
Speaker 6: And what did you think when you first asked me
Speaker 6: about this movie. I was trying to remember if I
Speaker 6: had seen it, because there's a whole bunch of movies
Speaker 6: that are very similar between probably about a thirty year gap,
Speaker 6: and as I started looking at it and I'm like, yeah,
Speaker 6: I've seen this. Wait, no, that's The Lays of Grass.
Speaker 6: Wait i've seen this. No, that's eight other movies that
Speaker 6: this could have been. Five was the other one I
Speaker 6: kept thinking it was, and then I went to watch it.
Speaker 6: I'm like, oh, wait, this is Panic in the Streets,
Speaker 6: which I always write accidentally instead of Panic in the
Speaker 6: year zero. But then I finally watched it and said, oh, no,
Speaker 6: I have seen this, and I watched it maybe five.
Speaker 1: This years ago.
Speaker 6: I feel like this might have been a Netflix disc
Speaker 6: at the time, where it wasn't that easy to find,
Speaker 6: and it was always one that would come up in
Speaker 6: different Apocalypse books of all these movies that I had
Speaker 6: on my checklist to see, and it didn't leave much
Speaker 6: of an impression back then, which is why I didn't
Speaker 6: remember if i'd seen it or not. Rewatching it this
Speaker 6: week in this place of time in the year twenty
Speaker 6: twenty five, it played really differently. I won't say in
Speaker 6: a bad way, because I think there's stuff about the
Speaker 6: film that obviously we'll get into politically socially. It was
Speaker 6: a really different experience watching it today than maybe five
Speaker 6: ten years ago when we weren't quite where we are
Speaker 6: in the world right now.
Speaker 3: Howard, how about yourself.
Speaker 2: I came to this film by a very different path Italy.
Speaker 2: So when I was growing up, there was an institution
Speaker 2: in New York called the Million Dollar Movie, which was
Speaker 2: a TV broadcast in movies, and at that point there
Speaker 2: was not enough programming to fill an entire programming day
Speaker 2: for some local stations, so they would either broadcast what
Speaker 2: was clearly filler, I mean on some of the It's
Speaker 2: hard to believe now, but the ratio of Hamburger to
Speaker 2: Hamburger Helper on some of these local stations was a
Speaker 2: bit dodgy, or they would just rebroadcast something and on
Speaker 2: the Million Dollar Movie for whatever that week was, they
Speaker 2: would show the movie every night, and sometimes multiple times
Speaker 2: on weekends. So if you saw the movie on a
Speaker 2: Monday and you liked it, you just kept showing up.
Speaker 2: And there were a couple that were cult favorites among
Speaker 2: me and my tea bopper friends, and I think one
Speaker 2: of them was Panic in the year zero exclamation point
Speaker 2: and to tell tales out of school although I think
Speaker 2: the Statute of Limitations has passed on this. Myself, my
Speaker 2: friend Adam Duhan who Harold Duhan who later became Adamduhan
Speaker 2: and a blessed memory, and the late Walter Becker, late
Speaker 2: of Steely Dan. The three of us and sometimes some
Speaker 2: friends would sit on a couch either in my living
Speaker 2: room or Walters, and we would have in preparation, gone
Speaker 2: to the local drugstore and bought as many bottles of
Speaker 2: Romolar as they would let us get away with, which
Speaker 2: was a cough syrup which in that day and age
Speaker 2: actually contained codeine as opposed to more useless substitutes. And
Speaker 2: we would get woozy on Romolar and watch Panic in
Speaker 2: the year zero, and loved it so much that we
Speaker 2: would come back the next night to do it again.
Speaker 2: So that was my introduction to the film.
Speaker 1: I'm jealous. I wish that was mine.
Speaker 2: In some ways, I can't quite put my finger on it,
Speaker 2: but the story of nuclear family in a post nuclear
Speaker 2: world spoke to us, especially with the aid of ob eights.
Speaker 3: Yeah, my story is not nearly as impressive. No, no
Speaker 3: Steely Dan, no codining. Nothing. I remember probably similar to you, Emily.
Speaker 3: I probably saw it around the time of those Netflix stays.
Speaker 3: I don't know if I saw it in or if
Speaker 3: it was on cable, but yeah, I definitely saw this
Speaker 3: around the early two thousands, and it left a little
Speaker 3: bit of an impression on me. I remember liking it,
Speaker 3: and I always love nuclear apocalypse movies. I don't know why,
Speaker 3: probably just because growing up in the eighties and being
Speaker 3: threatened by that, growing up and watching Thread and The
Speaker 3: Day After After. Yeah, so all of that was been
Speaker 3: great to me. So going back and seeing some of
Speaker 3: these earlier ones, which just seems so quaint and they
Speaker 3: really don't talk about radiation whatsoever. There's really no problem
Speaker 3: with radiation. And I've complained about this before on the
Speaker 3: show where we've gotten back to now where people are like, Oh,
Speaker 3: we'll just drop a nuclear bomb in that hurricane. Sure,
Speaker 3: that'll get rid of it. We'll just throw a new
Speaker 3: at Godzilla, who's five miles off the coast of San Francisco.
Speaker 3: That's not going to be a problem, is it.
Speaker 6: I came to The Day After late because I missed
Speaker 6: it in the initial broadcast. I was too young, But
Speaker 6: I think it was the sci Fi Channel before it
Speaker 6: was the Siphy channel back when it was SciFi in
Speaker 6: ninety four.
Speaker 1: Maybe they aired it and it was just a random day.
Speaker 6: Where I'm like little teenage me is flipping around and
Speaker 6: lands on this movie and doesn't know what it is.
Speaker 6: But for the next I think three and a half hours,
Speaker 6: and they just aired it in it's entirety. I just
Speaker 6: sat there and probably turned progressively like more action as.
Speaker 1: The movie ended, and looked around and said, wait, this
Speaker 1: was a wait you thought this was oh oh god,
Speaker 1: And it launched that obsession. And it was much later
Speaker 1: when I saw Threads. So just imagine the world that
Speaker 1: it could have been.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Threads was like the real deal of the day
Speaker 3: after Scared the Bejesus Side.
Speaker 1: Yeah, tell us it changed Reagan's view on nuclear war, right.
Speaker 3: But then you see Threads and you're like, oh my god.
Speaker 2: There is now a film called Television Event, which is
Speaker 2: about the nineteen eighty three broadcast of the Day after.
Speaker 1: Oh Wow, it's excited.
Speaker 2: It's a documentary as interviews with Nick Meyer, who directed it,
Speaker 2: whom you may know better from the Sherlock Holmes seven
Speaker 2: Percent series or Star Trek to Rapid Kahn and this
Speaker 2: came quotes the interviews with Nick but also footage with
Speaker 2: Ted Kopple, Carl Sagan and Me Kissinger, Robert Tomara, William F. Buckley, Junior,
Speaker 2: Elie Vizelle. It's that kind of thing. So if you're
Speaker 2: into not only post apocalypticism but the history of post
Speaker 2: apocalypticism as received by the American public, I think you
Speaker 2: would enjoy it.
Speaker 3: I'm definitely gonna have to check that one out because
Speaker 3: for whatever reason, and I don't know if it's just nostalgia,
Speaker 3: but it's all right. No Blade of Grass, as you said, Testament, Yeah,
Speaker 3: oh boy. Another good one.
Speaker 2: Damn Nation Alley with Dominique Sanda.
Speaker 3: That vehicle that Jan, Michael Vincent and George Prepar drive
Speaker 3: around so cool. I love that.
Speaker 6: I think there's so much to it. I think there's
Speaker 6: a lot of there's the era if you live through it.
Speaker 6: I think it's the same with the zombie apocalypse. It
Speaker 6: is that weird wish not wish fulfillment, but there is
Speaker 6: an aspect of I know what I would do, I
Speaker 6: know how i'd survive.
Speaker 1: I live near York. I'm going to die in the
Speaker 1: first bomb.
Speaker 6: I hope if everything goes well, because I don't want
Speaker 6: to deal with that the reason I think zombies caught
Speaker 6: on eventually when they did. Like growing up, we were
Speaker 6: big zombie fans, and we always just did the scenario
Speaker 6: of Okay, we're walking at night, what happens as zombie
Speaker 6: comes out. Most apocalyptic movies or apocalyptic movies are putting
Speaker 6: normal everyday people in these situations.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 6: Sure, you have your road warriors and you have your
Speaker 6: kind of more extreme, but this, right and the movies
Speaker 6: around this time were very much the pure nuclear family.
Speaker 6: You know exactly who you could be in the scenario,
Speaker 6: and if you're a good man, you can figure out
Speaker 6: how to survive it.
Speaker 1: And save your family.
Speaker 6: And I think there is a lot of that, And
Speaker 6: this is where it gets into that weird territory that
Speaker 6: I'm sure we'll go into of today in twenty twenty five,
Speaker 6: where it's become a source of pride. I think there
Speaker 6: are this idea that there are people that kind of
Speaker 6: secretly want World War three to happen because it would
Speaker 6: give them a chance to show off why they keep
Speaker 6: their guns and why they need their rights and why
Speaker 6: they have all of this, and it justifies things.
Speaker 1: But at the same time, like you get it, it's
Speaker 1: really appealing it's very exciting to.
Speaker 2: Watch absolutely emily that there is a certain kind of
Speaker 2: wish fulfillment here, which is God. If there were a
Speaker 2: nuclear or I could unleash my inner Jordan Peterson, I
Speaker 2: could show them what an alpha I am.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't have to put on pants, I don't
Speaker 1: have to comb my hair.
