Speaker 1: Oh he is, folks, it's show tied.
Speaker 2: People say, good money to see this movie. When they
Speaker 2: go out to a theater.
Speaker 3: They want cold sodas, pop popcorn, and no monsters in
Speaker 3: the protection booth.
Speaker 1: Everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring.
Speaker 2: Cut it off.
Speaker 4: I got a job.
Speaker 2: Got a job or do a job?
Speaker 4: Kind a job, a real job. Hey, I ask good name,
Speaker 4: Oh Fell, When do you want me back?
Speaker 5: Let's say one week, one week.
Speaker 6: Whatever you do.
Speaker 5: Think of the children.
Speaker 6: First.
Speaker 4: I'm gonna walk into the room.
Speaker 2: And sometime I've gotta come.
Speaker 4: I gotta come.
Speaker 2: Welcome to the projection booth. I'm your host, Mike White.
Speaker 2: Join me once again as mister Jedediah Ayers be in
Speaker 2: the Movies Tanto. Also back in the booth is mister
Speaker 2: Spencer Parsons.
Speaker 7: I think Salivation Army has added to my permanent lexicon.
Speaker 2: After The Brave, our look at rare, overlooked or seldom
Speaker 2: seen films continues with one that is relatively easy to
Speaker 2: find outside of these United States. The Brave, based on
Speaker 2: the book by Gregory MacDonald yes the guy that wrote Fletch,
Speaker 2: and adapted by Paul McCudden. The film stars and was
Speaker 2: directed by Johnny Depp. Here he plays Raphael, a Native
Speaker 2: American who, in desperate need of money for his family,
Speaker 2: decides to sell himself to a group of shady men
Speaker 2: who cast him in a snuff film. We will be
Speaker 2: spoiling this film as we go ahead, so if you
Speaker 2: don't want anything ruined, track down the movie. Like I said,
Speaker 2: it's available on dvdvia import, but never officially released in
Speaker 2: the US for reasons Jenny did. Was this a first
Speaker 2: time watch for you?
Speaker 4: Actually no, I saw it probably twenty years ago, a
Speaker 4: little bit more than that. I was working at a
Speaker 4: bookstore and there was another cinema nut there and he
Speaker 4: had a copy of it and he loaned it to me.
Speaker 4: Actually he had, I think he had a VHS copy
Speaker 4: of it that he longed to me, So I'm not
Speaker 4: sure where he got that.
Speaker 1: But I watched it and.
Speaker 5: I remembered it.
Speaker 4: It was memorable, but it didn't make a big I
Speaker 4: didn't spend a lot of time thinking about it in
Speaker 4: the last twenty years before before this opportunity to talk
Speaker 4: about it. Yeah, I've watched it a couple of times recently,
Speaker 4: and my impression of it has improved. I do think
Speaker 4: it's a little more noteworthy than I originally thought.
Speaker 7: How about you, Spencer, Yeah, this is my first time
Speaker 7: seeing it, though its reputation really precedes it. Victorious premiere
Speaker 7: can that I remember reading about back in the day,
Speaker 7: and it definitely is the kind of thing that had
Speaker 7: it been available in the United States more easily, I
Speaker 7: would definitely have wanted to check it out, but kinda
Speaker 7: forgot about it for a.
Speaker 1: Long time because it just wasn't very available.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I was excited to finally check it out, and yeah,
Speaker 7: we'll get into it.
Speaker 1: But I think it's a really fascinating, singular kind of movie.
Speaker 1: It's nothing else.
Speaker 7: Quite like it, and a lot more actually, a lot
Speaker 7: more interesting than I expected initial response. It definitely suggested
Speaker 7: something more incompetent than I think this is. So yeah,
Speaker 7: I'm excited to dig in.
Speaker 2: I don't remember the con well of the kind response.
Speaker 2: How was that.
Speaker 1: Treated as a total embarrassment?
Speaker 7: Johnny Depp is quoted in one place a hard experience
Speaker 7: for him, maybe harder than I think he led on
Speaker 7: he took a punk rock fuck you sort of response
Speaker 7: to American critics. But yeah, he talked about feeling attacked,
Speaker 7: like how dare he direct a film in the responses,
Speaker 7: and you know, I'll be honest, I.
Speaker 1: Like cutting down this kind of hated film.
Speaker 7: From festivals like con and generally it's a little easier
Speaker 7: to eventually catch up with them.
Speaker 1: But yeah, just I guess because of when it happened.
Speaker 7: Too much time passed before maybe I could have chased
Speaker 7: it down and I lost some interest. But yeah, it
Speaker 7: was really despised and was treated as incompetent and an
Speaker 7: embarrassment not just to Johnny Depp but token for running it,
Speaker 7: which I think is more telling about the people that
Speaker 7: have that opinion. And that's without thinking that it's a
Speaker 7: really great film. I just think this is the kind
Speaker 7: of thing where you're telling on yourself a bit. If
Speaker 7: this is the biggest embarrassment you've ever witnessed.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm very curious to talk about that as we
Speaker 2: go along, because this one, yeah, you wave a lost
Speaker 2: film in front of my nose or a you shouldn't
Speaker 2: be watching this kind of movie, and I'm all right there,
Speaker 2: I'm like, okay, well, now I need to track this
Speaker 2: thing down. So I think I tracked it down probably
Speaker 2: ninety eight, ninety nine something like that, and it's the
Speaker 2: thrill of the chase rather than the actual Once you
Speaker 2: get it in your hand, it's like, Okay, it's going
Speaker 2: up on the shelf and I kind of forget about it.
Speaker 2: One of these days, I'm going to watch that movie.
Speaker 2: And it just sounded so fucking depressing. I was like,
Speaker 2: this guy sells himself to be in a snuff film. Okay, Wow,
Speaker 2: how am I going to process that? And yeah, it's
Speaker 2: not the most uplifting film in the world because the
Speaker 2: material itself is so depressing. But I think it was
Speaker 2: handled with a lot of respect. I think it was
Speaker 2: a really good adaptation. I mean, we'll hear from Paul
Speaker 2: mccutten later on, and he doesn't necessarily like this adaptation.
Speaker 2: For him, it's strayed a lot from where he was
Speaker 2: going with the screenplay. It was ironic. I was watching
Speaker 2: some press conferences and interviews from that period of time
Speaker 2: at con and Depp is like, oh, yeah, well, I
Speaker 2: wrote the first draft. I'm like, no, you didn't. You
Speaker 2: and your brother rewrote the draft and changed some things around,
Speaker 2: but you didn't write the first draft of this, and
Speaker 2: it was going around before. I don't know if it
Speaker 2: was the stuff too that happened before this movie was
Speaker 2: made that also colored what happened.
Speaker 7: I tend to think, So this is one where I
Speaker 7: think this is a film mody in the truest sense.
Speaker 1: It is cursed, is like truly a cursed film.
Speaker 2: I agree. And it's really weird too, because I was
Speaker 2: looking at other movies, like I just watched Fletch Live recently,
Speaker 2: and I really have never gotten into the Fletch phenomenon
Speaker 2: until starting to do this Chevy Chase podcast that we
Speaker 2: also do, so that was really my excuse. I think
Speaker 2: it was maybe the second time I ever watched the
Speaker 2: original Fletch, and then second time watching Fletch Lives was
Speaker 2: just a couple of weeks ago. I didn't realize that
Speaker 2: McDonald's work had been adapted one other time with a
Speaker 2: movie called Running Scared from seventy two that David Hemmings directed,
Speaker 2: and that is also a lost film, as in, I
Speaker 2: cannot you know me, you know, the guy who's such
Speaker 2: a mad dog when it comes to tracking down movies.
Speaker 2: I cannot find that movie whatsoever. And I'm like, so
Speaker 2: two of this guy's adaptations are lost to America and
Speaker 2: one of them is lost to the world. And then
Speaker 2: I watched Confess Fletch, so nothing to do with this whatsoever.
Speaker 4: I was really happy for the chance to rewatch Confess.
Speaker 5: I really loved that movie.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a lot of fun, right. I really thought
Speaker 2: that John Hamm captured that pretty darn well.
Speaker 8: Though.
Speaker 2: I have to say that the original Fletch films that
Speaker 2: that was kind of ideal for chevy Chase. And I
Speaker 2: don't know why he didn't make a third, or fourth
Speaker 2: or fifth. It seems like it was ready made for
Speaker 2: him to be in a series. I guess maybe because
Speaker 2: Fletch Lives didn't do that well and that one wasn't
Speaker 2: based on McDonald at all, just based on the characters.
Speaker 2: So I think they made a poor mistake by not
Speaker 2: actually adapting the books like they should have.
Speaker 4: My guess is that would just be a budgetary thing,
Speaker 4: like more expensive to license another book, rather than it's
Speaker 4: something new what the character you already have a license for.
Speaker 2: So the film really takes place for me in about
Speaker 2: three main locations. There's the office building that he goes
Speaker 2: to where he meets Marshall Bell, and I think it's
Speaker 2: the same office building where he meets Marlon Brando. Marlon
Speaker 2: Brando who had worked with depth on what was it
Speaker 2: don Juan DeMarco, So I guess they had become fast
Speaker 2: friends at that point. That was also a big selling
Speaker 2: point of this is, Oh, look at Marlon Brando's in
Speaker 2: this movie, and he does a fine job. Tho he's
Speaker 2: only in what one scene, really and then he shows
Speaker 2: up towards the end. But I don't know if those
Speaker 2: almost look like outtakes towards the end, like they didn't
Speaker 2: get this guy for a second day. They probably just
Speaker 2: paid him a million dollars for one day kind of thing.
Speaker 1: It looks a lot different at the end.
Speaker 4: So the first scene he's in, he's got that long
Speaker 4: hair is all a mess, and he looks very bedraggled,
Speaker 4: and then at the end all the hairs pulled back
Speaker 4: a tight ponytail, and he looks a lot more put together,
Speaker 4: and wish we understood why he's not playing harmonica.
Speaker 5: At the end.
Speaker 7: I think there's a little bit of a comment in
Speaker 7: the book that didn't quite make it into the movie,
Speaker 7: where the title of the book is the title of
Speaker 7: the film, the snuff film that he's going to take,
Speaker 7: which I think comes out of the tradition of very
Speaker 7: careless ethnic casting of Native Americans in Hollywood movies.
Speaker 1: Anyone that's looked ethnic could be cast.
Speaker 7: Is that great joke in Blazing Saddles with the Yiddish
Speaker 7: speaking Indians as big as ay and DNA laben they
Speaker 7: dark and.
Speaker 2: They're not whop.
Speaker 7: And then of course, thinking about Johnny Depp playing Tanto
Speaker 7: in The Lone Ranger several years later and the kind
Speaker 7: of blow up around representation that started, it's really interesting.
Speaker 7: It's different time, but I do suspect that there would
Speaker 7: have been some similar blowback if it had been released
Speaker 7: in American theaters at the time.
Speaker 1: It's certainly not nearly the same.
Speaker 7: As with The Lone Ranger, but that's one of the
Speaker 7: aspects of the film that is, you know, once like
Speaker 7: really a fascinating attempt to try to understand something and
Speaker 7: also in a very problematic tradition of using Native Americans
Speaker 7: indigenous people in America as allegories for all manner of
Speaker 7: different problems in the world. And I did find it
Speaker 7: interesting that the screenwriter was really disappointed that his christ
Speaker 7: allegory was scrubbed out of it, and that.
Speaker 1: Definitely is something that's also in the book.
Speaker 7: But I'll be frank, I think That's one of Johnny
Speaker 7: Depp's good moves in fact, because the situation and it
Speaker 7: is a very stripped down kind of allegorical treatment. There
Speaker 7: definitely scenes that are highly allegorical messages built in throughout
Speaker 7: the film, but I think just embracing that sense of
Speaker 7: how allegorizing Native Americans in American history, not very directly
Speaker 7: and not importing kind of Christian mythology into it.
