Speaker 1: Oh he is, folks, it's show tied.
Speaker 2: People pay good money to see this movie.
Speaker 1: When they go out to a theater, they are cold sodas,
Speaker 1: hot popcorn in No monsters in the protection booth.
Speaker 2: Everyone for tend. Podcasting isn't boring.
Speaker 3: Turn it off.
Speaker 2: Illegal in forty seven states.
Speaker 1: It's the dirtiest sport in the world. Not since The
Speaker 1: Hustler has the sabbathe underbelly of the gambling world been
Speaker 1: so nakedly exposed. War Notes stars as Frank Mansfield's profession.
Speaker 2: And my bird here he can beat anything you've got, showed.
Speaker 1: Man Cockfighter of violent men and the sport that killed.
Speaker 1: He's got an animal instinct for winning and.
Speaker 2: Women to drive.
Speaker 4: Drive in in history, be the best.
Speaker 2: And he'll do anything to come out on top.
Speaker 4: Winning is the name of the game.
Speaker 1: Cockfighter from governor's mansions to cheap hotels. It's the big
Speaker 1: money sport that's dirty, violent and outside the law. From
Speaker 1: the award winning book, It takes a searing look at
Speaker 1: the men with the lust to win and the women
Speaker 1: who spur them on. Warren Os is the Cockfighter right
Speaker 1: at all.
Speaker 2: One hundred seventeen not admitted without Karen.
Speaker 5: Regarding Welcome to the Projection Booth. I'm your host, Mike Whitehead.
Speaker 5: Me once again, is mister Jedediah Ayers?
Speaker 6: Do you know there's no two ounce leeway an official
Speaker 6: a CT hack. Also back in the booth is Miss
Speaker 6: Heather Drain heleare Helene on this episode weirdscussing Monty Hellman's Cockfighter,
Speaker 6: released in nineteen seventy four, The film stars Warren Oates
Speaker 6: as Frank Mansfield. When he came to town with his
Speaker 6: cock in his hand, all the women swooned, and what
Speaker 6: he did with it was illegal in forty seven states.
Speaker 6: In other words, Frank Mansfield is a professional cockfighter, the
Speaker 6: ancient game of pitting two roosters against one another for sport.
Speaker 6: The film was based on Charles Williford's book of the
Speaker 6: same name, and Williford wrote much of the finished screenplay.
Speaker 6: We will be discussing his work and ruining this movie
Speaker 6: as we go along, So if you don't want Cockfighters
Speaker 6: spoiled for you, please turn off the podcast and come
Speaker 6: back after you've seen it. We will still be here. So, Jededi,
Speaker 6: when was the first time you saw Cockfighter? And what
Speaker 6: did you think? I was aware of the book first,
Speaker 6: and I read the book or probably fifteen years ago.
Speaker 6: I saw the movie probably look Out two or three
Speaker 6: years after that, more than a decade, but I can't
Speaker 6: remember exactly what it was I first saw it, But
Speaker 6: I loved the book and I liked the movie quite
Speaker 6: a bit, and I've liked it increasingly with rewatches, part
Speaker 6: of it just being I love warn Oates on screen,
Speaker 6: and he didn't get to be the star of too
Speaker 6: many movies, and this was just a great vehicle for him. Yeah,
Speaker 6: I love the film, though I don't think i've ever
Speaker 6: seen it on DVD, like a nice, kind of pristine
Speaker 6: version of it. I think all the stuff I've seen
Speaker 6: has been luddy, and I hope I get the chance
Speaker 6: to get one of those nice copies of it today.
Speaker 5: And Heather, how about yourself.
Speaker 3: This was a first time watched for me. This was
Speaker 3: a film that had been on my need to watch
Speaker 3: list for a long time. Of course I was familiar
Speaker 3: with it. I also knew that Kailagendiese is a huge
Speaker 3: fan of it. Of course she has a book. I'm
Speaker 3: so glad you're going to get to innerwer She is
Speaker 3: like the grand pouva of this film. So that's very exciting.
Speaker 3: And of course the quote Jedediah or to cite him,
Speaker 3: Warren is a god to me, he is an anty god.
Speaker 3: If he's in anything, I will watch it, And so
Speaker 3: I was like, this was the perfect impetus for me
Speaker 3: to watch it. I still need to read the book
Speaker 3: I Am super Neophied Calic Fighter Universe. And also kudos
Speaker 3: for the rampant Dick jokes, so that the introduction.
Speaker 5: That's all from Oh gosh, why am I blanking on
Speaker 5: the gentleman's name? Who produced Thunder and Lightning? And which
Speaker 5: was another vehicle with Charles Williford in it and David
Speaker 5: Krdine I guess David Cardyine stars in it and Charles
Speaker 5: Williford has a like five minute part in it. Him
Speaker 5: and Joe Dante and Alan Arkash were all making up
Speaker 5: the lines for this trailer, and including those that I
Speaker 5: was quoting above, which I don't know if they ever
Speaker 5: made it to any of the trailers The Born to
Speaker 5: Kill or any of those, but we'll definitely be talking
Speaker 5: about the retitlings and recuts as we go along here. Yeah,
Speaker 5: this one, I'm trying to remember how I came to
Speaker 5: this movie because Monty Hellman was a real big cipher
Speaker 5: for a long time. People knew of some of his works,
Speaker 5: but I wasn't aware of him as a person. And
Speaker 5: I think I got to know him through the producing
Speaker 5: work that he did on Reservoir Dogs, and then eventually
Speaker 5: interviewed him for an old issue of Cashiers. And that
Speaker 5: was back when it was still really tough to find
Speaker 5: his movies. It was ordering two Lane Blacktop through a
Speaker 5: video search of Miami. When it comes to this movie,
Speaker 5: I found a VHS copy of it at Suncoast or
Speaker 5: Sam Goodie or one of those. And the back cover
Speaker 5: of this VHS tape, speaking of shitty quality, Jedidiah looked
Speaker 5: absolutely awful. But this was the copy on the back
Speaker 5: of the book. And I think you're both going to
Speaker 5: enjoy this. Take a dark and eerie walk deep into
Speaker 5: the Georgia backwoods, where those who aren't welcome don't always
Speaker 5: come out. Warren Oates wants to be the king of
Speaker 5: the roost in the rough and dangerous Southern underground, where moonshine, talk, fights,
Speaker 5: hard luck, and wild knights are all part of his game.
Speaker 5: This ain't no place for the timid, and Oates uses
Speaker 5: his fists, knives, and whatever else it takes to get
Speaker 5: what he wants and hold on to what he's got.
Speaker 5: The plot thickens when Oak crosses the wrong guys and
Speaker 5: learn about Mountain style justice the Hard Way, a riveting
Speaker 5: look at a side of life where most civilized people
Speaker 5: can't even imagine eight but for one law in these parts,
Speaker 5: and they don't care who lives or dies.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's a much more be shitting the thunder and
Speaker 6: lightning Bobby than Cockfighter.
Speaker 2: But yeah, you know what's.
Speaker 3: Weird, that's actually the drain family crest. I can't believe
Speaker 3: they cribbed our whole Famili's lenneage like that. Good Lord,
Speaker 3: do you think said brown Rig direct this is a movie?
Speaker 3: And I say that loving brown Rig, But holy a
Speaker 3: Purple pros the hell out of the description.
Speaker 5: And this was so then the video stopped when they
Speaker 5: showed the title of it. It was very much like
Speaker 5: when I watched Disco Godfather the very first time, and
Speaker 5: the video stops and they put in Chiron over at
Speaker 5: the avenging Disco Godfather. So they changed the title, but
Speaker 5: with this one it stops and they pasted board to
Speaker 5: kill over Cockfighter. But as far as I know, it's
Speaker 5: the exact same movie that we saw. It is no different.
Speaker 5: There were no knife fights, are moonshiners that shit in here? Instead,
Speaker 5: it was the movie that we still eat these days.
Speaker 5: And yeah, I have yet to find that alternate cut
Speaker 5: with like dream sequences and all of these crazy things.
Speaker 5: But what this was and when I finally saw it,
Speaker 5: I was just blown away. I'm not that into cock fighting,
Speaker 5: but I am very much into the Big Three that's
Speaker 5: war Oates, Monte Hellman, and Charles Williford. And this movie
Speaker 5: has those elements in space, including Charles Williford acting in this.
Speaker 5: So my heart was just all a flutter when I
Speaker 5: got to see this.
Speaker 6: I wasn't aware really of Charles Wilford. I'd seen Miami
Speaker 6: Blues and I knew it was based on a book.
Speaker 6: Probably about twenty years ago or so, I first became
Speaker 6: aware of Charles Wilford and had some friends who were
Speaker 6: big Willingford heads and started reading I think Cockfighters the
Speaker 6: first one I read. And I remember reading it because
Speaker 6: I was sick, and I was so thankful I was
Speaker 6: sick because I didn't have to go to work and
Speaker 6: I could just stay in bed and read all day.
Speaker 6: I had young kids at the time, and I was
Speaker 6: just exhausted, and I was like, nope, I have a
Speaker 6: great excuse just to stay in bed and read all day.
Speaker 6: And I read probably two or three books over the
Speaker 6: course of a few days. Cockwriter was one of them,
Speaker 6: and I really made them impress I loved it, and yeah,
Speaker 6: it wasn't for a few years after that I realized
Speaker 6: they've been a movie adaptation. Williford was definitely my initial
Speaker 6: interest in cock Fighter, and then about the time I
Speaker 6: saw the movie, I was really starting to hone in
Speaker 6: on realizing that I really like Warren Oates as a
Speaker 6: screen presence. Yeah, but yeah, Williford for me first, and
Speaker 6: then of course the rest of the cast. Two are
Speaker 6: heading Stanton and it's just lovely to watch the two
Speaker 6: of them hang out on screen. Any chance to.
Speaker 5: Do that, I'm down for.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I don't remember how I came to Williford, or how
Speaker 5: Williford came to me. I'm pretty sure my friend rich
Speaker 5: Osband turned me on to him. I don't remember when
Speaker 5: that was. So this was Cashier's to Cinema at number five,
Speaker 5: and by issue nine they weren't a yearly thing. They
Speaker 5: were a as soon as I possibly can type of thing,
Speaker 5: which sometimes was two years or more. By issue nine,
Speaker 5: I was writing about Williford overall, and with that one,
Speaker 5: I was so glad. I was able to track down
Speaker 5: the Cockfighter Journal and read his book about the behind
Speaker 5: the scenes stuff, which is fascinating as well. But the
Speaker 5: only thing I really remember from that whole book was
Speaker 5: him just complaining about Lori Bird so much he just
Speaker 5: could not stand fair. And then reading Kayla Jennings's book,
Speaker 5: it sounds like it was a pretty big club that
Speaker 5: he was part of. When I came to the we
Speaker 5: can't stand Lori Bird club.
Speaker 6: I remember hearing that on the two Lane Blacktop commentary
Speaker 6: that they were irritated with her, especially because they were
Speaker 6: musicians and she was singing and she really couldn't pull
Speaker 6: the tune, and apparently they were chopping at the bit
Speaker 6: every time she would sing it on screen, and Martiella
Speaker 6: was having to tell Nope, you gotta take it, you
Speaker 6: gotta sit there and take it, and they irritated by that.
Speaker 6: I think she's fun on screen, though, I like her.
Speaker 5: I think she's perfect in this movie.
Speaker 3: The cast of this film blew me away, and I
Speaker 3: expected part of that because of who was in it,
Speaker 3: but the authenticity they nailed it. This phil's so real.
Speaker 3: You could practically smell this movie, and that's out of way.
Speaker 3: It's a good smell, but I love that and the
Speaker 3: fact that it's like, of course it's authentic. We have
Speaker 3: Charles Williford involved. He's literally in the movie. I found
Speaker 3: out he was from my home state. He's born in
Speaker 3: Little Rock, Arkansas. And it feels authentic because that's the
Speaker 3: thing you can always tell whenever somebody who's not familiar
Speaker 3: with the South is making a movie, because it's just
Speaker 3: like bad he Haw accents, even when they're trying to
Speaker 3: do serious dramas. I remember seeing the trailer for Hillbilly Elegy.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, god if we knew then, and seeing Glen Clobe,
Speaker 3: they like, this is a fabulous actress, but her accent,
Speaker 3: oh my god. It was about as authentic as Surely
Speaker 3: C Liquor, which, yeah, it's a deep cut there bating
Speaker 3: radio advance. But this film that just feels not only
Speaker 3: authentic to the locale and the actor is still authentic
Speaker 3: to that, but it feels very honest because there's something
Speaker 3: about like in rural communities where there's not a lot
Speaker 3: of money, and it's like you have this necessity that
Speaker 3: kind of breeds desperation. You have necessity that breeds brutality.
Speaker 3: It's a hard life, and it's I feel like this film,
Speaker 3: even though our protagonist is not a good person and
Speaker 3: he doesn't brought of really crummy things, he's a human
Speaker 3: being and everybody this film is a human being, and
Speaker 3: there's such a respect with that. There's not a judgment
Speaker 3: with that. And I absolutely love that about this film
Speaker 3: because that's a I think that's a hard line for
Speaker 3: a lot of storytellers, whether you're doing pros or film,
Speaker 3: can do and do it well.
Speaker 6: The elements that you would take to sell a picture
Speaker 6: like this, like you're reading off the jagged copy on
Speaker 6: the VHS, all that stuff that would be so played
Speaker 6: up is very much just the day to day reality
Speaker 6: each year, and it's shrugged off people like when the
Speaker 6: robbery happens, just prison doing business. We understand this is
Speaker 6: going to happen. It was an approached and handled like
Speaker 6: a big set piece, like a suspense sequence or something
Speaker 6: like that. It was just and here's one more thing
Speaker 6: that this life entails. And yeah, so there was a
Speaker 6: lot of that too. Heather's point of brutality is took
Speaker 6: part of the life. But again, no, he's not a
Speaker 6: good guy and there but there's a certain respect given
Speaker 6: to the people who lived this lifestyle and that it's
Speaker 6: treated matter of factly and it's not particularly titillating in
Speaker 6: a judgment was held, which.
Speaker 3: I really appreciate because I think even to this day,
Speaker 3: a lot of people have and our culture looked down
Speaker 3: upon people that live, especially if they're living in a
Speaker 3: poor rural area and you don't have access good education.