Speaker 2: That could be a chad. I grew up in the
Speaker 2: nineteen fifties under the shadow of the bomb, and we
Speaker 2: would regularly have duck and cover drills in school, and
Speaker 2: all kinds of cheerful nostrums like don't look out the window,
Speaker 2: the fireball will melt your eyeballs, but stay safe under
Speaker 2: your desk, as if getting under the desk in PS
Speaker 2: one ninety six Q Class five would save you from
Speaker 2: a holocaust that would melt everything else in the world.
Speaker 2: And I remember, I'll come out of the closet on this.
Speaker 2: My mother was a communist, was a Stalinist.
Speaker 1: Oh thing, I got to make a phone call.
Speaker 2: Yeah, sure, feel free, Statute of limitations once more. And
Speaker 2: she said, these things are stupid. If there's a nuclear war,
Speaker 2: we're all going to die.
Speaker 1: So that's a good thing.
Speaker 2: The next time there was a duck and cover grill
Speaker 2: at PS one ninety six Q. I didn't go into
Speaker 2: the desk, and my teacher said why not, and I
Speaker 2: parroted what my mother had said, which was that there's
Speaker 2: a nuclear war, We're all going to die. And she
Speaker 2: sent the other principal's office, and I assumed I was
Speaker 2: going to get lectured and maybe do detention, god knows what.
Speaker 2: And it was the weirdest goddamn thing. The principal, a
Speaker 2: guy named Abraham Pauschner, the principle of PS one ninety six,
Speaker 2: talked to me in a kind of rambling way for
Speaker 2: twenty maybe thirty minutes about the fact that we were
Speaker 2: all going to die, and it is death that gives
Speaker 2: life meaning but also renders life meaningless. It was like
Speaker 2: I expected to be reprimanded. Instead I got Albert Camu.
Speaker 1: A philosophy lesson.
Speaker 2: And then after he was finished talking about death meaning
Speaker 2: they need to I said, go back to class. And
Speaker 2: that was That was one of the weirder things of
Speaker 2: a very weird childhood.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I have a similar mother involving duck and cover story,
Speaker 6: because my mother grew up also in the fifties and
Speaker 6: about sixteen seventeen years ago, as she lived in Russia
Speaker 6: for a year. I was teaching English there and I
Speaker 6: had a class of adults, lawyers and professionals, and my
Speaker 6: mother had come to visit and it brought her to
Speaker 6: the class. And it was fascinating because my mother has
Speaker 6: never really been abroad, and she's talking to Russian and
Speaker 6: she's saying to them, growing up, you guys were the enemy.
Speaker 1: I was so scared of you.
Speaker 6: And she's going through what it was like, and she
Speaker 6: was talking about duck and cover and how we thought
Speaker 6: you were going to bomb us. So when they a
Speaker 6: bell would ring and then we'd all have to go.
Speaker 1: Under the desks. And my students, who were probably in there,
Speaker 1: like early thirties, late twenties, looked in they were just so, wait,
Speaker 1: you went what was your school like?
Speaker 6: You had a bomb shelter? No, we just went under
Speaker 6: the desks. Wait, you went under a desk for a
Speaker 6: nuclear bomb. And it finally hit my mother, Oh my god,
Speaker 6: we weren't going to survive.
Speaker 1: Why do they make us do that?
Speaker 3: Better late than never?
Speaker 1: Yeah, it took the Russians to teacher that.
Speaker 2: And I also think I believe that you're right to
Speaker 2: draw the parallel between the sort of wave of postal
Speaker 2: apocalyptic films, which in some ways morphed into zombie apocalypse films,
Speaker 2: many of the same. We are barricaded here in our house,
Speaker 2: everybody outside is either radioactive, and a lot in connection
Speaker 2: with these films are the kind of inciting incident, if
Speaker 2: you will. Is a big externality the bomb drops, But
Speaker 2: really there about community, neighborhood. How thin is the veneer
Speaker 2: of civilization? What does it take to strip us away
Speaker 2: from our quote unquote civilized selves and turn us into Hobbsey?
Speaker 2: And I've got mine. After I rewatched Panic in the
Speaker 2: year zero this week without the aid of coughs here,
Speaker 2: I was reminded of a nineteen fifty nine Twilight Zone
Speaker 2: episode which you may be familiar, called the Monsters Are
Speaker 2: Due on Maple Street.
Speaker 3: Do you know that one?
Speaker 2: Yes?
Speaker 1: I thought you were going to say the one in
Speaker 1: the Bombshelter.
Speaker 6: I' forget the name of it, but there's one where
Speaker 6: a family has built a bomb shelter and they're not
Speaker 6: letting the other family in.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, Maple Street is the episode that may be
Speaker 1: want to write.
Speaker 3: Actually, the episode Emily is referring to is the Shelter
Speaker 3: Season three episode three of The Twilight Zone.
Speaker 2: Let me just quote Rod Serling if I might. This
Speaker 2: is sort of afterward to the episode. The tools of
Speaker 2: conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosion and fallout.
Speaker 2: They are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to
Speaker 2: be found only in the minds of men. For the record,
Speaker 2: prejudices can kill, and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless,
Speaker 2: frightening search for Escapegoat has a fallout of its own
Speaker 2: for the children, and the children yet unborn. And the
Speaker 2: pity of it is that these things cannot be confined
Speaker 2: only to the Twilight Zone, do you do?
Speaker 3: It's amazing to look at some of the films that
Speaker 3: were coming out around this time. We spoke earlier this
Speaker 3: year about On the Beach. I forgot that we had
Speaker 3: already done a post apocalyptic film this year. On the
Speaker 3: Beach nineteen fifty nine, The World of Flesh and the
Speaker 3: Devil nineteen fifty nine, The Day the Earth caught fire
Speaker 3: in nineteen sixty one. I would consider le Jetee to
Speaker 3: be a post of Black Ealliptic Film nineteen sixty two, Ladybug,
Speaker 3: Ladybug nineteen sixty three, Fail Yeah, Fail, Safe and After
Speaker 3: Strange Love in sixty four, Peter Watkins The War Game
Speaker 3: in nineteen sixty five, who ironically we've already done Late
Speaker 3: August in the Hotel Ozone that was nineteen sixty six.
Speaker 3: None to just continues from there. Of course, it's never
Speaker 3: really gone out of style, I don't think. But yeah,
Speaker 3: that's a killer list of amazing films. Interestingly, on this
Speaker 3: list I'm looking at there is the Creation of the Humanoids,
Speaker 3: which we covered quite a few years ago, also written
Speaker 3: by Jay Simms, who wrote the screenplay for this. Jay
Speaker 3: Simms probably best known these days for writing The Killer Shrews,
Speaker 3: one of the best mystery sites Theater three thousand movies.
Speaker 3: And then also that same year The Giant HeLa Monster
Speaker 3: came out as well, which he wrote, also a good
Speaker 3: MSD episode. Yeah, this guy's knocking them out of the park.
Speaker 2: Music coordinator for this who is Al Simms? Did all
Speaker 2: of the bikini movies, any movie with bikini in the title, Bikini,
Speaker 2: Beach Party, Goldfoot, and The Wild Bikini, The Return of
Speaker 2: Doctor Goldswood, How to Stuff a Wild Bikini Bikini Al Simms,
Speaker 2: I mean it's he is in the Bikini Cinematic universe.
Speaker 2: He owns Music League, and I love the Less Baxter
Speaker 2: movie and the Al Sims music in this and I
Speaker 2: actually found on Spotify there is a soundtrack album.
Speaker 6: I would listen to this soundtrack out of context. I
Speaker 6: think it is a really good soundtrack. I like the
Speaker 6: idea of this jazzy score over It's very incogruous in
Speaker 6: a way because it's getting back to and here you
Speaker 6: have wild drums and saxophone. But there are times where
Speaker 6: this score is just so intrusive that I think it
Speaker 6: genuinely affects.
Speaker 2: This movie absolutely, and you can see it as bretty
Speaker 2: and if you want to be charitable.
Speaker 1: But again, this is a case where it's oh, I
Speaker 1: get why the codeine helps.
Speaker 2: And if I can go off on a tangent and
Speaker 2: I'm not derailing you. I also think that in addition
Speaker 2: to this belonging to the genre of post apocalyptic films,
Speaker 2: it also is part of another genre, which is the
Speaker 2: sort of disturbed teenager movie, the cool and the crazy
Speaker 2: or the delinquents, the kind of Richard becallon cinematic universe
Speaker 2: that goes through all of this. He plays Carlolk, but
Speaker 2: Dick McAllan was it him? And Scott Marlowe were in
Speaker 2: all of these movies about beat Nicks disturbed teenage, all
Speaker 2: of whom were hopped up on Mary Jane and then
Speaker 2: did bad things. And in some ways this feels to
Speaker 2: me like that episode of Dragnet, which is about drugs,
Speaker 2: or the Delinquent School and the Crazy, where it's about
Speaker 2: finger snapping, about jazz and about the threat that young
Speaker 2: and of course the apotheosis of this is rebel without
Speaker 2: a cause. And if you look at James Dean's Harrington
Speaker 2: jacket in that, and if you look at Thank You
Speaker 2: Abalon's jacket in this, you can see the kind of
Speaker 2: through line. But I do think that in some ways,
Speaker 2: in addition to this being about the nuclear family under
Speaker 2: threat from the bomb, it's also about the American white
Speaker 2: picket fence nuclear family being under threat from the teenage
Speaker 2: rebellion that's just under the white picket fence of the
Speaker 2: Eisenhower years well, and it's.
Speaker 3: Like that teenage rebellion can run wild in this one
Speaker 3: because there are no police anymore. So you can take
Speaker 3: all of those things from the Delinquent movies and take
Speaker 3: them to their quote unquote logical end, where we've got
Speaker 3: them armed, very dangerous, going after this family, very open,
Speaker 3: and then the whole thing with them torturing the girl.