Speaker 9: For a Norman Steel Lesson, I'm a writer, Ted oakming
Speaker 9: a lot of thing right as Gum and Go, we
Speaker 9: always need Indians.
Speaker 2: Marlon Brando famously all about Native American causes, you know,
Speaker 2: having sesshin little feather go and pick up his oscar
Speaker 2: and everything at the ceremony where he was supposed to
Speaker 2: win for what was that The Godfather? I think so
Speaker 2: this movie really addresses a lot of problems that Native
Speaker 2: Americans were having at the time and probably still having
Speaker 2: today and just being completely disenfranchised. That was interesting. In
Speaker 2: the book, they don't really ever say for sure that
Speaker 2: he is Native American. They say, oh, are you Italian?
Speaker 2: Are you Mexican?
Speaker 3: Are you this?
Speaker 10: Are you that?
Speaker 2: And they just kind of assume that he's an Indian.
Speaker 7: It also feels like Depp's approach to it is to
Speaker 7: treat this as I want a horrifying crime, but also
Speaker 7: more of a philosophical experiment.
Speaker 1: This notion of.
Speaker 7: Death and what the image of someone dying and or
Speaker 7: pain can reveal is the pitch from Brando's character, whereas
Speaker 7: in the book and in the original screenplay it is
Speaker 7: much more of a to be quite frank intended's pornography.
Speaker 7: And I find that to be an interesting divergence in
Speaker 7: this movie, because again, this is all tricky and problematic,
Speaker 7: but in another interesting way, it speaks directly to not
Speaker 7: merely the exploitation of Indigenous people, which it takes as
Speaker 7: a given, but it also deals with this idea of
Speaker 7: indigenous people as a kind of allegory thought experiment for
Speaker 7: the benefit of white people. Found that to be an
Speaker 7: interesting take because obviously then the movie itself is.
Speaker 1: Doing the thing that I think it means to critique.
Speaker 7: There is this history that is very uneasy that I
Speaker 7: felt that moment of the film drawing on in a
Speaker 7: way that I wouldn't as I call it deep, because
Speaker 7: I think it's so sparse. The scene is so sparse,
Speaker 7: and it's referential, so I don't know that I can
Speaker 7: really quite make an argument that it's mounting a philosophical case,
Speaker 7: but at the same time it's referring to I think
Speaker 7: a bigger philosophical idea than the notion of pornographic snuff film.
Speaker 1: Doug.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think it was a good call by Depth
Speaker 4: to take it out of the screenplay because it was
Speaker 4: in that original screenplay too, pretty much straight out of
Speaker 4: the book, and it's a horrifying description of what awaits
Speaker 4: in is. The idea of it is heavy enough to cast.
Speaker 4: As you said, we were already maybe avoiding it because
Speaker 4: we know what the plot is and it sounds so
Speaker 4: so depressing. That might have really taken it over the
Speaker 4: edge with that end film.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like whole ironized Cody thing. This guy what
Speaker 2: he was actually Sicilian, but he became like the most
Speaker 2: famous Native American that we ever saw on screen. He's
Speaker 2: the guy who's like crying in the commercial and stuff.
Speaker 2: I want to say, Yeah, it's just like I think
Speaker 2: Depth can pass if he wanted to, and he kind
Speaker 2: of does in this He looks very natural amongst the
Speaker 2: actual Native Americans. And then you get you know, like
Speaker 2: Louis Guzman and I'm trying to remember the other actor's name,
Speaker 2: so they're more Latino, but I think it's just like
Speaker 2: again disenfranchised people, so it really becomes I mean, like
Speaker 2: the place where Depp and all of his friends live
Speaker 2: is a literal garbage stump, like they are the scavengers
Speaker 2: of the world, just going through the garbage stump and
Speaker 2: trying to fix things up, resell things. You meet the
Speaker 2: Frederick Forrest character who's got this weird oh voice that
Speaker 2: he's doing in here with his I guess maybe mentally
Speaker 2: challenged son played by Max Perlick, who used to be
Speaker 2: like what Parker Posey was to women roles in independent films,
Speaker 2: Max Perlock was to male roles in independent films insofar
Speaker 2: as he would show up in everything. It was like
Speaker 2: I think him and Steve Zoon probably had like a
Speaker 2: turf war as far as who's like the most indie
Speaker 2: of the independent actors, and he was everywhere for a
Speaker 2: long time. I think he even shows up in Dead Man,
Speaker 2: which is another movie where Johnny Depp plays a Native
Speaker 2: American as well, playing William Blake. Though wait, actually I
Speaker 2: take that back. He's adopted by the Native Americans. He's
Speaker 2: not a Native American in that one, because there is
Speaker 2: an actual Native American, if not more than one. But
Speaker 2: I do remember the one guy, yeah, like really telling
Speaker 2: him off, which was pretty great. It's been a long
Speaker 2: time since I've seen that movie, but I remember really
Speaker 2: really enjoying it when I saw it, And yeah, you're
Speaker 2: right about the whole thing with the snuff film that
Speaker 2: they want to make. They actually tell him because they
Speaker 2: don't talk too much about it in this but they
Speaker 2: really go into a lot of detail in the book
Speaker 2: for sure, but talking about how they want to put
Speaker 2: like a white stripe across his nose like war paint,
Speaker 2: and just really, yeah, play it up this whole thing,
Speaker 2: Like I think they'll probably even put like a feather
Speaker 2: in his head kind of thing in his hair, just
Speaker 2: to be like, oh, yeah, here's this brave Native American
Speaker 2: and we're killing this person. And some of the details
Speaker 2: they go into in the book, and I like that.
Speaker 2: McDonald actually in the beginning of the book is just like, yeah,
Speaker 2: there's a chapter in here that is really rough to read,
Speaker 2: but I really had to put it in here. If
Speaker 2: you want to skip it, go ahead and skip it.
Speaker 2: But I really had to have this here because it
Speaker 2: looms over the rest of the book.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So Marlon Brando's character, the McCarthy character, is one
Speaker 4: who has changed maybe the most. It's changed a lot
Speaker 4: though from the book and the original screenplay to the film,
Speaker 4: in that you don't really buy into it. You do
Speaker 4: think this guy's just a sleazy criminal and things like that,
Speaker 4: but you do think that he sells the idea that
Speaker 4: he believes his own bullshit in the scene where he
Speaker 4: talks about the service that he provides and that he's
Speaker 4: asking Johnny Depp to provide, whereas in the book, in
Speaker 4: the original treatment that the Raphael character, the Johnny Depp
Speaker 4: character is really a lot more kind of naive and
Speaker 4: being that sort of devastating reveal at the end of
Speaker 4: the book where you get the contract. You see the
Speaker 4: contract it was written out and it's just nonsense on
Speaker 4: a It's just a couple of scribbles on a piece
Speaker 4: of paper and he was just really do pretty much.
Speaker 4: And yeah, and the Yeah, so the character of course
Speaker 4: doesn't give the speech that Brando gives in this, but yeah,
Speaker 4: it changes a lot, and I'm not sure that I'm
Speaker 4: not sure that it works entirely. There's a lot of
Speaker 4: elements of this film that I think are really good
Speaker 4: that seem to be existing in a different film than
Speaker 4: other elements that I think are good.
Speaker 11: They don't quite gel into a satisfactory whole, but taken
Speaker 11: on their own, I think, oh, that's interesting and that's worthwhile.
Speaker 4: And I'd watched that movie that consistent with that, and
Speaker 4: I'd watched the Machine that's consistent with other elements that
Speaker 4: are in opposition to that in this film.
Speaker 2: The way that Brando sells it in the movie, for me,
Speaker 2: really reminds me of the film Martyrs, that whole idea
Speaker 2: of like you see the face of God and the
Speaker 2: person that is about to martyr themselves, and with this
Speaker 2: it seems very much like, yeah, we're looking for that
Speaker 2: kind of thing, but there is that tinge of and
Speaker 2: that really gets us off, like that is the ultimate
Speaker 2: orgasmic material as seeing somebody who is losing their life
Speaker 2: for us.
Speaker 4: It reminds me of Peter the James Mason movie Odd
Speaker 4: Man Out. He's dying throughout the film, and the artist
Speaker 4: goes from vignette to vignette because people discover him and
Speaker 4: how they react to him. But the artist is obsessed
Speaker 4: with painting his face because he knows he's dying and
Speaker 4: he's not really concerned about his fate.
Speaker 1: It's just for his art.
Speaker 4: He's got to paint this face because yeah, he mumbles
Speaker 4: that same stuff about seeing God and see the truth
Speaker 4: in that consistent throughout film history.
Speaker 2: I think I think they make a better point in
Speaker 2: the book and the screenplay than they do in the
Speaker 2: realized film as far as will he get the money
Speaker 2: at the end, And when you read the book and
Speaker 2: when you read the screenplay, you know that he's not.
Speaker 2: You know that he is completely illiterate, that he cannot
Speaker 2: read the contract. Like you said, it's just a whole
Speaker 2: bunch of nonsense, and he's never going to get that
Speaker 2: money for his family. So what he ends up getting,
Speaker 2: at least in the book, as far as I remember,
Speaker 2: it's a very paltry sum that he gets, and he
Speaker 2: goes through the same thing. He gets like almost it's
Speaker 2: like a deposit. But yet the Marshall Bell character is
Speaker 2: just like, why would we give you money? That doesn't
Speaker 2: make any sense. Why would we give you anything at all?
Speaker 2: Because you're just gonna waste it. You're just going to
Speaker 2: go get drunk. You know, you're just gonna throw this
Speaker 2: all away. We're not going to give you shit. But
Speaker 2: they end up giving him a little bit of money
Speaker 2: and he goes out and does what he does in
Speaker 2: this as far as like, oh, I'm going to buy
Speaker 2: stuff now, I'm going to buy stuff for my family.
Speaker 2: I'm going to buy some new clothes. And then every
Speaker 2: single time he tries to do something nice, people are
Speaker 2: after him and in his shit and just being like,
Speaker 2: would you do how'd you steal this money? You know,
Speaker 2: like in this movie it's you know, what robbery did
Speaker 2: you do? Like you're going to go to jail, and
Speaker 2: there's this whole thing. It's interesting as far as his
Speaker 2: wife and his kids keep thinking he's going to go
Speaker 2: back to jail, that he's going to be out of
Speaker 2: their lives soon. He is going to be out of
Speaker 2: their lives soon, but it's for a completely different reason,
Speaker 2: and it's just for the sacrifice that he's trying to
Speaker 2: do to them. But he's such a fuck up that
Speaker 2: they're never going to see one red scent out of this.
Speaker 7: There's a toggling between genuinely playful, kind of fun moments.
Speaker 1: The trip to the grocery store.
Speaker 7: I think, in particular, which even has this like on
Speaker 7: their way home, they have this enormous bird, it looks
Speaker 7: like an ostrich that they've even put the flannel shirt
Speaker 7: onto as they're headed home from the grocery store on
Speaker 7: the bus, that they've made such an outrageous kind of
Speaker 7: purchase with the grocery cart filling up, and then yeah,
Speaker 7: there's this giant, gray plucked bird beyond a turkey that
Speaker 7: they take home. There are these like kind of wild moments,
Speaker 7: and then metronomically after each one, somebody wants to know,
Speaker 7: whether it's his wife or Louis Guzman or other characters,
Speaker 7: the priest, they all want to know, how.
Speaker 1: Did you steal this? Where did this come from? Are
Speaker 1: you going to jail?
Speaker 7: This is going to seem like a really nutty comparison,
Speaker 7: but this movie is an interesting quinn with Preston Sturge's
Speaker 7: His Christmas in July, which has it has a similar
Speaker 7: messed up situation. Preston Sturges is one of the funniest
Speaker 7: filmmakers ever, and this is one of my favorite films
Speaker 7: of his. But I don't find it funny at all.
