Speaker 1: Oh giez, folks, it's showtime.
Speaker 2: People say, good money to see this movie.
Speaker 3: When they go out to a theater, they want cold sodas,
Speaker 3: hot popcorn, and no monsters in the protection booth.
Speaker 2: Everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring.
Speaker 4: Cut it off.
Speaker 3: It begins with seduction, the lady.
Speaker 2: It leads to betrayal.
Speaker 4: You're working, Sam Angela, don't tell me you're not because.
Speaker 3: I wrote the book.
Speaker 4: What do you sell anyway?
Speaker 5: Self confidence? You're not skimming it?
Speaker 4: Oh well, you know, put the book here in the.
Speaker 5: Book there, ski man. I can walk away from it
Speaker 5: any time I want. I've heard that before.
Speaker 2: And it ends with murder.
Speaker 4: Yeah, haven't got the stomach for it.
Speaker 3: Academy Award nominee for Best Actress, Angelica Houston John Cusack,
Speaker 3: I want to learn everything. I want to be a
Speaker 3: crypted and the Academy Award nominee for Best Supporting Actress
Speaker 3: Annette Benning.
Speaker 2: I was teen ten years with the best in the business.
Speaker 1: I'm still the best long contract.
Speaker 4: For you'll ever seen.
Speaker 3: In the highly acclaimed new thriller from the director of
Speaker 3: Dangerous Liaisons and producer Martin Scorsese, Have Goodfellas, Who's Conning
Speaker 3: who the Martin Scorsese production of a Stephen Frears thriller,
Speaker 3: The Grifters.
Speaker 5: Welcome to the projection booth. I'm your host, Mike White,
Speaker 5: joining me once again as mister Jedediah Ayers.
Speaker 2: Hello, Hello.
Speaker 5: Also back in the booth is mister Andrew Netti.
Speaker 2: You told Bilinga what she pitched.
Speaker 5: We wrap up November twenty twenty four with a look
Speaker 5: at Stephen Frears's The Grifters, Based on a book by
Speaker 5: Jim Thompson and adapted by Donald Westlake. The film stars
Speaker 5: Angelica Houston as Lily Dylon, a grifter who's down for
Speaker 5: the long con changing the odds at horse races. She
Speaker 5: is reunited with her estranged son Roy played by John Cusack,
Speaker 5: and meets Roy's girlfriend Myra, played by Annette Benning. They
Speaker 5: play in a messy world to grifting, where double crossing
Speaker 5: is a way of life. Killer, cast killer, script killer, everything.
Speaker 5: We will be spoiling this film as we go along,
Speaker 5: so if you don't want anything ruin, turn off the
Speaker 5: podcast and watch the film. Just as an aside, we
Speaker 5: just recorded this whole GD episode with the record button off,
Speaker 5: So if we refer to as I said before, that's
Speaker 5: what we're talking about. So, yes, you did miss a
Speaker 5: great conversation. Hopefully we can do it again. So, Jenniediah,
Speaker 5: when was the first time you saw The Grifters and
Speaker 5: what did you think?
Speaker 2: The Grifters was a big film for me in that
Speaker 2: it introduced me to Jim Thompson and he became a
Speaker 2: favorite author later on. I don't remember the actual viewing,
Speaker 2: but I remember being very aware of the movie, thinking
Speaker 2: John Cusack looked really cool, and the poster and the
Speaker 2: little snippets of dialogue sounded meat in the trailers. When
Speaker 2: I did actually see the film sometime in the early nineties,
Speaker 2: probably by ninety three or ninety four, anyway, it just
Speaker 2: seemed like something that had always been part of my life,
Speaker 2: because it just felt like a piece of me had
Speaker 2: been captured and put on screen and I got to
Speaker 2: see it. And for the last thirty years, I've watched
Speaker 2: the movie many times, and I've read Jim Thompson books
Speaker 2: and enjoyed those, and it was just one of those
Speaker 2: things that when it came out and I saw it,
Speaker 2: I just I knew it was for me, and it
Speaker 2: ended up changing kind of the course of my life,
Speaker 2: defining my interests and things I would pursue and enjoy.
Speaker 2: Let me tell you a story.
Speaker 1: In the early nineties, I was living in a small
Speaker 1: Southeast Asian country called Laos in Vianchan was Communist controlled
Speaker 1: and quite isolated. We didn't have a TV, but we
Speaker 1: could rent a vis player and TA locally. It was
Speaker 1: one shop that sold VHS tapes and they had a
Speaker 1: selection of about five Dix English language movies. I remember
Speaker 1: Perfilm was one of them, the first Dolph Lunger and
Speaker 1: The Tunersher was one of them, and The Grifters was.
Speaker 2: One of them.
Speaker 1: I watched all of those films countless times until we
Speaker 1: discovered that we crossed the river and go to Bangkok
Speaker 1: by bootleg VHS tapes and bring them back. But anyway,
Speaker 1: I would have watched The Grifters first then, and I
Speaker 1: didn't really have a great deal of context for it.
Speaker 2: I hadn't really got into crime cinema.
Speaker 1: I hadn't really even gotten to cinema yet, and I
Speaker 1: had only just started reading crime fiction.
Speaker 2: But I really loved this film.
Speaker 1: There are certain themes in the film which I know
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about the scene with Bobo and
Speaker 1: Lily and the Orangers are the ending, which always stuck
Speaker 1: with me when I first saw it and still stick
Speaker 1: with me, which I think about a lot. And I
Speaker 1: just think the whole package of the film, that the cast,
Speaker 1: the script, the story, it's darkness, the whole package kind
Speaker 1: of works for me.
Speaker 5: So I saw this one probably on VHS. I didn't
Speaker 5: have to rent a TV and VCR to see this
Speaker 5: like you did, but definitely rented it. Probably. I might
Speaker 5: have been working at Blockbuster when I saw it.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 5: I probably talked about this on The Better Off Dead
Speaker 5: one crazy summer episode we did a while back. But
Speaker 5: I grew up just absolutely loving John Cusack, just could
Speaker 5: not get enough of him, really love the sure thing
Speaker 5: the afore mentioned two movies I talked about. Eventually, I
Speaker 5: would see Tape Heads and fall in love with that,
Speaker 5: but my love of him started to fade when it
Speaker 5: came to say anything. For whatever reason, I just really
Speaker 5: disliked that film, like the twist of the crime and
Speaker 5: the father and all this kind of stuff, and just
Speaker 5: Lloyd always creaked me out a little little bit. But
Speaker 5: he did feel a little bit like a con man
Speaker 5: in that movie. This whole thing of kickboxing, the sport
Speaker 5: of the future and just that he wanted to be
Speaker 5: with Aoni Sky and kickbox his life.
Speaker 2: It was a stalking.
Speaker 5: It was just.
Speaker 2: It was stalking and basically just wore her down essentially.
Speaker 5: Yeah. I started to the Bloomers off the Rose with
Speaker 5: that movie. And when I saw The Grifters the first time,
Speaker 5: I really didn't like the movie because this was my
Speaker 5: own mistake because I thought that Roy was the hero
Speaker 5: of the piece. And now watching it again all these
Speaker 5: years later, I'm like, oh no, this is the Lily story.
Speaker 5: This is not Roy's story at all. So I really
Speaker 5: because I was twenty when I saw it the first time,
Speaker 5: I was too stupid to appreciate this movie. So now
Speaker 5: all these years later, I can finally say that I
Speaker 5: really liked The Grifters. I was really glad to do
Speaker 5: this dive, really happy to read the Jim Thompson book
Speaker 5: because anytime I read his stuff, I absolutely love it.
Speaker 5: It's one of those I've talked about this before with
Speaker 5: other filmmakers where it's like I don't want to dive
Speaker 5: in headfirst and see everything, you know. I don't want
Speaker 5: to check out every single Fellini film all at once.
Speaker 5: I just want to every few years, you know, even
Speaker 5: with Jean Pierre Melville. Okay, there's still a few of
Speaker 5: his that I haven't seen, but I'm just waiting for
Speaker 5: that right day to break it out from the wine
Speaker 5: cellar and be like, ah, here we go, here's the
Speaker 5: Silence of the Sea. Kind of the same thing with
Speaker 5: Jim Thompson. It's okay, pretty soon I'm going to be
Speaker 5: watching Siri Noir. So I need to read Hell of
Speaker 5: a Woman. I can't wait to finally dig into that one.
Speaker 5: This was great being able to read that book and
Speaker 5: just dive into this film and learn about all the
Speaker 5: behind the scenes. And then, yeah, now I can appreciate
Speaker 5: that it's Donald Westlake doing the script. I could have
Speaker 5: appreciated that probably twenty years ago, but not thirty years ago.
Speaker 5: It's I just really now am finally falling in love
Speaker 5: with this film all of these years later. But then also,
Speaker 5: this movie has everything that I love. When it comes
Speaker 5: to character actors. There are no small roles in this movie.