Speaker 3: Of course that's where the delinquents would take it if
Speaker 3: there was no rule of law around.
Speaker 6: I feel like this movie had the potential to be
Speaker 6: really fascinating and great, and I don't think it really
Speaker 6: gets there, because I think part of the most interesting
Speaker 6: kernel of the movie is Frankie Avalon character, because he's
Speaker 6: there as this sort of okay, we the dad is
Speaker 6: trying to teach him because he knows, okay, I need
Speaker 6: you in order to the two of us. Of course,
Speaker 6: we have to keep the women safe because they can't
Speaker 6: do anything. We have to keep you, saying, if you
Speaker 6: have to learn to kill, but not to enjoy it.
Speaker 6: And there's all that, and there's a moment early on,
Speaker 6: like somewhere in the middle where I can't remember if
Speaker 6: it's after they shoot one of the beating the kids,
Speaker 6: but we're Frankie Avalon's smiles and the dad kind of
Speaker 6: sees it and you see him.
Speaker 1: Upset by it.
Speaker 6: And that's so that's a story right there, to see
Speaker 6: where he's gonna go. And I think not to jump everywhere,
Speaker 6: but going back to the short stories that this is
Speaker 6: based on, and I don't know how much that yeah,
Speaker 6: that is, but my jaw dropped at the end of
Speaker 6: first short story when I realized what was happening. But
Speaker 6: it was so much about the dad looking at his
Speaker 6: kids and saying, this one's gonna make it, this one's
Speaker 6: not gonna make it, this one's not. And I just
Speaker 6: wish in a way it was a little bit digging
Speaker 6: deeper into who is Frankie Avalon becoming in this movie?
Speaker 6: Is he going to be the dad in twenty years
Speaker 6: or is he gonna be one of these other delinquents
Speaker 6: going around and taking other people's property in women and
Speaker 6: so on. But I don't And also it's I get it,
Speaker 6: it's the year and the time, and this wasn't going
Speaker 6: for that kind of story, but it's just like it.
Speaker 1: I'm like, oh, are we gonna pull it now? Okay,
Speaker 1: we run out of time.
Speaker 2: But I think you're absolutely right to point to that
Speaker 2: is the kind of moral dilemma at the center of
Speaker 2: this movie. I think Raymonland's line to Frankie Avalon and
Speaker 2: I love this because it so encapsulates all of this.
Speaker 2: I want you to use that gun if you have to,
Speaker 2: but I want you to hate it.
Speaker 1: That is a great line, and that.
Speaker 2: He says, A big piece of civilization is gone, and
Speaker 2: your mother wants you to save what's left. Try to
Speaker 2: unpack that, A big piece of civilization is gone and
Speaker 2: your mother, not me, your mother wants you to save
Speaker 2: what's left. I think you're absolutely right. Emily chasits this
Speaker 2: as a kind of theme, sometimes rather deliberately, sometimes over deliberately,
Speaker 2: But then does it quite take it to the extremes that, say,
Speaker 2: a late sixties movie might of really tearying that character
Speaker 2: apart with any kind of straw dog's kind of way.
Speaker 1: There's no real transition to his character. He looks the
Speaker 1: same as he did in the beginning, but.
Speaker 2: There is that sort of weird smile on his face
Speaker 2: and I love that moment.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so much of this is the Ray milland story.
Speaker 3: Of course, it makes sense. He's the director and his
Speaker 3: cheapest star. He does a great job with the direction
Speaker 3: of this, and I love Raymonland. I've always enjoyed Ray
Speaker 3: miland this period of his career was interesting because this
Speaker 3: was right before he worked with I think was Roger Corman,
Speaker 3: who did X the Man with the X Ray Eyes.
Speaker 3: I can't remember who directed that or he definitely.
Speaker 1: Worked with Corman quite a bit.
Speaker 2: I mean, he did those movies like the Wilder movie,
Speaker 2: the Hitchcock movie, Last Weekend, I'm for Murder, but he'd
Speaker 2: also had directed at this point I'm correct, and if
Speaker 2: I'm not, please correct me. A man alone lives been
Speaker 2: the Safecracker, which are good competent BB minus. So this
Speaker 2: was not his directorial debut, and I think he actually
Speaker 2: knew what he was doing, and not in as when
Speaker 2: forgive the implicit screenwriterly bias here, but when actors turn directors,
Speaker 2: sometimes you get a lot of showy performances because oh,
Speaker 2: look what I can do in acting if I weren't
Speaker 2: constrained by that director. And sometimes you get weird, unexpected
Speaker 2: pieces of genius like Charles Lawton's Not of the Hunter.
Speaker 2: But here it feels to me like he is doing
Speaker 2: a far better directorial job and a I'm not sure
Speaker 2: that it's self effacing is the right way, but I
Speaker 2: would say very economical and professional. It reminds me more
Speaker 2: of say on that Spectrum, more Howard Hawks than North
Speaker 2: and Welles.
Speaker 3: Just for the record, yes, Roger Carman directed X the
Speaker 3: Man with the X Ray Eyes also a score by
Speaker 3: Less Baxter, and yes, that Less Baxter music is intense
Speaker 3: a lot of the time. We start with that shot
Speaker 3: of the.
Speaker 2: On the AM radio. You see an AM radio dial
Speaker 2: in a car.
Speaker 3: We pull back and get that title on there, and yeah,
Speaker 3: like you guys are saying, as far as this being
Speaker 3: somewhat post apocalyptic, but somewhat, if not more, a survivalist
Speaker 3: film and having this is year zero, we were starting
Speaker 3: from scratch. This is it, ladies and gentlemen. Civilization other
Speaker 3: than that small piece that you're mentioning that your mother
Speaker 3: wants you to keep is gone. And we just see
Speaker 3: the breakdown through so much of the first probably into
Speaker 3: the second act of this film, as they realize what's
Speaker 3: going well, they don't ever seem to really realize to me,
Speaker 3: like it feels like they don't really connect with the
Speaker 3: fact that Los Angeles is just gone now or at
Speaker 3: least maybe no, it's so strange, like I said, without
Speaker 3: the radiation and the destruction, and it just feels like
Speaker 3: sometimes they're like, we don't want to go into that area, okay,
Speaker 3: because at the end, aren't they going back to Los Angeles?
Speaker 2: The central question is my mom okay.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and then we have to just stop asking that
Speaker 1: very quickly in some ways.
Speaker 6: At the beginning of the film is actually the most
Speaker 6: interesting part to me of this family is going out
Speaker 6: for a vacation. They realize what an now we're into
Speaker 6: their ride, that there are bombs over Los Angeles, and
Speaker 6: I think this is so much. And this is where
Speaker 6: I think this aspect of the short story does feel
Speaker 6: very much there of it being purely Dad knows what
Speaker 6: to do?
Speaker 1: Who knows why? I forget what he does for a living.
Speaker 1: If they say it, I think they do.
Speaker 3: He gets so annoyed that whole short story, at least
Speaker 3: the first one. We'll definitely talk about the second one.
Speaker 3: But that first short story just feels like I am
Speaker 3: pissed off at all times. Just feels like the dad
Speaker 3: who you don't want to mess with because he's going
Speaker 3: to turn around.
Speaker 6: Dad is always right, don't piss off Dad. Dad doesn't
Speaker 6: like you to tap your foot. Don't tap your foot.
Speaker 3: If you were sitting in the back of that car
Speaker 3: and you said how much longer, he would turn around
Speaker 3: and literally bite your head off and spit it out
Speaker 3: The window.
Speaker 6: The ory Milan version of that is not He's not that,
Speaker 6: but he is immediately survivalist of I know exactly what
Speaker 6: we have to do. We are not gonna stop. We're
Speaker 6: gonna keep driving. We'll stop at a phone if we
Speaker 6: can't get your mother. We're just gonna keep going. We're
Speaker 6: not gonna go to the main road. We're gonna go
Speaker 6: to a side road. We are not going to tell
Speaker 6: the proprietor right away what's going on. We're gonna go
Speaker 6: somewhere where they are a little bit less in the know,
Speaker 6: and they don't know. So we're gonna buy everything first.
Speaker 6: We're gonna pay for everything first, and then we're a
Speaker 6: good person, we're gonna say, hey, by the way, turn
Speaker 6: on the news. Something really bad is happening. You should
Speaker 6: shut things down, you should take your stuff and go.
Speaker 6: So it's very the evolution of it. And then immediately
Speaker 6: the next stop he makes, which is the gun shop,
Speaker 6: where he similarly, I need a gun, I need this,
Speaker 6: I need that. Here's everything, and already it's getting a
Speaker 6: little bit looser as far as yeay, oh okay, fine,
Speaker 6: I'll pay you double and then gun laws. What do
Speaker 6: you know in nineteen sixty two, I can't sell it
Speaker 6: to you right now. You got to come back tomorrow
Speaker 6: for it. And he does the trick that the one
Speaker 6: era of my life where I played PlayStation, I had
Speaker 6: a stressful job and I would kill an hour in
Speaker 6: the afternoon by playing Grand Theft Auto and all I
Speaker 6: would do is drive around and shoot people and do
Speaker 6: violence dark time in my life.
Speaker 1: I'm good now.
Speaker 6: But one thing you cannot do is you cannot go
Speaker 6: into a gun shop and purchase guns and immediately try
Speaker 6: to shoot the proprietor of that chop in order to
Speaker 6: not think for them, because the proprietor is going to
Speaker 6: be faster with the gun than you are. And I
Speaker 6: was very happy to be validated in this movie when
Speaker 6: that happens. And then of course the gun shop guy
Speaker 6: comes back. But there's just something to that of how
Speaker 6: it quickly progresses into Okay, I was the good guy
Speaker 6: with the grocery store owner. I'm a little bit less
Speaker 6: of the good guy now with the gun store owner.