Speaker 7: It's so stressful. It's like a Fosspender movie because the
Speaker 7: premise is that this guy is being trick into thinking
Speaker 7: that he's won this big prize, and so he goes
Speaker 7: on a spending spree and throws a little carnival for
Speaker 7: the kids in his neighborhood. That's very much like Carnival
Speaker 7: that seems to get bigger and bigger as the Brave
Speaker 7: goes on and with everything that he's that he buys.
Speaker 7: I'm just like, no, don't do it, don't do it.
Speaker 7: This is different because, like in the one case, he's
Speaker 7: been tricked. But I think Sturge's is working a similar
Speaker 7: kind of allegory about American capitalism and consumer capitalism in particular,
Speaker 7: that all involved depth, various writers are all kind of
Speaker 7: tapping into in a kind of similar way.
Speaker 1: But dep really loves that carnival to a point that
Speaker 1: it's one of the things I love it too. But
Speaker 1: it unbalances the film.
Speaker 7: There are so many if one of the reasons why
Speaker 7: it's two hours long is that there there's so many shots,
Speaker 7: and they're elaborate shots moving among all the different carnival
Speaker 7: rides with the kids and all this kind of stuff,
Speaker 7: And it's even mysterious where did all this money come from?
Speaker 1: How does he do this? How is he showing it off?
Speaker 7: But it's interesting because in The Sturges, we know that
Speaker 7: eventually this guy is going to find out that it's
Speaker 7: a ruse and that he's spent all this money that
Speaker 7: he doesn't have and it's.
Speaker 1: Going to ruin him. And in this movie we know
Speaker 1: that all the money is coming from torture and death
Speaker 1: that Depp is going to have.
Speaker 7: I doubt that Johnny Depp was thinking of Christmas in July,
Speaker 7: but I do think that these two movies make for
Speaker 7: really interesting sort of comparison, given they're like parallel setup
Speaker 7: and then the specific for the imagery that they get into.
Speaker 1: It's not the Coffee, it's the Bunk. Absolutely one of
Speaker 1: my favorite movies ever.
Speaker 7: Lady Eve can only edge it out because of Barbara
Speaker 7: Stanwick and because it really is like the funniest movie
Speaker 7: I've ever seen.
Speaker 2: I love that reveal of the carnival scene when you
Speaker 2: see him and he's like jumping on a trampoline and
Speaker 2: then the camera's like just doing the slow pan, so
Speaker 2: you see him doing one thing and then it's completely
Speaker 2: seamless from him. Actually it's him opening up a refrigerator
Speaker 2: showing all of the stuff that he stocked it with,
Speaker 2: and then the camera keeps panning and then boom, he's
Speaker 2: on a trampoline and I like that he's kind of
Speaker 2: moved under there, and then some balloons come up to
Speaker 2: kind of mask the cut, and then he's on a
Speaker 2: kind of makeshift Merry Go Round And I thought that
Speaker 2: was really nice the way that he presented all this,
Speaker 2: and that he's the one going through all of these
Speaker 2: rides and kind of like exploring and showing like, hey,
Speaker 2: wife and kids, look at all of this stuff, and yeah,
Speaker 2: it is completely nuts that he would do this, and
Speaker 2: it is something that his wife is just like, you
Speaker 2: woke us up in the middle of the night to
Speaker 2: show us this, Like what are you doing? Where did
Speaker 2: you get this?
Speaker 6: You know?
Speaker 2: When are you gonna be going to jail? And she
Speaker 2: lays him out with a punch right across the jaw
Speaker 2: and I love it. I love her character. I think
Speaker 2: the only character I love more is the Marshall Bell character,
Speaker 2: because Marshall Bell is just always amazing and to see
Speaker 2: him in this he's just he loves playing these unhinged characters,
Speaker 2: like of course, when he shows up in Starshift Troopers.
Speaker 1: Oh God, we're gonna die. Don't you understand we're all
Speaker 1: gonna die.
Speaker 2: Control yourself general quato and total recall and stuff. Oh
Speaker 2: it's so good. But yeah, here, he's just this. He's
Speaker 2: the right arm of the Marlon Brando character, and he
Speaker 2: just seems to show up all the time, and I
Speaker 2: guess he's kind of he's almost like an Angel of
Speaker 2: Death type character who just keeps showing up. And like,
Speaker 2: at one point, Death past to put all of these
Speaker 2: bottles that kind of slung over his shoulders, and he's
Speaker 2: going to get water from this creek, and I'm just like, oh, man,
Speaker 2: that water is probably so dirty and so filthy. And
Speaker 2: Belle even says, no, wonder you people die so early
Speaker 2: if you're drinking that kind of stuff. And he's just
Speaker 2: there to taunt depth almost the entire time, to taunt
Speaker 2: him and then also to hurt him. There's some one
Speaker 2: scene later where and I'm guessing it's the other guy
Speaker 2: that was in the office with Bell when we first
Speaker 2: meet him.
Speaker 7: I recognize him, and I checked it out a couple
Speaker 7: of times and then just decided no, it's so like
Speaker 7: a bizarre sort of it reminds me of the theatrical
Speaker 7: punishments of various apparatics in the trial for the benefit
Speaker 7: of Joseph k I'll be coming back to Kafka again
Speaker 7: in relation to this, But yeah, it was like a strange,
Speaker 7: not quite recognizable person.
Speaker 1: But Depth reacts in a way that seems not just
Speaker 1: like he's shocked.
Speaker 7: That there's this victim of his tormentor, but also that
Speaker 7: he seems to recognize him, which I guess he would
Speaker 7: in such a small community, but it is it's a
Speaker 7: really strange moment.
Speaker 4: I'm pretty sure it is the wizzy character that Chuck
Speaker 4: Weiss's character who's in the office at the beginning in
Speaker 4: Marshall Palo's office. But what the significance of that character
Speaker 4: is outside of showing up twice and Depth being pretty
Speaker 4: thrown off by him when he's alive, So I guess
Speaker 4: he'd be is thrown off by him dead? What purpose
Speaker 4: he serves other than to be a cameo, I'm not sure.
Speaker 2: Fucking Marshall Bell just sitting out there by his van,
Speaker 2: has a very shallow grave, dug just kind of and
Speaker 2: it's like in the middle of nowhere. But Depth ends
Speaker 2: up running across him, and I'm like Okay, this feels
Speaker 2: very much like a moment of fate and it's basically like,
Speaker 2: oh yeah, see what I'm doing to this guy like that.
Speaker 2: It's almost like that long goodbye thing where it's like,
Speaker 2: this is this the guy is my friend? Imagine what
Speaker 2: I would do to somebody who's not my friend.
Speaker 1: The figure of that character.
Speaker 7: And like the setting in a garbage stump, and a
Speaker 7: lot of elements of the movie abstract, even the desert
Speaker 7: setting is used in this kind of absurdist fashion, like
Speaker 7: really stripping things down to icons and allegory. Absurdism isn't
Speaker 7: as allegorical as this movie is, but there's a real
Speaker 7: strain of absurdism here. Then, Jed, you mentioned this the
Speaker 7: different movies and how they fit together. Absurdism doesn't generally
Speaker 7: veer into such sentimentality as.
Speaker 1: The Brave does in some moments. But I'm not gonna
Speaker 1: say that it works like I'm not.
Speaker 7: I don't exactly want to throw down for this as
Speaker 7: a great movie or even altogether a good movie, but
Speaker 7: I find it a fascinating movie in the way that
Speaker 7: it is using these kinds of influences, sometimes quite well
Speaker 7: and at other times can't quite make them fit together.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 7: In the book as well, there's a strong kind of
Speaker 7: stripped down absurdist streak that I think in some ways
Speaker 7: the limitations of doing this movie on its budget militates
Speaker 7: toward absurdist world that then alto includes is some more
Speaker 7: standard melodrama and exploitation. It is absolutely an exploitation film
Speaker 7: set up. Some of the reviews referred to it as
Speaker 7: a kind of neo Western, and I don't think that
Speaker 7: is actually the case.
Speaker 1: I think this is more like one of those rural noirs.
Speaker 7: This is more in a tradition of a kind of
Speaker 7: fated character in a crime narrative than particularly a Western setting.
Speaker 1: It is obviously the place is like the West, but
Speaker 1: that's not really what puts you in the.
Speaker 7: West as a genre, and I think we've got something
Speaker 7: that's much closer to a crime film, which is again
Speaker 7: related I don't know if this is the case as
Speaker 7: an influence on the novel, but related to the trial
Speaker 7: and other Kafka absurdist stories that are about guilt and
Speaker 7: crime following characters in an extremely abstract and therefore almost
Speaker 7: supernatural kind of fashion.
Speaker 2: I can almost see this being like a doa but
Speaker 2: you with that you know Edmund O'Brien is going to
Speaker 2: die because he's been poisoned. In this movie, it's like
Speaker 2: the world is poisoning.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 2: Depp is going to die by the end of this.
Speaker 4: I think one of the standout qualities of the film
Speaker 4: is really the production design, because, as you noted, the
Speaker 4: book is very stripped down. There's a lot of detail
Speaker 4: in the dump and things like that, but you don't
Speaker 4: really come away reading the book with a very good
Speaker 4: idea of what things really look like. And the film
Speaker 4: put together this world, and they put together a really
Speaker 4: fascinating world. It doesn't really make much sense. It doesn't
Speaker 4: have to when you're in these sort of fantastic and
Speaker 4: allegorical spaces, but they do such a good job of
Speaker 4: grounding the world in some areas that it does butt
Speaker 4: up against the more fantastic elements of it. Like they've
Speaker 4: got to go up the dirty creep to get water,
Speaker 4: but they've got electricity everywhere. They've got a TV. In fact,
Speaker 4: my favorite detail of the carnival that he builds and
Speaker 4: sets up is that right in front of it is
Speaker 4: a comfy chair with a giant TV in front of it,
Speaker 4: so you could just sit in the comfy chair and
Speaker 4: watch TV. You don't have to actually play on the
Speaker 4: carnival world. You could just sit there and watch TV.
Speaker 4: That seems like a nice touch. But there's a really
Speaker 4: nice shot early on the first introduction to the little
Speaker 4: community that they live in, where there's a woman with
Speaker 4: a very tiny patch of grass that she is watering.
Speaker 4: She's got a fence around it with stones, and it
Speaker 4: is very guarded. She is just trying to make something
Speaker 4: grow in this really dusty, horrible place. But several shots
Speaker 4: of characters in there with fresh vegetables and peppers and
Speaker 4: things like that that they're stringing together, and it's like, well,
Speaker 4: I don't understand how all the fresh vegetables are there.
Speaker 4: You make such a point of this patch of grass
Speaker 4: being so precious. So there's just all these nice, really
Speaker 4: great details that, like I said, really ground it in
Speaker 4: reality at times. That almost like a Cherry Gilliam film.
Speaker 4: And I guess probably right after this was Fear and
Speaker 4: Loathing in Las Vegas, So who knows if Depth was
Speaker 4: already thinking of Gillium, but the Fisher King quality to it,
Speaker 4: or Brazil sort of quality where those films go in
Speaker 4: and out of fantasy very seamlessly, but clearly the audience
Speaker 4: really understands what's a fantastic vision and what the reality
Speaker 4: of it is there, especially the carnival scene and scenes
Speaker 4: and things like that really deserve that otherworldly Does it
Speaker 4: really look like this is it? Or is this just
Speaker 4: amplifying the emotional the ecstatic reality of their emotional state. Really,
Speaker 4: it hats off to the production design and to for
Speaker 4: orchestrating some of those great shots and great scenes.
Speaker 5: But again, two good and.
Speaker 4: Strong elements that don't really gel for me in the film,
Speaker 4: and had been happy to see either one of those
Speaker 4: films that really lean into the one aspect more. No,
Speaker 4: it's usbun. I don't think that's right.
Speaker 2: I have a dumb question for you guys, because I
Speaker 2: was reading there's not that much written about this movie, unfortunately,
Speaker 2: but I was reading some reviews last night and one
Speaker 2: person was writing about how Depth kills the Marshall Bell character.