Speaker 5: Even the four sailors that he's playing against on the train,
Speaker 5: I recognize at least two of these faces. John Grys
Speaker 5: as the friend of the drunk guy who costs Angelica Houston,
Speaker 5: you can barely see Grys's face because he's hidden behind
Speaker 5: his friend on screen. Or Xander Berkley as the Arizona
Speaker 5: police detective who takes Cuzach over to see the dead body,
Speaker 5: just all of those, Every single little part in this
Speaker 5: movie is so well cast and with so many people
Speaker 5: that you would just start to see over and over again.
Speaker 5: This was like I was really starting to see Tobolowski,
Speaker 5: who I know I'd been working for a longer time,
Speaker 5: but Tobolowski going to show up again in a few
Speaker 5: years here in Groundhog, where Xander Berkeley is going to
Speaker 5: show up in Leaving Las Vegas, and we're just going
Speaker 5: to keep getting these faces. But I think this was
Speaker 5: honestly the first time I ever saw and at Benny,
Speaker 5: because at this point I hadn't seen Valmont, and maybe
Speaker 5: I saw Bugsy before I saw this film, but she
Speaker 5: was this amazing breath of fresh air because who is
Speaker 5: this woman and she's able to turn it on and off.
Speaker 5: She's got that almost Betty Boop type voice that she
Speaker 5: uses at times, but then when she does her flashback,
Speaker 5: she's speaking in a light Southern drawl to it, and
Speaker 5: everybody from this would be either on their way to
Speaker 5: bigger and better things, or there were character actors in
Speaker 5: here like Henry Jones, who probably this was probably one
Speaker 5: of his later films, if not one of his last ones.
Speaker 5: Every face in here is just fantastic. The casting of
Speaker 5: this movie is so well done. And now I finally
Speaker 5: feel like I appreciate this movie probably the way that
Speaker 5: you guys did thirty years ago.
Speaker 2: Know that I appreciated it the way that it deserves
Speaker 2: to be appreciated. For a while, I just felt, Oh,
Speaker 2: it's super cool, and then oh what a bummer. But
Speaker 2: multiple viewings and certainly a maturation process on my part,
Speaker 2: have brought about a deeper appreciation, a really richer appreciation.
Speaker 2: It's it's a really amazingly textured and layered film and
Speaker 2: book and adaptation process. It was all pretty masterful.
Speaker 5: Yeah, the adaptation of this it is so well done.
Speaker 5: Donald Westlake knows what to keep, knows what to throw away.
Speaker 5: We'll talk about some of the deleted scenes and things,
Speaker 5: but he knew how to tell the story, the order
Speaker 5: in which to tell this story, and just the emphasizing
Speaker 5: of the right things. And I love that whole story
Speaker 5: about how he did a draft and gave it over
Speaker 5: to Stephen Frears, the director, and Frears is, yeah, no,
Speaker 5: this isn't really hitting it for me, and Westlakes, Oh
Speaker 5: what do you want? And Frears goes through the novels
Speaker 5: just starts pointing out all these scenes that he really
Speaker 5: wants to have in there, and Wes like's like, oh
Speaker 5: you like trash basic. I thought you wanted this elevated
Speaker 5: as I can roll around the gutter too, So I
Speaker 5: was just like, yes, this is great. Donald, you did
Speaker 5: a fantastic job. He knows enough to get the hell
Speaker 5: out of the way when it comes to so much
Speaker 5: of Thompson's pros and being able to put the descriptions
Speaker 5: inside of characters mouths, like things that Thompson is telling
Speaker 5: us directly. He will then have characters start to say, so,
Speaker 5: like the whole thing we're talking about the oranges, like
Speaker 5: he's writing all of that He's talking about like this
Speaker 5: is an old thing. You beat someone with one with
Speaker 5: oranges and they get these horrific bruises on them. But
Speaker 5: if you do it wrong then it might burst to
Speaker 5: an organ and kill the person. But yet he rather
Speaker 5: than there's no voiceover in this other than a little
Speaker 5: bit of an intro from courtesy of Martin Scorsesey. There's
Speaker 5: not any voice over telling these things. Instead it's Pat
Speaker 5: Hengel saying, Okay, Lily, tell me about the oranges, and
Speaker 5: making her say it, and making her think about it
Speaker 5: and making us think about it, and her just on
Speaker 5: the edge of hysterics with the catching her voice where
Speaker 5: she is just about to lose her shit. I love
Speaker 5: that kind of stuff. I love how there's other times
Speaker 5: where it's Henry Jones giving this information that was written
Speaker 5: in the book, but here he's like expounding it, talking
Speaker 5: about how all those women they got that little piggy
Speaker 5: bang between their legs and I don't want any women
Speaker 5: staying at this hotel because they're just going to be
Speaker 5: working on their backs. And I'm like, this is brilliant stuff.
Speaker 5: And this is the reason why you read Jim Thompson,
Speaker 5: and now you get to hear these incredible actors deliver
Speaker 5: this kind of exposition, and I just fucking love it.
Speaker 5: The acting and the caliber of actors and the quantity
Speaker 5: and quality of character actors in this movie is beyond belief.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's funny. And somebody else was saying about fears,
Speaker 2: how much. He just loves the worse things. He wants
Speaker 2: his characters to be worse and worse, He wants the
Speaker 2: situations to be worse and worse, and trash was a
Speaker 2: word that was thrown around in that documentary about Stephen
Speaker 2: Frears to Watch Last Night.
Speaker 5: Weslake really does a great job in here, just crafting
Speaker 5: this and knowing when to show us things when not to.
Speaker 5: Apparently he wrote a lot of the flashbacks that we
Speaker 5: don't get, which I think we're really better off for
Speaker 5: not having those. Just keep it contemporary, like when we
Speaker 5: have the flashbacks that we do. And I think there's
Speaker 5: three main flashbacks in the movie. One of them is
Speaker 5: just flashing back to something that was done off screen
Speaker 5: off of Roy's radar. In the book he figures it out,
Speaker 5: but in the movie they actually show it, but as
Speaker 5: that flashback, and I want to say it might even
Speaker 5: be his thought process a little bit as well. There's
Speaker 5: the one of Moira and oh gosh, JT. Walsh's the
Speaker 5: Langley might be yeah, leangle called Langley and J. T.
Speaker 5: Walsh is the one who plays him just absolutely brilliantly,
Speaker 5: another wonderful character actor. And then the other one is
Speaker 5: it's not too far in the past. Roy's what twenty five.
Speaker 5: It feels like this might have happened when he was eighteen.
Speaker 5: He doesn't look too different or anything other than this
Speaker 5: member's only jacket or whatever that he's wearing, and that's
Speaker 5: the origin of Roy as grifter. We get to actually
Speaker 5: see him meet his mentor and hear his mentor spiel.
Speaker 5: Other than that, it's all like in the present, and
Speaker 5: that I think really helps out quite a bit that
Speaker 5: we aren't just dealing with Rory's childhood or going back
Speaker 5: to earlier times with us. Apparently Weslake wrote all of
Speaker 5: these flashbacks and fears might have even shot all these flashbacks,
Speaker 5: and I'm pretty sure that he did because Juliette Landau
Speaker 5: Martin Lando's daughter, who had a pretty good career of
Speaker 5: her own. I mostly remember her from ed Wood where
Speaker 5: she's no no liquids. She's just amazing in that where
Speaker 5: she doesn't ever drink water. She was playing a young lily.
Speaker 5: But yeah, they had all of these scenes that were
Speaker 5: in there, and I'm glad they took him out because
Speaker 5: this movie just runs so tight and so taut. But
Speaker 5: back in Roy's childhood, if he say he broke his arm,
Speaker 5: she'd be like, oh, it's only one arm, And if
Speaker 5: he did something, she would just play it down so much.
Speaker 5: And that's one of the final lines of the book,
Speaker 5: is when she accidentally slashes his throat, she goes only
Speaker 5: one throat, so good.
Speaker 1: The thing I found most interesting on the two viewings
Speaker 1: of the film that I did this episode of the
Speaker 1: show is how it occupies and I'm going to use
Speaker 1: this word and you can't stop me. It occupies a
Speaker 1: liminal space between are sort of older forties fifties peel
Speaker 1: of a film noir and something that feels also very
Speaker 1: nineties in terms of its look and its sensibility and
Speaker 1: the actors, as you say, and I just felt I
Speaker 1: find that fascinating how they did that. There's all those
Speaker 1: visual cues to those older films, but it still feels
Speaker 1: quite contemporary in its own way because some respects the
Speaker 1: grift has just become mainstream now, but we were far
Speaker 1: less aware of it then, So I to think I
Speaker 1: found absolutely fascinating about it and how they did that,
Speaker 1: how they they're dressed kind of nineties.
Speaker 2: But Roy lives in that old La hotel.
Speaker 1: I don't know what hotel it is, or if it's
Speaker 1: still there the bright and then they're at the track.
Speaker 1: Just a very film noire place to be, but their
Speaker 1: sensibility and the way they are able to go full
Speaker 1: bore on some of the more adult themes like the
Speaker 1: incest and the self loathing about their lives and to
Speaker 1: have more than they've got feels very contemporary.
Speaker 5: I'll have that I used the word liminal at work
Speaker 5: a few weeks ago, and my boss tried to correct me,
Speaker 5: thinking that liminal wasn't a real word.
Speaker 1: So I thought you were going to say you used
Speaker 1: the word liminal, and now you're managing the place.