Speaker 3: The public school systems dodgy enough in our country and
Speaker 3: wealth funded areas. And it's like this film does exactly
Speaker 3: what it showed because it's not justifying any bad behavior.
Speaker 3: It's not glorifying it, which diet, but it's not condemning it.
Speaker 3: It's just here's his story. And I love that with
Speaker 3: Laurie Bird's character, they could have done more pathos with
Speaker 3: her because I really get the filling and are a
Speaker 3: friend of mine and my husbands are friend. Randall has
Speaker 3: this phrase us like certain people, it's almost like they're
Speaker 3: like a hamburger rapper in the wind, which is they're
Speaker 3: living their life in this way and I feel like
Speaker 3: this poor girl, it's just like this hamburger rapper in
Speaker 3: the red just floating to and she's ynged, but just
Speaker 3: floating to whatever guy and is literally sold. She's property.
Speaker 3: And just the way that we hear him refer to her,
Speaker 3: just like, oh she's a pretty girl, she's a good lay.
Speaker 3: She'll land on her feet and it's good. Crazy she
Speaker 3: ends up herr Dan Stanton, that's not too bad. Everything
Speaker 3: is so smartly he in the code of edinboard pathos
Speaker 3: the whole robbery, which I honestly, if this was a
Speaker 3: more traditional movie, ye, would you guys have been surprised
Speaker 3: at one of the guys the mask was Steve Rareil's back.
Speaker 3: I totally was expecting the how And I don't know why.
Speaker 3: I think it's just because I like to see Steve brelsman.
Speaker 3: My brain was like, get me more reals.
Speaker 6: Bat.
Speaker 3: It's just all the little touches, Omar hiding his money
Speaker 3: in the bathtub full of chicken carcasses. Insane, but such
Speaker 3: a great time.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's really a simple film when you boil it down,
Speaker 5: because it's this guy who's got this code of ethics
Speaker 5: right or wrong, what's his code, and he's going to
Speaker 5: live by it, especially when he shot off his mouth
Speaker 5: and I was drinking too much, boasting about his cock
Speaker 5: and how his cock would be undefeated, and yeah, Harry
Speaker 5: Dean Stanton took him up on it. I was like,
Speaker 5: all right, let's see it, and they had their little
Speaker 5: cock fight in the hotel room. He ends up losing
Speaker 5: his prize rooster and he's sunk. He cannot go to
Speaker 5: the Southern what is it, the Southern Cocker Tournament or whatever.
Speaker 5: It is the big thing that he's living his life for.
Speaker 5: And then he makes a promise to himself, I will
Speaker 5: not speak or drink again until I win that medal,
Speaker 5: and that's his whole thing. Laurie Bird calls him on it. Hey,
Speaker 5: I heard you talking to your sleep last day. If
Speaker 5: you can talk while you're sleeping, you can talk while
Speaker 5: you're awake. He just does not want to explain to
Speaker 5: her what is going on with him. He doesn't want
Speaker 5: to explain to anybody, and he just wanders his way
Speaker 5: through stuff. And once he loses that initial match that
Speaker 5: we see in the movie, he's given, Okay, now I
Speaker 5: got to figure this out. And that's the whole movie
Speaker 5: is him moving from place to place getting money, trying
Speaker 5: to buy these chickens from Ed Middleton, this now retired
Speaker 5: judge of cock fighting and training, this bird up partnering
Speaker 5: with Omar Bredinski, the Richard Schule character, who I just
Speaker 5: fucking love. And they're Pal Buford, who's played by Robert
Speaker 5: Earl Jones, the father of James Earl Jones, who we
Speaker 5: just learned passed away today, So that's a real shame.
Speaker 5: But yeah, I love the chemistry of those guys. And
Speaker 5: the ending of the movie kind of sneaks up on
Speaker 5: you because it's just basically them going through all these tournaments.
Speaker 5: The next thing they're at the big tournament. It's almost
Speaker 5: like a Bad News Bears type of thing, like we're
Speaker 5: gonna go through and pick off all of these smaller competitions,
Speaker 5: and we get to see all these adventures that they
Speaker 5: go on. We get to see, yes, Steve Railsback, get
Speaker 5: to see Ed Begley Junior in here going absolutely ape
Speaker 5: shit with a fucking hatchet going after Frank.
Speaker 3: I love that, and especially because you get the feeling
Speaker 3: he's his character's a little middlely off and then you
Speaker 3: hear and he's going after warn Oats with an axe
Speaker 3: and Warren Oats and them was drowning him and his
Speaker 3: in his and I've looked that character was his father, right.
Speaker 5: Yes, yeah, you might want not to hold him under
Speaker 5: the water.
Speaker 3: So loss it's like, you know that family tree does
Speaker 3: not have a lot of branches and the baby ed
Speaker 3: Bailey Junior. Like this film we get Millie Perkins for
Speaker 3: five minutes and Trey Donnie, who I look like. I
Speaker 3: kept feel like it's a mad, mad mad world, but
Speaker 3: with just like cool character actors. It's such a I
Speaker 3: I think miss it was Joe Spinell, but he's not
Speaker 3: Southern Wright. We love Jow but Joe's so New York.
Speaker 3: It's yeah, that would have worked out. But I'm so
Speaker 3: glad you mentioned Omar. Omar was absolute my favorite character.
Speaker 3: He's like the farmer poet, like the way he talks
Speaker 3: and Schol's performance is so magnetic and he's just looks
Speaker 3: like this gentleman just sparkle in his eye, gentleman farmer
Speaker 3: with away with words and just the talking about lightning.
Speaker 3: And oh I loved him in Viewford so much. I'm
Speaker 3: like these two were characters. I'm like I wouldn't mind
Speaker 3: hanging out with these guys. They seem nice, They're lovely.
Speaker 3: Cockfighting is awful.
Speaker 6: It is it loves the book. Of course, you get
Speaker 6: a lot more out of the Frank character because it
Speaker 6: is it's all internal, internal monologuing, so you understand him
Speaker 6: a little bit better. But by god, you get swayed
Speaker 6: by him. You buy into his bullshit a lot more
Speaker 6: about what he's doing being in Noble Pursuit, and he's
Speaker 6: talking about how much he loves, like his real love
Speaker 6: for these birds, and he's just describing the routine he's
Speaker 6: going through to train them and things like that, and
Speaker 6: then he's just or true to death. He's got two
Speaker 6: birds that are siblings, and he figures he can push
Speaker 6: one until it chills him, so he knows what the
Speaker 6: other one can take, and he can push him. It
Speaker 6: just tortues this bird to death while he's talking about
Speaker 6: how much he loves him. And yeah, it was a
Speaker 6: real Warren Oates is great, but it is different. Having
Speaker 6: even the voiceover that is in there is a little less.
Speaker 6: It's less compelling than for making these types of arguments
Speaker 6: than really living with this voiceless characters in air. Voice
Speaker 6: through the pages of the books. I carried that with
Speaker 6: me into watching the movie. And I'm curious for people
Speaker 6: who haven't read the book if it's how much of
Speaker 6: that they bought into Frank's kind of bullshit, because I
Speaker 6: did bought into it, and then I realized how awfully
Speaker 6: was and it was hilarious, but it was all.
Speaker 5: I don't think you read the book, So how much
Speaker 5: did you buy into his bullshit?
Speaker 3: Let's just say I wasn't one of the I wouldn't
Speaker 3: be one of the ladies. How was the intro swooning
Speaker 3: over his massive cock or whatever that the cock talk?
Speaker 3: But yeah, it's more no to me. That's what helps
Speaker 3: is you. I think a lesser actor, it would have
Speaker 3: been tausted, not the movie, because got the movie the
Speaker 3: whole good Lord, yeah, money Hellman, Lewis tig The editing's great.
Speaker 3: The cinematography is fantastic, like Mester Almandrose, I know on
Speaker 3: Butcher that't sorry, sir, but fabulous cinematographer. But you need
Speaker 3: an actor to pull up that character who you can't
Speaker 3: help but just even look at and be like, I
Speaker 3: like this guy. He's just got a presence about him.
Speaker 3: Frank's many flaws I think it's what made him interesting.
Speaker 3: He approaches cockfighting and I maybe I hope we're not
Speaker 3: talking on my ass with his analogy, but to me,
Speaker 3: it's almost like he moves like an addict. He literally
Speaker 3: sells the house that his brother and his wife are
Speaker 3: living in so he could get money to keep cockfighting.
Speaker 5: I hope he made a little bit more than five
Speaker 5: hundred dollars out of that transaction.
Speaker 6: He sells his brother's house.
Speaker 2: Out from my.
Speaker 6: I'm sure he made a little more, but yet he
Speaker 6: wants five hundred dollars to buy ed Middleton's cock.
Speaker 3: This violent sport. And that's to say, like the scenes
Speaker 3: of cockfighting were very hard for me to get through.
Speaker 3: I feel, especially as I've gotten to the point in
Speaker 3: my life now, like seeing animal violence in films. It's
Speaker 3: never that it was easy when I was younger, but
Speaker 3: it's really hard for me now, Like I'm so sensitive
Speaker 3: and I didn't have to cover my eyes through some
Speaker 3: of it just because I just can't. I don't know how.
Speaker 3: It just hurts my heart to see the innocent suffer.
Speaker 3: It is filmed like a dance, and I think the
Speaker 3: way the film approaches this and it's awful this is
Speaker 3: such a horrible baby for animals over the dupes, but
Speaker 3: it films it like a dance, and that is so compelling.
Speaker 3: And then also I think helps to what we were
Speaker 3: just talking about with Frank, because this is a dance
Speaker 3: he is so invested in you get the feel like
Speaker 3: he defines his soul almost who he is as a
Speaker 3: human with his fiancee, Mary Elizabeth, who we meet and
Speaker 3: she basically you can tell she loves and she's like,
Speaker 3: I don't want you to doing this.
Speaker 7: I don't want to be living like this, and which
Speaker 7: is more than an understandable, which is more than reasonable,
Speaker 7: and he invites her to this big, fancy derby so
Speaker 7: she could see him in the ring, and I was like,
Speaker 7: what a stunning thing to be like, this is such
Speaker 7: a huge.
Speaker 3: Part of you. That's if you're gonna love me, I
Speaker 3: want you to see me at my work. Which that
Speaker 3: that go well for him in the Romhetz department. A
Speaker 3: little romantic note for any anybody who's sang old out, well,
Speaker 3: don't do cockfighting.
Speaker 5: It's a leak. So he doesn't want to end up
Speaker 5: like Ed Middleton who is being pressured to get out
Speaker 5: of cock fighting. He won't admit it to Frank, but
Speaker 5: he's his wife is okay, sure, I'll do that. I'll
Speaker 5: sell this prize rooster for five hundred dollars, which Frank
Speaker 5: is never going to be able to pay me that money.
Speaker 5: I know he's not going to be able to. So
Speaker 5: then yeah, he turns around, sells that house out from
Speaker 5: under his near Dowell brother, his brother who and I'm sorry,
Speaker 5: I'm going off of a lot of stuff in the book,
Speaker 5: so a lot of stuff that doesn't come across in
Speaker 5: the movie. But he Frank was not the golden child
Speaker 5: because he was the guy who went off and was
Speaker 5: doing this whole cockfighting thing. So his dad said, okay,
Speaker 5: I'm giving everything to your brother, to Randall I think
Speaker 5: his name is. And Frank was like, no, that if
Speaker 5: any court in the cull would read the Bible and
Speaker 5: know primogeniture and know that I'm the one that deserves
Speaker 5: all this stuff. So I'm going to fuck over my
Speaker 5: brother to get this money so i can start this
Speaker 5: new cockfighting venture because he doesn't want to be poor
Speaker 5: and he wants to win this thing so much, and yeah,
Speaker 5: you're right, it is very much like he's got an
Speaker 5: addiction and it's all so much of the book is
Speaker 5: how do I get money? How do I get money?
Speaker 5: I'm going to go back to this guy, this doctor
Speaker 5: who sells salves and bones, and he has this new
Speaker 5: anti indigestion medicine that he's trying to get off the ground. Well,
Speaker 5: he owes me money, I'm going to go to him.
Speaker 5: I'm gonna get money out of him. No he doesn't
Speaker 5: have any money. I'm okay, I'm going to go to
Speaker 5: my brother and try to get money out of him.
Speaker 5: No he doesn't have any money. Fuck my brother. I'm
Speaker 5: gonna just sell this fucking house and take all this
Speaker 5: money that way.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: He is asperate to do this, and he goes through
Speaker 5: so much. There's a whole character, whole section that's in
Speaker 5: the book that isn't in the movie where he's going
Speaker 5: out and playing music at a bar. Eventually gets picked
Speaker 5: up by this woman, Bernice, who takes him home and
Speaker 5: he will She agreed to pay him twenty dollars to
Speaker 5: pay for all of her to play for all of
Speaker 5: her fancy friends and family, And when she goes to
Speaker 5: give him a fifty at the end of the night,
Speaker 5: and he's just, oh, no way, I agreed to twenty dollars,
Speaker 5: not fifty dollars. Like, again, those principals come up, So
Speaker 5: what's he do? He ends up sleeping with her, taking
Speaker 5: the fifty dollars, breaking his guitar and leaving it on
Speaker 5: her front porch to be like, this is the extra
Speaker 5: thirty dollars that you gave me. My guitar is worth
Speaker 5: about thirty dollars. I'm just like, you are fucking insane.
Speaker 5: And all of Charles Wildeford's protagonists are insane. They all
Speaker 5: are obsessed with things. They're always going after things, they
Speaker 5: always have weird little works and stuff, and I'm just like,
Speaker 5: they're fascinating to me to read these characters because they
Speaker 5: are all fucked up in one way or another.
Speaker 6: They remind me of a middle ground between a Michael
Speaker 6: Man very driven, code living character and a Darren Aronofsky
Speaker 6: or someone who's who's society thinks they're crazy, but they've
Speaker 6: got this muse that they're going to follow to the end.
Speaker 6: And it's that mel ground Frank would see himself. I
Speaker 6: think more like a Michael Man character, maybe more like
Speaker 6: the guy in Jericho. Mild is just running and he's
Speaker 6: not running for it's not competition, it's not whatever. It's
Speaker 6: just this is how I'm doing my time. This is
Speaker 6: how I keep the world from owning me. Is I
Speaker 6: just brought and that's what he's going to do. But yeah,
Speaker 6: it's I hadn't really thought of it as as an
Speaker 6: addict story, but hearing you guys describe it that way,
Speaker 6: it makes sense. And I do think it maybe brings
Speaker 6: those two sort of one he's perhaps nobler than the other,
Speaker 6: but they almost touch and I sink cockwriter. Maybe is
Speaker 6: the bridge that connects them that way.