Speaker 2: I don't remember him killing Marshall Bell. Did I forget
Speaker 2: something and just completely blank out on this because and
Speaker 2: they even talked about him being covered in blood and
Speaker 2: stuff and like did he kill Bell on his way
Speaker 2: after like doing a Mike Tyson on Louis Guzman and
Speaker 2: murdering Louis Guzman. It's like, no, that's not in here,
Speaker 2: so yeah, it's It is interesting though that Guzman kind
Speaker 2: of takes the place of Belle, because Bell not only
Speaker 2: is he a threat, he's not really a threat for Depp.
Speaker 2: He's more of a threat to Depp's family. He's like,
Speaker 2: if you don't go through with this, I'm going to
Speaker 2: murder your family. And then when Guzman shows up, and
Speaker 2: it's basically it's almost like a swap because at one
Speaker 2: point around like I don't know an hour or something,
Speaker 2: maybe it's like an an hour ten something like that,
Speaker 2: Bell just disappears. It's like that last scene that we
Speaker 2: saw with the Shallow Grave. The grave is the last
Speaker 2: time that we see him, and then Guzman shows up
Speaker 2: maybe right before that, and starts to become this threat.
Speaker 2: And then he again is the one that's threatening Dep's family.
Speaker 2: He's just like, Oh, if you don't cut me in
Speaker 2: on this deal, you know, I'm going to be taking
Speaker 2: care of your wife. And there's one point where he
Speaker 2: talks with him. Actually I think that might be Belle
Speaker 2: where he like goes running home to make sure that
Speaker 2: his family's okay. And that's also interesting too. You're talking
Speaker 2: about the whole Christ metaphor, and what does Bell do
Speaker 2: the last time we see him. He pokes Step right
Speaker 2: in the hand with a it almost looks like a
Speaker 2: fire iron, and he's got the wound of Christ right
Speaker 2: there in his hand. You know, it doesn't do it
Speaker 2: to both hands, but he's like got that there. And
Speaker 2: then Depth, you know, the scene of him running through
Speaker 2: the desert and the blood and the moonlight and everything,
Speaker 2: I'm like, oh, that's pretty nice.
Speaker 7: Guzman and Bell are related as a kind of pair
Speaker 7: or thematic twinning going on within the story.
Speaker 1: I do think that this speaks to the way that
Speaker 1: the larger Allegory.
Speaker 7: Works about its world of depravity and exploitation, where it's
Speaker 7: possible for Raphael Depth's character to fight and kill Guzman,
Speaker 7: but ultimately the battle take place among the working and
Speaker 7: criminal class and does not extend to overthrowing or in
Speaker 7: any way really opposing the wealthy people exploiting them.
Speaker 1: And the final images of the film.
Speaker 7: And this works a little bit differently from how the
Speaker 7: book can, because it's a purely sort of cinematic montage.
Speaker 7: Thing is as heads toward his fate. We see all
Speaker 7: the trucks and the bulldozers come in to destroy the
Speaker 7: community that he's been living in, and miss trailer that's
Speaker 7: much smaller on the outside than it is on the inside,
Speaker 7: and a kind of wonderful absurd fashion gets hoisted into
Speaker 7: the air as Depp is about to get into this elevator,
Speaker 7: and we left not knowing whether his money has allowed
Speaker 7: his family to get out of there in any meaningful
Speaker 7: way on time, and it seemed.
Speaker 1: Like probably not. He's not necessarily a compli anything.
Speaker 7: But again, I think though, like not knowing at the end,
Speaker 7: as these images are presented next to each other, depth
Speaker 7: headed to his fate and the community in this garbage
Speaker 7: heap being destroyed, I think the ambiguity of it for
Speaker 7: me is actually more satisfying than having a real notion
Speaker 7: of was the money delivered or not the money and
Speaker 7: all of this.
Speaker 1: Becomes so secondary to the human concerns.
Speaker 7: Even if that family does receive it's only fifty thousand dollars,
Speaker 7: and even in late nineteen nineties money that's really not
Speaker 7: going to get them very far in the scheme of things,
Speaker 7: especially if they've been living in a garbage heap.
Speaker 1: Really not that much. I find the ending of the
Speaker 1: movie to me more affecting.
Speaker 7: Than the book by far, because it is the final
Speaker 7: abstract and absurd playing out of the economics that are
Speaker 7: running the world that it takes place.
Speaker 2: In well, and that he comes back and gets in
Speaker 2: that elevator with no one else there. That it's he
Speaker 2: doesn't need the Marshall Bell character to watch over him.
Speaker 2: He is he's a dog coming back to the kennel,
Speaker 2: you know, and just getting ready, or he's a pig
Speaker 2: coming back to slaughter kind of thing, because that's all
Speaker 2: he's doing. Is I mean, we've thought about this so
Speaker 2: many times on this show, the whole elevator ride to Hell,
Speaker 2: you know, I mean Jeded dyeh you run the literally
Speaker 2: the elevator to the gallows episode, right, So it's like, yeah,
Speaker 2: here he is getting on this elevator and he's just
Speaker 2: gonna go into the depths and we just get the
Speaker 2: doors closing, and that's how the movie ends, you know,
Speaker 2: roll credits kind of thing. But yeah, it's it's it
Speaker 2: is interesting that Guzman is preying upon Depp and his family,
Speaker 2: and Guzman doesn't live in the dump, but he is
Speaker 2: basically of that criminal class and is yeah, just praying
Speaker 2: on something that he shouldn't be praying on. And I
Speaker 2: think it's very telling too that the one I don't know,
Speaker 2: redemptive type character that Clarence Williams the third character that
Speaker 2: that is a African American priest, not a white priest,
Speaker 2: that is taking care of him, and by him being
Speaker 2: Clarence Williams a third, I'm like, Okay, I can trust
Speaker 2: this person. I can trust that he is going to
Speaker 2: give that money that Depp gives to him to the
Speaker 2: family when he's done. And I love that moment at
Speaker 2: the end when he takes the collar off. It's just like,
Speaker 2: all right, he's he knows that he's broken his val
Speaker 2: because he's basically aided in this self made suicide of Depths,
Speaker 2: and he really can't be a man of the cloth anymore.
Speaker 2: He basically sees the world for what it is, in
Speaker 2: my opinion.
Speaker 7: Tells dep that he's sold his soul, and Depth comes
Speaker 7: back with no, I sold my body, which is I
Speaker 7: think a pretty interesting ugue under the circumstances with these
Speaker 7: and I like that these characters are not terribly articulate.
Speaker 7: They can throw out these opposing points and then there's
Speaker 7: a larger there's larger implications that we can get at
Speaker 7: with them, but we're not going to get a full
Speaker 7: philosophical argument.
Speaker 1: It's not Destfeyevski where we're going to get each one
Speaker 1: of those sides.
Speaker 7: And for the movie, I find that to be really
Speaker 7: effective and hold together even some of the less successful elements.
Speaker 7: For me, one thing about this film I'll just I'll
Speaker 7: veer into this direction. And this is one level and
Speaker 7: which I guess for me, this is both a plus
Speaker 7: and a minus. This is like an overgrown student film
Speaker 7: in so many ways. There are these big grand ambitions
Speaker 7: to how the allegory is to work, and there's some
Speaker 7: there's actually like some really beautiful technical work that I
Speaker 7: would really want to praise from depth as a director.
Speaker 7: And the minus on a student film is, yeah, the
Speaker 7: pretension and that the movie couldn't possibly live up to
Speaker 7: everything that.
Speaker 1: It seems to be aiming at.
Speaker 7: But on another level, I'll take the pretension sometimes even
Speaker 7: when it becomes laughable or when it doesn't fully hold together,
Speaker 7: it is I will say that it's refreshing to see
Speaker 7: a movie by somebody who's trying. Yeah, it's a bit
Speaker 7: of a white elephant, and myself, I prefer the termite arc.
Speaker 7: But there are a lot of people not particularly termiting either,
Speaker 7: who don't even go after very interesting kinds of white elephants.
Speaker 1: And an interesting film. They're really strange elements that don't
Speaker 1: quite go together. One thing, back to the student film thing.
Speaker 7: I want to praise Depth technically, and I think is
Speaker 7: work with the cinematographer is really excellent. But you can
Speaker 7: really see a big difference with most of the dialogue scenes.
Speaker 7: Almost anytime there's dialogue, the camera just locks down into
Speaker 7: close up shot and reverse for long periods of time.
Speaker 7: It's only with Guzman and Depp on screen at the
Speaker 7: same time. Oh now we're going to get a walk
Speaker 7: and talk because we know that both of these actors
Speaker 7: are really capable of it.
Speaker 1: They're good for it. But in most other.
Speaker 7: Cases, Depth is not really He does some amazing blocking
Speaker 7: and staging and some really nice and consistent and narrational
Speaker 7: kinds of moved every time. It's strictly visual that I
Speaker 7: really respect. And yeah, okay, so first time that he directed,
Speaker 7: he's going to come down an easier approach whenever he's
Speaker 7: got to do dialogue.
Speaker 1: But I don't know.
Speaker 7: There's some really beautiful shots where he's constantly revealing things
Speaker 7: about spaces, he reveals characters. There's the nice playful one
Speaker 7: that you described earlier, Mike, where he appears several times
Speaker 7: within the same long take.
Speaker 1: It's doing some really cool stuff. There's even a shot
Speaker 1: in it.
Speaker 7: I watched this ten times to try to figure out
Speaker 7: what was going on, and I still don't have an
Speaker 7: answer to it. Probably my favorite scene in the movie
Speaker 7: is that bizarre wrestling match with the television that just
Speaker 7: suddenly goes roll across the floor and it's done in
Speaker 7: this like static. It's not exactly a wide but as
Speaker 7: wide as you can get inside that trailer, it's done
Speaker 7: in a static wide master. As the TV starts to
Speaker 7: roll one direction and then Dep's wife goes for it
Speaker 7: and tries to wrestle it back to where it's going,
Speaker 7: and it's sign off is happening for TV? And you've
Speaker 7: got the national anthem playing in flags, and so wrestling.
Speaker 1: With a TV that has flags on it if all
Speaker 1: too obvious.
Speaker 5: But then at the same time I'm like, how is this?
Speaker 1: What is going on? How this happening?
Speaker 7: And the sort of grange whimsy of it that doesn't
Speaker 7: seem to work by the same rules as the rest
Speaker 7: of the movie.
Speaker 5: Here for it.
Speaker 1: It even ends up with the TV going to static
Speaker 1: at the dead center of the frame as Depp comes
Speaker 1: in and grabs his family to take them outside to
Speaker 1: see what he's been up to. It's really strange, and
Speaker 1: I could never figure out what was supposed to be happening,
Speaker 1: other than I guess maybe an homage to Poulter Geys
Speaker 1: to be Poultergeist activity all of a sudden, and the
Speaker 1: use of that television but wonderful stuff. Does it precisely fit?
Speaker 1: I don't know, and to some degree I don't care
Speaker 1: the movie.
Speaker 7: It's slow, it's too long, but again it's slow and
Speaker 7: too long in a way I'll take it in order
Speaker 7: to get such a bizarre, interesting jumble as what it
Speaker 7: serves up.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm surprised that it's not the old test pattern
Speaker 2: that they used to have sometimes with the Indian head.
Speaker 2: I was just watching a collection of commercials the other
Speaker 2: day that were called I think it was something like
Speaker 2: inappropriate commercials from the I think it was from the
Speaker 2: seventy there might have been the eighties, and just how
Speaker 2: often there were Native American characters in these commercials that
Speaker 2: were not portrayed by Native Americans, and they were just
Speaker 2: completely exploiting Native culture for selling things. And it was
Speaker 2: just like, oh okay, I mean there were inappropriate things
Speaker 2: other places too, like this whole ad campaign where these
Speaker 2: women are getting their skirts ripped off so they can
Speaker 2: show their underwear and legs and talk about how whatever
Speaker 2: product is working so well on their legs. I'm like, Wow,
Speaker 2: we've come a long way, baby, And I think there
Speaker 2: was even a Virginia Slim's commercial in there too. All right,
Speaker 2: we're going to take a break and we'll be back
Speaker 2: with an interview with screenwriter Paul mccutten. Right after these
Speaker 2: brief messages.