Speaker 5: Now I own the whole company.
Speaker 2: Is that's right.
Speaker 5: We make matchsticks and that's what I sell. Go around
Speaker 5: from a bar to bar and I put down a
Speaker 5: twenty and lift it up and there's a ten on
Speaker 5: there and hopefully I don't get belted in the stomach
Speaker 5: with the wrong end of a baseball bat. Yeah, which
Speaker 5: is very smart too that we start the whole movie
Speaker 5: with Lily, But even before that, we start with this
Speaker 5: amazing black and white montage of Los Angeles you're talking about,
Speaker 5: like film noir, and just setting us in that whole space.
Speaker 5: The idea of this is such an LA story and
Speaker 5: to have this very I'm not an LA guy, but
Speaker 5: even I recognize this architecture that's going on. I recognize
Speaker 5: some of these streets just mostly because of movies. And
Speaker 5: to have that and have a little bit of color
Speaker 5: with the credits, the blues and the reds and that
Speaker 5: nice little voiceover from Martin Scressezi at the beginning, uncredited,
Speaker 5: but the executive producer stepping in to do that. But
Speaker 5: to start it off with the black and white I
Speaker 5: thought was really smart. It really reminded me of Roman
Speaker 5: Polansky and the way that he starts off Chinatown with
Speaker 5: the kind of muted opening credits and then going right
Speaker 5: to those black and white photographs that Jack Nicholson is
Speaker 5: showing to Bert Young, with those little squeals that Bert
Speaker 5: Young is doing as his hard at breaking to see
Speaker 5: his wife in flagrante with another man. But yeah, it's
Speaker 5: the same thing here where we've got all of these
Speaker 5: black and white photos and then we start with Lily
Speaker 5: coming into the racetrack and just she's got the white
Speaker 5: hair driving out that think of lighter colored vehicles, and
Speaker 5: you've also got that quality of light of the southern
Speaker 5: California sky that Priers was talking about on the commentary,
Speaker 5: where it's just everything feels so sun baked and drained.
Speaker 5: I know they did some flashing on the film to
Speaker 5: draw that out as well, But then the whole idea too,
Speaker 5: that they were avoiding red as their color palette until
Speaker 5: the movie went on. As the movie goes forward, they're
Speaker 5: slowly introducing red until you get this blood bath at
Speaker 5: the end, but not only just in him Cusac with
Speaker 5: the red all over his shirt, but then also the
Speaker 5: red dress that Lily's wearing at the end, which I
Speaker 5: think you guys mentioned was also moirist dress as well,
Speaker 5: or might she was wearing red as well, And I
Speaker 5: love that.
Speaker 2: I love that little trope and a lot of films,
Speaker 2: especially friend films and films noir, where somebody starts off
Speaker 2: with a very flite, pristine outfit and by the end
Speaker 2: of the movie it's totally trashed, it's dirty, it's ripped,
Speaker 2: it's blood soaked. It's brings me ahead of Alfredo Garcia
Speaker 2: basically that transition, as he's in that white suit the
Speaker 2: whole time, and Lily's white outfit at the beginning of
Speaker 2: the film and it's a different outfit, but it's that
Speaker 2: I like that transition. That sematic transition worked very nicely
Speaker 2: for me. It's also the merging of the Lily and.
Speaker 1: Moira characters way that they start to basically by the
Speaker 1: end of it, they're wearing that same red dress. They're
Speaker 1: merging together as characters, which works in terms of that
Speaker 1: lot that loot surprise they have when Moira tries to
Speaker 1: kill Lily, but Lily actually kills Mura instead, and they
Speaker 1: think it's pasts Moira's body off as her own, so
Speaker 1: that's her out from being.
Speaker 2: Chased by the mob.
Speaker 1: But also it's the way they fuse those characters together
Speaker 1: in terms of their sexuality in Roy's mind, I think,
Speaker 1: because I mean, the source of the incest or the
Speaker 1: sort of hint of attraction between was not really a hint.
Speaker 1: Come on, let's talk like adults here. The very strong
Speaker 1: influence of attraction between Roy and Lily, which in the
Speaker 1: book is even.
Speaker 2: Ladder on even more strongly.
Speaker 1: It's pretty full on. It's one of the most powerful
Speaker 1: lines in the book. At the very end, when Lily's
Speaker 1: just killed Moira, Lily's on the run from Bobo justice,
Speaker 1: Roy finds Lily rifling around the back of his clown
Speaker 1: pictures his massive shape for his money, and Lily wants
Speaker 1: the money to get away from Bobo. And Lily says
Speaker 1: to Roy, what if I told you I wasn't your mother.
Speaker 1: It's a big mood shift. There's several mood shifts in
Speaker 1: that film. One mood shift is when Moira and Roy
Speaker 1: a talking and Moira confronts him about the fact that
Speaker 1: you're a grifter. I know you're a grifter. Don't treat
Speaker 1: me like a square. I'm a grifter to it, And
Speaker 1: there's a whole shift there. And there's another shift very
Speaker 1: late in the film when Lily says to Roy, what
Speaker 1: if I selled you I wasn't your mother? And it
Speaker 1: opens up the possibility that I can do this thing
Speaker 1: I want to do that I'm not able to do otherwise,
Speaker 1: and Roy's struggling with that. In the book, it's even
Speaker 1: more for long. I mean, the film, Lily is mortified
Speaker 1: when she kills Roy, weeps over his corpse, but in
Speaker 1: the books she's life. I think, what do we say
Speaker 1: that anybody got study one? You already got one throws?
Speaker 1: What does he say, yeah, got one throat? And takes
Speaker 1: the money and just goes. She is one hard, hard hussy.
Speaker 2: You have a film.
Speaker 5: Yeah, though I do appreciate Jed and I we talked
Speaker 5: about Elevator to Gallows years and years ago, and this
Speaker 5: is the opposite way with her going down the elevator,
Speaker 5: and we do have a shot of Moira going down
Speaker 5: in an elevator prior to that, but with that shot
Speaker 5: of Lily going down after she's murdered her own son,
Speaker 5: and yet she's completely put together when she's going down
Speaker 5: the elevator, and you get them multiple shots of her
Speaker 5: going down in the elevator. I love the focus on her,
Speaker 5: how it changes and eventually comes into focus then goes
Speaker 5: out of focus, because just shooting that type of shit
Speaker 5: must have been very difficult. But yes has the wherewithal
Speaker 5: to get out of there, to take his car, to
Speaker 5: leave that Cadillac of Moira's, and to make it look
Speaker 5: like Moira killed him or whatever happens, Moira is to
Speaker 5: blame and Lily gets off scott free and can start
Speaker 5: a new life. But to your point, Andrew, I don't
Speaker 5: know how much of a new life she's going to
Speaker 5: start because all of the things that you were saying,
Speaker 5: as far as I can stop whenever I want to,
Speaker 5: it's such an alcoholics refrain, I can quit whenever I want.
Speaker 5: Yet the constant draw back to it, and even when
Speaker 5: he's trying to go on vacation and go down to
Speaker 5: La Joya with Moira, and yet here it is on
Speaker 5: the train doing the whole tat thing with the dice
Speaker 5: and caging drinks and getting more and more money off
Speaker 5: of these guys, basically financing his trip. I was thinking
Speaker 5: about doing the same thing when I go out to
Speaker 5: Vegas in a couple of weeks, and I wouldn't be
Speaker 5: surprised that if Lily is an odd to the whole
Speaker 5: Lilith myth myth as well, I'm sure they didn't choose
Speaker 5: these character names just out of a hat. And then
Speaker 5: I love that preres is, Oh, this is all multice Falcon.
Speaker 5: This is Mary Astor going to hell after betraying Sam
Speaker 5: Spade in the maltice Falcon. And he knows that who
Speaker 5: he's dealing with, Angelica Houston and the legacy that she's
Speaker 5: bringing to it with her father and all of his work.
Speaker 5: But you're talking about the white suit before Jededie, and
Speaker 5: I was thinking about that white suit that he's wearing
Speaker 5: in Treasure Madre. Yeah, it's just like and yeah, doesn't
Speaker 5: he wear one in Chinatown as well?
Speaker 2: Like John Houston? Yeah, no, I thought you were talking
Speaker 2: about John Houston, but Treasures Madre was he's in that.
Speaker 5: He's Oh, he's in this the guy that is constantly
Speaker 5: getting hit up by Humphrey Bogart, could you help a
Speaker 5: fellow America who's down on his luck? And Yeah, just
Speaker 5: keeps hitting the same mark every single time. I only
Speaker 5: know it because of the Warner Brothers cartoon with Penguin
Speaker 5: where Hvrey Bogar kept showing up and asking him to
Speaker 5: help out a fellow American who's down on his luck.
Speaker 5: So took me twenty years before I finally connected with
Speaker 5: the Treasure of Sierra Madra and said, oh my god,
Speaker 5: now I get the joke again. Just the what Angelica
Speaker 5: Houston brings to this role is just amazing the sharpness
Speaker 5: of her dialogue, the sideline glances that she gets, just
Speaker 5: the ascid in her voice when she's talking with Moira.