Speaker 3: Talking about the whole chasing the money, you feel like,
Speaker 3: what's ever going to be enough? He could win the
Speaker 3: most amount of money and he's just going to use
Speaker 3: it to keep the cycle going.
Speaker 5: But it's not even the money. I think he earns
Speaker 5: a thousand dollars for it. It's that fucking medal. He
Speaker 5: just wants that medal, and that medals what triggers his
Speaker 5: whole flashback. Like when Middleton shows him the medal, He's
Speaker 5: just like, this could have been yours, but you talk
Speaker 5: too much and you drink too much, and then that
Speaker 5: triggers that flashback, and I love I can't remember if
Speaker 5: it was Brad Stevens or who it was writing about.
Speaker 5: Does Frank ever come out of the dream sequence? Is
Speaker 5: he just in that dream sequence for so much of
Speaker 5: this movie, because the way that Hellman presents it, it
Speaker 5: isn't like a typical dream sequence. It's not like the
Speaker 5: screen gets blurry or the edges fog up or something.
Speaker 5: They're just like, okay, that's interesting. And then this writer,
Speaker 5: whoever it was, and I apologize if it was Brad
Speaker 5: or somebody else, was talking about the scene with Omar
Speaker 5: being robbed, and that's the only time that we really
Speaker 5: move away from Frank, and we aren't with Frank because
Speaker 5: almost every single scene he's in, but that's the one
Speaker 5: time that we go away. And it's also all taking
Speaker 5: place in a hotel room, which is where Frank's humiliation was.
Speaker 5: They all end up taking off their pants at the
Speaker 5: end of this robbery, and so it's just is this
Speaker 5: like some sort of weird sexual humiliation that Frank went
Speaker 5: through with Jack Burke, the Harry Deedon Stanton character. Yeah,
Speaker 5: it might be a little bit out there, but it
Speaker 5: is interesting that this is the only time that we
Speaker 5: don't see Frank in the movie, that we just stick
Speaker 5: with Omar and meanwhile they're cross cutting it with Frank
Speaker 5: and I believe it's the whole scene with Ed Begley
Speaker 5: Junior where he's cheating and they have rosin up the
Speaker 5: rooster's feet and all that, and yeah, that seems amazing.
Speaker 5: And that's all again somebody trying to welch on a deal.
Speaker 5: Ed Bigley Junior's father tries to welch on this deal. Oh, sorry,
Speaker 5: don't have a thousand dollars. I only have three hundred.
Speaker 5: And then Steve Railsback tries to welch on a deal
Speaker 5: as well. It's just like, oh, I don't have the
Speaker 5: twenty five dollars and they have to push him down
Speaker 5: and grab his wallet and be like, no, you got
Speaker 5: plenty of money here, Junior. This is what you get
Speaker 5: for trying to stick your finger up a chicken's ass.
Speaker 6: His daddy told him, though, you gotta show him how
Speaker 6: to stick up finger up the cock's ass.
Speaker 3: I love that the way he said, bro, my dad,
Speaker 3: I don't know. Just here is Steve Railsback say that baby,
Speaker 3: Steve rails meck of fat. Like this is two years
Speaker 3: before Helter Skealper. And so that was amazing there's so
Speaker 3: many great shots in this film too. There's one and
Speaker 3: this is early on where but one of the early
Speaker 3: cock fights, you hear a little boy just crying, which, yeah,
Speaker 3: that's the thing. Why would you take your children too that?
Speaker 3: And that's what my daddy told me. But yeah, but
Speaker 3: the little boy and this shot like haunts me. It's
Speaker 3: just such a brilliant jode Is. He's covering, he's crying,
Speaker 3: and he's covering his eyes with what looks like a
Speaker 3: one dollar bill, and that just ooh, that just hit
Speaker 3: me so hard. And just this is the horrors of
Speaker 3: what we do for money, of what just in our society.
Speaker 3: It's like this, it's the innocent again. To me, it's
Speaker 3: like the innocent suffer. And even the fact that the
Speaker 3: robbers aren't they all wearyly President masks a little.
Speaker 5: Point blank all those years beforehand.
Speaker 3: And just that shot, the way they did the super
Speaker 3: imposition of Mary Elizabeth sitting by the light. You notice
Speaker 3: how they're transitioning to him going to the real estate
Speaker 3: office to how cold his brother out of money. But
Speaker 3: that's so a position of her lasts longer than it
Speaker 3: normally won in a movie. It's almost it adds just
Speaker 3: to this sort of plonning tolle of this is what
Speaker 3: he's leaving behind. This is having any sense of healthy love,
Speaker 3: any sense of just normality and gentility is gone.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I really picked up a lot more this time listening
Speaker 5: to the book, just the way that women are treated
Speaker 5: in the book, between Dodi and Bernice and Mary Elizabeth.
Speaker 5: It's like Dody you see this in the movie, that
Speaker 5: she has started to wash some of Frank's clothes, but
Speaker 5: she hasn't finished, and so they're just all in a
Speaker 5: wet buckaville of water, and he throws those clothes at her.
Speaker 5: And then later on when he meets Bernice after they
Speaker 5: have sex, she's just compelled to do something for him,
Speaker 5: and so she goes in and washes his underwear in
Speaker 5: the sink. So it's like more wet clothes and they're
Speaker 5: still wet when he tries to sneak out to just like,
Speaker 5: I guess I'm leaving these things here. So I'm just like,
Speaker 5: how many times is it like women not only were
Speaker 5: women washing for him, but then they would also cook
Speaker 5: for him, And you get that also in the movie,
Speaker 5: but like Bernice cooks for him, Dodie doesn't cook for him.
Speaker 5: I don't even think she knows how to cook that well.
Speaker 5: She talks about hungry man dinners, and then his sister
Speaker 5: in law she cooks for him as well. And it's
Speaker 5: just what are women just cooking and cleaning vehicles in
Speaker 5: this book and movie? And I think they are so
Speaker 5: I don't think that's going to change my opinion of
Speaker 5: Charles Williford, but it was just pretty funny to realize
Speaker 5: just how the status of women is just so low in.
Speaker 3: Cockfighter the chickens. They're treated better for the chickens.
Speaker 7: But.
Speaker 3: Not very much.
Speaker 5: I think Dody White is almost a rooster when she
Speaker 5: comes in and starts attacking him, and she's wearing that
Speaker 5: bright red outfit. I'm just like, is she a rooster?
Speaker 3: Now? Yeah?
Speaker 5: And I love how got that line about what are
Speaker 5: the odds on missus Burst?
Speaker 3: I love Omar. Yeah, any of that characters would say that.
Speaker 3: I'd be like you sex and panted, and Omar says it,
Speaker 3: I'm just like, oh you like, you're so funny. Oh
Speaker 3: my god, you're watching a strange man's underwear after a
Speaker 3: one night stand. That's wool.
Speaker 5: He was offender too, because I was clean underwear. How
Speaker 5: dare she?
Speaker 3: Oh, I highly doubt they were clean. Let's be honest,
Speaker 3: let's let's think about the life freaks living you want.
Speaker 3: These drawers are about as clean as the little nasty
Speaker 3: floor that Ed Bagley's chicken died on. Late drawers. Yeah,
Speaker 3: thank god that wasn't in the movie. I'm glad that
Speaker 3: didn't make it into the film.
Speaker 5: Apparently Bernice was in there for a long time, and
Speaker 5: there's even an ending with Bernice in there, because she's
Speaker 5: I don't know if she takes the place in Mary Elizabeth,
Speaker 5: but I think it's a torn between two lover type
Speaker 5: of things between Bernice and Mary Elizabeth. Now why I
Speaker 5: say the book ends that way as well. This whole
Speaker 5: thing of the ending of the movie with him ripping
Speaker 5: the head off of the chicken and putting her putting
Speaker 5: her his cock in her purse, which is always the
Speaker 5: Freudian vagina metaphor. So it's just like, okay, we're having sex,
Speaker 5: I guess here, or is he saying I will give
Speaker 5: up my manhood for you? Because there is that whole
Speaker 5: thing of like, how dear these women try to change
Speaker 5: us men? Middleton's got it, And here's Frank take this
Speaker 5: just pah at that moment. Oh, it's bad enough when
Speaker 5: he cuts the head off of that one rooster, it
Speaker 5: just so matter of factly, But then for him to
Speaker 5: pull the fucking head off of a chicken at the
Speaker 5: end of this movie, hand it to her that disgust
Speaker 5: on her face, and when she puts it in the
Speaker 5: the handkerchief and just reads in the riot act. I
Speaker 5: love her speech at the end of this about how
Speaker 5: she just looked at She wasn't watching the chickens, she
Speaker 5: was watching him and just saw no what was it,
Speaker 5: No love, no pity, nothing, and just saw what a
Speaker 5: man he really is. But then she takes that talk
Speaker 5: from him. I'm just so surprised, and then his little
Speaker 5: she loves me Omar at the end. Wow, what a
Speaker 5: fucking way to go with this. What do you guys
Speaker 5: think as far as she loves me Omar, what does
Speaker 5: that mean to you guys?
Speaker 2: Hey?
Speaker 6: Yeah, I think it signifies just that it's another teller
Speaker 6: about just how he sees the world and how he
Speaker 6: sees anybody else would look at him and his life,
Speaker 6: and most people in the movie too and say what
Speaker 6: a loser, but an absolute waste of a life, but
Speaker 6: he's determined not to see himself though way, He's determined
Speaker 6: not to have the values of the world. And he's
Speaker 6: decided this metal, this prize, is of value, and I'm
Speaker 6: going to treat everything as less than that and get there.
Speaker 6: And anybody else, including most of the I think they're
Speaker 6: probably a fair amount of spectators and competitors there, don't
Speaker 6: give a shit about the metal. They just want to
Speaker 6: make money. They're gamblers, they're whatever. They want to make money,
Speaker 6: they want to do that, and they don't care about
Speaker 6: that kind of standing. But he's decided this is what's
Speaker 6: worth while in his life.
Speaker 2: He's going to.
Speaker 6: Sacrifice everything toward that. And yeah, at the end, when
Speaker 6: she's so angry and disgusted with him, I think, I
Speaker 6: don't know, it seems more like a spin like him
Speaker 6: going aha, I've moved her. I've got a real reaction
Speaker 6: out of her. She loves me.
Speaker 5: Was he just nagging her in the parlance of our times.
Speaker 6: I don't know. I think it's insight into how he
Speaker 6: sees the world and how he sees himself, and now
Speaker 6: he's determined to see himself, and it seems almost like
Speaker 6: an arbitrary declaration, but it's one he's gonna probably live
Speaker 6: the rest of his life by whether they're together or not.
Speaker 6: He'll have something in the back of his head saying,
Speaker 6: I've got a woman who loves me. She's disgusted. We
Speaker 6: don't spend any time together. I haven't seen her twenty
Speaker 6: years or whatever, but she loves me. I decided she did,
Speaker 6: so she does really pick up.
Speaker 3: The Freudian big at all I have to say with
Speaker 3: that all scene. But I think I don't typically look
Speaker 3: at purses like pseudo vaginas. I don't pick up my
Speaker 3: person be like it'le pudani. I don't know, but I
Speaker 3: thought it was such a cool ending though. I loved
Speaker 3: her speed. I love that performance. She and she's really
Speaker 3: like the only she's not prim but she seems like
Speaker 3: the most out of all the characters, especially if all
Speaker 3: the women we meet, she's the one that's got probably
Speaker 3: a good head on her shoulders. This is a she's
Speaker 3: the closest to normal. She's gonna beat. She really will
Speaker 3: be fine regardless and him tearing the head off. I
Speaker 3: was to admit. My initial director was like, good, crazy,
Speaker 3: Have I not seen enough animal cruelty in this fucking movie.
Speaker 3: Good lord, dude, what is wrong with you? This poor animal,
Speaker 3: poor little white Lightning Justice for White Lightning the Chicken.
Speaker 3: But I do love that they name that. That's a
Speaker 3: nice little moon moonshine reference. Any George Jones fans out
Speaker 3: there will immediately get but and then hands and it's
Speaker 3: almost like he's like chabbing its deceased beak and her
Speaker 3: palm of her hand because she looks like she's in pain.
Speaker 3: It's so violent. It's not violent enough that he just
Speaker 3: tore this dead towered head off its body and then
Speaker 3: he's got to force it in her hand. And I
Speaker 3: loved her. I was like her ramping it. That's a
Speaker 3: power move. That was a power move to me. I
Speaker 3: didn't viewed as a sexual thing at all. I viewed
Speaker 3: it as why you want to get crazy with me? Okay,
Speaker 3: I'm still going to remain a lady. I am in
Speaker 3: charge of this situation. You're not the man I thought
Speaker 3: you were. You probably never were, which I thought was
Speaker 3: a great and really heavy line. And it also made
Speaker 3: me wonder like how was he before all those Like
Speaker 3: how was he? I got to read the book, but
Speaker 3: do you really get that? I actually sent she both
Speaker 3: have read the book. Do you get a sense of
Speaker 3: who he was before he got into cock fighting in
Speaker 3: the book or is it just pretty much you're end
Speaker 3: too the cock fighting journey. He talked tor and he drank.
Speaker 5: He makes him mention that the very beginning and the
Speaker 5: voiceover and it's so close to the beginning of the
Speaker 5: movie that I think it's all almost in danger of
Speaker 5: being not heard, where he says something like I got
Speaker 5: into race cars and I did this and I did that,
Speaker 5: which of course makes some people think, oh, maybe he
Speaker 5: was gto from two lane Blacktop and this is like
Speaker 5: his punishment for talking too much as gto. Yeah, it's
Speaker 5: like he has tried all of these other things, but
Speaker 5: they didn't have the drive to perfection that he thinks
Speaker 5: that cockfighting has, and that he just knows that if
Speaker 5: you follow the rules and if you train your bird properly,
Speaker 5: then you can win this thing, which it doesn't feel
Speaker 5: like for him at least this is me saying this.