Speaker 10: You see Squaws in Big Pow Wow. They talk about
Speaker 10: big Deal at arrow Ford. You buy a car truck
Speaker 10: this month only, you get free one hundred gallons of
Speaker 10: gas plus one hard dollar. Get certificate companies by Lots
Speaker 10: of Deeds, or you can apply to You want to
Speaker 10: know how, come with me to my teev.
Speaker 5: Just follow Errol.
Speaker 1: I'm here to tell you the story of how red
Speaker 1: Pop began.
Speaker 6: A long time ago.
Speaker 5: Our tribe was hot.
Speaker 4: And thirsty and the great Spirit Fago.
Speaker 6: Appeared and said, here's a first quenching, great tasting soft
Speaker 6: drink just for you, and I call it red Pop.
Speaker 6: You can share it with the early settlers when they
Speaker 6: come to America.
Speaker 5: It will give them something to give thanks for.
Speaker 6: And you, running pudgy, be thankful for diet Fagel.
Speaker 2: No, I am cheap, I am.
Speaker 7: Well.
Speaker 2: I want to know a little bit more about you,
Speaker 2: and especially how you got into show business.
Speaker 5: It's an odd story. I was a physics student. I
Speaker 5: was in graduate school in physics. In college at the
Speaker 5: University of Chicago, joined the Legendary Doc Films, which is
Speaker 5: this student film club that is the oldest film club
Speaker 5: in the country. And it's quite an intense experience, and
Speaker 5: I immersed myself in films to an extent that's really
Speaker 5: pretty frightening. And I watched everything and it was just
Speaker 5: I became so obsessed with films that when I got
Speaker 5: to graduate school in physics, I ran a film group
Speaker 5: at Harvard and spent more time doing that. They're doing
Speaker 5: my studies. I said, I'm going to take a year
Speaker 5: off and I'm gonna try to think about something to
Speaker 5: do with movies. And I'd seen every film ever made
Speaker 5: just about but I had no experience in making them.
Speaker 5: So I said, maybe I'll apply to film school. They
Speaker 5: can teach me how to make movies. So I applied,
Speaker 5: and why knew and USC and got in and said,
Speaker 5: I bet NYUS pulled a bunch of film nerds that
Speaker 5: have seen as many movies as I have, So how
Speaker 5: about the USC, where they probably know more about Hollywood
Speaker 5: and make films. So I went to USC, got an MFA,
Speaker 5: and originally was interested in being in a cinnatographer. Ever
Speaker 5: it turned out I was no good at that at all,
Speaker 5: and just fell into writing and just wrote a bunch
Speaker 5: of student films, and then Brave came along and other things,
Speaker 5: and just ended up writing and it turned out to
Speaker 5: be really a great thing. Got an agent and all that,
Speaker 5: and broke for a while, and then I aged out
Speaker 5: and I'm not interested in They used to call them
Speaker 5: comic books. Now they call them graphic novels. But that's
Speaker 5: just not my scene. I wrote a lot of historical
Speaker 5: dramas and dramatic adaptations of things. And at the time,
Speaker 5: in the mid two thousands, Hollywood was becoming a franchise factory,
Speaker 5: and so there were fewer and fewer projects that were
Speaker 5: interesting in me. I did a few for HBO, which
Speaker 5: is great, but then that kind of like Peter Dobber little,
Speaker 5: and so I went back to teaching. So now I'm
Speaker 5: here in Colorado and I teach both physics and screenwriting.
Speaker 2: At quite a double major.
Speaker 5: There's, yeah, you know, right brain, left brain. But as
Speaker 5: I tell people, is they're both about thinking about the
Speaker 5: world clearly, one physically, one psychologic, and trying to explain
Speaker 5: how the world works, either physically or psychologically.
Speaker 2: So you were going to Harvard and majoring in physics.
Speaker 4: I was in the grads program. I was a PhD
Speaker 4: program in physics at Harvard.
Speaker 2: I know how disappointed were your parents.
Speaker 5: God bless him. They were very tolerant, and they understood
Speaker 5: that I had to do what I needed to do.
Speaker 5: As my mom probably who really got the obsessed with
Speaker 5: BIZAM As a kid, I used to stay up late
Speaker 5: at night and watch things like Dark Victory with her.
Speaker 5: We both we've been yes. So they were pretty good
Speaker 5: about it, and then of course they got more interested.
Speaker 5: I had them come out to La into my twifty
Speaker 5: screenings and things, and that is fine. Should I have
Speaker 5: stayed and gotten a PhD and become a physicist. Who knows.
Speaker 5: But I had a great time in Hollywood. Had really
Speaker 5: enjoyed storytelling, and to this day still buiddle around with
Speaker 5: projects and work on things and just am obsessed with
Speaker 5: the movies, although Hollywood has become a very different place
Speaker 5: from when I was there.
Speaker 2: So what year were you graduating from USC?
Speaker 5: I got my MFA in production there and I think
Speaker 5: it was ninety one until nineteen one, I think it was. Yeah,
Speaker 5: I went there in eighty six. I stuck around and
Speaker 5: did a couple of things while I was down there,
Speaker 5: and then that's actually part of the whole story of
Speaker 5: the Brave. But there was a feature filmed a bunch
Speaker 5: of US students worked on that was made by students
Speaker 5: at USC. It was directed by a professional director, but
Speaker 5: I took an extra semester to work on Zombie High
Speaker 5: an incredible I wouldn't wish it too many people to watch,
Speaker 5: but it was a great experience and it was the
Speaker 5: brainchild of not to segue into the Brave stuff, but
Speaker 5: it was the brainchild of the Zias Gazal I'm sure
Speaker 5: you've read about, and he was the stock manager at USC.
Speaker 5: They they go in and out chip track it and
Speaker 5: I worked there in the stock room and he had
Speaker 5: actually a really great idea, which was, hey, we got
Speaker 5: all these bills tunes, they are dying to work on
Speaker 5: a feature film in thirty five millimeter and work on
Speaker 5: professional equipment. Why don't we get a real producer and
Speaker 5: a real director B producer and B director and get
Speaker 5: them to raise a little money and we'll have the
Speaker 5: entire crew be usc fill students. And after we did,
Speaker 5: and I had a bunch of credits on it, and
Speaker 5: I wrote things that I worked with the editors and
Speaker 5: all this stuff. But it was great. It was a
Speaker 5: great Crash Courses Bar version of Roger Cornet. I think
Speaker 5: it'd still widerland Netflix if you really want to torture
Speaker 5: yourself was really incredible and working with a lot of
Speaker 5: people who are now really pillars Bollywood community. Bob, do
Speaker 5: you say a lot of people weren't done that. Yeah,
Speaker 5: that was a lot of eighteen hour days. But we
Speaker 5: shot on Panavision thirty five cameras, we use all our
Speaker 5: lighting equipment, and it was directed by someone that they
Speaker 5: actually hired, Ron Link. It is what it is, but
Speaker 5: it was a fantastic learning experience.
Speaker 2: To tell you that, oh, how does the Brave come
Speaker 2: to you?
Speaker 5: I just graduated worked on Zombie High, and like most
Speaker 5: film school graduates, I got a job working at a
Speaker 5: production company at Universal reading scripts assistant thing, and one
Speaker 5: of my fellow students actually was there working the same thing,
Speaker 5: kind of story editor, script reader, and she came across
Speaker 5: a little blurb about The Brave, the novel I think
Speaker 5: publishers weekly as story editors do see what's coming out,
Speaker 5: and she said, oh, oh, this sounds like your kind
Speaker 5: of story, knowing my tendency to go for dark tragedies,
Speaker 5: and so we got a copy of it, and I
Speaker 5: read it, and I think I had a good sense
Speaker 5: of story, and I read it and I said, well,
Speaker 5: this is absolutely easily going to be incredible self. It's
Speaker 5: really sparingly i've ever read the novel it's but it's
Speaker 5: very sparing. It's very visual as a single protagonist, as
Speaker 5: a clear art. And of course what appealed me was
Speaker 5: the very clear christ. I said, I could write this,
Speaker 5: leak it. I know exactly how this was going to
Speaker 5: look on screen. I had written a couple of shorts
Speaker 5: at USC that had a kind of bleaked dark tone
Speaker 5: and I just knew exactly what the tone the story
Speaker 5: should be. And so I'm trying to remember. I think
Speaker 5: I wrote a letter to gregoram donald's the author book,
Speaker 5: wrote to his agent and let it go well, I said,
Speaker 5: if you're honest, I think the first thing I did
Speaker 5: was I went to his ease and I said, because
Speaker 5: seemed to scrabbling to be a producer. And I said, Disease,
Speaker 5: I could write this. We could get to give us money,
Speaker 5: it's no problem. And he didn't have any connections. I
Speaker 5: didn't really have any connections. So I wrote to McDonald
Speaker 5: I think somehow we got his all the dress. There
Speaker 5: is agent's dress that I wrote a letter and I said, essentially, listen,
Speaker 5: I poured out my idea of what this film is about. Well,
Speaker 5: it would be about how I would adapt it. And
Speaker 5: I said, I'll tell you what. I'll write you the
Speaker 5: first act and i'll send it. Can you tell me
Speaker 5: what you think? If you don't like it, fine, just
Speaker 5: broke me trash. So I did it. I just wrote
Speaker 5: the first act, sent it to him and he said
Speaker 5: I love it. And he said I'll option it to
Speaker 5: Disease for a very small sum. Because he had no money,
Speaker 5: and that's what did and so then I wrote it.
Speaker 5: It got me an agent, It got a lot of attention.
Speaker 5: People loved it. Of course, anyone in the studio said, yeah,
Speaker 5: I love it. I can't make it here. Obviously a
Speaker 5: sort of a stuff rebed, but they all said, oh,
Speaker 5: I'd love to make this if I had a deal
Speaker 5: that was somewhere else. Oh, I'd make this yet And
Speaker 5: then kind of stuff began to happen. Not to go
Speaker 5: into too much, but Disease was a volatile person and
Speaker 5: he saw this as his ticket, as did I, which
Speaker 5: it was, and so we began to show it around
Speaker 5: and have meetings all over Hollywood with all sorts of people,
Speaker 5: and no one, of course, wanted to have him on board.
Speaker 5: He was just a bald person because he had technically
Speaker 5: optioned it. He was attached to it and refused to
Speaker 5: give it up. And we tried to say, listen, we
Speaker 5: can get this very big name people. They could get
Speaker 5: di Spabe, but you're gonna have to step down. He wouldn't.
Speaker 5: And there was some other personal things going on in
Speaker 5: his life, which is where it gets really intense. But
Speaker 5: you can read about some of that stuff. I don't
Speaker 5: need to go into too much detail, but to be honest, yeah,
Speaker 5: I'm to have you read the script as it's floating
Speaker 5: around somewhere, so if yeah, yes they have and it's
Speaker 5: the story of a margin. And as I said, said Christling, right,
Speaker 5: and unfortunately, the Seas began to see himself in that
Speaker 5: role as someone who needs to sacrifice a lot and
Speaker 5: a lot of stuff. Then went on in there, and
Speaker 5: ultimately a very big tragedy happened. And then after we
Speaker 5: had been meeting with oh Stone and Judy Foster, you
Speaker 5: name it, the big tragedy happened. And then it was
Speaker 5: just dropped like a hot potato understandable reasons. It was
Speaker 5: just this horrific tragedy. There's more to I could say,
Speaker 5: but that was what happened. So then for a year
Speaker 5: or two the rights were still in his name. It
Speaker 5: was just a nightmare. And so then a couple of
Speaker 5: young producers, Carol Kemp and Charlie Evans, had formed a company.