Speaker 5: I absolutely loved that little moment where she quote unquote
Speaker 5: accidentally drops her keys and picks those up and basically
Speaker 5: shoves her ass and Moira's face. You're talking about the merging, Andrew,
Speaker 5: and just the time that we see all three of
Speaker 5: those characters together quote quote is right there at the beginning,
Speaker 5: with that amazing split screen effect that they're doing, and
Speaker 5: following all three of those characters and then bringing them
Speaker 5: together in one frame with the two women on either
Speaker 5: side and John Cusack in the middle, all with their
Speaker 5: sunglasses on, all of them checking out the rest of
Speaker 5: everybody around them. But that, oh god, that shot is
Speaker 5: just incredible.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and he goes into Bennigan's. Bennigans Benigans, Andrew, you're
Speaker 2: not an American, you wouldn't know Benigan's is. Yeah, it is.
Speaker 2: Hell on earths, it is. It's a shitty chain restaurant.
Speaker 5: If you remember the film office space, the restaurant where
Speaker 5: Jennifer Aniston is working is very similar to Bennigan's. They
Speaker 5: call it Chotchkes and she has to have all those
Speaker 5: buttons and things on her uniform. Eighteen pieces of flair
Speaker 5: or something they say. But yeah, it's very similar to that.
Speaker 5: Feeling good in the neighborhood I think was the catchphrase
Speaker 5: for them.
Speaker 2: That's the moment at the beginning of the film that
Speaker 2: really places it firmly in the present for me is
Speaker 2: that you had all this cool throwback film noir photography
Speaker 2: and this great Elmer Bernstein's score, and it felt so
Speaker 2: very classical film noir, and then you got the shock
Speaker 2: of the color photography of the three characters. But it's
Speaker 2: that he goes into Benigan's and there's country music blasting
Speaker 2: on the saying in downtown LA for some reason that
Speaker 2: firmly puts it in the present for me, or in
Speaker 2: the nineteen nineties for me.
Speaker 5: Bennigan's walked so that Outback could run. And I'm sure
Speaker 5: you know Outback Steakhouse Andrews since it is Australian themed
Speaker 5: and they have boomerangs and pictures of Koalas Slalas. Yes. Yeah,
Speaker 5: you go in and you say I would like some
Speaker 5: shrimp on the barbie, and they are very accommodated.
Speaker 1: Have they all got their hat trip of cool some Yeah, fantastic, They've.
Speaker 2: Got your books on the show.
Speaker 5: They really every morning they released twenty thousand flies into
Speaker 5: the restaurant.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I don't know if he lies to us or how
Speaker 5: he states it, but I swear he says that Roy
Speaker 5: will be dead in three days now he would be
Speaker 5: if Lily doesn't intervene and show up back in his
Speaker 5: life and have the hospital take him. But it's a
Speaker 5: great wait foreshadow that's not going to be three days.
Speaker 5: It'll probably be about three weeks. I think it's the
Speaker 5: length of this novel, if even that, because.
Speaker 6: Things happen fast, and Lily cuts through the whole bureaucretit
Speaker 6: the lies of the US health system by basically just saying,
Speaker 6: if my son Dot you're going to live, otherwise I'll
Speaker 6: have you killed.
Speaker 2: To that doctor, I'll always want to site to a doctor.
Speaker 2: I've always want to say it to a bartender.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, I just love that delivery. This was probably
Speaker 5: the first time that I saw Anette Benning in a movie.
Speaker 5: I don't I don't know if I had seen Bugsy
Speaker 5: yet or not. Maybe I had, But she really makes
Speaker 5: an impression in this movie, and I think she does
Speaker 5: such a great job. I was shocked to hear how
Speaker 5: easy going she was with the nudity on set. Oh,
Speaker 5: rather than my body double. If you want to put
Speaker 5: me here, you can do that if it's going to
Speaker 5: save you time. Because this is an independent film now
Speaker 5: put out by Mirror Max apparently what was there. There's
Speaker 5: that story about Harvey bidding against himself because nobody else
Speaker 5: even wanted this movie basickly. But yeah, there's a great
Speaker 5: behind the scenes documentary on this that came out on
Speaker 5: one of the Blu rays. It took me a little
Speaker 5: bit to fine, but really some incredible stories and it's
Speaker 5: really nice. You get to hear from two of the producers,
Speaker 5: maybe three, but at least two of them, and we'll
Speaker 5: actually hear from them a little bit later in the show,
Speaker 5: which is pretty cool that I was able to speak
Speaker 5: to them, and I hope people don't mind. But I
Speaker 5: had to ask Barbara defeed out a whole lot of
Speaker 5: questions about Goodfellows while I was at it, just because
Speaker 5: when was I going to get that chance again.
Speaker 2: The good Fellow's episode.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I guess. So if I ever get the bravery
Speaker 5: to do the good Fellaw's episode, it's like.
Speaker 2: Oh, I'm down for the Goodfellow's episode.
Speaker 5: It's like the Mount Rushmower of Amazing films, And I
Speaker 5: don't know if I can climb that peak, even though
Speaker 5: about Rushmore isn't really that tall, but I'll look like
Speaker 5: carry Grant just crawling around on Lincoln's nose, and.
Speaker 2: That Benning did make an impression in this one, And
Speaker 2: you're right, it wasn't just the nude scenes, though certainly
Speaker 2: as a teenage viewer, they made an impression. I was like,
Speaker 2: isn't that the lady from the Great Outdoors?
Speaker 5: It was the John Candy movie.
Speaker 7: Yeah, Ackroyd's wise and she talks about masturbating up against
Speaker 7: the dryer when it's or the washer when it's on
Speaker 7: spin cycle.
Speaker 2: Oh god, I forgot how that had made an impression clearly,
Speaker 2: and then I saw the rafters and it was great,
Speaker 2: but no doing the channeling. We talked about how she
Speaker 2: was very much channeling Gloria Graham in The Big Heat,
Speaker 2: and I don't think we even mentioned though, that she
Speaker 2: played Gloria Graham years later in film Stars Don't Die
Speaker 2: in Liverpool, which I thought makes an interesting transition to
Speaker 2: start her career there, and not that her career is
Speaker 2: over now, but all these years later, actually get around
Speaker 2: the plane Gloria Graham. That was an interesting exercise. I
Speaker 2: watched The Grifters and the film Stars Don't Die in
Speaker 2: Liverpool back to back a few weeks ago.
Speaker 1: As part of the thirty watched for these podcasts.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, there was thirty Stephen Frears films, I watched
Speaker 2: more like ninety five I think we counted.
Speaker 5: So yeah, just some light viewing.
Speaker 2: A little light viewing. Yeah, yeah, but yeah, big ee
Speaker 2: to the grifters, to filmstars don't like Diane Liverpool, so good.
Speaker 2: I recommend that to people as a triple.
Speaker 5: Bill if memory serves. That didn't Gloria Graham end up
Speaker 5: with Nicholas Ray's son, Is that right, Nicholas race son.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he did after Nicholas Rye. I think that's what
Speaker 1: broke the relationship as Yeah, I haven't swatted on Gloria
Speaker 1: Graham's life for this episode, so yeah, I'm flying blind
Speaker 1: a bit on that one.
Speaker 2: But yes, she did.
Speaker 1: She did end up with She had had an affair
Speaker 1: or relationship I think with Nicholas Ray's sun.
Speaker 5: Yeah, which, Wow, when we're talking about a movie with
Speaker 5: so much incest, it just yeah, it's a little close
Speaker 5: to home there with that one. Holy shit. Yeah, they
Speaker 5: definitely the idea of the incest in this and just
Speaker 5: that the women are so similar looking, and they get
Speaker 5: more and more similar looking as the movie goes along,
Speaker 5: to the point where we actually have the Francis Bay
Speaker 5: shows up later in the film as this hotel attendant
Speaker 5: and she at one point, you know, when and Nett
Speaker 5: Benning comes in, she's, oh, is there something wrong? Oh, oh,
Speaker 5: I'm sorry, I thought you were the other lady. Yeah,
Speaker 5: And then we're gonna get Harry Jones confusing and then
Speaker 5: luckily the police confusing these two ladies. And it's really
Speaker 5: just that mark on the hand that tips us off
Speaker 5: that it's not Lily that is actually Myra. And oh
Speaker 5: the mark on the hand, the cigar burn, the whole
Speaker 5: scene with pat Hingele as Bobo justice coming to deliver
Speaker 5: some bobo justice to her. Holy shit, that scene leaves
Speaker 5: a major impression. And what's the best is that, Yeah,
Speaker 5: there's some really awful violence in there, but I think
Speaker 5: in your mind it was even worse going in and
Speaker 5: it's almost a relief when you come to a fucking
Speaker 5: cigar burn on the back of the hand.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I was once you know, a film lecture where someone
Speaker 2: asked a question of person, what do you think is
Speaker 2: the most disturbing violence you've ever seen.
Speaker 5: In a movie?