Speaker 5: I don't think that he admires what he considers the
Speaker 5: perfection of this and thinks that if he can do
Speaker 5: the best job, he will get the reward. It's the
Speaker 5: American dream. Basically, it's if you do hard work and
Speaker 5: do everything that you're supposed to, say your prayers before
Speaker 5: you go to bed, brush your teeth, all that stuff,
Speaker 5: you're going to get rewarded. And that's what he thinks,
Speaker 5: and he finally does in this, But even to that point,
Speaker 5: I don't know what he's going to do after, like
Speaker 5: this whole mystery of what was he before and what
Speaker 5: is he going to be after, because after this, I
Speaker 5: don't know if he's gonna bite chickens anymore or if
Speaker 5: he's just going to become a judge. She talks about how, oh,
Speaker 5: you can get paid one hundred and fifty dollars a
Speaker 5: match if you are a set medal winner and they
Speaker 5: call you up to judge at any of these tournaments. Okay, great,
Speaker 5: but is that your life now? Is that how you're
Speaker 5: doing everything? It's I love that it's ambiguous, though, as
Speaker 5: you'll hear in the interview with Kayla Jennis in a
Speaker 5: few minutes that there is mention of Frank Mansfield in
Speaker 5: I Believe Miami Blues and that you find out that
Speaker 5: he ended up getting married later on. I don't know
Speaker 5: if it's with Mary Elizabeth. I think probably not, but yeah,
Speaker 5: it is funny that you hear little Frank's Mansfield and
Speaker 5: that will Efferd will make references. Is that nearly that
Speaker 5: Elmore Leonard connected universe. But you do get a little
Speaker 5: nod here and there to other things.
Speaker 6: But he also used the name Barnice. I know we
Speaker 6: said Bernice a few times in this, but it's in
Speaker 6: the book. It's Berenice is the which is unusual name
Speaker 6: at least sounds that way to me. I don't think
Speaker 6: I've ever met any Baronice. But she's also the name
Speaker 6: of the lead female character in bernd Ora Cherisee. He
Speaker 6: did maybe just have these names that he liked to use.
Speaker 6: And something else that I think of the warn Oates
Speaker 6: and Cockfighter. Frank Mansfield as liked the Chris Cooper character
Speaker 6: and adaptation, this guy who's like obsessive about things and
Speaker 6: he masters them and then he's I'm done with that.
Speaker 6: Fuck fish. I was really into fish, and then I
Speaker 6: decided one day, fuckfish, and I'm moved on the you know,
Speaker 6: the next thing, And that little thing at the beginning
Speaker 6: about the different things he had pursued and had mastered
Speaker 6: and in the book, guitar playing really is part of
Speaker 6: that too, though it's very pretty sure said he goes
Speaker 6: to grade lengths to say he never took a lesson,
Speaker 6: He just picked it up and knew how to play.
Speaker 6: And one of his memoirs, I was looking for a street,
Speaker 6: talking about his formative years, he said that his grandmother
Speaker 6: was a big believer in inherited talents and assumed that
Speaker 6: someday Charles would be able to play the piano because
Speaker 6: his mother had and so she kept the piano in
Speaker 6: the house. He never really had any interest in it,
Speaker 6: but his grandmother really believed that someday he'll just be
Speaker 6: able to sit down and play that piano, not take
Speaker 6: lessons and things like that. But I think that's kind
Speaker 6: of a through line a lot of Wilford's books. He
Speaker 6: has these characters who just have an innate sense, especially
Speaker 6: something artistake or creative. I think of The Woman Chaser,
Speaker 6: where the Richard Hudson character just starts dancing ballet with
Speaker 6: his mother, who's of course a trained ballerina, but he's
Speaker 6: just one day, yeah, I'm gonna do that, and he
Speaker 6: takes up filmmaking, never having been to film school or
Speaker 6: anything like that, and it makes a perfect movie, right
Speaker 6: I think these things are relined in a lot of
Speaker 6: Wilford's stuff, just people with these inborn talents, and they're
Speaker 6: not too interested in explaining that.
Speaker 5: Jamie Figuerreias in the Burt orange Chersee, who paints that
Speaker 5: perfect painting after the master has passed away. Yeah, I
Speaker 5: forgot that I had opened. I wrote a piece about
Speaker 5: Willaford years and years ago, and I opened it with
Speaker 5: a quote for the Bird Orange Chresee, which was Bernice
Speaker 5: and our main character talking and he says, a boy
Speaker 5: who doesn't have a father around doesn't develop a super ego,
Speaker 5: and then she says that's silly. Super ego is only
Speaker 5: a jargon word for conscience, and everybody's got a conscience,
Speaker 5: and he says, have it your way, per nice, and
Speaker 5: I'm like, yeah, not all of these characters that Williford
Speaker 5: writes do have conscience. They can be even Junior. I
Speaker 5: can't remember Junior's last name, but Junior from Miami Blues,
Speaker 5: he had no conscience and just Yea was just out
Speaker 5: for himself. And God, I love that. I loved all
Speaker 5: of these books, and just being able to revisit a
Speaker 5: Cockfighter for this a Cockfighter Journal, I was just tickled
Speaker 5: to be able to read about that. And even inside
Speaker 5: of Cockfighter you've got his personal recollections as Frank Mansfield,
Speaker 5: where he's talking about being in the Philippines and watching
Speaker 5: cockfights over there, and I'm just like, Yeah, that really
Speaker 5: feels like a Woollerford thing, like I think Man's. I
Speaker 5: think Williford and all of his protagonists share a lot
Speaker 5: of DNA, which may be unpleasant or not, but I
Speaker 5: think that. You know, he was a terrific writer and
Speaker 5: wrote about some really twisted characters.
Speaker 3: Man, I know what I'm doing, well, get I need
Speaker 3: to seriously, why haven't I read it? It's ridiculous. What
Speaker 3: a wonderful world we live and we do have access
Speaker 3: to so much great r One can never get bored.
Speaker 3: This is why I don't trust people that are like
Speaker 3: I'm bored. Heck, get bored. There's so much to do,
Speaker 3: there's so much to see.
Speaker 5: And it's so much easier to find his books now
Speaker 5: than it used to be. So many of them have
Speaker 5: come back in print. I just picked up a new
Speaker 5: version of The Machine Ward eleven, which has the oh
Speaker 5: I can't even begin to pronounce the name of it,
Speaker 5: but it's telling fortunes with chickens. So it's a precursor
Speaker 5: to Cockfighter in there. I know it s's with an A,
Speaker 5: but I'm not even going to try to pronounce that word.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Also, this isn't aside, But how amazing was Harrydean
Speaker 3: Stanton's style and this fill his character?
Speaker 5: Those shoes, he wears those two toed shoes because he
Speaker 5: can't make up his mind. He's an ambivalent character, the
Speaker 5: guy that wears the belt in suspenders in Once Upon
Speaker 5: a Time in the West. Yeah, how can I trust
Speaker 5: you if you can't even trust your own damn pants?
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I have been my notes and I don't even know
Speaker 3: what this phrase mean. That just came to me. I
Speaker 3: was like, he's stressed, like at Kentucky pimp. Apparently in
Speaker 3: my brain that's what a Kentucky pip should look like.
Speaker 5: Amazing, He's so good. I love Harry Dean. He is
Speaker 5: just so good. Can you imagine because those guys are
Speaker 5: probably sitting around playing guitar to each other, because war
Speaker 5: notes could play in real life, and of course we
Speaker 5: know Harry Dean could play. Those guys probably just going
Speaker 5: back and forth, trading shots, singing songs. Oh man, oh man.
Speaker 3: I how was there not like a tectonic plate shifted
Speaker 3: with these men being together in the same space. It's amazing. Yeah,
Speaker 3: this is such a cool film. And one thing that
Speaker 3: hits me is there's a line of dialogue about where
Speaker 3: he says the chicken has the brain size of a pee,
Speaker 3: but they know how to fight. They have that instinct.
Speaker 3: And it's because I have, and this may be just
Speaker 3: my own theory, I feel like our species, humanity, we
Speaker 3: have a really bad tendency to we can justify any
Speaker 3: sort of act of cruelty.
Speaker 5: Doesn't mean we should.
Speaker 3: We don't. I'm just the general we obviously, But and
Speaker 3: because it's like these poor animals and this is but
Speaker 3: again it's like coming phillies are not judging the people
Speaker 3: doing it, especially because this also was set in a
Speaker 3: time period where it was we get whiffs that it's
Speaker 3: starting to get illegal in the film, but it's still
Speaker 3: the racist senator. I feel bad for Omar. That's was terrible,
Speaker 3: which means, of course I can easily believe him being
Speaker 3: a senator in real life. He just makes some nasty
Speaker 3: comment about Polish people or Omar's I'm third generation, he's
Speaker 3: had to like I just got off the boat. The
Speaker 3: whole pageantry of a senator and his wife. Everybody does
Speaker 3: it up and it's cockfighting. It's I don't know, it's
Speaker 3: such a bizarre j exaposition. Yeah, that of the two
Speaker 3: tone shoes of Harrding Samton. God bless for.
Speaker 6: As good a cast as it is. I'm delighted that
Speaker 6: Wilford himself held up so well.
Speaker 1: I was.
Speaker 6: I can't believe he didn't do more acting. I did
Speaker 6: watch as Thunder and Lightning because he was in the cast.
Speaker 6: And yeah, it's just the one scene, just a real
Speaker 6: brief jammio. But like she was, was so great in
Speaker 6: that role. And I looked up in the book the
Speaker 6: way the Ed Middleton character is introduced. This is Frank
Speaker 6: Mansfield's inner monologue. He said, Ed Middleton is one of
Speaker 6: my favorite people. He's in his early sixties. If I
Speaker 6: happen to live long enough, I want to be exactly
Speaker 6: like him someday. He's a big man with a big
Speaker 6: voice and a big paunch, except for a bumpy, bulbless
Speaker 6: nose with a few broken blood vessels here and there
Speaker 6: on his bright red surface. His face is smooth and
Speaker 6: white with shiny ligged look of the dog's favorite bone,
Speaker 6: like he's describing him. So that's he wrote Backfighter came
Speaker 6: out the novel in sixty two. The movie didn't come
Speaker 6: out till seventy four, and he was apparently not even
Speaker 6: supposed to be in it. Like cast very late in
Speaker 6: the process. Asked the Ed Meddleton character, and shit, sounds
Speaker 6: like he's describing himself right there. He had that bulbous
Speaker 6: nose with broken blood vessels and the big paunch and
Speaker 6: the big voice. But he's somebody that comes cross very much,
Speaker 6: very likable, very easy to see someone like Frank admiring
Speaker 6: him and wanting to be like that. Was he always
Speaker 6: intending to play this character someday or I don't know,
Speaker 6: but I think a great presence in the film, and
Speaker 6: I wish he'd done more acting.
Speaker 5: I really liked when Frank comes back and you can
Speaker 5: tell Middleton's pissed, like you called me on my bluff.
Speaker 6: I didn't expect you to sell your house.
Speaker 5: Leave him alone, just like he gets mad at his
Speaker 5: wife because he can't get mad of Frank. And by
Speaker 5: the way, the producer I was trying to think of
Speaker 5: is John Davison. We're going to take a break and
Speaker 5: play an interview with Kayla Denise, author of the new
Speaker 5: book Akfight, A Fable of Failure. Right after these brief messages.
Speaker 9: Put on your swim fins, film fans, and take a
Speaker 9: deep breath, because you're about to go on a deep
Speaker 9: dive into cinema with the Deep Dive Film Talk podcast.
Speaker 9: Whether you're a casual viewer or a season cinephile, this
Speaker 9: podcast is your guide to understanding mind bending cinema. Join
Speaker 9: us for deep dives into films that blur the lines
Speaker 9: between reality and fantasy. No film degree required, just an
Speaker 9: open mind and a sense of adventure. Listen now on
Speaker 9: weirding Way Media. Him the sounds to the echos.
Speaker 5: Oh, Kayla Jennings, It is great having you back in
Speaker 5: the projection booth and I'm so excited to talk to
Speaker 5: you about your new book all about cock Fighter. Please
Speaker 5: tell me how did this book project come about? Because
Speaker 5: I know you've been working on it for a long time.
Speaker 8: I became really obsessed with the film back where Anchor
Speaker 8: Bay first put it out on DVD, which would have
Speaker 8: been like two thousand or two thousand and one. They'd
Speaker 8: been doing a bunch of Monte Hellman reissues, and so
Speaker 8: I've become obsessed with the character of Frank Mansfield based
Speaker 8: on the film. So it was before I had read
Speaker 8: the book, but I didn't really decide to start doing
Speaker 8: a book about it until.
Speaker 3: About twenty fifteen.
Speaker 8: And originally the idea just started as it was like
Speaker 8: one of those labels I think it was like God,
Speaker 8: not Midnight Marquis. It was like one of the British
Speaker 8: labels that does the books that are just about one
Speaker 8: movie twenty five pages. Wasn't Devil's Advocates, but it was
Speaker 8: like one of the other ones that Neil Snowden is
Speaker 8: the editor. Anyways, they were doing a call out for
Speaker 8: pitches for their book line, so I said, oh, I
Speaker 8: know a movie I'd want to do a book about
Speaker 8: class fighters, and they rejected it. And partially they may
Speaker 8: reject it because the movies can't screen in the UK,
Speaker 8: and so if you have a UK specific book label
Speaker 8: of classics, they obviously can't say some So I could
Speaker 8: never pitch to the BFI as a BFI classic if
Speaker 8: they're not allowed to even play it there.
Speaker 9: So it was.
Speaker 8: Limited where I could even pitch that idea. But then
Speaker 8: I just realized that if I did get a deal
Speaker 8: like that, I would be stuck with a book that
Speaker 8: had a handful of pictures that was all black and white.
Speaker 8: I would have any control over the paper stock. And
Speaker 8: I'm way too eat. Maybe I'll just do it myself,
Speaker 8: and that way I can just do it however I want.
Speaker 8: And so I didn't try very hard to find another
Speaker 8: publisher for it. I just decided to start working on it,
Speaker 8: and then in twenty sixteen was when I did my
Speaker 8: first interviews for it. Although I had stayed at Monte
Speaker 8: Hellman's Airbnb before I had ever decided to do a
Speaker 8: book of a clockwriter.
Speaker 3: It was like twenty fourteen.