Speaker 6: And now it's we're going down that slope.
Speaker 3: The only time that doesn't hold water is if you
Speaker 3: are Arnold Schwarzenegger coming back in time and able to
Speaker 3: take out Dick Miller as the gun proprietor anything.
Speaker 2: Else phase plasma vifer in the forty range. It's just
Speaker 2: what you see, Pal, who's the nine millimeter? You know
Speaker 2: your weapons, buddy. Any one of these is ideal for
Speaker 2: home defense. So which shall it be?
Speaker 3: All close early today?
Speaker 2: It's a fifteen day away on ten guns. Rifles you
Speaker 2: can take right now. You can't do that. The politics
Speaker 2: of this film are really interesting because, on the one hand,
Speaker 2: there's a very strong strain of pakriarchalism. Father knows best
Speaker 2: with a gun in his hand. But there's also some
Speaker 2: kind of I think some weird left wing politics as well,
Speaker 2: that that kind of thread through this. I don't know
Speaker 2: if this is true, but I have read that ward
Speaker 2: More was expelled from d wait Clinton High School in
Speaker 2: New York for his pacifism during World War One. I
Speaker 2: do know in a more confirmed way that he was
Speaker 2: in the Federal Writers Project of the WPA with people
Speaker 2: like Ralph Ellison and Nelson Algren and Zora Neil Hurston
Speaker 2: and John Chiever and Studs Turkle and Jim Thompson of
Speaker 2: all people, and Richard Wright and Saul Bellow, and there
Speaker 2: was a strong kind of left liberal strain in that too,
Speaker 2: and I think there is at one and the same
Speaker 2: time a kind of endorsement of nuclear war would be
Speaker 2: a very bad thing. But also if there were a
Speaker 2: nuclear war, the men stop is to kill other men
Speaker 2: and protect there women with a strong underlining of the
Speaker 2: possessory adjective.
Speaker 6: Well, that's what I really liked about the second story,
Speaker 6: Lot's Daughter, because it has a little bit of a
Speaker 6: kick to that with its ending just for.
Speaker 3: Folks who may not be as familiar with the Bible
Speaker 3: as other people. Of the story of Lot somewhat similar
Speaker 3: and so far as moving to I can't remember if
Speaker 3: he was in Sodom or if he was just as
Speaker 3: a Gemora. But there's the whole story of the angels
Speaker 3: coming in and if they can find what was it
Speaker 3: ten good men that they would spare the city. They
Speaker 3: eventually take shelter with Lot and his family. All of
Speaker 3: these people come from outside, so again protecting the family,
Speaker 3: protecting the house. But when all of these people show
Speaker 3: up and they go, hey, you have two strangers in there,
Speaker 3: basically send them outside so we can fuck them, is
Speaker 3: how I understand the story. And he goes, you, no,
Speaker 3: these are my guests. Here's my daughters take them. Yeah,
Speaker 3: which is great. Then the angels are basically like, hey, man,
Speaker 3: you need to get you and your family the fuck
Speaker 3: out of here. We're going to lay waste to this city.
Speaker 3: Of course, there's the whole thing of them running away.
Speaker 3: Lot's wife turns around, and I really wish I remembered
Speaker 3: her first name. I don't even know she has a first.
Speaker 1: I don't think she has one. I think it's just
Speaker 1: Lot's wife.
Speaker 2: I think she's missus Lott.
Speaker 7: Yeah, my name is Lot, and I'm Abraham's cousin.
Speaker 5: I live.
Speaker 3: I live in Sodomgamore.
Speaker 7: I live really right on the line outside Imamore. I
Speaker 7: met my wife about six hundred years ago. We've been
Speaker 7: married for like five hundred and.
Speaker 8: Ninety eight years.
Speaker 9: I'm Lot's wife. Everybody refers to me as Lot's wife,
Speaker 9: but I have a name. I'm Myra, Myra Lott, actually
Speaker 9: the light of my life for my two daughters, Tracy
Speaker 9: and Stacy.
Speaker 3: Missus Lott turns around, turns into a pillar of salt.
Speaker 1: You can color. You're ready to see if you want to.
Speaker 3: Second part of the story, yes, very apropos. Second part
Speaker 3: of the story is now Lot is alone with his family,
Speaker 3: with his daughters, and the name of the second story
Speaker 3: that this was somewhat based on, I would say it's
Speaker 3: really much more based on Lot. And then Lot's Daughter
Speaker 3: is the follow up story. And if you remember again
Speaker 3: in the Bible, Lot's daughters want to perpetuate the lineage,
Speaker 3: so they get a Lot nice and drunk, and a
Speaker 3: couple nights in a row they have their way with him,
Speaker 3: or he has some semi consensual sex with them, or
Speaker 3: maybe not. Maybe it's even darker than that. But yeah,
Speaker 3: So when we come to ward More's story Lot's Daughter,
Speaker 3: he now has a new son and his wife is
Speaker 3: gone and his daughter. Look at how nice my daughter looks.
Speaker 3: And yes, things are falling apart, but she really takes
Speaker 3: the place of her mother very well. Fucking dark.
Speaker 6: She's stronger than her mother, She's more logical than her mother. Yeah,
Speaker 6: the stories are great. I had heard the name word Moore,
Speaker 6: but I had never read anything by him, and I immediately.
Speaker 1: Added a bunch of his books to my list.
Speaker 6: I think in some ways, I actually the first story
Speaker 6: is just written with such an intensity, and the dad.
Speaker 1: Is despicable and you know that dad, you absolutely do.
Speaker 6: And so that has a great ending that shocked me,
Speaker 6: and the second story kind of gives a little bit
Speaker 6: of upp into and a way I think in the end,
Speaker 6: I would love to see an adaptation that is a
Speaker 6: little bit closer to that, because it would be hard
Speaker 6: to watch, but it would be yeah, evident.
Speaker 2: And if you were doing a nineteen fifties adaptation set
Speaker 2: in car culture of Orpheus, you could call it Orpheus
Speaker 2: and Furry Dice.
Speaker 3: And that's why it makes the big bucks. I was laughing,
Speaker 3: of course, as he's going with the ray milland characters
Speaker 3: going on this quest to get the supplies, get the guns,
Speaker 3: get the gas. I love when they stop at a
Speaker 3: diner and they're talking about how they don't have any
Speaker 3: eggs anymore, and I was just like, oh, wow, everything
Speaker 3: old is new.
Speaker 2: Again that diner. By the way, the Saddle Peak Lodge
Speaker 2: is still there. Yeah, it is now much grander. It
Speaker 2: is a kind of in Calabasas. It's at four to
Speaker 2: one nine Cold Canyon Road. It also appears in episode
Speaker 2: eighty three of Perry Mason that aired on January thirty,
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty. But it's funny when I'm looking at that
Speaker 2: or the movie ranch that appears in it. There's a
Speaker 2: kind of subterranean dialogue between all of the different movies
Speaker 2: that feature the stock locations that you do when you're
Speaker 2: shooting on the cheap in Los Angeles. I forget whether
Speaker 2: it was Sam Goldwyn or Harry Cohne who's alleged to
Speaker 2: have said, a tree is a tree, a rock is
Speaker 2: a rock. Shoot it in Griffith Parker, don't shoot it.
Speaker 2: But there are these sort of trope locations that pop
Speaker 2: up in movie after movie, and in some ways it
Speaker 2: takes you out of the film because you're saying, oh
Speaker 2: my god, saddle Peak Lodge. I officiated at a wedding
Speaker 2: at saddle Peak Lodge. It takes you out of the movie,
Speaker 2: but also sews you back into this Los Angeles movie world,
Speaker 2: where there are five or six iconic locales which have
Speaker 2: doubled for fifty or sixty places in as many movies.
Speaker 2: If both of you come to Los Angeles at the
Speaker 2: same time and I will take you to saddle Peak
Speaker 2: Lodge and we can make our pilgrimage, I would be
Speaker 2: very happy to do that.
Speaker 1: Blast the jazz, whatever we do.
Speaker 3: It took me so long to figure out who was
Speaker 3: playing the mother in this film, or I knew her from.
Speaker 1: I know her as I can't stand it. I never
Speaker 1: ever have figured out that that was her.
Speaker 2: Oh she is so good.
Speaker 3: But when I figured it out, I was like, oh,
Speaker 3: I see it in the face. Of course she was
Speaker 3: in The Big Knife and a whole bunch of other stuff,
Speaker 3: but yeah, that role and singing in the rain so
Speaker 3: freaking classic, god.
Speaker 6: Is iconic, one of the best supporting performances in a
Speaker 6: movie of all time.
Speaker 3: And then using Franky Avalon as this kind of I
Speaker 3: guess it would have been a box office draw at
Speaker 3: this time. Right, this is before the bikini films.
Speaker 2: Yes, I think so.
Speaker 1: I feel like he and at least the quick trivia
Speaker 1: I read like he was already doing me. Let's see.
Speaker 2: I know he was a teen idol as a musical star,
Speaker 2: but I don't know to what extent he was a
Speaker 2: movie star. Reports that he was, but I don't know.
Speaker 6: Oh, the Beach Party was sixty three, Operation Bikini sixty three.
Speaker 1: Wow, he did a lot of bikini movies prey quickly.
Speaker 3: So this is right before, right before I was going
Speaker 3: to break out, almost right after Voyage to the Bottom
Speaker 3: of the Sea, which is what I really remember him for.
Speaker 3: And he did a few other things before that, but okay,
Speaker 3: so he's probably yeah, not quite box office idle, but
Speaker 3: more the musical hit. Okay, that makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 3: Let's cast this guy in here and bring in some
Speaker 3: of the teeny boppers. He looks amazing in this movie.