Speaker 5: They managed to buy the rights from this state. I
Speaker 5: don't know exactly how they did that, but they did,
Speaker 5: and they said, okay, we're going to resurrect this bill
Speaker 5: pun intended and see if we can't get this bad,
Speaker 5: and to their credit, they did. They did the legwork
Speaker 5: and showed it around and I was less involved with
Speaker 5: that at that point because they had the script and
Speaker 5: they eventually make a long story short found his way
Speaker 5: to Jaradi deep. This is where I have to just
Speaker 5: try to understand things from Afar. But he liked it
Speaker 5: and he said, yep, let's make this. However, I have
Speaker 5: to start in it and direct it, and so that's
Speaker 5: what happened, and I was really not involved, to be honest.
Speaker 2: They just said, step aside, you're good.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Once Johnny Depp got involved and he was rewriting it,
Speaker 5: which I discovered, and directing and starring in it. I
Speaker 5: was the typical writer. I was watching from afart. I
Speaker 5: got to give Charlie and Carol credit. They did try
Speaker 5: to fight for me to be involved, but Johnny was
Speaker 5: not having it. I got to go over to the
Speaker 5: set once, I to this day had not met Johnny.
Speaker 5: And then the film went to can and again Charlie
Speaker 5: and Carroll, to their credit, wangled me some tickets to
Speaker 5: my wife and I got to go to the PLA
Speaker 5: and we saw the film. And I don't know if
Speaker 5: you've seen it.
Speaker 2: I have seen that. Yeah, yeah, I'm curious about your
Speaker 2: thoughts about it.
Speaker 5: I wasn't involved in the making of it, so I
Speaker 5: it was interesting. A lot of choices made there that
Speaker 5: I wouldn't admit. That's all I can say. Really. The
Speaker 5: main one, of course, that it's not a Christal so
Speaker 5: I think the story of that's the central consteat. But
Speaker 5: that's okay. Was the great experience. It got me agent,
Speaker 5: It got me a lot of work, and it taught
Speaker 5: me a lot. As I like to say, some people
Speaker 5: have a great beginning in Hollywood, and they I have
Speaker 5: some kind of terrible things happening later on. I had
Speaker 5: the terrible stuff happened right at the beginning. Got it
Speaker 5: out of the way, get it out of the way,
Speaker 5: Get all that tragedy, all that real horrific stuff out
Speaker 5: of the way. So from then on it was great. No,
Speaker 5: I got to meet some great people, write some great stories.
Speaker 5: But as I say, HBO was great. I really there
Speaker 5: were some great executives to HBOS, a great projects, and
Speaker 5: me in the studios, I was always the one they
Speaker 5: would bring into and write their kind of pet projects
Speaker 5: and production company. I'll really want to do the story
Speaker 5: to destroy in Joan of Arc and Lorenzo de Medici
Speaker 5: won on the locker beat playing disaster for Columbia. That
Speaker 5: was I thought turned out really well for Sean Connery's
Speaker 5: but those were all production company projects that may or
Speaker 5: may not get made. Most of course didn't. Some other stuff.
Speaker 5: I wrote an episode, I'm sure you know, from the
Speaker 5: Earth to the Moon. I think they were counting on
Speaker 5: my scientific backgrounders, I think, But again that one was
Speaker 5: a little rewritten, that episode, and that was a little frustrating.
Speaker 5: I saw it as Apollo twelve was the only all
Speaker 5: needy crew for the Apollo missions, so I wrote it
Speaker 5: as short leaves on the women and I don't help they,
Speaker 5: so quite that way, I couldn't say a lot more
Speaker 5: about the whole disaster with disease and this tragedy his
Speaker 5: family and all, and there were a lot of people
Speaker 5: caught up in that, and usc was caught up in it,
Speaker 5: and it was a big mess, and to stay it
Speaker 5: breaks my heart what happened to him and his family
Speaker 5: and with then the survivors, his two sons, and I
Speaker 5: have to separate that from the gratitude I have for
Speaker 5: it really getting me to be able to write stories. Yeah,
Speaker 5: it's the oldest story in Hollywood. The writer sits there
Speaker 5: in the sidelines and pops its bubble of sheets to
Speaker 5: keep the stress level down.
Speaker 1: It was what it was.
Speaker 2: It never got released, of course, for reasons you probably
Speaker 2: can tell. I was curious how that experience was for you,
Speaker 2: kind of watching that unfold as far as because I've
Speaker 2: heard different theories as to why it wasn't released here,
Speaker 2: and I'm curious what your take on it was.
Speaker 5: Charlie and Carroll tried to sell it around, and I
Speaker 5: think a lot of it, to be honest, was there
Speaker 5: was just this kind of taint from the tragedy that
Speaker 5: had happened, and people just didn't want to be associated.
Speaker 5: It was just cursed in a way. It didn't help
Speaker 5: that the filmmakers maybe didn't understand the central meaning of
Speaker 5: the story. But I think there was just a lot
Speaker 5: of sense of, oh, yeah, we met that guy, we
Speaker 5: weft about this project. We loved it, but now there's
Speaker 5: just something untouchable about it. Had a better, different film,
Speaker 5: it might have gotten released, but it was. It is
Speaker 5: surprising to me that it never twenty years, whatever it is,
Speaker 5: it's really seen the light of day anywhere and I
Speaker 5: think a lot of that is probably because the filmmakers
Speaker 5: prefer it that way. But I didn't just speculating, Well.
Speaker 2: It is good that you're still able to get gigs
Speaker 2: and everything after that, because if the film's not released,
Speaker 2: maybe you just get swept away with that. So I'm
Speaker 2: glad that didn't affect you in that way.
Speaker 5: Oh No, I had a great career there for fifteen years,
Speaker 5: running great projects, so I really not all were great.
Speaker 5: Most of them are really fascinating and I got to
Speaker 5: really I enjoy doing research sheet projects into delving into
Speaker 5: historical ideas, and so that was great. I did one
Speaker 5: for each that I really liked, and I still think
Speaker 5: it would make a good film about based on the
Speaker 5: true story about two identical twin Chinese brothers who were
Speaker 5: separated by the Revolution China. One Their father sent one
Speaker 5: to a fight with the communists and one to fight
Speaker 5: with the nationalists, thinking one of them will survive, and
Speaker 5: that the brother fought the Communists went through this hell
Speaker 5: and high water and survived the revolution and lived in poverty.
Speaker 5: The one who walked the Nationalists went to Taiwan, became
Speaker 5: a millionaire, ran at TV station, and then forty years later,
Speaker 5: the one in mainland hurt his brother's voice on the
Speaker 5: radio from Taiwan, and they were reunited. They were reunited,
Speaker 5: but they were no longer identical twins. They were now
Speaker 5: as different as your people can be, and in fact
Speaker 5: they were not even brothers. They learned different worlds. That
Speaker 5: was a really interesting project and I still think that
Speaker 5: would make a really good, interesting film. And as I said, HBO,
Speaker 5: I worked on a few projects them and they were
Speaker 5: right there. Really they were taking chances and making writing
Speaker 5: scripts that were of limiting interests to the HBO audience
Speaker 5: at the time. But that was great for me from Phoenix,
Speaker 5: like from the disaster beginning. It really worked out so
Speaker 5: that I was able to work on some great projects
Speaker 5: and not all they were not like great was Unicorn
Speaker 5: in a way, And it's just it's still a shame
Speaker 5: of such a clear, simple allegory.
Speaker 2: You said to your fellow former student and coworker read
Speaker 2: about this and was like, oh, you're perfect for this.
Speaker 2: You like bleak material. How did you get that reputation?
Speaker 2: And do you actually really enjoy bleak material?
Speaker 5: It's just yeah, I always say bleak, but I always
Speaker 5: hate people in Hollywood tragedies win awards, comedies made money,
Speaker 5: and I was always more interested in tragedies. I don't
Speaker 5: know why, but I've always the Godfather being the peak
Speaker 5: example of great tragedies in the Aristotelian sense, and so
Speaker 5: doesn't mean something dies in the end, but that's just
Speaker 5: always what I've liked. And the couple of films I
Speaker 5: wrote short films, I wrote polls through a Sea. There
Speaker 5: was one set in the fourteenth century. This Night to
Speaker 5: Night did got a little buzz at the time, and
Speaker 5: student fellow students were, well, I think they enjoyed it
Speaker 5: because it was a tragic, big historical story shot in
Speaker 5: twenty minutes. In film school, and I know those are
Speaker 5: just the kind of stories of interest me. I love
Speaker 5: a good comedy in the Ristatilian sense, not necessarily funny,
Speaker 5: but I think that there's I don't know, something is
Speaker 5: attracted to stories where characters pay a bigger price than
Speaker 5: they expected to pay. And when I teach film and
Speaker 5: I always tell my students, look at the films that
Speaker 5: win big awards, they're usually tragedies. And look at the
Speaker 5: films that make money, stopping over charge, they're all comments.
Speaker 5: And that's fine. It's a place for both. But I'm
Speaker 5: just attracted to characters who have laws that are brought out.
Speaker 5: Don't ask me why, no, baby, it's watching too much
Speaker 5: Dark Victory with my Bob Steel. Something. I remember watching
Speaker 5: The Night cowbolaying the fact when I was probably came
Speaker 5: out seventy years so and just being for ad bites
Speaker 5: in that Storytelle, That's true, And I still always have
Speaker 5: a spec thing, and I'm working on the background and
Speaker 5: for better one. Several of them are indeed the blot
Speaker 5: characters can pay a price, unfortunately, and then I want
Speaker 5: to get out of myself box here. Those are tragedies.
Speaker 5: Theirs detealing tragedies are free, rare. The entire Marvel subculture.
Speaker 5: I just don't get those films, just don't get them.
Speaker 5: But there are still some filmmaker out there who understand
Speaker 5: storytelling in a deep way. They're getting older, of course,
Speaker 5: he is still a genius. It is getting older, but
Speaker 5: I think that there's still some sense that there are
Speaker 5: other kinds of stories. They're ones that have numbers in
Speaker 5: the time, and I would I'd love to work on
Speaker 5: some of those projects. And as I said, I've got
Speaker 5: always working on a couple of spec ideas, but it's
Speaker 5: tough that only as the business changed since the graphic
Speaker 5: novel Coming with World came out. Kind of when I
Speaker 5: loved Hollywood mid two thousands, then the whole streaming world.
Speaker 5: I'd missed that tire. That's real change, Sason Covid. So
Speaker 5: I don't even I have an ancient apparently somewhere. I
Speaker 5: think it's still out there, but I don't know who's buying.
Speaker 5: It's really crazy upside down world. It was great to
Speaker 5: see Netflix in them for a decade, pouring money into
Speaker 5: projects that was great, some really good stuff, But now
Speaker 5: that seems too drive up. So yeah, you probably have
Speaker 5: a better sense of the business, how the business is changing.
Speaker 5: But yeah, I don't know who bakes those kind of
Speaker 5: HBO type films. Kind of was Netflix for a while, Hulu,
Speaker 5: but yeah, who does it? In studios? Gosh wow, I mean,
Speaker 5: these horror film studios interesting because they've carved out a
Speaker 5: space for them in the horror genre. And some horror
Speaker 5: films are interesting. Our asters could be talented filmmaker, and
Speaker 5: Mike's Flanning plan against pretty talented. Those are interesting, but
Speaker 5: they're just such a narrow genre, such a fine line
Speaker 5: between that and the torture more. It's really tough to
Speaker 5: have bought that line. I just watched It's a parenting
Speaker 5: and you could see a really interesting idea there and
Speaker 5: then just follows into the goopy guts. Yeah, I don't know,
Speaker 5: it's tough. They're small mid budgets, not sty mid budget,
Speaker 5: but just brahmas and tragedies that aren't based on dry
Speaker 5: historical English history that we're going to do something historical.