Speaker 2: And they brought up, oh, getting beaten with the oranges
Speaker 2: in the grifters, what was really the most disturbing thing
Speaker 2: for me? And like she just talks about it, and
Speaker 2: it is just that powerfully delivered the whole making her
Speaker 2: stuffs this towel with oranges and described to Pat Hendele
Speaker 2: how it's potentially going to, in his words, make you
Speaker 2: not shit right the rest of your life. And yeah,
Speaker 2: it is really unnerving. Great performances on both but great
Speaker 2: writing to know that you were going to be able
Speaker 2: to get away with something if you could show on TV,
Speaker 2: but have the impact of such horrific violence delivered just
Speaker 2: in the dialogue. It was amazing.
Speaker 1: And then he's all chatty and friendly Hu, which I
Speaker 1: think is what adds that edge.
Speaker 2: Stay into that scene.
Speaker 1: You know, I've got to you want to stick around
Speaker 1: for a drink after he's put the cigarette on her hand,
Speaker 1: and of course in the book it's very graphic. She,
Speaker 1: of course, as you do when you're in that much
Speaker 1: pain and trauma, soils herself and then he you know,
Speaker 1: you want to stick around for a drink and she's, oh, no,
Speaker 1: I've got to go and see my son.
Speaker 2: He's in hospital. How is your son five from me?
Speaker 2: And then he's absolutely, that's a good thing to have
Speaker 2: on a T shirt chat.
Speaker 1: He's an absolute psychopaths as a mobster. He's not one
Speaker 1: of those funny, wise cracking con man type mobsters exactly
Speaker 1: how you would expect a powerful mobster to actually be
Speaker 1: one question, you want.
Speaker 2: To stick to that story, you want to keep your teeth? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: what the fuck are you doing with the sub.
Speaker 1: And she tells you about what the fuck you're doing
Speaker 1: with the sun.
Speaker 5: The way Thompson describes his knees on her spine while
Speaker 5: he's putting that cigarette out on her and just keeping
Speaker 5: the skill it took to keep the ember alive on
Speaker 5: the cigarette while he's doing that to her, so he's
Speaker 5: not putting it out on her, he's using the heat
Speaker 5: and burning her. And I don't think they really like
Speaker 5: they keep the whole thing about the long coat, but
Speaker 5: I don't think they really imply. If they do, it's
Speaker 5: not very well in the movie that she has soiled
Speaker 5: herself because.
Speaker 2: Because that's why she's wearing the coat.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but it's not. I don't know. It just you
Speaker 5: don't see anything, and I know that you wouldn't really
Speaker 5: I'm not into women peeing on film like some people.
Speaker 5: But yeah, I'm.
Speaker 2: Yes, is there an inference they have walk.
Speaker 5: Well, no, just a general thing I think ban to it.
Speaker 1: But The Bad Book is a dark, little cookie of
Speaker 1: a book. It's really, as I said, the incest is
Speaker 1: sign's hosted very early and laid on the Moira Lily comparison.
Speaker 1: I mean, this is a key constant film in all
Speaker 1: of Thompson's books, a sort of angst and existential emptiness
Speaker 1: of the characters is because in the book, Roy's got
Speaker 1: a sort of straight job as a salesman and does
Speaker 1: the grift on the side.
Speaker 2: And he's addicted. He's addicted to the grift.
Speaker 1: He can't really get offer even though it's pennanty bullshit grifting,
Speaker 1: and they're all looking for something better out of it.
Speaker 1: But there's also that whole subplot in the book about Carrell,
Speaker 1: the nurse in the film that Lily hires the look
Speaker 1: after Roy, and Roy basically says, you realize one another's
Speaker 1: hired you. She's just hired you so I can fuck you,
Speaker 1: because she's trying.
Speaker 2: To wean me off Moira.
Speaker 1: But in the book, Carol is a Nazi concentration camp
Speaker 1: survivor who's been had some horrific experiments on the part
Speaker 1: of the Nazis, And there's this whole subplot of Roy
Speaker 1: sleeping with her, and as soon as he finds out
Speaker 1: that she's a concentration camp survivor, he basically just treats
Speaker 1: it absolutely and visibly. That is such a dark little subplot.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's funny how with this one she gets offended
Speaker 5: when he says, Oh, my mom hired you to fuck me,
Speaker 5: and it's just like, oh, she run basically runs off.
Speaker 5: And in the book, it's so much worse, so terrible.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, and you get just it's only a few
Speaker 5: paragraphs worth of stuff, but your mind just goes to
Speaker 5: all these places with the things that happened to Carol,
Speaker 5: to her mom, to her grandmother, how she was a
Speaker 5: dacout concentration camp survivor, and it sounds like experimented on
Speaker 5: her medically. So Roy's all happy when he's, oh, have
Speaker 5: you been with other people? And she's like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 5: I've had sex before, and she says something like I
Speaker 5: can't get pregnant, and she's upset about it. Oh, we
Speaker 5: can never have children together. Roy, like she's already planning
Speaker 5: the wedding and everything, and he was like Oh, that's great,
Speaker 5: let's fuck This is terrific. And then yeah, after they
Speaker 5: have sex, she talks about her past and she barely
Speaker 5: touches on it, but in your mind you expanded out
Speaker 5: to so much because she's talking about her mother and
Speaker 5: her grandmother and they're trying to see how young a
Speaker 5: woman can be or a girl can be before she
Speaker 5: can have a baby. And they found out five years
Speaker 5: old she was able to conceive, and then they sterilized her.
Speaker 5: They almost found out when it came to her grandmother,
Speaker 5: but they killed her in the process.
Speaker 3: Oh.
Speaker 5: It just tears the heart out of it. And then
Speaker 5: Roy being such an asshole about it and just his
Speaker 5: reaction to it, no empathy whatsoever. And that really helps
Speaker 5: for me the book where it's like, oh, man, up
Speaker 5: till now, I thought Roy was okay, But from this,
Speaker 5: I know this guy's no good whatsoever. It is just
Speaker 5: wretched stuff. That was something the whole Communism angle. There's
Speaker 5: a real quick mention in the Grifters, and I was like, Oh,
Speaker 5: he's definitely being ironic here because I knew that he
Speaker 5: was a Communist because he's talking about he's talking about
Speaker 5: the fucking Nazis as Roy he's talking about the Nazis,
Speaker 5: and it's just he gets after he's getting mad at
Speaker 5: Carol for her telling him her past. He says, after all,
Speaker 5: the one time friends, poor fellows were now our friends,
Speaker 5: and it would be bad takes to show gas stoves
Speaker 5: on television. After all, you couldn't condemn a people, could you,
Speaker 5: And what if they had done exactly that themselves, should
Speaker 5: you make the same regrettable error? After all, they hated
Speaker 5: the Reds as much as we did. They were as
Speaker 5: eager as we were to blow every stinking Red in
Speaker 5: the world to Helen gone. And after all, those people
Speaker 5: they allegedly sinned against had brought most of the trouble
Speaker 5: on themselves. And what he's saying with they had brought
Speaker 5: the trouble on themselves. He's talking about Jewish people, and
Speaker 5: I'm just like, holy fuck. And then the next paragraph
Speaker 5: is it was their own fault, it was her own fault.
Speaker 5: But with him railing against the Reds, I was like, Okay,
Speaker 5: we're being ironic here. I'm so glad that it's not.
Speaker 5: I'm glad that Roy Dylan is not Jim Thompson. Of course,
Speaker 5: there's nothing in nineteen ninety that is going to line
Speaker 5: up with that, And it's not like she's I don't know,
Speaker 5: like Vietnam survivor or somebody, I don't know what would
Speaker 5: be the corollary. There's nothing that can be a corollary
Speaker 5: to the Holocaust, guys, I think that's pretty safe to say.
Speaker 5: But that removal was very smart. Again going back to
Speaker 5: Westlake and his adaptation, what he was doing, making the
Speaker 5: internal making the descriptions that Thompson is giving us, and
Speaker 5: then putting them into the mouths of these characters, taking
Speaker 5: the description of the hotel where Roy is living at
Speaker 5: and putting some of that stuff into the mouth of
Speaker 5: Henry Jones as the only I think he's the only
Speaker 5: guy that works at the hotel basically other than the
Speaker 5: one maid who he's telling to take any towels that
Speaker 5: she finds on the floor and refold rather than launder,
Speaker 5: because it's going to cost him probably a few cents
Speaker 5: to launder all those towels. Just refold them. If it's white,
Speaker 5: refold it. But yeah, fucking Henry Jones, man, he is
Speaker 5: so good in this. Henry Jones is always great in
Speaker 5: anything that he's in. At The Bad Seed, him just
Speaker 5: completely emasculating Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo and yeah, just playing
Speaker 5: yet another skeazy hotel landlord type person. I'm trying to
Speaker 5: remember the name of the actor that plays the guy
Speaker 5: with the big teeth in Blazing Saddles Taggart's right hand man,
Speaker 5: but I think he runs the hotel in the Getaway,
Speaker 5: And it's very much the same idea of these transient
Speaker 5: people living in hotels, which is funny because I know
Speaker 5: that's how Charles Wiliford lived a lot of his life,
Speaker 5: but it was in San Francisco where he's living in
Speaker 5: hotels for months and months at a time. And to
Speaker 5: hear about the Los Angeles transience and some of the
Speaker 5: stuff that they were talking about on the audio commentary
Speaker 5: of guys trying to coerce women into prostitution while they're
Speaker 5: walking down the line at the Actors Strike, just handing
Speaker 5: out business cards to all the attractive women. I'm just like, man,
Speaker 5: what a world? What a world does Los Angeles is?