Speaker 3: I didn't really recognize the daughter too much, and speaking
Speaker 3: of this being such a patriarchal film, she gets barely anything.
Speaker 1: She gets nothing.
Speaker 6: I was mad because I felt like I was just
Speaker 6: annoyed because I think it's like, what is it, probably
Speaker 6: forty five minutes in the film when she finally gets
Speaker 6: to say something, and what does she say? Okay, we
Speaker 6: have to go, Carrie, we found the place we're gonna
Speaker 6: live as the world ends. Let's go get it ready,
Speaker 6: and she says, what a drag? I'm bored. Yes, that's
Speaker 6: great work right there. But that actress. I felt bad
Speaker 6: after because I was so angry at her as a character.
Speaker 6: And then I realized she's in Spider Baby. Oh yes,
Speaker 6: she is a blonde in Spider Baby, and she's so
Speaker 6: great in that. But yes, it's not her fault that
Speaker 6: she just gets No. I'm sorry she doesn't get nothing
Speaker 6: to do. She does get to get sexually assaulted, which.
Speaker 1: Has nothing to do with her.
Speaker 6: In the end, it is all about how the dad
Speaker 6: is said, it's the dad's responsibility and he'll never forget help.
Speaker 2: Was he insufficiently good at protecting his women? It's not
Speaker 2: about them, it's about him.
Speaker 6: Yes, we never see her actual react to it after.
Speaker 6: We never see is she recovering, is she defensive, is
Speaker 6: she anything like?
Speaker 1: Nope, you would never know. This girl just went through
Speaker 1: it horrific, right, and.
Speaker 2: Nabe Molan's wife says, maybe you should talk to her,
Speaker 2: and you're expecting that will be the next scene, and
Speaker 2: instead the next scene is Frankie Avalon clumsily trying to
Speaker 2: pick up the woman that they rescued.
Speaker 1: Yes, so there's a second woman in this movie who
Speaker 1: is also being actually assaulted, and they do decide to
Speaker 1: help her. Okay, come stay with us, we'll take care
Speaker 1: of you. And I think this woman is not on
Speaker 1: the market right now, and every scene is just Frankie
Speaker 1: Avalon make an eye at her, and here I pitched
Speaker 1: a flower for you. She does not want that, No,
Speaker 1: she doesn't.
Speaker 3: Should get this woman to a trauma center, right, Now
Speaker 3: before we move off of actors, I just want to
Speaker 3: sing praises of a couple of sort of smaller actors.
Speaker 2: Dick mcallian, who plays Carl, who is just such an
Speaker 2: axiom of cinema, all of those beat big movies, the
Speaker 2: Linklin School and the Crazy that we mentioned, but he
Speaker 2: had a career that goes through Robin and the Seven Hoods,
Speaker 2: Von Ryan's Express. He is a loach in Chinatown. For
Speaker 2: God's sake. Once you see his face, you see it everywhere.
Speaker 2: He is almost the Dick Miller of the Beatniks. You
Speaker 2: know here he is cast let's just say, not cast
Speaker 2: against type. He's doing that thing that he often does.
Speaker 2: But I just love, Oh, oh my god, it's Dick mckallion.
Speaker 2: And then the other guy who I recognized was the
Speaker 2: grocery store owner who's an actor named o Z Whitehead,
Speaker 2: and he's if Kustin Sturgis had his the Allen Quell Company,
Speaker 2: his stock company of actors, John Ford had a bunch
Speaker 2: of them too, and he was one of the john
Speaker 2: Ford Stock Company actor guys. He's in everything from Grapes
Speaker 2: of Wrath to Man who Shot Liberty Balance and again,
Speaker 2: once you see his face. You see it everywhere. He's
Speaker 2: one of that great generation of I guess you could
Speaker 2: say character actor, although that seems a little insufficient, non
Speaker 2: leading men. For the most part, supporting actors who once
Speaker 2: become aware of them, have great faces, and once you
Speaker 2: become aware of them, it's like, oh my god, there
Speaker 2: he is again. Oh that's whoa And I think Ray Miland,
Speaker 2: who was an actor, knew in his mental or even
Speaker 2: maybe physical rolodex whole bunch of guys who could come
Speaker 2: in do a day or two's work, deliver and do
Speaker 2: it professionally, not have to be what's my motivation or
Speaker 2: any of that stuff.
Speaker 3: I was thrilled to see Paul Gleason as the gas
Speaker 3: station attendant about ten minutes in that gets his lights
Speaker 3: punched out.
Speaker 1: There didn't raise me to be a hero for four bucks.
Speaker 1: It's that great line, just in case the.
Speaker 3: People of my generation need a little reminding. Paul Gleeson,
Speaker 3: the principal from the Breakfast Club, you mess with the bully,
Speaker 3: get the horns. So great seeing him here where he
Speaker 3: just looks like he still went behind the ears. And yeah,
Speaker 3: it's about thirty minutes in when we finally get the
Speaker 3: roughnecks coming in here, these teenage hoodlums, and they really
Speaker 3: become the motivation for the whole second part of the
Speaker 3: film because we think we're done with them for a
Speaker 3: little while once they find their new world Swiss family.
Speaker 1: Robinson kind of what it feels like for a bit,
Speaker 1: let's build a house in a cave.
Speaker 2: But those of us who make our living screenwriting, he
Speaker 2: knew that they're going to come back.
Speaker 1: You didn't kill them, you had just shot them. It
Speaker 1: was a grace.
Speaker 2: But they are the kind of motor that kicks you
Speaker 2: into the second activeness and changes it a little bit
Speaker 2: from the dominant tone being is ray Miland being going
Speaker 2: to be able to keep his family together by being
Speaker 2: an authoritative, strong leader of the population of basically this
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty two Mercury Monterey custom or what's it going
Speaker 2: to be like when they are tangling with the anarchy
Speaker 2: of this new doggie dog world that they're now finding
Speaker 2: themselves in.
Speaker 3: Ray Miland has one of the best ways to enter
Speaker 3: traffic that I've ever seen when he is trying to
Speaker 3: get onto the freeway again from a side road, unable
Speaker 3: to get on there because going back to the short story,
Speaker 3: That's a lot of it is the traffic and trying
Speaker 3: to make it through.
Speaker 1: And get down this road and not use all your
Speaker 1: gas just idling.
Speaker 3: And here he's trying to get back into the road.
Speaker 3: Nobody's stopping, nobody's allowing him to merge.
Speaker 2: So do you know what to do?
Speaker 3: You just get a big old bucket of gasoline, throw
Speaker 3: that out onto the freeway, light it on fire, and
Speaker 3: that gives you a little bit of a path.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and look, New York traffic can be rough. I'm
Speaker 1: not gonna lie. I did watch that and think a
Speaker 1: little super soaker.
Speaker 2: I want to give a little plug here if I
Speaker 2: may to. I think we all know IMDb a good
Speaker 2: old m de bath. I am a CDB International Movie
Speaker 2: Car Database.
Speaker 3: Oh I love that one.
Speaker 1: Yes, I have used that one.
Speaker 2: I went, of course there to see what kind of
Speaker 2: car is that? Because it struck me in many of
Speaker 2: its sort of configurations and aspect ratio to be a
Speaker 2: kind of second cousin to the car that let me
Speaker 2: caution drives in alphabilt. It's a Mercury Monoabe. It's a
Speaker 2: Ford product, and all the Ford products share a base
Speaker 2: body style, although different trim levels according to IMCDB, whom
Speaker 2: I trust absolutely explicitly. It was a nineteen sixty two
Speaker 2: Mercury Monterey Custom. It was a fifteen foot can Skill
Speaker 2: travel trailer in tow and you actually see the can
Speaker 2: Skill logo at some point, and I love it. Somewhere
Speaker 2: there is somebody who cares enough about this to document it.
Speaker 2: The interiors were not shot in a nineteen sixty two
Speaker 2: Mercury Monterey Custom because the Mercury Monterey Custom is a
Speaker 2: kind of a small ish car. It is not what
Speaker 2: we now would consider a compact or subcompact, but it's
Speaker 2: not one of those large land sharks. So in order
Speaker 2: to shoot the interiors capaciously enough, they used a nineteen
Speaker 2: sixty Mercury Montclair, which is a size level up from that. Cool. Okay,
Speaker 2: you're shooting a movie. You've got your sort of picture car,
Speaker 2: but then you're shooting the interiors and now it's cramped.
Speaker 2: But the idea that there's somebody who cares enough about
Speaker 2: cars and cares enough about movies to actually do that research.
Speaker 2: And here we are because somebody is obsessive and that
Speaker 2: shit crazy in the best possible sense. We get to
Speaker 2: rebel in these things that we now know that we
Speaker 2: would never have known on our own.
Speaker 3: My head is off.
Speaker 1: I would believe that my dad would have done that.
Speaker 6: However, my dad isn't good enough for the Internet to
Speaker 6: have executed that, because he is somebody who would watch
Speaker 6: this kind of movie and say that can't be the
Speaker 6: inside of that car if that's too small. And just
Speaker 6: a memory I have is as a child, Barbie's nineteen
Speaker 6: fifty seven Chevy was the car for Barbie. It was
Speaker 6: this pink Chevy and my dad was helping me put
Speaker 6: it together when I was like eight years old, and
Speaker 6: remember him doing it and putting it down and looking
Speaker 6: at me and being very torn about something and saying,
Speaker 6: I'm really glad they did this because it's a toy
Speaker 6: for kids and they should have this. But I just
Speaker 6: have to say, in nineteen fifty seven, there would not
Speaker 6: have been seat belts in the backseat of this car.