Speaker 8: So when my book Kid Power came out, I was
Speaker 8: in l La promoting that book and I was going
Speaker 8: to be there for nine days and I had to
Speaker 8: stay somewhere. And my friend Donna McCrae had stayed at
Speaker 8: Monty Helman's Airbnb and was raving about it, and I
Speaker 8: was like, oh my god, he has an Airbnb. And
Speaker 8: I looked it up on Airbnb and there it was.
Speaker 3: It was like one picture and he's come stay with me.
Speaker 8: I loved talking about movies with people, and I was like,
Speaker 8: oh my god, this is like a dream. So I
Speaker 8: went and I stayed there and he made me breakfast
Speaker 8: every day. He made me the same breakfast every day.
Speaker 8: I was not allowed to deviate in any way from
Speaker 8: the menu that he had prepared. I wanted scrambled eggs
Speaker 8: instead of fried eggs, and he's like, no, scrambled eggs
Speaker 8: are bad for you.
Speaker 3: You have to eat this.
Speaker 8: I don't know how fride egg is better than I
Speaker 8: scrambled egg but anyways, So it was funny.
Speaker 3: We had his way of doing things.
Speaker 8: He had his routines, and him having these people coming
Speaker 8: through the house as guests work like his social life
Speaker 8: in a way. He didn't seem to go out very much.
Speaker 8: So it was like that was his social life, which
Speaker 8: people come to him. He would talk about.
Speaker 3: Movies except that.
Speaker 8: So I was there and he has this big poster
Speaker 8: of two lank blacktop in the kitchen and he starts
Speaker 8: talking about it somehow, and I said, oh, my favorite
Speaker 8: movie of yours is Cockfighter and he just goes, worst
Speaker 8: picture I ever made?
Speaker 3: And I said, worse than.
Speaker 8: Silent Knight, Deadly Night three, And he says, I liked
Speaker 8: Silent Night, Deadly Night greet Silent Night, Deadly Night.
Speaker 3: I've got to do everything I wanted.
Speaker 8: I got to make the movie I wanted to make,
Speaker 8: whether or not you like it, but I never got
Speaker 8: to dog that.
Speaker 3: There's the script, re visions were stopped.
Speaker 8: I never felt like I really got to finish it,
Speaker 8: and so I just think it's like my worst movie
Speaker 8: because of that. So then after that, it seemed like
Speaker 8: he didn't He was definitely way more quiet around me
Speaker 8: after that because there was another guest staying in the
Speaker 8: house and he would just laughed or all the time,
Speaker 8: and then with me he was really quiet, and I
Speaker 8: felt like he had just lost respect for me or
Speaker 8: gone I had like no taste in movies or something,
Speaker 8: because this was my favorite movie of his, and obviously,
Speaker 8: like I kept trying to wear them down. I was
Speaker 8: there nine more days, and I also interviewed him like
Speaker 8: several times officially, like after that, because I did not
Speaker 8: interview him formally while I was there because I didn't
Speaker 8: yet know I was.
Speaker 3: Going to be doing a book.
Speaker 8: You know, eventually got to the point where, you know,
Speaker 8: my last interview with him, he was just like, it'll
Speaker 8: never be my favorite, and that was as good as
Speaker 8: it was going to get But yeah, so started in
Speaker 8: this backwards way where I became obsessed with the film
Speaker 8: for a long time. I went to clock fites for real,
Speaker 8: I stayed at Manti Hellman's house, and then a couple
Speaker 8: of years after that, then I decided I was going
Speaker 8: to try to do a book about it, and I
Speaker 8: was also losing people a lot while the book was
Speaker 8: being written. It took me so long to write because
Speaker 8: I work full time and I'm working on all those
Speaker 8: other things, and so if there's nobody like paying you
Speaker 8: to view something, it's really hard to prioritize it. But
Speaker 8: it always ends up being the last priority. So yeah,
Speaker 8: so I was losing people. People were away that worked
Speaker 8: on the film. Carried Dean Stanton died like a month
Speaker 8: before I was supposed to interview him, Like I was
Speaker 8: coming to LA to interview him and they died like
Speaker 8: a month before, So stuff like that. And then one
Speaker 8: of the casting agents, John Phillips, like he didn't want
Speaker 8: to do an interview. He's like many people I found
Speaker 8: just didn't like the movie, like people who worked on
Speaker 8: it and didn't want to talk about it. And I
Speaker 8: couldn't get a whole lot of elaboration as to why,
Speaker 8: whether it was like because of the clock fighting or what.
Speaker 8: But Don Phillips, the casting agent, was also like Michael
Speaker 8: Chinnitch and John Phillips both cast it together, and they
Speaker 8: both had nothing to say about it. They were just
Speaker 8: like least favorite movie of anything I worked on. When
Speaker 8: they went on to do like Fast Times and John
Speaker 8: Hughes movies and all kinds of stuff like I think
Speaker 8: the Days in confused. Why of them did too so
Speaker 8: much bigger things, much bigger and more important things than
Speaker 8: what they considered Clockwriter to be. But anyway, so yeah,
Speaker 8: so that's like how it all happened.
Speaker 5: When I love the way that you structure the book
Speaker 5: and the way that you sectioned off into so many
Speaker 5: of the people that were behind it, the actual sport
Speaker 5: of cockfighting. You go into so much detail on that
Speaker 5: that I never would have known otherwise it was super educational.
Speaker 8: Well that's great because their eyes actually so much more
Speaker 8: detail that I could have gone into. It was just
Speaker 8: getting bought down with like too much detail. So I
Speaker 8: kept in enough so that people could get a sense
Speaker 8: of what some of the things were called and what
Speaker 8: the rationale was behind certain things. But then also what's
Speaker 8: really important I think the story of Cockwriters book and
Speaker 8: the film is the kind of history of the sport
Speaker 8: and the way that history is still held up by
Speaker 8: a lot of the people that participate in it as
Speaker 8: like an important connection they have to their past.
Speaker 5: Well then also just the idea of the Southern Gothic
Speaker 5: in how does cock fighting play into Southern culture, And
Speaker 5: even when you get into the role of women and cockfighting,
Speaker 5: or the role of African Americans and cockfighting, it just
Speaker 5: you dig so deep and have taught me so much
Speaker 5: more about that than I ever knew. I thought I
Speaker 5: needed to.
Speaker 8: Know, probably more than you needed to know. But yet
Speaker 8: obviously the thing about women is super interesting to me
Speaker 8: because it was like, because being a woman having bonte
Speaker 8: cock fights, I experienced the thing of being a rarity
Speaker 8: in the audience. Like there's a lot of women at
Speaker 8: cock fights, but they are working at cock fights. They're
Speaker 8: working at the concession stands, they're working at the ticket booth,
Speaker 8: they're working at the merch tables. So there's like all
Speaker 8: the kinds of women that are put to work in
Speaker 8: the cock fighting world, but there weren't a whole ton
Speaker 8: of them just sitting there and enjoying the sport or
Speaker 8: making bets or whatever. That said, the audiences were relatively
Speaker 8: diverse in terms of ages classes. There was one fight
Speaker 8: I saw where it was like kid, like a little kid,
Speaker 8: and then like his dad and then the grandpa all
Speaker 8: fought the same day, and the little kid was like
Speaker 8: I don't know, maybe twelve at the most, and it
Speaker 8: was like this whole family talk writers. But yeah, the
Speaker 8: thing about women was just important to me because in
Speaker 8: the book and in the movie, and actually in Charles
Speaker 8: Wilford's books, Like I have not read every book that
Speaker 8: he wrote, but I've probably read like twenty of his
Speaker 8: books now, and.
Speaker 3: Women are just like an annoyance. They're just like in.
Speaker 8: The way nagging or annoying the men. And obviously in
Speaker 8: the film they probably directed by that a bit by
Speaker 8: adding a bit more character from Mary Elizabeth, like making
Speaker 8: her a little bit more sassy than she is in
Speaker 8: the book and stuff and giving her a little bit
Speaker 8: of humor and stuff. But overall it was like, yeah,
Speaker 8: I just was interesting did in this kind of absence
Speaker 8: and curious about whether that reflected the real clock fighting world.
Speaker 3: And then of.
Speaker 8: Course through researching that, I found that so many of
Speaker 8: the editors of the cock fighting magazines were all women,
Speaker 8: so that was super interesting. So I feel like in
Speaker 8: the future that's something I actually want to look into more.
Speaker 8: I want to do a bit more to document these
Speaker 8: women's careers.
Speaker 5: It makes total sense that there's a magazine dedicated to cockfighting,
Speaker 5: or there was, but it just never even crossed my radar.
Speaker 5: I was like, what, there was a magazine dedicated.
Speaker 8: Yeah, there's several. Wow, there's like a Feathered Warrior, Britt
Speaker 8: and Steel the game Cock. Those are the three I
Speaker 8: know of. There's probably more, but.
Speaker 5: Well, and speaking of people that we lost along the way,
Speaker 5: it was great to read Roger Corman and some of
Speaker 5: his thoughts about the movie and his history with it
Speaker 5: as well. That was delightful.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I took Roger was super helpful. I would say
Speaker 8: I interviewed Roger, I would email him and whenever I
Speaker 8: just had odd questions. So there are lots of times
Speaker 8: where it wasn't even like a formal interview. It just
Speaker 8: some question that I didn't have the answer to, So
Speaker 8: I would send an email to his assistant or whatever
Speaker 8: I didn't have his email, and then his assistant would
Speaker 8: get back to me. With the answers and stuff. So
Speaker 8: he was just helpful along the way, and you could
Speaker 8: tell that he was, like, despite the fact that the
Speaker 8: movie flopped and that it's famously the only movie he
Speaker 8: ever lost money on and stuff like that, you could
Speaker 8: tell liked the movie a lot and thought it was
Speaker 8: a good movie and that he thought it was shane
Speaker 8: that it never hit, not financially, not because he was oh,
Speaker 8: I wish it made money. Yes, I'm sure he wished
Speaker 8: it made money, but he just thought it was a
Speaker 8: shame that it was a good movie that just didn't
Speaker 8: find its audience, and so he was really supportive. But
Speaker 8: anything that would celebrate popfire, so that was great.
Speaker 5: And the ways that he tried to save it by
Speaker 5: having it retaught, or the trailers and the titles and
Speaker 5: what you had four different titles it was under at one.
Speaker 8: Point, yeah, well it had so it was like Cockfighter
Speaker 8: and then it was. So it's interesting because he claims
Speaker 8: these titles were never actually officially used, but there are
Speaker 8: ads that show the titles of Wild Drifter and Gambling
Speaker 8: Men in some of the different regions, So he thinks
Speaker 8: that those titles were just like tested serve like they
Speaker 8: surveyed people asking which title do you think is better,
Speaker 8: and he thought that those titles were never actually used
Speaker 8: on the prints or anything, but apparently they were like
Speaker 8: occasionally on some prints a few months after it was
Speaker 8: released as Cockfighter, and then Born to Kill was the
Speaker 8: title that stuck, and that one came into use. I
Speaker 8: think it was March of the next year. So it
Speaker 8: was like they talk about it anecdotally, like when you're
Speaker 8: interviewing people, their timelines are really shaky. They'll talk about
Speaker 8: something like it was immediate or a long time ago
Speaker 8: or whatever, but it's actually the opposite sometimes, so I
Speaker 8: think when they tell a story anecdotally, it's like Cockfire flop.
Speaker 8: We knew on the Friday it was failure. By Monday
Speaker 8: we had a whole new campaign and it was Born
Speaker 8: to Kill whatever it's no. Five months later it was
Speaker 8: Born to Yes, I'm sure they knew right away that
Speaker 8: it was going a flop, but the new ad campaign
Speaker 8: was not in place the next week. It was like
Speaker 8: many months later, and it did do better as Born
Speaker 8: to Kill, but not, as Roger said, not appreciately.
Speaker 5: So I know you spent a lot of years working
Speaker 5: on this. It also sounds like you put a lot
Speaker 5: of miles on your car or on your frequent flyers
Speaker 5: to go around in all these different places too.
Speaker 8: Now I'm like, I do everything to get the miles.
Speaker 8: I could never figure out. I'm like, how do people
Speaker 8: get these like free flights everywhere, air miles loyal always
Speaker 8: to the same airline because I was like, I just
Speaker 8: go expedient and buy whatever is the cheapest usually, and
Speaker 8: you can't rack up.
Speaker 3: Them miles that way.
Speaker 8: So anyway, No, I did not get any benefit from
Speaker 8: traveling around, but I did travel a lot, Like I
Speaker 8: went to Charles Wilfrid's archive several times, which is amazing.
Speaker 3: It's just amazing.
Speaker 8: When you go into any archive like that, you're just like,
Speaker 8: oh my God, Like it's you're so grateful that people
Speaker 8: take care to document this stuff and just keep it
Speaker 8: because some little thing that like two people in the
Speaker 8: world are going to care about. It's that's the thing
Speaker 8: that has all the answers or whatever. And whenever you
Speaker 8: go into an archive, you appreciate like how shitty Google
Speaker 8: search are. But you're just like people who rely on
Speaker 8: Google searches to do all their research for everything, And
Speaker 8: then you're like, oh my God like when you Yeah,
Speaker 8: it's like when you're actually handling these like old documents
Speaker 8: and manuscripts and be able to see. Within the case
Speaker 8: of Charles Wilfert, his not only revisions to the script
Speaker 8: and stuff, but also earlier short stories where he has
Speaker 8: the character of Frank Mansfield and he's like trying to
Speaker 8: work out what he wants to did with this character.
Speaker 8: And then also his step son, Stephen Hooker, wrote some
Speaker 8: songs for Copwriter because in the book of Pock Fighter,
Speaker 8: he has this whole detour where he's trying to raise
Speaker 8: money and he's playing the guitar in the nightclub and
Speaker 8: he has these three songs and they're like the only
Speaker 8: songs he knows. He's made up these songs himself, and
Speaker 8: he just plays the same songs over and over again.
Speaker 8: And his step son actually wrote song of these songs
Speaker 8: and they have the recordings of them in this archive.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 8: So I was actually gonna ask him for permission to
Speaker 8: see if I could give them to you for your podcast.
Speaker 5: Oh, that would be amazing.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 8: So he feels like he's embarrassed of them, like they're
Speaker 8: really amateurish and whatever, because I had asked him could
Speaker 8: I give it to somebody who's like a press scoop
Speaker 8: or something, and he's like, I don't know so, but
Speaker 8: maybe he would allow it for the podcast or something.