Speaker 5: I'm interesting is I said the locker be playing as
Speaker 5: that was a great watch shot and that was stuff
Speaker 5: with I see them they well, we just came out
Speaker 5: with that the locker bew one with it was on
Speaker 5: one of the streams and it was interesting actually because
Speaker 5: they chose the point of view one of the parents,
Speaker 5: and I showed the point of view of the cow.
Speaker 5: But hey, yeah, because it was shocked.
Speaker 2: There's not a lot I can ask you about your
Speaker 2: physical class, but I'm curious do you have any sort
Speaker 2: of specialties when it comes to the film classes that
Speaker 2: you teach.
Speaker 5: I'm now in the small time. I live in Steamboa, Sphings, Colorado,
Speaker 5: and it's about it as far from all in this
Speaker 5: get but I do teach a class, and we have
Speaker 5: some yellow students. There's some high school kids.
Speaker 9: I really enjoy hating young people and teaching them what
Speaker 9: film is because they are this is their idea to
Speaker 9: right and to really preach about what film really is
Speaker 9: and storytelling this and visual storytelling.
Speaker 5: I think that's a lot of fun. So we worked
Speaker 5: with a lot of younger kids and some older. They
Speaker 5: just try to get them to think visually and write
Speaker 5: fishing and it's telly insta these days, even if it's Netflix,
Speaker 5: the Beautiful Cinematograph and it's still a dialogue based still,
Speaker 5: as I tell my student students that when you watch Netflix,
Speaker 5: even the best things on Netflix, to keep the lights
Speaker 5: on in room. You wouldn't do that in a movie, Richie.
Speaker 5: And because you're listening basically not reading, watching, you're enjoy
Speaker 5: that pictures but ridicously. So I liked to get on
Speaker 5: myself bobs and talk about visual storytelling. They're mostly young,
Speaker 5: all of me. Their stories are some signs of the
Speaker 5: whole realm. But I enjoyed that and it's fun to proctize.
Speaker 5: I absolutely believe that film is twenty to cent shorty
Speaker 5: American and French art form that will never be curseed.
Speaker 5: COVID won't kill it, streaming won't kill it, and nothing's
Speaker 5: going to kill it. We love to be your stuts there.
Speaker 5: I think it's essential that we feed that love as
Speaker 5: much as we can, and not by doing Spider at
Speaker 5: twelve or something. So yeah, it's a chance for me
Speaker 5: to spread the gospel about building a little bit. But yeah,
Speaker 5: it's far from Bob. It's fun. Although it's interesting because
Speaker 5: I sometimes bill as a student the storytelling has changed
Speaker 5: in seventy five years, it's still all the same. I
Speaker 5: try to watch all the Oscar Moltadata shorts each year
Speaker 5: and there's some good ones and bad ones, but nothing
Speaker 5: has changed, just the technology. They're all shot beautiful two
Speaker 5: K and great sound and beautifully lit. But the stories
Speaker 5: there's could be there, dear Center. Yeah, no, the Brave
Speaker 5: was a great experience and our horror experience, and to
Speaker 5: be honest, I wouldn't have it any other way. Of
Speaker 5: course I would have well people well trenched, But personally
Speaker 5: I think it was a great experience to learn and
Speaker 5: as except I like my tragedies.
Speaker 1: There you go.
Speaker 5: It confirmed my world vide that bad things could happen,
Speaker 5: bad things could happen the gogfile. Best of intentions can
Speaker 5: lead to the worst of outcomes sometimes and go to
Speaker 5: my sapbox. But we're living an interesting time.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much, mister mccutnon. It's great talking with you.
Speaker 5: Thanks Mike, I appreciate it. And as I said, give
Speaker 5: a cuestion to me any time.
Speaker 2: All Right, we are back and we were talking about
Speaker 2: The Brave and yeah, watching some of those clips from CON,
Speaker 2: it did not seem like Depp had a good time
Speaker 2: making this movie. He just kept talking about how hard
Speaker 2: it was and how hard it was directing himself, and
Speaker 2: just not really enjoying it. I know he had done
Speaker 2: a couple shorts and some music videos. I think he's
Speaker 2: done music videos since this period of from ninety seven,
Speaker 2: but I guess he just got kind of scared off
Speaker 2: of it. And apparently the reason that we don't have
Speaker 2: the movie in this country is because of that critical
Speaker 2: reaction that happened after the CON screening and just all
Speaker 2: of the reviews that were coming out just lamb basing
Speaker 2: this film. And I just don't think it's that bad.
Speaker 2: I agree with you, Spencer does feel very student filmish.
Speaker 2: But the oddest thing was that there were so many
Speaker 2: critics who were really on top of depth because he
Speaker 2: was showing his body and they're just like, oh, it's
Speaker 2: just all of these close ups of him and he's
Speaker 2: so handsome and all this. I'm like, yeah, and basically like,
Speaker 2: that's the only thing this man has left in the
Speaker 2: world is his body. So why wouldn't you kind of
Speaker 2: fetishize that with this film, because that is ultimately what
Speaker 2: he is selling to this underground establishment or to the
Speaker 2: you know, to the entire world. I mean, basically, Depp
Speaker 2: is useless to anybody. His character is useless to anybody
Speaker 2: other than a person who wants to buy him to
Speaker 2: kill him, even.
Speaker 7: Within a plot that is about fetishizing his body. I
Speaker 7: had read that before I saw the film, and then
Speaker 7: I was surprised to find out. But wait, he's walking
Speaker 7: around with his shirt open in a really hot place
Speaker 7: and also conjuring the movie image of the brave that
Speaker 7: kind of a filmic iconography, and it just did not
Speaker 7: seem that much. This is like a director with an actor.
Speaker 7: Just compare this movie to like The Place Beyond the
Speaker 7: Pines and the way that Ryan Gosling's body is constantly
Speaker 7: fetishized and built up in the first big chunk of
Speaker 7: that film. Depth is not doing anything near that to
Speaker 7: his own body, when certainly the fiends of the film
Speaker 7: could do that could justify it.
Speaker 1: So I find that to be odd and bogus.
Speaker 7: Again, if we want to have a fight with it,
Speaker 7: it's that goes along with when he played Tanto, that
Speaker 7: more problematic way of taking on a very traditional Indigenous
Speaker 7: iconography that's been very much controlled by white people and
Speaker 7: fetishized by white people, And so that just raises the
Speaker 7: question of how much is critique and how much is
Speaker 7: it just playing out the cliche. I think that's an
Speaker 7: argument worth having. But yeah, it's really strange to me
Speaker 7: that they needed to make a case against that was personal.
Speaker 7: It's certainly possible to dislike the movie but just just
Speaker 7: treat it like this ultimate bad object and treat Depth
Speaker 7: so poorly at that time as a director, the kind
Speaker 7: of how dare you I find this to be?
Speaker 10: Like?
Speaker 1: Since we were talking about this at the very beginning, Mike,
Speaker 1: the kinds of films that generate these sorts of responses
Speaker 1: at film festivals. Yes, sure, quite often they're bad, but
Speaker 1: they're also they're often like bad in ways that are
Speaker 1: not nearly so terrible as people say.
Speaker 7: I personally happen to like Southlands Tales, and I know
Speaker 7: plenty of people who don't, and that's fine, we can disagree.
Speaker 1: But Southland Tails is not some kind of crime against aesthetics.
Speaker 7: And honestly, when I first saw it, I expected it
Speaker 7: to be much much crazier in some way. My point
Speaker 7: here being, I do think that these kinds of movies
Speaker 7: are really interesting to look at because they are actually
Speaker 7: quite revealing about the frankly, very staid and conservative standards
Speaker 7: for cinema. At whatever moment that they are unleashed upon
Speaker 7: an unsuspecting can or sun Dance or tell you ride audience,
Speaker 7: that they become an outrage.
Speaker 4: I think the movie's definitely going to have a rediscovery
Speaker 4: at some point, if nothing else, just upon the incredible cast,
Speaker 4: When you got all of those guys Marshall Bell, Frederick Forrest,
Speaker 4: Clarence Williams, Louis Guzman and then mac Perlick and all
Speaker 4: the cameos in there, people are going to find it.
Speaker 4: It'll someday have a US release some confident To your point, Spencer,
Speaker 4: I think people will say what was going on? What
Speaker 4: was in the Water in ninety seven that this was
Speaker 4: so reviled, and honestly, maybe it's depth. Maybe he'd never
Speaker 4: had that kind of response, Maybe he was particularly vulnerable,
Speaker 4: and had he released this in the US, that rediscovery
Speaker 4: or possible reclamation may have already happened.
Speaker 5: By now.
Speaker 4: I'm glad that he was able to especially because it
Speaker 4: sounds like he puts a lot of his own money
Speaker 4: into the production knowing that it wasn't going to be
Speaker 4: made back. I think it's great that he was able
Speaker 4: to say, flying fuck it, you don't deserve it. I'm
Speaker 4: not going to let you see it.
Speaker 1: And to the point of putting in his own money.
Speaker 1: That's mentioned in I forget which source, but one of the.
Speaker 7: Stories about how this film was losing its way in
Speaker 7: the world back at the time just tosses off that
Speaker 7: Depp committed the ultimate cinema sin of putting his own
Speaker 7: money into the movie.
Speaker 1: And I just have to say fuck off to all that.
Speaker 7: Not just because there have been a number of movies
Speaker 7: where people put in their own money.
Speaker 1: I guess that's also one of the knocks on orson Wells,
Speaker 1: which I refuse to take.
Speaker 7: Yeah, okay, so he put some of his own money
Speaker 7: into a bunch of his films and nobody else made
Speaker 7: it for fake fuck off with that. And also it
Speaker 7: is it's like one of those things too, where it's
Speaker 7: like even somebody wealthy and influential depth has to be
Speaker 7: taken down a peg for doing the thing that people
Speaker 7: from much less lofty backgrounds have to do in order
Speaker 7: to get a film made at all, so that then
Speaker 7: they can get into the world of auditioning to get
Speaker 7: somebody else to pay for their movie. On many levels,
Speaker 7: I think that's really strange and problematic. And also you
Speaker 7: mentioned Jed the performances, and this is a really rare
Speaker 7: late brand O performance where he's not trying to torment
Speaker 7: the director. If like the other movies that he did
Speaker 7: at this point in his career, he's doing crazy stuff
Speaker 7: and getting people fired, and refused to call Frank Oz
Speaker 7: anything but miss Piggy when they were on the set
Speaker 7: of the score, and also wouldn't wear pants so that
Speaker 7: they would have to photograph him only from the chest
Speaker 7: up most of the time.
Speaker 1: Brando actually on good.
Speaker 7: Behavior, and I'm not going to say that this is
Speaker 7: an amazing performance from him, but I do think that
Speaker 7: there's something valuable if you're interested in Brando as an
Speaker 7: actor and as a figure, And certainly I am to
Speaker 7: see a performance from this point of his career when
Speaker 7: he did actually show up to work and not just
Speaker 7: see what he.
Speaker 1: Could get away with, like on Island of Lost Souls
Speaker 1: for instance.
Speaker 2: That was the year before was when he was getting
Speaker 2: Richard Stanley fired.
Speaker 1: There was more than Val Kilmer actually, but yeah, what
Speaker 1: a disaster there.
Speaker 7: But yeah, definitely Brando's behavior did not recommend him on
Speaker 7: that particular film.
Speaker 2: As far as the fetishization of depth, going back to
Speaker 2: what we were talking about before the Break, I think
Speaker 2: the only real fetishy type scene it plays into the narrative,
Speaker 2: like towards the end, after he kills Guzman, he goes
Speaker 2: to see the Floyd Redcrow Westerman character and he takes
Speaker 2: him in, cleans them up, and there's a shot of
Speaker 2: depth coming out of this water in the moonlight, and
Speaker 2: you get to see his body and everything, and it's
Speaker 2: just like, okay, but not only are they showing you
Speaker 2: his body, but they're showing you this huge cut that
Speaker 2: he has on his chest, and I'm like, okay, yeah,
Speaker 2: this isn't just like look at how beautiful. This man
Speaker 2: is because Johnny Depp was Slash is possibly a beautiful man,
Speaker 2: just an absolutely gorgeous guy to look at. You know,
Speaker 2: He's one of these guys who just had that about him.