Speaker 3: I am disappointed that one of my other favorite movie databases,
Speaker 3: the Internet Movie Firearms Database, does not have an entry
Speaker 3: for this, because then they'd be able to tell us
Speaker 3: all of the guns that we're seeing.
Speaker 1: There's multiple guns, and they play huge plot points, and
Speaker 1: they're apparently very easy to aim. And fire. Everybody's really
Speaker 1: quick at figuring that out.
Speaker 3: Somebody's letting me down.
Speaker 1: That is very disappointing.
Speaker 3: Or the movie Internet stock location, which I imagine that's where. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I know, you know where all of these locations are.
Speaker 3: But I love when they go from real location and
Speaker 3: then walk right onto a set and we are so
Speaker 3: set bound for quite a lot of this second act
Speaker 3: where we're just walking through a bunch of either fake
Speaker 3: trees or trees they've just planted on a sound stage.
Speaker 3: Man oh man, does that really just bring a battle
Speaker 3: where it's no, we're on a sound stage all.
Speaker 2: Yes, they had three weeks.
Speaker 1: That feels like it. Yeah.
Speaker 2: One of the things I love about the Arcoff Nicholson
Speaker 2: movies and the Corman New World stuff is let's make
Speaker 2: a virtue of necessity. We've got no money, we've got
Speaker 2: three weeks, We've got these actors, we've got these locations.
Speaker 2: But we're making a movie, so we're gonna.
Speaker 1: Make it something.
Speaker 6: Also, I think really neat about a kind of stark,
Speaker 6: undecorated end of the world film, very different movie, but
Speaker 6: also about the end of the world in a very
Speaker 6: different way. Something I love is the just blandness of
Speaker 6: the visuals of the movie, the rapture where it just
Speaker 6: feels there is nothing visually interesting, and that is deliberate
Speaker 6: and it just puts it in a different headspace when
Speaker 6: you watch it.
Speaker 1: I mean, have a little bit of that here.
Speaker 6: Where there's no I think we see a mushroom cloud quickly.
Speaker 6: There's no real visual style or like attempt at pinache
Speaker 6: to the movie.
Speaker 1: And it's fine because let's see focus on the story.
Speaker 2: These days, if we were to see a roland emerate
Speaker 2: post apocalyptic movie, we would go for the special effects
Speaker 2: in some ways.
Speaker 1: Well we'd have twenty minutes of that mushroom, Yeah, we would.
Speaker 2: In this there is one shot of a mushroom clud
Speaker 2: in one shot of a sort of ascending whatever. Clearly
Speaker 2: either stock footage is primitively matted in, but maybe not even.
Speaker 2: But that's not what we came for. We didn't come
Speaker 2: for the glander of the special effects, or the awe
Speaker 2: of it, or the shock of it, or the oh
Speaker 2: my god, that looks so real. We're here for something else.
Speaker 3: We're for good storytelling, and that's what we're getting with this.
Speaker 3: Like I love so simple, this whole idea of the
Speaker 3: reintroduction of these hoodlums done in such a beautiful way,
Speaker 3: and maybe a reference to Moses. This whole thing where
Speaker 3: mom's doing laundry, daughters on the shore, and mom accidentally
Speaker 3: drop a shirt or something into the water, and we
Speaker 3: follow that down. Then we go past the daughter, and
Speaker 3: then we keep going down and then a hand reaches
Speaker 3: in and pulls it up, and sure enough, it's one
Speaker 3: of those tufts that we saw before. Who's just oh,
Speaker 3: somebody's around here, okay, And.
Speaker 2: If that thing came from upstream, we're gonna go there
Speaker 2: and find the humans to prey on it. A long
Speaker 2: time ago, there were some women by the shore of
Speaker 2: a river, not unlike the one we see in the movie,
Speaker 2: and floating down through the rushes is a basket with
Speaker 2: a little baby, and they say, oh my god, it's
Speaker 2: a basket with a baby in it. And they pluck
Speaker 2: it out from the rushes and they go to the
Speaker 2: pharaoh and present this child to the pharaoh and say, Pharaoh,
Speaker 2: look at this baby. It's the most beautiful tube we've
Speaker 2: ever seen. And the pharaoh looks and says, this baby
Speaker 2: is really ugly, and the women say, but he looks
Speaker 2: so good in the rushes.
Speaker 3: That's a lot of bull just.
Speaker 2: Into terms of exposition. There is lightning, hope it doesn't rain.
Speaker 2: It came from behind us, and there's a sense that okay,
Speaker 2: could be lightning, could be this, could be that, And
Speaker 2: then there's a second one that wasn't lightning. Maybe they're testing.
Speaker 2: So the existence of one could be anything. The existence
Speaker 2: of two therefore means purpose. It reminds me a lot
Speaker 2: of any random plane can crash into the World Trade Center.
Speaker 2: Once the second one crashes, that something else, or Goldfinger
Speaker 2: saying the first is happenstance, the second is coincidence, the
Speaker 2: third is enemy action. There is something about the other
Speaker 2: hue dropping, which I find an extraordinarily beautiful piece of storytelling,
Speaker 2: of narrative, unminding that it's done here and again, Like
Speaker 2: many of the things, is some of this dialogue cheezy assolutely,
Speaker 2: but the storytelling is done with I think great economy
Speaker 2: and intent. And I love the fact that if you're
Speaker 2: operating on a very limited number of shooting days and
Speaker 2: a very limited budget, the thing that we'll get you
Speaker 2: through again and again is the storytelling is you know
Speaker 2: what really comes through.
Speaker 6: The efficiency, the fact that it opens and very quickly,
Speaker 6: and we don't need a lot of backstory. We don't
Speaker 6: need to know that it's the Russians, or it's World
Speaker 6: War three or instance, or that it is very immediate
Speaker 6: setup of here's dad, here's mom, the kids, they're lazy teenagers.
Speaker 1: Let's go here.
Speaker 6: It happens now we move into action. It is within
Speaker 6: the first five minutes. I think that he is heading
Speaker 6: to the grocery store and with a plan, and some
Speaker 6: movies move like that, and I think it's for the better,
Speaker 6: but very easy to make that opening a good fifteen minutes.
Speaker 1: Before we get to them back in the car going
Speaker 1: to the grocery store.
Speaker 2: It's lean and economical, and there's not so much wasted
Speaker 2: effort in this film, because we know we're in the
Speaker 2: grips of storytellers. When there does seem to be something
Speaker 2: that momentarily doesn't make sense or what's that about or
Speaker 2: where's that coming from, we have the faith that they
Speaker 2: will in very short ordered pay off that setup.
Speaker 3: I'm very surprised that Frankie gets shot towards the end
Speaker 3: here and that we actually don't see him recover. We
Speaker 3: have the scene with the doctor that kind of fixes
Speaker 3: him up a little bit and then can't really do
Speaker 3: too much more, sends him off on their own way
Speaker 3: and they get stopped by the military, and of course,
Speaker 3: being a fan of twenty eight days later, I think, okay,
Speaker 3: now you're dead.
Speaker 1: Oh no, this is even worse.
Speaker 3: But they flag him down. Okay, it's all right. Basically
Speaker 3: it's okay to go back to Los Angeles.
Speaker 2: Guys.
Speaker 1: It's like a misstanding instead.
Speaker 3: And then that great title car of there must be
Speaker 3: no end, only a new beginning.
Speaker 2: What a way to end this right, and it's oh
Speaker 2: my god, there's this car. They're all gonna die, and
Speaker 2: it turns out, thank god, it's the police, which is
Speaker 2: in some ways the mirror image of a Jordan Peele ending.
Speaker 1: There's a big difference between this family and Chris in
Speaker 1: that movie, right, And that is the thing. I don't
Speaker 1: think this movie intended in any way to be overly
Speaker 1: conservative nuclear family.
Speaker 6: I don't think it was as politically minded as that.
Speaker 6: But the way it watches today is just this is
Speaker 6: the American way. We have this perfect family. Of course
Speaker 6: they're white, but this entire movie is but just that this. Okay, yeah,
Speaker 6: they're doing it right, they're Christians, right, they are saying
Speaker 6: grace before their meals. They might kill people, but that's
Speaker 6: because they have to protect their own. And see even
Speaker 6: in the end, what is the policeman or the army
Speaker 6: guy say as he waves them over.
Speaker 2: That's fid more, five more, one by more that are okay.
Speaker 5: They come from the hills, no radiation, sickness, yep, five
Speaker 5: good ones.
Speaker 1: We're rebuilding. We've got five perfect specimens of Christianity. And
Speaker 1: they are clearly upstanding because they still were shaving and
Speaker 1: Raymlan still wearing his hat, so we know it's going
Speaker 1: to be okay. This is the kind of people we
Speaker 1: want to continue in society. And again in twenty twenty five,
Speaker 1: that read a little icky. I know it was a
Speaker 1: different time and it's not intended that way, but I
Speaker 1: think it just feels so specifically a particular portrait of America,
Speaker 1: if you will.
Speaker 2: I would maintain though, that there is a certain kind
Speaker 2: of in movies of Lake Ifew's early sixties. It's all
Speaker 2: going to be all right, which we the audience know
Speaker 2: that the.
Speaker 3: Scars left by the movie will persist.