Speaker 8: But he said Charles Wilford actually wrote the lyrics, because
Speaker 8: they do have lyrics, because the idea is that these
Speaker 8: songs were written by Frank Book four G had his
Speaker 8: Bow of Silence, and there's both there's lyric versions and
Speaker 8: instrumental versions. But yeah, it's just it's so interesting because
Speaker 8: there's so much world building happening that you can see
Speaker 8: in the archive, and it goes even as cock leg
Speaker 8: just the other references, like in the book The Shark
Speaker 8: Infested Custard, the very opening conversation is a conversation with
Speaker 8: these four guys sitting around talking about two lang blacked right,
Speaker 8: and it's clearly a reference to this experience that Charles
Speaker 8: Wilford had. I also feel like, I don't know if
Speaker 8: have you read that book arts that scene. When I
Speaker 8: was reading it, I kept thinking, I don't want this
Speaker 8: just reminds me so much of the scene at the
Speaker 8: beginning of Depth Crew of the Women's and around talking
Speaker 8: about like vanishing point or whatever. I was like that
Speaker 8: scene in depth group just seems like this scene. I
Speaker 8: was like, I wonder if scared you know, read this
Speaker 8: and then wrote that see based on it. But there's
Speaker 8: my point is just that Charles Wilford had all these
Speaker 8: connections all throughout his career before Clockwriter and after Clockwriter,
Speaker 8: like linking to it, and so I just found that
Speaker 8: that was my very last afterward in my book is
Speaker 8: called clock Fighter Aspires to Endlessness, And it's partially because
Speaker 8: of that, and partially that's a tribute to Monty in
Speaker 8: the sense it's a riff on a line from Sigfried
Speaker 8: crack Hour's Theory of Film is like a chapter that's
Speaker 8: called something like that, not a boat clock. But yeah,
Speaker 8: so I felt like the world building that Wilford was
Speaker 8: doing was really interesting. And then also just the fact
Speaker 8: this is a spoiler, so you may want to cut
Speaker 8: it out, but just the fact that in Miami Blues
Speaker 8: at the very end she marries Frank Mansfield. It's just
Speaker 8: little things like that that are like really interesting.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you're talking to the other person who would love
Speaker 5: to go to the Wiliford archives. So I that's definitely
Speaker 5: now on my bucket list is to make my way
Speaker 5: down there.
Speaker 8: Yeah, they even have a copy of the books that
Speaker 8: was I can't remember. I think it was side Swipe,
Speaker 8: and it was like somebody bought a hardcover of Sideswipe
Speaker 8: and thought they hated it so much they got it
Speaker 8: like six times and they sent it back to him
Speaker 8: with a note saying, this is what I think of
Speaker 8: your shitty book. And that's in the archive, the book
Speaker 8: that they'll shot.
Speaker 5: Up, and you get to talk to Betsy as well.
Speaker 8: Oh yeah, Betsy was like the hero of this project
Speaker 8: to me. She saved me from despair at the last moment.
Speaker 8: She gave me access to use the stuff from the archive.
Speaker 8: Because obviously if you read other books about Monty Hellman,
Speaker 8: they will reference these documents, Like Charles Tatum has a
Speaker 8: book like in French where he references some of the
Speaker 8: letters for Our New World and stuff like that, but
Speaker 8: he doesn't show them. He just like references them, and
Speaker 8: I think at one point he types out like what
Speaker 8: one of.
Speaker 3: The letters says.
Speaker 8: But she let me actually use the letters and print
Speaker 8: them in the book, which I also thought was important
Speaker 8: because you get to see what thoughtful notes Roger Forman
Speaker 8: gives because whether it's him or his assistant Francis dole Or,
Speaker 8: who was known as Francis Kimbro at the time. So
Speaker 8: in some cases it's Roger giving the notes, in other
Speaker 8: cases it's Francis giving the notes, but obviously in consultation
Speaker 8: with Roger. But they give such thoughtful and respectful notes
Speaker 8: to Charles Wilford about ways that you can work on
Speaker 8: the script, and I just feel you don't get that
Speaker 8: from studio executives and stuff and agents and producer. Everybody
Speaker 8: just gives such crappy, thoughtless, clueless notes now, and so
Speaker 8: I thought it was really important to print those letters
Speaker 8: in full and have people see what kind of a
Speaker 8: creative producer Roger Corman was. That he was not just
Speaker 8: a money minded producer, even though he obviously had skills
Speaker 8: with money and was very good at business. But he
Speaker 8: was kind of rare mix of somebody who was both.
Speaker 8: He was like an incredibly creative and intellectual person but
Speaker 8: also very good with money and business, so he really
Speaker 8: was like a unique individual.
Speaker 2: Well, it was great.
Speaker 5: Too that you were able to print a couple pages
Speaker 5: from the script as well and show some of the
Speaker 5: stuff that had been cut out.
Speaker 8: That to me was like the other thing going to
Speaker 8: the archive was finding first of all, the earliest versions
Speaker 8: of the script where it still has the character of
Speaker 8: Bear Nice in it, so that was an important thing.
Speaker 8: But then the fact that there were these two identical
Speaker 8: scripts and the only difference was on one of them.
Speaker 8: They're like an additional two pages with this alterprinate ending
Speaker 8: that is clearly more of an exploitation film ending. And
Speaker 8: I was like, wow, I've never even heard of this ending.
Speaker 8: And I didn't know if he ever showed it to
Speaker 8: Rodrick Buurman. I didn't know if he offered it as
Speaker 8: an option of a more traditional exploitation film ending or what,
Speaker 8: but either way, it was there in the archive, and
Speaker 8: I was like, this is really cool, So Betsy, let
Speaker 8: me use it. And then the other thing she was
Speaker 8: happy that I wanted to use was the letter from
Speaker 8: Kate Millet, the postcard from Kate Millet, who, for people
Speaker 8: who don't know it, was like a rock star feminist
Speaker 8: in the early seventies and she was like a household
Speaker 8: name at the time, and Charles Wilford wrote for a
Speaker 8: letter saying that he wanted to send her his new book,
Speaker 8: and he had this theory that women were raping men
Speaker 8: with foods. Obviously, I go into detail about that in
Speaker 8: the book. But then she just wrote him back this
Speaker 8: like funny letter saying keep meeting. And I just thought
Speaker 8: that was so funny that he would send a letter
Speaker 8: to Kate Mirllett. It's like radical feminist. But yeah, so
Speaker 8: Betsy is great. I'm pretty sure you've spoken to Betsy
Speaker 8: before too. I think you were the one that was
Speaker 8: really saying you should really get in touch with Betsy,
Speaker 8: and I was like really intimidated to at first, but
Speaker 8: then when I talked to her, she was just so amazing,
Speaker 8: and she's so funny. She's you can tell she has
Speaker 8: this kind of like straight based humor, like really fighting humor.
Speaker 8: They must have been quite a pair together. But yeah,
Speaker 8: so she really helped out a ton with the book,
Speaker 8: which was awesome.
Speaker 5: It was nice to read some of the New World guys,
Speaker 5: they Parkish and Dante and t those guys just superstars
Speaker 5: and just their role in the making up the campaigns
Speaker 5: or the editing in the film. Wonderful to read some
Speaker 5: of those stories, especially the Arkish and Dante's stuff. They
Speaker 5: must have been together right when you're interviewing them, because
Speaker 5: comedy team.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, that's what it was like. That was the
Speaker 8: first section of the book that really had a world
Speaker 8: history element to it because I didn't go in like
Speaker 8: bamily back and forth between them, and then I ended
Speaker 8: up doing that a little bit in earlier parts of
Speaker 8: the book just to balance it out were but yeah,
Speaker 8: it was really great talk. Whenever you've interviewed people together,
Speaker 8: it's fun because they just make they make each other last,
Speaker 8: and they make each other remember stuff, and yeah, so
Speaker 8: that was like super fun.
Speaker 3: They clearly had.
Speaker 8: So much fun in those days, like editing the trailers
Speaker 8: and coming up with the marketing campaigns with John Davison
Speaker 8: and stuff. So yeah, it was a real thrill getting
Speaker 8: to talk to the people who were involved in the
Speaker 8: kind of post production release of the film. The harder part,
Speaker 8: obviously was the set the making of the film. Trying
Speaker 8: to find every because so many people had died who
Speaker 8: were on the who were in the film, or had
Speaker 8: important roles on the film, that like trying to bring
Speaker 8: that to life was a challenge, and luckily I had
Speaker 8: a couple of people who had very good memories of
Speaker 8: a lot of stuff, namely production manager Peter Kornberg and
Speaker 8: John Wall who was like the first steady, so they
Speaker 8: remembered stuff really well. But yeah, that was like and
Speaker 8: then at the very last minute, I got the interview
Speaker 8: with Earl mac roush. That was insane because I'd been
Speaker 8: trying to reach him for five years. And then the
Speaker 8: book was supposed to go to print. This is like
Speaker 8: a miracle. Okay, So the book is supposed to go
Speaker 8: to print on Tuesday night because on Wednesday morning, my
Speaker 8: designers leaving town on a victation. So he's about to
Speaker 8: deliver the files to the printer and then he realizes,
Speaker 8: oh shit, something went wrong with all the footnotes and like,
Speaker 8: what do you mean? He's like, all the footnotes have
Speaker 8: gone totally out of order. I was like what and
Speaker 8: he was like, and I have to leave. I don't
Speaker 8: have time to Pikes, like I have to get on plane.
Speaker 8: And I was like, oh my god, like we're going
Speaker 8: to miss our printed line. And I already had Fantasia
Speaker 8: set up to do a screening there, so I was like,
Speaker 8: there's no way, We're just that's it. Book's not gonna
Speaker 8: be ready time. I'm gonna have to cancel the event.
Speaker 8: And so I contacted the printer. I let them know
Speaker 8: the book wouldn't be in until the next week after
Speaker 8: the guy got back, and so I was super bummed out.
Speaker 8: I'm just thinking, God, I can't believe, like stupid footnotes
Speaker 8: are making me miss my own book launch. So I
Speaker 8: wake up the next morning, I'm all bummed out. The
Speaker 8: first thing I get is this, like, hang on my
Speaker 8: phone and it's Earl Rowse. It's his nickname is Mac.
Speaker 8: I've just been reading it so long that I always
Speaker 8: say Earl my grouse, but anyway, it's him, and he's
Speaker 8: just like I heard, He've been trying to reach me.
Speaker 8: And I was like, oh my god. It was like
Speaker 8: and so if the book had gone to print when
Speaker 8: it was supposed to.
Speaker 3: It would have that interview in it.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 8: So it was like, I said, can you do an
Speaker 8: interview like in the next two days and he was
Speaker 8: like yes. So we did it and I got it
Speaker 8: in the book and it was yes. And to me,
Speaker 8: it was great because it cleared up so many questions
Speaker 8: I had about the script revisions, because I had heard
Speaker 8: from both frien Ancest Dole and Monty Hellman that Mac
Speaker 8: had done revisions on the script, but nobody could remember
Speaker 8: what revisions he had done or when he had done
Speaker 8: the revisions, like what the timeline was, and the way
Speaker 8: that Francis spoke about it was almost as though they
Speaker 8: were on set at the same time, in different hotel rooms,
Speaker 8: working on different scripts. So there were so many questions
Speaker 8: I had, and Monty even remember, especially as it got
Speaker 8: to the point where as I got closer to the
Speaker 8: end of the book and as he got older, and
Speaker 8: he'd also had like an accident at some point and
Speaker 8: had some brain surgery and stuff. But it was like,
Speaker 8: as you're getting closer finishing a book, is when you
Speaker 8: start getting more and more detailed things that you need.
Speaker 8: You start off asking these broad, generic questions and then
Speaker 8: it just gets more and more detailed as you go along.
Speaker 8: So by the time I was getting into the real
Speaker 8: nitty gritty of stuff, Monty was not capable of answering
Speaker 8: those questions. We just didn't remember enough anymore. Oh, there
Speaker 8: was a lot of vague stuff originally in that chapter
Speaker 8: about what girl mac Rouse may or may not have written,
Speaker 8: And then thankfully I got that interview and it just
Speaker 8: cleared up everything, including like this speech that Mary Elizabeth has,
Speaker 8: and I said, I think you wrote this speech that
Speaker 8: she has by the Lake with war notes, and he
Speaker 8: was like, I don't know, it doesn't sound familiar, and
Speaker 8: I said, I'm positive. I just feel positive he wrote
Speaker 8: it because, like I read one of his books. He
Speaker 8: wrote this book called Arkansas Audios, which I've read, and
Speaker 8: I was like it, First of all, it sounds like
Speaker 8: the writer of that book wrote this anctim. And second
Speaker 8: of all, Charles Wolford has never given a monologue to
Speaker 8: a woman like in any of the books I've read,
Speaker 8: so it just seems like it'd be out of character
Speaker 8: for her to have this funny monologue. And so he's like,
Speaker 8: what is the story against So I transcribed the story
Speaker 8: from the film, and then he wrote back and oh
Speaker 8: my god, he literally wrote, OMG, he is not only
Speaker 8: did I write that it's a true story.
Speaker 3: Oh wow, that happened to somebody I went to high
Speaker 3: school with.
Speaker 8: I've told that story a million times.
Speaker 3: I don't know why I didn't when you first mentioned it.
Speaker 8: That was great. I felt very validated by having doubt
Speaker 8: he had written that. But yeah, so it was like
Speaker 8: it was an adventure. It's the first time I've done
Speaker 8: a book project that that really required the memories of
Speaker 8: other people for it to work. Obviously, House of Psychotic
Speaker 8: Women is so personal that it's really just stated from
Speaker 8: the outset, this is just how I remember things. Whether
Speaker 8: it's true or not, it doesn't matter, because this is
Speaker 8: how I remember it. It's based on my own memories
Speaker 8: and my own perspective, my own take on things. But
Speaker 8: when you're doing the book like this, you're dealing with
Speaker 8: other people's lives, like experiences they had that you are
Speaker 8: just recording on based on this disparate information coming in
Speaker 8: from different sources, some of which does not coear with
Speaker 8: each other. And so I still am the terror that
Speaker 8: it's full of things that are just wrong.
Speaker 3: For people who are going to be like, that's not
Speaker 3: what I meant or whatever.
Speaker 8: But I worked on it for eight years and I
Speaker 8: feel like fit my all.
Speaker 5: You mentioned the design and the design of the book
Speaker 5: is beautiful. It just looks so good.