Speaker 2: I believe it's pronounced Los Angeles. Yes.
Speaker 5: Yeah. She really insists on hitting that hard, which I appreciate.
Speaker 2: But she hits all the angles. Some have called it
Speaker 2: a city of angles. Westlake's adaptation certainly would have run
Speaker 2: into trouble coming up with a parallel to the Holocaust
Speaker 2: to give that character a backstory. But I do think
Speaker 2: that excising the nurses.
Speaker 8: Carol's story gives the movie a different feel because it
Speaker 8: does put us more in Roy's corner.
Speaker 2: You know, the book really wallows in what a crummy
Speaker 2: guy or what you know, all the characters, how lousy
Speaker 2: they are as human beings. But the movie, at least
Speaker 2: on your first viewing of it, actually if you're a
Speaker 2: teenager like I was, having watched a lot of John
Speaker 2: Cusack romantic teenage romantic comedies, and I do think that
Speaker 2: he's who I'm rooting for in this movie into and
Speaker 2: then at the end what happens to him is really
Speaker 2: awful in a way that it wouldn't quite be if
Speaker 2: I really thought he was such a piece of shit,
Speaker 2: the way I would if Carol's story had been preserved.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I agree, Jeda Dyah that he is an absolute
Speaker 5: shithead when he does that to Carol, and it just
Speaker 5: I can't say that I completely turned against him at
Speaker 5: that point, but I definitely lose a lot of any
Speaker 5: respect that I had for him, just from that reaction.
Speaker 5: One thing that you were talking about earlier, Andrew with
Speaker 5: the whole idea of I can quit grifting anytime. I
Speaker 5: can do this whenever. Jim Thompson was a notorious alcoholic,
Speaker 5: and that seems like such the alcoholic thing to say,
Speaker 5: I can stop anytime. I don't have I just have
Speaker 5: a couple of drinks of parties. I just do a
Speaker 5: couple of grifts on the weekdays when I'm selling match
Speaker 5: sticks to different bars and things. I just take five
Speaker 5: dollars here, dollar there. I'll have this weird bet with
Speaker 5: this guy where I pay him a dime for every
Speaker 5: quarter that he can set up on end. Yeah, those
Speaker 5: kind of things were. Yeah, it's like he's penny Ante.
Speaker 5: But he can never stop.
Speaker 1: None of these people, they're all they're all basically imprisoned
Speaker 1: in the obsession of the grift.
Speaker 2: That's actually another great line I can't remember. I think
Speaker 2: it is in the normal when.
Speaker 1: Bobo basically says you're stealing from Lily, Oh, she's a clip,
Speaker 1: a buck here, or a back there. First, don't steal
Speaker 1: a little bit too smart. It is not stealing a lot,
Speaker 1: I think she says, or something like that. But they're
Speaker 1: all engaging in this incredibly danger, risk, risky, obsessive behavior
Speaker 1: which they just can't get out all and they're turned
Speaker 1: on by that, emotionally, sexually, psychologically turned on by the grift.
Speaker 2: And that's that scene at the beginning.
Speaker 1: Would all three of them turn around at the same
Speaker 1: time and they're looking at over the straight world, going Okay,
Speaker 1: another die at work, Let's do this.
Speaker 5: It's also very clever to use the racetrack because the
Speaker 5: racetrack was in the book. The racetrack is still a
Speaker 5: thing in nineteen ninety, it's probably still a thing in
Speaker 5: twenty twenty four. I just don't know. But the idea
Speaker 5: of the shifting of the odds that she's doing for
Speaker 5: Bobo and his syndicate, what was it Amusement Eastern AMusA,
Speaker 5: Adjument and amusements, that she's there with this wads and
Speaker 5: words of money, shifting all of these odds and making
Speaker 5: sure these horses don't come in for too much, and
Speaker 5: that really to me mirrors the Moira scam of the
Speaker 5: stock market. That's the new horse race, even though that's
Speaker 5: been around for one hundred years as well. But the
Speaker 5: whole idea of the hackers and oh, we have an
Speaker 5: eight second lead here. It's so much in eight seconds
Speaker 5: the horse could come in faster than somebody else, that's
Speaker 5: by like milliseconds. So here they've got this eight second lead.
Speaker 5: So we can figure this stuff out and put in
Speaker 5: these buys and puts and all this kind of stuff.
Speaker 5: It's win place or show for the modern age. And
Speaker 5: then also that is nineteen ninety. We've gone through eight
Speaker 5: years of Reagan. We're halfway through George Bush the first term.
Speaker 5: It's yeah, these the idea, these predatory lending and all
Speaker 5: this kind of stuff. Pretty much, Thompson almost comes out
Speaker 5: and says, hey, whatever we're doing, the government's doing it
Speaker 5: way worse to you. But we're honest grifters. We're the
Speaker 5: ones that are looking you right in the eyes as
Speaker 5: we're taking your money out of your pocket. The government
Speaker 5: won't even do that. The one thing that Weslake brings
Speaker 5: whole cli as far as I know, to the screenplay
Speaker 5: is the scene with JT. Walsh is the flashback of
Speaker 5: Moira and this setting up of Charles Napier as this
Speaker 5: Texas Oil millionaire I presume to be clipped, and that
Speaker 5: whole scene of them, it tells you so many things.
Speaker 5: It tells you all about Moira that the voice that
Speaker 5: she's using, that Gloria Graham voice, is not her voice.
Speaker 5: We don't know what her real voice. Probably sounds like.
Speaker 5: She's got a little bit of a Texas drawl when
Speaker 5: she's talking with Charles Napier. We find out about JT.
Speaker 5: Walsh and how he's this Basically, he's the ultimate comment
Speaker 5: to me, he's that mentor character that John Cusack meant
Speaker 5: if that mentor just kept getting deeper and deeper until
Speaker 5: you get off the deep end. And that part of
Speaker 5: the flashback where we see what happens as JT. Walsh,
Speaker 5: I just think that's fantastic that he goes crazy, been
Speaker 5: double crossed, and has been double crossing people all of
Speaker 5: his life that now suddenly all seems to be rushing
Speaker 5: back onto him and he can't even trust that there's
Speaker 5: a floor. That he can't even step off of his bed.
Speaker 5: He's just paralyzed with fear, who can trust who, Who's
Speaker 5: going to double cross who? It's like he gets to
Speaker 5: the point in his life where he can't even trust
Speaker 5: that the floor is going to hold him up anymore.
Speaker 5: He just has gone completely off the deep end. And
Speaker 5: I even though that scene is there is a character,
Speaker 5: there is a Langley character in the book, and I
Speaker 5: think he just I think want to say he became
Speaker 5: a drunk or something and was off the grift and
Speaker 5: all this, but this whole idea, the elaborate con that
Speaker 5: they set up, and then also the mental illness that
Speaker 5: is very Westlake, that is him making these things up
Speaker 5: and investigating the whole thing with the stock market and stuff.
Speaker 5: And that's really his addition to the screenplay is that
Speaker 5: whole section. I thought that was brilliant and just to
Speaker 5: show first off, fucking JT. Walsh and Charles Napier going
Speaker 5: at it. Yes, I absolutely love it. But JT. Wallsh
Speaker 5: just in and off himself was always just delivered those
Speaker 5: performances like nobody's business and could just come in and
Speaker 5: be in a movie for five minutes and just knock
Speaker 5: you out with his performance, like even his little turn
Speaker 5: in A Few Good Men, all of that is wonderful.
Speaker 5: But yeah, in this movie, he's great, and I just
Speaker 5: love that he ends up cracked up and unable to
Speaker 5: even move. He's so paranoid. And I know it's a
Speaker 5: little thing, but her with her clip on earrings. How
Speaker 5: she takes the clipy ond earrings off before she leans
Speaker 5: in to kiss him, and I'm just like, oh, okay,
Speaker 5: you don't even have your ears pierced. There's not even
Speaker 5: that commitment to that. It's just these clip on things. Yeah,
Speaker 5: the way that when he talks about his mom going
Speaker 5: to the track, I think it's like, oh, the track.
Speaker 5: And then there's just like a few beats before she
Speaker 5: says I want to know everything about you, and I'm like, yeah,
Speaker 5: I bet you do. I bet you see your meal
Speaker 5: ticket just coming down the street here. I love that,
Speaker 5: And I love too that her hair is completely different
Speaker 5: in the older in the flashback with JT. Walsh, and
Speaker 5: also when you can see her getting nervous about how
Speaker 5: extravagant JT. Walsh is with the con when he opens
Speaker 5: up the door, he's just like, I got a whole
Speaker 5: room of hardware back here. Come on back and check
Speaker 5: these computers out. You can hear them humming, and Napier
Speaker 5: starts to stand up and she's just like, no, that's okay, honey,
Speaker 5: that's okay. And they're like, oh, you're actually really nervous here,
Speaker 5: and then yeah, just that whole idea of her being
Speaker 5: so malleable with her looks and things, and then of
Speaker 5: course when she is in the present with Roy, that
Speaker 5: her hair and Lily's hair are so similar, just that
Speaker 5: kind of wild blonde just streaking out. An like the
Speaker 5: end of the film with having Lily come in and
Speaker 5: try to steal all of her son's money, it's like
Speaker 5: the one thing she doesn't ask for it, she just
Speaker 5: comes in and takes it every single bit. She's just like,
Speaker 5: I need that money, Roy, and that becomes that whole
Speaker 5: inciting thing of that end scene that you're just talking about.