Speaker 2: Down onto many generations. And I think it's Hollywood's way
Speaker 2: of giving you what, on the level of plot is
Speaker 2: a happy ending, but on the level of emotional attack
Speaker 2: is an undertail. I think a lot about Nick Ray
Speaker 2: movie Bigger than Life, where Ray Milan does a lot
Speaker 2: of courtizone and turns crazy and tries to kill his
Speaker 2: son another biblical haha, and at the end of it,
Speaker 2: they're in the hospital. They've finally figured out that it's
Speaker 2: a cortizone that's been driving him to these delusions, and
Speaker 2: they're going to get him off of it, and he's
Speaker 2: going to be a good dad again, and the family's
Speaker 2: going to be together again. And they all gather around
Speaker 2: the bedside in the hospital, but Nick Ray shoots it
Speaker 2: out of slight Dutch tilt, and you're looking at it
Speaker 2: and you're realizing, oh, no, for the purposes of whatever,
Speaker 2: the equivalent of Father Breen and the Hayes Commission, yes,
Speaker 2: everything's going to be all right, But boy, is that
Speaker 2: not the message the visuals are telling us. And I
Speaker 2: think there's something of the same thing going on here,
Speaker 2: which is ostensibly he's going to get to the hospital
Speaker 2: and he's not going to die. They're probably not even
Speaker 2: gonna have to Amtibata's lag. We're going because civilization is
Speaker 2: going to be okay. But nothing in the pit of
Speaker 2: my stomach, either medicated or unmedicated, tells me that this
Speaker 2: world is going to be okay. And I like that
Speaker 2: there's a lot of that stuff going on. When Ray
Speaker 2: Millan says for the next few days, you're going to
Speaker 2: have the kind of togetherness you've always dreamed of unpacked
Speaker 2: that what does that mean in terms of expectations for
Speaker 2: nineteen fifties white Christian families and what we know of
Speaker 2: the world, or the kind of weird is this Frankie
Speaker 2: Avalon's coming of age through trial. I just keep coming
Speaker 2: back to that line, where what do you do when
Speaker 2: your dad says I want you to shave every day,
Speaker 2: or in Rick's case, maybe every other day.
Speaker 3: So much of this movie takes place in that car
Speaker 3: that we're talking about. We almost start in the car,
Speaker 3: but we definitely end in the car, maybe what twenty
Speaker 3: thirty minutes out of the car, but that we have
Speaker 3: the credits playing over them still driving is wild for me.
Speaker 3: And we go back to that radio so many times
Speaker 3: in the end credits. And I found it fascinating that
Speaker 3: at the beginning of the movie, when the title comes up,
Speaker 3: it's all in black letters with a white outline. At
Speaker 3: the end of the movie, it's now in white letters,
Speaker 3: no black outline. It's almost like it's giving us hope
Speaker 3: through just the font choice. I'm like, am I stretching?
Speaker 3: I don't think I am, because they're being so deliberate
Speaker 3: about these end credits.
Speaker 1: And the music too.
Speaker 6: The music is very triumphant and cheery and yeah, we
Speaker 6: got this, We're going in the right direction.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the right people survived.
Speaker 3: This family vacation from hell, starting off with Raymonlan there
Speaker 3: with this fishing rod. He's just like, Oh, I can't
Speaker 3: wait to go out with my family and catch some
Speaker 3: big ones. Me and the boy. We're gonna bond out
Speaker 3: in the river.
Speaker 2: When civilization gets civilized.
Speaker 6: I'll rejoins being like sixteen and being in the backseat
Speaker 6: of the car of your parents gone fishing.
Speaker 3: Like it sounds like help that moment in the short
Speaker 3: story to go back to that when they have to
Speaker 3: put the dog out of the car.
Speaker 6: Yes, I'm reading it. I'm like, oh, this dad is
Speaker 6: already awful. And of course the dad says no dog,
Speaker 6: and almost there's a part of me that it's terrible
Speaker 6: because my Internet database is does the doogdie dot com.
Speaker 6: That's what I look at anytime there's an animal in
Speaker 6: a movie, and I just need to separate myself from
Speaker 6: the emotionality of having to worry about this animal.
Speaker 1: But it's such a powerful moment in the short story.
Speaker 6: It is such a way to establish somebody as willing
Speaker 6: to throw their young child's dog out the window of
Speaker 6: the car to move on and survive.
Speaker 1: I would not have wanted to see that, but I
Speaker 1: think it would have gone a.
Speaker 6: Long way in establishing exactly what kind of man, or
Speaker 6: what kind of person Raymland was going to be could
Speaker 6: be to have him say, put.
Speaker 1: The dog outside. I don't think there's any coming back
Speaker 1: from it, though.
Speaker 6: It's one of those things where a lot of audience
Speaker 6: would just never walk out the screen rightfully.
Speaker 2: You can do anything you want to a Uman in
Speaker 2: a movie, but you harm a dog.
Speaker 1: That's talks, don't heard anybody.
Speaker 3: They're perfect save the cat.
Speaker 2: You were talking about Rame Miland at the beginning with
Speaker 2: a fishing rod, and it starts weirdly with an apology
Speaker 2: thanks for the help. I'm sorry, and I'm sorry thanks
Speaker 2: for the help. Is very sarcastic there's a way in which,
Speaker 2: although they don't underline it, we are in the first
Speaker 2: act watching Raymond land go from a guy who was
Speaker 2: a little bit in the parlance of the time, henpack.
Speaker 2: His wife is snarky at him, and he's apologizing to
Speaker 2: the guy who can take command. And that is such
Speaker 2: a common trope of movies in late fifties early sixties too,
Speaker 2: which is to see the Jim backus wearing an apron
Speaker 2: and rebel without a cause, being the sort of, to
Speaker 2: use that period word, emasculated husband either succeeding or failing
Speaker 2: into becoming the man that his son needs him to be.
Speaker 6: It's a good point too, because in the beginning there
Speaker 6: the husband and wife's interactions are very playful and sex like.
Speaker 6: They're making jokes about I'm gonna pull over and because
Speaker 6: the kids are sleeping, and it feels like such.
Speaker 1: A different marriage. Once the story kicks in, suddenly their
Speaker 1: relationship which seemed positive enough for a couple married probably
Speaker 1: twenty years at that time, but that how it. The
Speaker 1: affection seems to go very quickly once she is an obstacle.
Speaker 6: I think to him, on we can't survive your way.
Speaker 6: You're not necessarily wrong and wanting us to. But we're
Speaker 6: not going to do that because otherwise.
Speaker 1: We'll be dead.
Speaker 2: Sorry about your mom, but sorry, but yeah, that's it.
Speaker 1: We got them a bun.
Speaker 2: Yeah. But I love the way that whether we're talking
Speaker 2: about this as again nuclear family in a post nuclear world,
Speaker 2: or whether we're talking about this as a sort of
Speaker 2: father knows best but with weaponry, or whether we're talking
Speaker 2: about this as the near of civilization versus the anarchy
Speaker 2: of lawlessness, whether we're talking about it as a fifties
Speaker 2: beacon a disturbed teenager movies and the threat they present
Speaker 2: to the white picket Daincet Eisenhower family, whether we're talking
Speaker 2: about it as Frankie Avalon's Coming of age. Whatever. Of
Speaker 2: the ten or twelve films that are embedded in this one,
Speaker 2: they're all in really good sink. They don't seem to
Speaker 2: be warring with one another or competing for control of
Speaker 2: the narrative. What is the central metaphor it's me? You know,
Speaker 2: it's me. They all seem to be there as different
Speaker 2: flavor and notes, which make this a kind of rich
Speaker 2: stew There's a little Carter mom, there's a little Annis,
Speaker 2: maybe there's It just makes me happy.
Speaker 3: I'm very happy too when it comes to the presentation
Speaker 3: of this film because I had only ever seen it
Speaker 3: full frame, and the scan of this that I think
Speaker 3: it was Radiance put out widescreen looks great. This movie
Speaker 3: looks better than I ever thought it had before. And
Speaker 3: I don't want to say any looks better than it
Speaker 3: has any right to. But it just looks fantastic, and
Speaker 3: I thought, I'm going back to Milan. He's like, okay.
Speaker 3: Apparently he felt overwhelmed by the shooting schedule and working
Speaker 3: with AIP was, like you said, probably very much a trial.
Speaker 3: But I think he knocked it out with some good stuff.
Speaker 3: I won't say this is a great movie, but I
Speaker 3: sure did have fun watching it.
Speaker 2: I want to, just as a footnote, keep a shout
Speaker 2: out to the guy who shot it, who is Gil
Speaker 2: Warren King, who shot thirty forty features, most of them
Speaker 2: have little note to be candid. As a cinematographer, you
Speaker 2: often don't get your choice of projects. You can start
Speaker 2: out as a cinematographer on The Lucy Show and end
Speaker 2: up shooting The Lucy Show. Has actually happened. As a
Speaker 2: footnote to a footnote, Gil Warrington's mother lul Warrington was
Speaker 2: an actress and was at the time when she was
Speaker 2: working for Universal, the only woman director in the entire world.
Speaker 2: There certainly was Alice Ki Bouchet, and there certainly was
Speaker 2: Dorothy Orsner and people that our generation is just now
Speaker 2: beginning to recover the histories of. But I love the
Speaker 2: fact that here's a guy who spent his lifetime as
Speaker 2: a good, serviceable and I don't say that as a
Speaker 2: majority cinematographer serving the material over a long span. With
Speaker 2: a mom who was the only woman film director in
Speaker 2: the entire freaking world.
Speaker 1: What era was she directing?
Speaker 3: Early tease, It's never been easy for a rooman director.
Speaker 1: What are you talking about? Actually mean, that's why we
Speaker 1: have so many of them? Now, Look two of them
Speaker 1: at Oscars, Come on, if three of them, we're fine.
Speaker 2: It's the white male directors who are having trouble getting
Speaker 2: work these days because they're the people who are really
Speaker 2: being discriminated against.
Speaker 1: It really upsets me sometimes.