Speaker 2: And he was such a pleasure to look at, and
Speaker 2: he was such a pleasure to watch. And the thing,
Speaker 2: and I probably have said this before on the show,
Speaker 2: and if so, I apologize, the thing I always liked
Speaker 2: about Depp is that he was not just a pretty
Speaker 2: boy actor, like he could have easily have parleyed the
Speaker 2: success that he had on twenty one Jump Street into
Speaker 2: a whole bunch of plain old leading man characters. But
Speaker 2: what does he do. He goes out, he makes freaking
Speaker 2: cry Baby, he makes Edward Scissorhands. He's making Arizona Dream.
Speaker 2: You know, he's doing these challenging films. I mean, what's
Speaker 2: eaton Gilbert Grape? It might have been the first Loss
Speaker 2: of Hellstrom film in the US. He's making ed Wood,
Speaker 2: the way that he ties his star together with Tim Burton,
Speaker 2: I mean, he's playing with all of these very interesting
Speaker 2: directors for the longest time. I mean, you mentioned Terry
Speaker 2: Gilliam before that. He comes back and does a part
Speaker 2: of the Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassis and stuff, it's like, yeah,
Speaker 2: that's great, Like, of course, I think he probably should
Speaker 2: have broken with Burton a little bit earlier. Like nobody
Speaker 2: needed that Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, nobody needed Alice
Speaker 2: in Wonderland, nobody needed Dark Shadows. You know, the list
Speaker 2: goes on and on. It's like, please unhitch your star
Speaker 2: at some point. But even when it comes to like
Speaker 2: this stuff that he's doing, you know, like he had
Speaker 2: Viki o'phelak as his one of his two dp's on
Speaker 2: this movie, who he had met on Arizona Dream, and
Speaker 2: it's like that's great, Like he's taking all of this town.
Speaker 2: I mean, fucking Iggy Pop is the one that does
Speaker 2: the soundtrack. He probably met him on Crybaby because Iggy
Speaker 2: Pop had that small rolling cry Baby. I remember him
Speaker 2: sitting in that tub scrubbing his back and stuff. I
Speaker 2: mean dead man. I mean yeah, working with working with
Speaker 2: with Jarmbush is a fantastic thing. He's working with all
Speaker 2: of these great directors from all over the world, and yeah,
Speaker 2: it's just amazing that he was doing that. And I
Speaker 2: remember telling the story before about you know, when young
Speaker 2: girls would come into the movie theater buying tickets to
Speaker 2: go see Crybaby, and I'm like, uh, this is a
Speaker 2: John Waters film, Like, you probably will not enjoy this,
Speaker 2: but they were all for it because it was Johnny Depp.
Speaker 2: We had so many complaints, so many refunds, because girls
Speaker 2: just thought that they were going to see beautiful Johnny
Speaker 2: Depp on screen, not hatchet face, not you know what
Speaker 2: they ended up seeing on screen. It was so wonderful
Speaker 2: and I loved it so much. And yeah, I just
Speaker 2: always appreciated that about Depp in these early days. And
Speaker 2: I don't know if to your point, if they were
Speaker 2: just kind of the critics laying in wait for this
Speaker 2: guy who just seemed to be making a lot of
Speaker 2: really interesting choices with his early career.
Speaker 7: This is an eccentric film, But I think one interesting
Speaker 7: thing about this is that this is a little bit
Speaker 7: more in the Gilbert Grape territory.
Speaker 1: As a performance, Johnny Depp has.
Speaker 7: Made an incredible career of weirdo roles, strange, restrained, heightened
Speaker 7: mannered kinds of performances. This is one of the more
Speaker 7: restrained and recognizably human performances from him, and I think
Speaker 7: it's a really excellent one.
Speaker 1: There is a kind of blankness built into the character.
Speaker 7: But what gives us is a lot of sense of
Speaker 7: thoughtfulness of someone who is at once not necessarily very smart,
Speaker 7: but who is presented with a lot of situations where
Speaker 7: he is kind of very desperately thinking and feeling on screen.
Speaker 7: And also he didn't have an expert director. He was
Speaker 7: not used to working with first time directors, and here
Speaker 7: he's doing both of these things. And I think that
Speaker 7: might really contribute to having made a first feature. That
Speaker 7: it's enough to break anyone, and if you come back
Speaker 7: for another round, that is something.
Speaker 1: So it's very hard on the most basic level. But yeah,
Speaker 1: for him to act in this and direct it, and
Speaker 1: it is an elaborate production, for the.
Speaker 7: Budget and everything, I'm really not surprised that it was
Speaker 7: an unpleasant shoot.
Speaker 1: For him, and I think it's unfortunate that he didn't
Speaker 1: direct again. But there we are.
Speaker 7: I barely want to mention this because I don't pay
Speaker 7: attention to it myself, But in terms of the future
Speaker 7: fortunes of this, I'm with you, Jed. I think it's
Speaker 7: ready for reevaluation, but I wonder how many people are
Speaker 7: going to be ready to reevaluate it after a grotesque
Speaker 7: and awful divorce that got a lot of attention. I'm
Speaker 7: personally not a Calvinist, so I can't quite see this
Speaker 7: sort of the sin back to the point when Depp
Speaker 7: made this movie, and I'm not really interested in playing
Speaker 7: those games with how we.
Speaker 1: Evaluate Bart.
Speaker 7: But I do think that this is like a really
Speaker 7: strange and challenging movie that's ripe for reappraisal for the Brave,
Speaker 7: if you will.
Speaker 2: Well, we mentioned it very early on. I don't really
Speaker 2: want to get into all of the details of this,
Speaker 2: but I would recommend if people want to know more,
Speaker 2: especially Paul mccutten mentions this all of the things with
Speaker 2: Azi's Gazal, the one of the original producers of this film,
Speaker 2: that is a bizarre and gruesome story, and what I
Speaker 2: was reading about him, he was very not healthy, and
Speaker 2: that he murdered his wife and one of his daughters
Speaker 2: before killing himself. So that was in ninety three, I think,
Speaker 2: and that almost put this project completely off the rails
Speaker 2: because we was supposed to start in ninety four, that
Speaker 2: it ever got made at all, that they were able
Speaker 2: to come back from that. Like you said, I think
Speaker 2: this is kind of a cursed film, because there was
Speaker 2: that that whole thing just a lot of times. Oh yeah,
Speaker 2: we're supposed to do this movie. One of the producers
Speaker 2: murdered two people his family and killed himself. Normally, that
Speaker 2: just puts the whole project in turnaround forever. But it's
Speaker 2: amazing that this ever actually got to the screen.
Speaker 5: Well, I guess the.
Speaker 7: Curse extends in that the say problematic a bunch of times,
Speaker 7: but that just goes with the territory. With the people
Speaker 7: generating the project are not Indigenous people dealing with and
Speaker 7: commenting upon issues of an indigenous genocide. It there's I
Speaker 7: suppose also that behind it, and again a tradition and
Speaker 7: filmmaking and and art making more generally, that is a problem,
Speaker 7: but I think also a problem that deserves any number
Speaker 7: of responses, and in particular since the time that this
Speaker 7: was made, thankfully there are a lot more Indigenous filmmakers
Speaker 7: making their comments and telling stories from their experiences out
Speaker 7: of a truly horrifying history that unfortunately is too close
Speaker 7: for comfort in our current moment. Yeah, I guess there
Speaker 7: is also that that's a lot of curse. I do
Speaker 7: really think it's a worthy object to wrestle with. This
Speaker 7: is not just some terrible film that nobody should ever acknowledge,
Speaker 7: and that's very much how it's been treated, and I
Speaker 7: think that's unfortunate. I was really pleasantly surprised, because there
Speaker 7: are cases where there isn't something to rescue in a
Speaker 7: movie that's known to be really bad, much as one
Speaker 7: might want to.
Speaker 1: I guess I'll throw it as an example.
Speaker 5: Maybe the new.
Speaker 7: Director's cut of Blairwitch two Book of Shadows is a
Speaker 7: vast improvement. Much as try as I did back in
Speaker 7: the early two thousands to watch that movie and try
Speaker 7: to rehabilitate it, to no avail. That's unfortunately just a
Speaker 7: bad movie. I don't know that it's quite so terrible.
Speaker 7: It's just boring, quite so terrible, as a lot of
Speaker 7: people said at the time. But some movies, yeah, sure,
Speaker 7: you can't recover when you're going diving for outrages. But
Speaker 7: this is definitely one that I think is worth a look,
Speaker 7: worth some attention.
Speaker 2: I kind of wish that there was a proper version
Speaker 2: of The Lone Ranger, because I've read that Elliott and
Speaker 2: Rossio script, which was so different than the movie, and
Speaker 2: if you watch the movie and know that the William
Speaker 2: Fickner character is supposed to basically be like a flesh eater,
Speaker 2: and there were originally more much more mysticism. There are
Speaker 2: were wolves in it. The whole thing with the silver
Speaker 2: bullets actually played out with the were wolf stuff. It's
Speaker 2: just like, that was such a much more interesting movie
Speaker 2: than what we ended up with, which it's a flawed film.
Speaker 2: But then, like, now, talk about that word that we
Speaker 2: hate so much. Problematic to have Ernie Hammer and Johnny
Speaker 2: Depp in the same movie. Oh my god, next thing,
Speaker 2: you know, like you know, Kevin Spacey shows up and
Speaker 2: you're just like, oh my god, what is happening here?
Speaker 2: I definitely agree that depth did deserved a little bit
Speaker 2: better than just having this completely lambassad by critics, And
Speaker 2: I would like, I think more people should check this out.
Speaker 2: It's not the best movie in the world, but it
Speaker 2: doesn't deserve this kind of lost status that it has
Speaker 2: here in the States. All right, guys, let's go ahead
Speaker 2: and take another break and play a preview for next
Speaker 2: week's show. Right after these brief messages, We've.
Speaker 7: Given you everything you've ever wanted.
Speaker 5: How can you do this?
Speaker 10: To work?
Speaker 6: This nice house, your own car, swimming pool.
Speaker 2: What more do you want?
Speaker 10: I want to be a star.
Speaker 1: Hello, finally going to meet a real man.
Speaker 2: Richard Nixon is a lesbian.
Speaker 4: I didn't know that.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 2: We will be back next week with a look at
Speaker 2: Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers. Until then, I want
Speaker 2: to thank my co host Jedidiah and Spencer so JEDEDDI,
Speaker 2: what's been keeping me busy these days?
Speaker 1: Just watching movies?
Speaker 4: You want to know anything about it, you can find
Speaker 4: me on Letterbox Jededi airs, but I'm not on any
Speaker 4: other social media at the time.
Speaker 2: I am following you on letterbox, my friend, and it's
Speaker 2: always great to see what you're up to. And Spencer,
Speaker 2: what's the latest with you?
Speaker 7: I am finding my way into editing whenever I can,
Speaker 7: so I can finally have a movie done and move
Speaker 7: on to making the next one.
Speaker 2: Well, I look forward to seeing it. Can you invite
Speaker 2: me to the premiere when that happens?
Speaker 1: For sure? Yeah, you're on the comp list for the
Speaker 1: premiere for sure.
Speaker 2: Well, thank you again guys for being on the show.
Speaker 2: Thanks to everybody for listening. If you want to hear
Speaker 2: more of me shooting off my mouth, check out some
Speaker 2: of the other shows that I work on. They are
Speaker 2: all available at weirdingwaymedia dot com. Thanks especially to our
Speaker 2: Patreon community. If you want to join the community, visit
Speaker 2: patreon dot com. Slash Projection Booth. Every donation we get
Speaker 2: help some projection Booth take over the world.
Speaker 8: Do anything George don't don't know about, I don't un
Speaker 8: George don't don't know about.
Speaker 3: At an under an, attain the act between act