Speaker 8: Yeah, So Luke Insect designed it. He also did the
Speaker 8: FOLKR box set that I did with Severn. He also
Speaker 8: did the Black A menu of the box set, and
Speaker 8: he did the Warped and Faded book that I edited
Speaker 8: about the American genre film arc On And he's like
Speaker 8: a really versatile designer. But he loves psychedelic stuff. And
Speaker 8: I also really like the kind of overlay effects and
Speaker 8: registration being off from the images and stuff like this.
Speaker 8: So there's like a certain place where our tastes neat.
Speaker 8: And I also knew that doing an entire book about
Speaker 8: one movie fair use of images becomes a problem. Like
Speaker 8: when I'm doing a book like House of Psychotic Women
Speaker 8: and i have three hundred movies in it, and I'm
Speaker 8: only using one picture from each movie, nobody's really going
Speaker 8: to freak out about that. But if you're doing the
Speaker 8: entire book about one movie and every picture in that
Speaker 8: book is from that movie, that's pushing the limits of
Speaker 8: fair use. You can't get away with that. So I
Speaker 8: had to think of some other way to illustrate a
Speaker 8: book without totally abusing the fair use thing. And like
Speaker 8: cock fighter images, so it's full of other images that
Speaker 8: are not from cockwriter, that are like more like atmospheric
Speaker 8: images are related somehow to the subject matter that's being
Speaker 8: talked about. But I also like every image is manipulated
Speaker 8: in some way, so they're not They're usually not just
Speaker 8: stills from clockwriter or post or strong clockwriter. There's usually
Speaker 8: two or three images like overlaid, like interplaying with each other.
Speaker 8: And so part of that design was like a practical
Speaker 8: consideration because in fair use, part of fair use is
Speaker 8: that if people want to sue you, they have to
Speaker 8: prove that you've somehow I pinned on their ability to
Speaker 8: commercially exploit that thing. So if I was to do
Speaker 8: this beautiful book all about cock Fighter and every picture
Speaker 8: is like a perfect reproduction of a still from Cockfighter,
Speaker 8: that would prevent like Shout Factory who now owns it,
Speaker 8: to make their own book about cock Fighter that's full
Speaker 8: of images, Whereas a book like this, where there's three
Speaker 8: images jumbled up together in one, it does not prevent
Speaker 8: them from doing like a coffee table book of all
Speaker 8: these beautifully pristine stills from the movie. So it's just,
Speaker 8: you know, it doesn't guarantee anything, but it's just one
Speaker 8: of the considerations I had to not abuse it. And
Speaker 8: then in the meantime, those kinds of challenges lead you
Speaker 8: to make creative decisions that ultimately make the book stand
Speaker 8: out more.
Speaker 5: You mentioned the screening up in Fantasia. How did that
Speaker 5: go and how do audiences react to Cockfighter in twenty
Speaker 5: twenty four?
Speaker 8: There was everally people that came out were like, there
Speaker 8: was a lot of clockwiting, but other people found it
Speaker 8: really interesting, and I don't know how much like my
Speaker 8: I read the introduction to my book before the screening,
Speaker 8: and so I did have a lot of people that
Speaker 8: said they were glad I did that because it just
Speaker 8: put them in the right mind frame to appreciate things
Speaker 8: about the film. Because the thing is, if you go
Speaker 8: into the film and you're just focused on how upsetting
Speaker 8: the cock fighting is, you miss everything else. If you're
Speaker 8: just focused on that, oh, this is awful, this is awful,
Speaker 8: I don't want to see this, then you're not paying
Speaker 8: attention to everything else in the movie, because that's overpowering you.
Speaker 8: So hopefully my introduction helped to diffuse that a little
Speaker 8: all bit, so that they knew other things that they
Speaker 8: should be looking out for with the characters and stuff
Speaker 8: like that. For the most part, people seemed to at
Speaker 8: the very least respect it when they came out. Nobody
Speaker 8: was outraged. Nobody was like I'm going to go all
Speaker 8: the SPCA and report you guys playing this movie or anything, which,
Speaker 8: like every theater I contacted about doing a book launch,
Speaker 8: like many of them asked me They're like, do you
Speaker 8: start protests. I was like, oh god, I don't even
Speaker 8: think about that. I mean maybe, but the movie's so
Speaker 8: old those chickens are they would be dead either way now, right.
Speaker 8: But also, I don't know. It is interesting it really
Speaker 8: only plays in the context of Monty Helman retrospective and
Speaker 8: so you typically don't have the word clupfighter on the
Speaker 8: marquee of the theater. It's Monty Helman retrospective, so nobody.
Speaker 8: It's not going to trigger those people who are like
Speaker 8: gonna get upset about it because it's couched inside this
Speaker 8: larger retrospective. Because it doesn't actually play on it's all
Speaker 8: not often very many places. The Maid Fair in Ottawa
Speaker 8: I think has actually played it because Lee Demarb, who
Speaker 8: runs that theater, has his own print of it. So
Speaker 8: there are these collector prints out there, and so some
Speaker 8: of those people I think have played it occasionally. But yeah,
Speaker 8: it does. It's pretty underplay. But I guess lots of
Speaker 8: Monte Hellman's movies are other than t Lang Blacktop.
Speaker 5: It's not like you go see Iguana on a retro screening.
Speaker 8: Yeah, but even like China nine Liberty thirty seven, which
Speaker 8: is another film of his people really love but you
Speaker 8: never see that anywhere. But yeah, I guess the shooting
Speaker 8: right in the Whirlwind to Lang Blacktop, those are the
Speaker 8: ones that get played the most.
Speaker 5: Nine years later, books finally out. What's next for you?
Speaker 5: You are like the busiest person that I know. You
Speaker 5: put me to shame when it comes to your projects.
Speaker 8: That's funny because I always think that about Can Ellinger
Speaker 8: and Alexandra Heller Nicholas.
Speaker 3: I'm like, oh my god, they do so much. I
Speaker 3: feel like a.
Speaker 8: Slob sitting here doing nothing. But yeah, so I am
Speaker 8: working on a couple more box sets per several and
Speaker 8: I have two more box sets that are supposed to
Speaker 8: come out this year that are pretty much finished. They're
Speaker 8: just like in the last touches of qcing and manufacturing
Speaker 8: problems and whatever, but my work on them is pretty
Speaker 8: much done. And then on a script, like an actual
Speaker 8: narrative script for an unannounced project. And then I have
Speaker 8: the Severn options, the book Killing for Culture, the Dave
Speaker 8: Correcus and David Slater, their book that came out in
Speaker 8: the nineties, which is like kind of the seminal book
Speaker 8: studying Mondo film and snuff film and death film and
Speaker 8: stuff like this, and so we optioned it to make
Speaker 8: a documentary and that's going to be my next documentary
Speaker 8: that I make, And it's still a couple of years
Speaker 8: away because there's a lot of research and reading and
Speaker 8: everything I want to do aside from that book. It's
Speaker 8: not going to be just like a straight adaptation of
Speaker 8: that book. It's going to be focused on what would
Speaker 8: I want to focus on from that book, and then
Speaker 8: a bunch of stuff that's just interviewing different people, so
Speaker 8: I won't be like just data corrects and David Slater
Speaker 8: and their book. What's going to be using that as
Speaker 8: like the center, but then building around it. And partially
Speaker 8: it's such a grim topic that it has to be
Speaker 8: a movie people would want to watch. It's going from
Speaker 8: the Woodland Stark and Days Bewitched, which has a hopeful ending,
Speaker 8: but it's got a lot of harsh imagery, but it
Speaker 8: has a lot of beautiful imagery, no, and it ends
Speaker 8: on a relatively uplifting note about people being connected and
Speaker 8: stuff like this, And then I feel like, then going
Speaker 8: from that to killing for culture is about snot films.
Speaker 8: Is the challenge just to make a film that can
Speaker 8: resonate with people in the same way day, and it's like,
Speaker 8: how do you do that when the subject matter is
Speaker 8: so grim and aesthetically that films are so grim. So
Speaker 8: that's one of the things I'm trying to play with
Speaker 8: is the esthetics a lot.
Speaker 3: And yeah, there's.
Speaker 8: Like certain things about it that it's like too early
Speaker 8: to talk about, but there's definitely like an angle that
Speaker 8: I'm taking that I think will make it interesting for
Speaker 8: the average person. Obviously, there's people who love death films
Speaker 8: and Wondo films and snap films who would watch it
Speaker 8: no matter what, But I do want it to be
Speaker 8: able to play for a person who isn't like a
Speaker 8: collector of that kind of material. So that's the next
Speaker 8: big thing I'm working on. I also have this book
Speaker 8: that I've been editing forever. It's like the cock Writer book.
Speaker 8: It's been like a real albatross, which is my book
Speaker 8: about Robert Downey Senors films, and so that's an anthology
Speaker 8: book and my friend Clint Ends and I started putting
Speaker 8: it together and like gone. I think it was right
Speaker 8: around the same time as I started thinking about Cockwriters,
Speaker 8: so it was like twenty fifteen, and at first we
Speaker 8: were having trouble.
Speaker 3: We just it's like the only book where.
Speaker 8: I've had trouble getting people to write the chapters. Like
Speaker 8: when we first started hitting people up, there was a
Speaker 8: lot of people who felt that they didn't know his
Speaker 8: catalog well enough, you know, like they'd see one movie
Speaker 8: of his and they're like, actually, I don't really know
Speaker 8: films that well. Or a lot of people who are
Speaker 8: like they didn't know how to read his films. They
Speaker 8: were like, I don't know how to understand the humor
Speaker 8: in his film. And then there was like people who
Speaker 8: had written extensively about his films. Many of those people
Speaker 8: didn't want to write extensively again, you know, they're like
Speaker 8: I already did that. So yeah, so that's been like
Speaker 8: a real challenge. And so we have I would say
Speaker 8: ninety percent of a book, but I'm not one hundred
Speaker 8: percent happy with it, and so it keeps being delayed
Speaker 8: as I'm trying to find these missing pieces that'll make
Speaker 8: me happy and make me feel like, Okay, this is
Speaker 8: enough strong material. And then the other thing too, is
Speaker 8: again dealing with similar with the cop Writer book, is
Speaker 8: how do you illustrate it when it's all one person's ip.
Speaker 8: So trying to find a creative way to do that
Speaker 8: while still being respectful. And the thing too, is, like
Speaker 8: my book is, it's a pretty much SEMII academic of essays,
Speaker 8: so it's not the final word. It's not a biography,
Speaker 8: nothing like that. So there's absolutely room for more studies
Speaker 8: of Robert Downey Senior after this book comes out. So
Speaker 8: I definitely don't want to do anything that makes people
Speaker 8: feel like, oh, I can't do my book now or whatever.
Speaker 8: I definitely want it to be just one of the
Speaker 8: first because to me, his work is so rich and
Speaker 8: deserving of analysis, even though he's so against his films
Speaker 8: being analyzed, but he really deserves it. His work deserves it,
Speaker 8: and so I feel like there should be five books
Speaker 8: about his work, and the fact that people have trouble
Speaker 8: reading his films is all the more reason and why
Speaker 8: we need these studies. So I'm still chipping away that,
Speaker 8: and then also working on a book with my friend
Speaker 8: Amy Searles about the depiction of horror fandom in film
Speaker 8: and television, because that's something that's of interest to me
Speaker 8: because I've seen horror fandom change so much in real
Speaker 8: life and I've seen those reflections happening in movies and
Speaker 8: stuff to where you can have a horror fan in
Speaker 8: a movie now and no one even comments on it.
Speaker 8: It's just somebody with the evil dead shirt is like
Speaker 8: totally normal, Whereas any time before the nineteen eighties, if
Speaker 8: that were to happen, that person would be pathologized narrative
Speaker 8: of the film. So we just wanted to do almost
Speaker 8: like an encyclopedia in a way of films and television
Speaker 8: throughout the twentieth century depicting these changes in horror fandom.
Speaker 8: So that's something that Amy and I have been working
Speaker 8: on for a while too.
Speaker 5: That sounds fascinating, as does the Robert Downey Seeing Your Stuff,
Speaker 5: as does the Killing for Culture documentary. This all sounds amazing.
Speaker 8: I still inspire constant. Everything inspires me. I feel like
Speaker 8: every conversation I have, Elorady book, I read, every movie
Speaker 8: I watched, just looking at my cat looking out the window,
Speaker 8: everything is yeah, it's weird, like I live on an
Speaker 8: island and I never see anybody. But I still feel
Speaker 8: totally overstimulated, like the world just has so much cool
Speaker 8: stuff going on that it's like hard to even pick,
Speaker 8: like where what to do next? So I'm just glad
Speaker 8: that like my stuff gets to be a little piece
Speaker 8: of just like building block of all these cultural studies
Speaker 8: and everything.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and some of the things that you've been behind
Speaker 5: with not only your book with House a Psychond of Women,
Speaker 5: but then also the movies that came out from that,
Speaker 5: And just I told you all those years ago when
Speaker 5: the first version came out, I was just like, damn you,
Speaker 5: Kayla for making my watch list so much longer. But
Speaker 5: then it's great that there's actually releases of these movies
Speaker 5: now that are tied into the book. That was fantastic.
Speaker 8: Yeah, No, I think that's cool, especially with some of
Speaker 8: the movies, like something like the Mapu Page. I feel
Speaker 8: totally after my book came out, that movie had a
Speaker 8: second life. Like Karen Arthur gets asked to come and
Speaker 8: present screenings pretty frequently since the book came out, and
Speaker 8: it was like, it's not like nobody remembered that movie
Speaker 8: A Scorpion. They put it out before my book came out,
Speaker 8: like somebody had put it out on a Blu ray.
Speaker 8: I just don't think it had gone much attention. It
Speaker 8: was like somebody's pet movie that they wanted to release,
Speaker 8: but it didn't really get a whole lot of ink
Speaker 8: or attention or anything, but the book changed it because
Speaker 8: a lot of the retrospectives around the book, like festivals
Speaker 8: and things would do like a House of Psychonic Women's
Speaker 8: series when the came out, and that would be one
Speaker 8: of the films that played at almost all of that
Speaker 8: see Secret Ceremony and that laid at so many of
Speaker 8: the record respective and then of course like Possession and
Speaker 8: The Greued were like the staples. But yeah, so some
Speaker 8: of those films it was great to see, and most
Speaker 8: recently with the reissue it was like Identicate Liz Taylor
Speaker 8: movie that seemed to have found a new audience through
Speaker 8: that book.