Speaker 2: My mom was pretty extraordinary woman, very gutsy, and was
Speaker 2: a single working mom, and she was working for the
Speaker 2: American Cancer Society helping produce their public service announcements. I'd
Speaker 2: cancer with a checkup and a check made enough money
Speaker 2: to support her and support me, and she didn't want
Speaker 2: to be the client on the set anymore. She wanted
Speaker 2: to be one of the filmmakers. So at age thirty
Speaker 2: seven in nineteen sixty, as a single working mom, she
Speaker 2: went to NYU Film School when no women went to
Speaker 2: film school. She held her own. Her mentor was Haigemnugian,
Speaker 2: who was Marty Scorsese's mentor and old generation of people.
Speaker 2: If you look at the end of Raging Bullet, says
Speaker 2: I was and now I see this film as dedicated
Speaker 2: to Hey Glen ag and he was that guy. And
Speaker 2: she got her ass pinstrel out as the only woman
Speaker 2: in class and made her requisite sixteen milimeter black and
Speaker 2: white movie of the Pigeons in Washington Square Park. When
Speaker 2: she got out of film school, she wanted to be
Speaker 2: a director, and nobody knew quite what to do with that. Oh,
Speaker 2: Dorothy Arsner and Lul Wonging were just utterly unknown. Nya
Speaker 2: Svarda was doing directing in France, but nobody really knew
Speaker 2: about it. Barbara Hammer, I think was making some wonderful
Speaker 2: soft hour in any porn films, but they wasn't considered director.
Speaker 2: Barbara Logan was several years down the pike. It was
Speaker 2: just what is that woman? Director just did not compute,
Speaker 2: and so she wanted to be an assistant director, thinking
Speaker 2: that might be a path, and people said, we've got one.
Speaker 2: There was a woman named Nancy Littlefield who was a
Speaker 2: first a d in New York and it was.
Speaker 10: Like, we have a woman ad and maybe she got
Speaker 10: sick one day, so she became a script supervis and
Speaker 10: that was a dub did her well when she did
Speaker 10: it for the rest of her life, and she was
Speaker 10: very good at it, and a lot of directors.
Speaker 2: Liked working with her, and she trained the next generation
Speaker 2: of script supervisors. And I think a lot about what
Speaker 2: she sacrificed as a single working mom in order to
Speaker 2: raise me, the dreams of her own that she put
Speaker 2: on the back burner in order to have and raise
Speaker 2: a child. And I'm grateful for that, but I'm even
Speaker 2: more grateful in many ways for what she refused to
Speaker 2: sacrifice to be a single working mom. And I think
Speaker 2: my life is so much the richer because of what
Speaker 2: she said. She was unwilling to give up simply because
Speaker 2: she was a woman and a mother and to the
Speaker 2: extent that I'm here now talking about panic in the
Speaker 2: year zero exclamation point. A lot of that really is
Speaker 2: due to what she told me I would be capable
Speaker 2: of by her words, but also by her example. This
Speaker 2: may not be the appropriate list, but I just want
Speaker 2: to say thanks.
Speaker 3: On that note, we're going to take a break and
Speaker 3: play preview for next week's show right after these brief messages,
Speaker 3: Ladies and.
Speaker 5: Gentlemen, Baby Jane Hudson, I real no let to daddy.
Speaker 8: Is ussis Helen Love?
Speaker 1: I wonder if you can guess who I am.
Speaker 5: I'm Baby Jane hutch The hell was Baby Jane Hudson.
Speaker 8: I've written a letter to Duddy say.
Speaker 1: My sister doesn't ever go out. She so not fit
Speaker 1: to receive visitors. Jane, I want to talk to you.
Speaker 1: I'm afraid I have bad news. You'll probably have to
Speaker 1: sell the house.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'm ever gonna sell this house, and yeah, I'm
Speaker 5: ever gonna leave it.
Speaker 1: She's sick and she's not getting any better. You mean, Jane,
Speaker 1: I think she seems much better lately. I was cleaning
Speaker 1: the cage the bird got out.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you wouldn't be.
Speaker 1: Able to do these awful things to me.
Speaker 2: If I were still in this chair, what your heart land?
Speaker 5: You are in that chair, Jane.
Speaker 1: Please don't do this to me.
Speaker 5: Jane, Jane Please.
Speaker 3: That's right. We'll be back next week to kick off
Speaker 3: a celebration of Victor Bruno with a look at his
Speaker 3: brover performance in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane. Until then,
Speaker 3: I want to thank my co hosts Emily and Howard. So, Emily,
Speaker 3: what is the leadest with you?
Speaker 6: Apparently not talking about Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? I
Speaker 6: guess we'll have to listen to that. One would have
Speaker 6: happily joined that episode, Mike. But in the meantime, I
Speaker 6: sometimes write about movies over at Dudley Dollshouse dot com
Speaker 6: and then the wonderful Christine Niek Peace and I do
Speaker 6: a podcast together also on Weird and Wait Media, The
Speaker 6: Feminine Critique.
Speaker 1: And our next episode which will probably be out by
Speaker 1: the time this drops. And it's us kin to read
Speaker 1: grouping together and talking about our favorite beach movies? Will
Speaker 1: Frankie avalon show up? I can't say, oh, come on.
Speaker 3: A discussion of beach movies unless you're just talking about
Speaker 3: a beach that makes you old.
Speaker 1: Spoiler alert That would totally be on my list because
Speaker 1: that Zaney Bonker's dumb movie keeps showing up on the
Speaker 1: sci fi or ciphy channel now and time it's on,
Speaker 1: I'm like, oh, leave this on, it's entertaining. I never
Speaker 1: said I had good taste, by the way, just to
Speaker 1: be clear on that.
Speaker 2: While we're on the subject of beach movies. So there
Speaker 2: was a family of v Andese intellectuals called the Coners
Speaker 2: Kohner and because fascism, they came to the United States,
Speaker 2: and Paul Koner became a literary and talent agent and
Speaker 2: represented people like John Houston. Paulconer represented him and the
Speaker 2: guy who wrote Tredudency and Madre represented all kinds of
Speaker 2: people for several generations. I think he represented them vendors
Speaker 2: towards the end of his life. And his brother, Frederick Kohoner,
Speaker 2: who was a scholar, was in essence the first person
Speaker 2: to get a PhD in film history, even though that
Speaker 2: category didn't quite exist from the University of Vienna, and
Speaker 2: this very cultured Enny Gray found himself in Malibu, blinking
Speaker 2: in the sunlight. He was writing little novels. There was
Speaker 2: one about Kiki of Montparnas. The lovely book. I like
Speaker 2: it a lot, but feeling displaced and not quite knowing
Speaker 2: what to do between what his life would have, should
Speaker 2: have could have been had not the Nazis come to
Speaker 2: powers and this weird sun dappled life. He was now
Speaker 2: living in malibuups and so just for kicks, he decided
Speaker 2: to write a little book about his daughter and her
Speaker 2: friends playing it on the beach called Gidget. What we
Speaker 2: know of this beach movies today really is the kind
Speaker 2: of weird fever dream of a comically or tragically displaced
Speaker 2: Viennese intellectual. And Howard, what's the latest with you, sir?
Speaker 2: He just finished writing a pilot for what we hope
Speaker 2: will be a limited series called The Last Baron, based
Speaker 2: on the book of the same name by Tom Sankton.
Speaker 2: It's a nonfiction book about the kidnapping of the Baron
Speaker 2: and from in front of his house in Paris in
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy eight by a gang of leftist idiologues and
Speaker 2: petty carthieves and all kinds of unhealthy mental excitement among
Speaker 2: the members of his family. No, I'm not going to
Speaker 2: pay his ransom. You pay us. So there's that, And
Speaker 2: then I think this is the first place I publicly
Speaker 2: said this, but two of my novels, A very early
Speaker 2: novel which is set in March of nineteen thirty three
Speaker 2: in Berlin in the filmmaking community, when all these people
Speaker 2: were trying to decide whether they should keep on making
Speaker 2: films for the Nazis or just take the next train
Speaker 2: to Paris and get the fuck out to novelical Destiny Express.
Speaker 2: And then a much more recent novel called The Great Eastern,
Speaker 2: which is my scrolling, lavish literary, nineteenth century anti colonial
Speaker 2: adventure novel. There were going to be what are you
Speaker 2: issued next year in uniform editions, so I get to
Speaker 2: be a novelist again and still get to romp in
Speaker 2: the playfields of filmed entertainment. And my current project is
Speaker 2: working on a screenplay for one of my very favorite
Speaker 2: French noir authors, again named John Patrick Manchett, who wrote
Speaker 2: a lot of books that became some good movies, some
Speaker 2: in different movies, some Alan de Lowell movies. French bleak
Speaker 2: existential noir is like mother's milk to me, and I'm
Speaker 2: very happy that I get to work in the Manchett's
Speaker 2: cinematic university.
Speaker 3: I just was recommending Destiny express on our episode we
Speaker 3: did don Metropolis to kick off sci Fi July, so
Speaker 3: very appropriate that we're now talking with the author of
Speaker 3: that here and the wrapping up episode.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for that shout out, and I
Speaker 2: would like to remind your audience not to pay any
Speaker 2: extra for a first edition because there's no other kind.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much folks for being on the show.
Speaker 3: Thanks to everybody for listening. If you want to hear
Speaker 3: more of me shooting off my mouth, check out some
Speaker 3: of the other shows that I work on. They are
Speaker 3: all available at Wordingwaymedia dot com, especially to our Patreon community.
Speaker 3: If you want to join the community, visit patreon dot
Speaker 3: com slash Projection Booth. Every donation we get helps the
Speaker 3: Projection Booth take over the world.
Speaker 2: And a and a.
Speaker 8: Ha a aver a ha aver a model, he said,
Speaker 8: facts to fall from the government, after from the land,
Speaker 8: after from a Fami