Speaker 5: I think I can't remember if it's Freeers. I think
Speaker 5: it might be. Westlake talks about how it's set up
Speaker 5: like a boxing match. They just keep trying these different angles.
Speaker 5: She comes at him this way and he won't do it.
Speaker 5: He comes at her this way and she won't do it.
Speaker 5: Then she turns it around like you were saying, Jededie,
Speaker 5: and starts to do that whole I don't think she
Speaker 5: says in the movie what if I wasn't your mother?
Speaker 5: But there's definitely that we can get together. There's a
Speaker 5: kiss that happens in this movie, and I'm just like, oh, shit,
Speaker 5: Is it okay? Every angle?
Speaker 2: What if I told you I wasn't your mother? And
Speaker 2: then she says, you'd like that, wouldn't you?
Speaker 1: That whole corn that the long con that Moira and
Speaker 1: Cole Langley are involved in, which is is a kind
Speaker 1: of direct I'm not saying Westlake, who I worship as
Speaker 1: a writer, but he lifts that from that George Royd
Speaker 1: Hill nineteen seventy pre film The Sting, which has almost
Speaker 1: the exact same long con in it, including the fake shooting,
Speaker 1: and so that they hustle a lot of get out
Speaker 1: because he doesn't want to basically be associated with a homicide,
Speaker 1: and all that's lifted directly from The Sting. I think
Speaker 1: it was influenced very heavily by the Sting, who.
Speaker 5: Was talking in one of those extras about the Sting
Speaker 5: and that the Sting was based on somebody's book and
Speaker 5: they had basically combined all these stories into like smaller stories.
Speaker 5: And so when The Sting came out, I ended up
Speaker 5: being able to sue them because he's, yeah, those are
Speaker 5: all real things, but I'm the one that put them
Speaker 5: together in this order.
Speaker 2: Was it the big don I think it might be the.
Speaker 5: Big con yeah, the David Marr book. Yeah, nice, Oh,
Speaker 5: there it is in your hands. Do you read that
Speaker 5: one too?
Speaker 2: I did not for this read, but.
Speaker 5: I have to say, just as a real quick aside,
Speaker 5: I listened to The Grifters and it was narrated by
Speaker 5: Barbara Rosenblatt, and at first I was like, why is
Speaker 5: there a woman narrating this one? It's Roy's story? And
Speaker 5: I'm like, it's not Roy's story, and she spends so
Speaker 5: much time as Lily and Moira, and she does a
Speaker 5: fantastic job, really great narration, and I actually look forward
Speaker 5: to hearing more Barbara Rosenblatt narrated books, because she really
Speaker 5: killed it, and especially if she does more Thompson's I'm there.
Speaker 2: Similar to myke, I've got a bunch more that I
Speaker 2: haven't read, and I do, at a very deliberate pace,
Speaker 2: take out another one and read it, because there's only
Speaker 2: so many of them, and they I love them. And
Speaker 2: when I know, when I've had maybe a string of
Speaker 2: disappointing reads in a row, like I really need the
Speaker 2: salvage my reading streak, I'll pull out at Jim Thompson then,
Speaker 2: or I've got a handful of authors like that where
Speaker 2: I've I've got some set aside that I can just
Speaker 2: pull out when I know I got to have a
Speaker 2: great one portraits.
Speaker 5: That's right. I only read after your I just open
Speaker 5: up another chapter of Revolution and thirty five Milimeter and
Speaker 5: read another great film essay.
Speaker 1: That's what actually people should be doing.
Speaker 2: That's right. Who wrote that book.
Speaker 5: I'm not sure who wrote it, but it was edited
Speaker 5: by Andrew Nettie and Sam Degan, available on PM Press.
Speaker 2: I see, I'm a big Sam Deagan f Yeah.
Speaker 5: Same here.
Speaker 2: May type that Mike's three of Us excellently.
Speaker 5: Jed. You pointed out that Dylan is a common name
Speaker 5: for Thompson.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he used a lot of the same names, different
Speaker 2: combinations of first names and last names that he would
Speaker 2: use in novel The novel Story to Story. Robert Pulito's
Speaker 2: amazing biography of Jim Thompson Savage Art I just read
Speaker 2: preparing for this podcast, and it's really great at going
Speaker 2: through Thompson's each of his books and pointing out which
Speaker 2: scenarios were retelling of real events from Thompson's life, which
Speaker 2: characters are based on his mother, his father, which character
Speaker 2: is supposed to be him, and a lot of those
Speaker 2: names are Communist Party names that Thompson used when he
Speaker 2: was in the Communist Party and had a several identities there,
Speaker 2: and Dylan was one of the identities that he used,
Speaker 2: and that name pops up an awful lot in his work.
Speaker 1: I think there's also a lengthy section in that absolutely
Speaker 1: brilliant literary biography of Thompson's by Palito where they talked
Speaker 1: about the fact that Thompson's first job was in a hotel,
Speaker 1: a sort of traveler's hotel in Oklahoma as the really One. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's basically where he had to supply the traveling sales from.
Speaker 2: With women, drugs, liquor, ran errands for them.
Speaker 1: It's where he ran up first, ran up against the
Speaker 1: organized crime that he had to deal with, criminals, he
Speaker 1: had to deal with other low life. So it's obviously
Speaker 1: that in futures, all these subsequent work.
Speaker 5: If memory serves, he was still like a kid when
Speaker 5: he was doing.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, late teens. I can't remember. So his dad, Yeah,
Speaker 2: his dad was a businessman who I think is very
Speaker 2: much one of the guys that Moira's talking about when
Speaker 2: she says, all over the Southwest, you've got these businessmen.
Speaker 2: They were making money when everyone was making money, and
Speaker 2: they think that means they're smart. I think that line
Speaker 2: is directly Thompson talking about his father, who made fortunes,
Speaker 2: made he was a millionaire one year, and then would
Speaker 2: they be destitute and having to move in with relatives.
Speaker 2: And Thompson as a young man, took it upon himself
Speaker 2: then to take care of his father. Would be absent
Speaker 2: for years at a time, just sending a little money
Speaker 2: or cards now and then. But Thompson would he took
Speaker 2: upon himself to support his family, support his mom and
Speaker 2: his sisters. And yeah, so he took these jobs working.
Speaker 2: He would work all night at the hotel and then
Speaker 2: go to high school and fall asleep in class. He
Speaker 2: was just constantly working. One of the oedipal stuff in
Speaker 2: the Grifters, and that shows up in Thompson's other books
Speaker 2: is because that was a lot of them. He's constantly
Speaker 2: killing his father and attracted to his mother or his sisters,
Speaker 2: things like that in the books. And I'm not suggesting
Speaker 2: that that Thompson really did any of this stuff, but
Speaker 2: a lot of those themes that come through and motifs
Speaker 2: that show up throughout his work there are here in
Speaker 2: the Grifters come out of his real life, and yeah,
Speaker 2: if you're interested in Thompson, I can't recommend that the
Speaker 2: Savage Art book by Robert Pluto enough. It was really great.
Speaker 2: I'd been aware of it for a long time and
Speaker 2: wanted to read it for a long time, but took
Speaker 2: the occasion of this episode to finally do it, and
Speaker 2: it was amazing.
Speaker 5: It's probably one of the best. And yeah, I were
Speaker 5: the years ago about so many of those things still
Speaker 5: stick with me today. And then I don't want to
Speaker 5: remember where I read this, but I want to say
Speaker 5: that Lily's look that she apparently looks a lot like
Speaker 5: I'm one of Thompson's wife's, but I found that interesting
Speaker 5: as well. But I don't know how much that was
Speaker 5: intentional or not, because that's a very specific look that
Speaker 5: she has going there, with the white hair and the
Speaker 5: way that it sticks all up. And then you get
Speaker 5: that echo again with Moira and that whole idea of yeah,
Speaker 5: he's just basically sleeping with his mom every time he
Speaker 5: sleeps with Moira, and that whole thing too of her
Speaker 5: with the separate rooms. And I want to say that
Speaker 5: they actually flip that from the book was it. I
Speaker 5: think it was Roy's idea to have the separate rooms
Speaker 5: so that he could grift and do whatever he wanted
Speaker 5: to without Moira knowing. And then and then she he actually,
Speaker 5: oh yeah. In the book, he gets up early one
Speaker 5: morning and he this is not in the movie. He
Speaker 5: gets up early while they're down in La Joya and
Speaker 5: takes a trip into I can't remember which adjoining city
Speaker 5: and goes to a bar and sees this old punchboard
Speaker 5: in the bar. He starts up this whole like friendly
Speaker 5: conversation with the guy who's running the bar, this guy
Speaker 5: named Bert, and he sees this punchboard and he knows
Speaker 5: it's an old drifting trick, and he intends on stopping
Speaker 5: it and tell you, or that's what he is telling
Speaker 5: himself anyway, that he's going to stop and eventually tell Bert, listen,
Speaker 5: you got rooked by this and you need to throw
Speaker 5: this thing away basically. But before he can do that,
Speaker 5: wouldn't you know, there's an undercover cop inside the bar
Speaker 5: who comes over and basically abuses Roy, doesn't arrest him.