Speaker 3: So that was cool.
Speaker 5: Elogenise, it is always wonderful talking with you. I appreciate
Speaker 5: your time because, like I said, I know you're super busy,
Speaker 5: but this was great. And thank you so much for Cockfighter.
Speaker 8: Oh, no problem, thank you. I thought you were going
Speaker 8: to like totally destroy me.
Speaker 5: Oh gosh, no, I loved it, els Fan.
Speaker 8: I thought you were totally gonna be like you didn't
Speaker 8: mention this, or you didn't talk about net or whatever.
Speaker 3: I got wrong.
Speaker 5: No, no, not at all. And I don't think you
Speaker 5: got anything wrong, and I think everything that you brought
Speaker 5: to the table was great. So I really cannot recommend
Speaker 5: the book enough to people.
Speaker 3: Thank you, Thank you so much.
Speaker 8: That really makes me very happy, coming right at you.
Speaker 2: War an Oath Orn to kill. In the Hustler's world,
Speaker 2: it's pay or duck.
Speaker 6: Oh wow, this means that I'm sorry.
Speaker 1: You know, I didn't bring no cash on me.
Speaker 2: I was so sure I was gonna win and everything.
Speaker 2: But listen, I got some money at home.
Speaker 3: I got a lot of I'm gonna bring you back.
Speaker 4: This sus like you know.
Speaker 1: He's a redneck rebel with a taste for hot women
Speaker 1: at fast comes born to be white. The law can't
Speaker 1: touch him at all.
Speaker 4: It's a sticker hands over your heads.
Speaker 1: Anybody lose hits a head bless though orn to kill? Wow,
Speaker 1: two high stake scamblers. How to con every fat cat
Speaker 1: in the cell. Much old movie the brickichetes off the
Speaker 1: screen with a double bear election blast.
Speaker 2: War an Ah's just born to kill rate it on.
Speaker 5: We were back when we were talking about Cockfighter and yeah,
Speaker 5: we mentioned before this whole thing. And Kayla does a
Speaker 5: fantastic job in her research of coming up with the
Speaker 5: whole post release of Cockfighter and all the different titles
Speaker 5: and went through and I never did find anything that
Speaker 5: really supported like the Gambling Man, and what's the other one,
Speaker 5: the Hard Fighter the Yeah, Wild Fights or whatever it's called.
Speaker 5: But I do have a Born to Kill poster which
Speaker 5: I'm very proud of, which changes the artwork significantly and
Speaker 5: puts an axe in Warren Oates's hand, much like Ed
Speaker 5: Begley Junior, and it's I guess it's Mary Elizabeth driving
Speaker 5: the car and he's like in the car swinging this
Speaker 5: axe and stuff. It's pretty fantastic. I was so happy
Speaker 5: to find that poster at Records of this Dates at
Speaker 5: a record store years and years ago and was able
Speaker 5: to pick that up. So one of these days I
Speaker 5: want to get that framed, that and the Cockfighter poster,
Speaker 5: and I'll just have them looking at each other. That'll
Speaker 5: be like double Warre Notes. And this was the same
Speaker 5: year that Warren Notes did bring me the head of
Speaker 5: Alfredo Garcia. How fucking crazy is that that's one of
Speaker 5: his all time performances the same year.
Speaker 3: I find it so fascinating though about when art house
Speaker 3: films get pre promoted in these ways. That are so
Speaker 3: lurid and it doesn't make any sense at all with
Speaker 3: the natural material. It really makes me think of which
Speaker 3: just came out a year before Cockfighter, which is tremendous.
Speaker 3: I call it art House because I think it's brilliant.
Speaker 3: I think it's a great movie. But that film, at
Speaker 3: one point it was put out is Daddy's Deadly Darling.
Speaker 3: The Vinegar Center release has an alternate intro that was
Speaker 3: tapped on like poor white trash style where it's applied
Speaker 3: her father later and it's the incest and then it
Speaker 3: cuts to the title screen of a woman's ass with
Speaker 3: the type. It's so boggers and horrifying because this is
Speaker 3: a great movie. This is legit a great movie, and
Speaker 3: they've completely like shot potted for that grass dollar. It's
Speaker 3: such a carny tactic. I don't think we see those
Speaker 3: kind of carni tactics as much with film nowadays. Uh,
Speaker 3: which is which is some ways is for the batter
Speaker 3: films like Cockfighter and Pigs and what we've talked about
Speaker 3: before Massacre at Central. Why these are serious films. These
Speaker 3: are really great films. They should be regarded as such.
Speaker 3: But it was just a different era and that passage Mike,
Speaker 3: you reading that VHS box description earlier, I want to
Speaker 3: make that an outgoing message on my phone that that
Speaker 3: is like a meditation tape. I love it so much.
Speaker 3: It's terrible, but it's amazing.
Speaker 5: I wish I could find those other versions. They alternates
Speaker 5: with Lewis Tegue says, Oh, yeah, I added more stuff,
Speaker 5: more dream sequences, and I know Monty Hellman is like, yeah,
Speaker 5: there's shots in the finished film that is called cock
Speaker 5: Fighter that aren't his, like the speaking of Jack or
Speaker 5: Burk's two tone shoes, like the blood that sprays on
Speaker 5: the two tone shoes. Apparently that wasn't a Monty Hellman shot.
Speaker 5: Doesn't sound like, at least in the maybe they caught
Speaker 5: him on a good day. But the audio commentary that
Speaker 5: was on the old Anger Bay DVD for this, it
Speaker 5: didn't sound like he was too angry about that, which
Speaker 5: was good because, Yeah, Kayla's book is fantastic to read
Speaker 5: just how curmudgeonly Monty Hellman was about his own movie
Speaker 5: and just like shutting her down, you know, oh, that's
Speaker 5: the worst thing that I made, and just not even
Speaker 5: wanting to talk to her after she said it's her
Speaker 5: favorite I'm like, yeah, no, I got the same treatment
Speaker 5: from him. It took a long time for him to
Speaker 5: warm up to me again after I told him how
Speaker 5: much I love Cockfighter.
Speaker 3: It's always so strange when you get to talk to
Speaker 3: artists about works that it hit you so hard and
Speaker 3: they act almost like a vampire. See. But at the
Speaker 3: same time, if you're dealing with studio interference, it's understandble
Speaker 3: that I should put a bitter taste certainly in someone's mouth. No,
Speaker 3: I hate it. I hated it that he This is
Speaker 3: a fine film. This is a really intelligent, really beautifully made.
Speaker 3: There's such a harmony with how every element in this
Speaker 3: film really comes together. Yeah, the editing, the cinematography, the direction,
Speaker 3: the writing, the acting, the music. Yeah, every element just
Speaker 3: really it's perfectly placed. And Yeah, if you didn't anyth
Speaker 3: about Charles Wiliford, you would just think he was another
Speaker 3: great character actor.
Speaker 7: He is.
Speaker 3: He's great. I was like, man, this is a great guy.
Speaker 3: The mustache and oh my god, it's the author. That's
Speaker 3: sound cool. I love if. I bet we're getting a
Speaker 3: book out documenting jiguliarly Kaylas journey with it. This is
Speaker 3: a story where people need to be talking about this film, hopefully.
Speaker 3: I don't know what status it's at right now. We're
Speaker 3: getting like a nice blu ray. It's me it seems
Speaker 3: like it should be primed for it, but god, there
Speaker 3: are so many terrible movies out in four.
Speaker 2: K that.
Speaker 3: Surely, to goodness it would be cool if somebody did,
Speaker 3: like Charles Williford set.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I'd love to get a new version of a
Speaker 6: woman Chaser over there too.
Speaker 5: To circle back on that episode from forever ago, they
Speaker 5: have re released it, but with a different score because
Speaker 5: all that original music was so cost prohibitive. So there's
Speaker 5: a version, but yeah, it doesn't have that awesome score
Speaker 5: that I talked about. And yeah, I'm looking at a
Speaker 5: shut factory blu ray of this. I'm not sure when
Speaker 5: it was released, but there are absolutely no extras on this,
Speaker 5: which is a real shame. Looks like a very bare
Speaker 5: bones blue ray. I think you get subtitles that's about it,
Speaker 5: or chapter stops on screen biographies of main characters.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm surprised I didn't mention the menu. And here
Speaker 3: I was upset that my blue ray of Jackal and
Speaker 3: Hyde together again it doesn't have any Dude, But Cockfighter
Speaker 3: come on ruefully.
Speaker 5: Yeah, because they had a lot more on that old disc.
Speaker 5: That was nice. And yeah, Dennis Bartak was doing the
Speaker 5: commentary with Monty Hallman and I'm trying to remember the
Speaker 5: other gentleman's named Stephen Gatos who was also wearing the
Speaker 5: Nixon mask. And yeah, I was working behind the scenes
Speaker 5: quite a bit.
Speaker 2: In this one.
Speaker 3: Oh nice, Yeah, Anchor Bay, that's some. They did such
Speaker 3: a beautiful work on their releases. I still treasure all
Speaker 3: my acre based.
Speaker 5: Off I'm also looking at a from the language. I
Speaker 5: think this was a French release on Blu Ray and
Speaker 5: you're gonna love this includes Bond's original, so includes the
Speaker 5: original trailer. I know that's gonna get you to buy
Speaker 5: that one.
Speaker 3: All the really cheap DVD so I wou'd say interactive venue.
Speaker 3: It's it's Health Takes Guys, which is okay when it's
Speaker 3: like Bruce Lee fights back from the grave and you
Speaker 3: pay literally two bucks for it. Not that I did that, yea.
Speaker 5: It Give me a Willaford box set, Give me a
Speaker 5: Monty Hellman box set. I don't know if Like Iguana
Speaker 5: has ever been released in a good version. I know
Speaker 5: China nine Liberty thirty seven. That was another one I
Speaker 5: had to order from Video Search of Miami. I think
Speaker 5: that one is a level now in good quality. I
Speaker 5: don't know about This isn't Monty Hellman. This is another
Speaker 5: Warre notes, but I don't know if Barcaro has ever
Speaker 5: been properly released. There's too many good movies out there
Speaker 5: that people just aren't paying attention to.
Speaker 3: When you think of Warren Oaks and great trailers, though,
Speaker 3: have you guys seen the trailer for Dixie Dynamite.
Speaker 6: I have a copy of that movie, but I don't
Speaker 6: think i've seen a trailer short.
Speaker 3: Imagine an American flag and you're just snorting a big
Speaker 3: old fat rail of illicit drugs off of it. It's
Speaker 3: got everything. It's got exploding cars, Warren Oats yelling, which
Speaker 3: I love him yelling, a cop that literally is on
Speaker 3: a toilet and it explodes if he flies off the toy.
Speaker 3: The trailer if you're having a bad day.
Speaker 5: I'm watching the trailer right now and it looks spectacular.
Speaker 3: Out the voiceovers great since real bomb ass and the guys.
Speaker 3: Dixie Dynamite is a blast, and it's like it's in
Speaker 3: ward outs yelling he's drinking there is an a in there,
Speaker 3: and it's just it's glorious. The only thing missing is
Speaker 3: like a bikini knife fight or something with some he
Speaker 3: haw honeys. It's just glorious hicksploitation.
Speaker 5: I'm watching the trailer for Born to Kill and it
Speaker 5: starts with a semi truck coming right at us. US
Speaker 5: shot that in the movie itself pretty good. Oh man, Yeah,
Speaker 5: we've got Steve rails Back being taken down ed, Begley
Speaker 5: running at the camera with the hatchet in his hand.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, here's some good car crashes and car chases that. Yeah,
Speaker 5: oh boy, this is so different. I can't wait for
Speaker 5: people to hear this.
Speaker 3: There's a song about a song by The Damned off
Speaker 3: their first album called Bourne to Kills. Even bore just
Speaker 3: does not work for this actual universe in movie.
Speaker 5: All right, we're gonna take another break and play a
Speaker 5: preview for next week's show right after these brief messages.
Speaker 4: Mal pertui so se if logi.
Speaker 2: Lona as.
Speaker 1: This is all it is a noble secrets.
Speaker 4: HM said to del sometimes stuff not just very love loyalty.
Speaker 7: That's a serp.
Speaker 6: If he needs.
Speaker 4: Mm hmm, came aboup.
Speaker 1: Lo love.
Speaker 5: Little that's right. We'll be back next week to kick
Speaker 5: off a confluence of Patreon requests with Shoctober surprises, starting
Speaker 5: with Harry Kamel's mail Pertwee. Until then, I want to
Speaker 5: thank my co hosts Heather and Jed So Jedediah, what
Speaker 5: is the latest with you, sir?
Speaker 6: I'm just partner around on Twitter and a little bit
Speaker 6: on the Good Little Blog, but low profile and no
Speaker 6: big projects right now. I finished a project this summer
Speaker 6: and not something I can talk about, but hopefully we'll
Speaker 6: see the light of day someday.
Speaker 5: Oh nice, all right, So mysterious and Heather, what's happening
Speaker 5: in your world?
Speaker 3: I know I'm not as mysterious, but I did update
Speaker 3: the Mondoheather Patreon has a new piece on ten Years Island.
Speaker 3: The Alfred Soul directed Oddity during Denise Winters and that
Speaker 3: was a fun piece to write. And that movie is
Speaker 3: complete bonkers, or one could say bananas because it has
Speaker 3: an A in it. But that I've recently contributed some
Speaker 3: supplementary work I can't really talk about, but I will
Speaker 3: tell you it involves this sat the genre of South
Speaker 3: Korean horror, and I am working on a video that's
Speaker 3: a little tribute to the glories of Greg House and
Speaker 3: Altre Cinema and anytime if the spirit vibs. You can
Speaker 3: find more on my leak treat lie createleaktreat dot com,
Speaker 3: Forward slash Mondo Heather.
Speaker 5: Thank you so much folks for being on the show.
Speaker 5: Thanks to everybody for listening. If you want to hear
Speaker 5: more of me shooting off my mouth, check out some
Speaker 5: of the other shows other work on there, all available
Speaker 5: at wirdingweightmedia dot com. Thanks especially to our patrion community.
Speaker 5: If you want to join the community, visit patreon dot com,
Speaker 5: slash projection booth. Every donation we get helps the projection
Speaker 5: booth just take over the.
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