Speaker 5: Roy manages to kno get his record a smirch at
Speaker 5: that point, but he calls all over the place, including
Speaker 5: calling Moira, and that I think is really what tips
Speaker 5: her off to what's going on. And then when he
Speaker 5: comes back to the room later on, she's not there
Speaker 5: for a long time, and she was actually at that
Speaker 5: point going over and finding out more about his mother
Speaker 5: because of the race track being right there too. That's
Speaker 5: a little bit of a twist that's happening in there,
Speaker 5: and I'm glad that they dropped that. They really didn't
Speaker 5: need that whole scene because the way that she figures
Speaker 5: him out in the movie, I think it takes a
Speaker 5: little bit of a longer time, or maybe not. I'm
Speaker 5: curious what you guys think as far as when is
Speaker 5: the first moment she realizes that what is it? Game
Speaker 5: meets game? Her attraction to Roy is based probably on
Speaker 5: the grift and she's, oh, this guy has something else
Speaker 5: happening with him.
Speaker 2: Her intention with Roy, I don't remember from the book
Speaker 2: what their meeting was. I remember it was explained in
Speaker 2: the book, not in the film, but I do know
Speaker 2: she is looking to replace her partner she can't work
Speaker 2: with any longer, and I think she is grooming and
Speaker 2: it isn't until she catches him drifting on the train
Speaker 2: in the film that she's confident she can make her
Speaker 2: pitch to him now. But yeah, I think that was
Speaker 2: definitely on her mind for their whole relationship, which I
Speaker 2: think then mentioned in the film has been about two months.
Speaker 1: Only two three flashbacks in the film when he's with
Speaker 1: Eddie Jones, who plays that great.
Speaker 2: I love that, actually do love that scene.
Speaker 1: It's one of the few human, lovely, light touch emotional
Speaker 1: scenes in the entire film.
Speaker 2: When we're always lying on the bed and.
Speaker 1: He doesn't know it, but he's dying and he's sort
Speaker 1: of tossing the coin and he imagines Mints walking into
Speaker 1: his hotel room, and Mitch just gives him this sort
Speaker 1: of eternal smile as if to say, oh, what the
Speaker 1: fuck have you got yourself into now?
Speaker 2: Kid? Come on?
Speaker 1: And then he has that flashback about when he first
Speaker 1: meets Mints and they talk and Mince basically says, you
Speaker 1: know what, and Roy does I want to be a grifter?
Speaker 1: And Mince basically says, first rule, no part of it's
Speaker 1: you know partner, takes your split down the middle and
Speaker 1: what's it? Apple on your head and against the part
Speaker 1: or a shotgun? No, no long con always the short
Speaker 1: cut and that's the bible he's lived with this entire time.
Speaker 1: So I do wonder whether Moyra is playing you, but
Speaker 1: he's just alert to that. One of the mysteries of
Speaker 1: the film. Will never knows.
Speaker 5: He's got a code, you know, he's got a code.
Speaker 5: I think his mother has a code. I think Lily
Speaker 5: has a code, but I don't think Moira has a code.
Speaker 5: I think that she is going to she's opportunistic in
Speaker 5: any way, and she doesn't have that idea like for him.
Speaker 5: He just he's content to do the shortcun He's content
Speaker 5: to get ten dollars change for a twenty when he
Speaker 5: puts down a ten. You know, that's a big thing.
Speaker 5: That seems to be his money maker. And he's been
Speaker 5: doing this long enough and squirrelling out his money that
Speaker 5: he can have. I think they say fifty thousand dollars
Speaker 5: in the book, and this is nineteen sixty three money. Guys,
Speaker 5: he's got fifty fifty two I think thousand dollars saved away.
Speaker 5: And you know that he he only uses that money.
Speaker 5: The only time it really comes out, it ever comes
Speaker 5: out from behind the clown paintings is when he's trying
Speaker 5: to pay off Lily. He thinks that by throwing money
Speaker 5: at her, literally, that he's going to pay his debt
Speaker 5: because he hates to be in debt to her. He
Speaker 5: hates her so much because he thinks he had such
Speaker 5: a shitty childhood and I think he did. He had
Speaker 5: such a shitty childhood that he's just I don't want
Speaker 5: her helping me, like it's a dreadful thing. That she
Speaker 5: was the one that got the ambulance that got him
Speaker 5: to the hospital, that saved his life. And she says
Speaker 5: that she gave him life twice birth and then saving
Speaker 5: him for this, and he's just desperate. I don't want
Speaker 5: to owe her anything. So he tries, hey, his own
Speaker 5: mother off with four grand to be like, there you go,
Speaker 5: that's gonna be good for the hospital, right, Just fuck you, Lily.
Speaker 5: And sometimes he wants.
Speaker 2: To the shot when she's killed him and he's lying
Speaker 2: there dead on the ground or at least expiring, and
Speaker 2: she's weeping, she's grieving, she's so upset that her body
Speaker 2: she's heaving. But the shot is really sick. It's just sick.
Speaker 2: He's lying on the ground and she's kneeling beside him,
Speaker 2: and the way she's moving and just the light, the composition,
Speaker 2: it really looks like they're fucking and it's just one
Speaker 2: more great little layer of nastiness in this movie that
Speaker 2: the closest they've been has led to this.
Speaker 1: It's a pretty horny film. It's because there's all that.
Speaker 1: Because also there is that scene in the book where
Speaker 1: Layra is trying to sell the jewelry to the jeweler,
Speaker 1: which in the film is that terrific character actor Stephen
Speaker 1: Dobolowski is that dorky guys and ground all day and
Speaker 1: he's in lots of other things. And in the film,
Speaker 1: she just doesn't that the jeweler said, look, this is
Speaker 1: the other book. The jeweler says, look, it's not real.
Speaker 1: It's not real diamonds. I can't really give you much
Speaker 1: for this, and she goes on her way. But there's
Speaker 1: this great we in double on Pondra See where the
Speaker 1: jewelers basically saying, oh, look, I'm sorry about this. The
Speaker 1: diarlands are fake. I can't give you much. But look,
Speaker 1: if there's anything else you think we might be interested in,
Speaker 1: you're a valued customer, just let us know. And she's
Speaker 1: she basically says, there might be there might be one thing,
Speaker 1: or I would have to see the merchandise, but you're
Speaker 1: looking at it. A terrific little introductory scene to Moira.
Speaker 1: Her particular anxiety in the book is that she knows
Speaker 1: she can't keep selling her body. She knows that it's
Speaker 1: a finite resource. She's getting old. She didn't want you
Speaker 1: to start with, but she also knows that she gets older,
Speaker 1: it gets harder, it takes more out of a It's
Speaker 1: a tough saying in that book, where she's still ruminating
Speaker 1: that she needs she needs money, and she needs it fast,
Speaker 1: and she she can't get it selling her body. So
Speaker 1: what's she going to do?
Speaker 5: Yeah, at some point the rent's going to be due
Speaker 5: and the landlord's actually going to take the money rather.
Speaker 2: Than that's right, that's right the lady or the loot.
Speaker 5: Yes, And then that whole weird thing of it. And
Speaker 5: that's an odd carryover from the book. It's because she
Speaker 5: and the character is basically Langley called Langley. They would
Speaker 5: read magazines and they would laugh at all of the
Speaker 5: catchphrases for the advertisements, and so in the movie they
Speaker 5: keep that with her suddenly saying all of these crazy things, well,
Speaker 5: that are all like written for out of magazine. It's
Speaker 5: all advertising pattern and talking about like germs and your
Speaker 5: crevices and things, and it's just like in the movie.
Speaker 5: I'm like, what the hell is this? And you know,
Speaker 5: I'm so glad I read the book because now that
Speaker 5: makes a lot more sense.
Speaker 2: Broiled hot house tomato under generous slice of ripe. She's
Speaker 2: the Moira Langley story. Oh god, yeah, I need to
Speaker 2: bring back your wirey zone as when talking about somebody's crotch,
Speaker 2: what was that? Sorry, I don't remember the She said
Speaker 2: that a couple of times to the landlord. The first
Speaker 2: one was something like, got something wrong with your wiy zone?
Speaker 2: And then as she's laid out on the bed naked,
Speaker 2: she's talking about a car as she's running her hands
Speaker 2: over her right naked body and how the stick shift
Speaker 2: handles and the immaculate wires and owners. It's good stuff,
Speaker 2: good stuff.
Speaker 3: Yea.
Speaker 5: All right, We're gonna go ahead and take a break
Speaker 5: and play back a couple of interviews. First up, you'll
Speaker 5: hear from producer Peggy Risky and then producer Barbara Defina,
Speaker 5: and we'll be back with both of those right after
Speaker 5: these brief messages.
Speaker 9: Hello everyone, This is Malcolm McDowell. I just want to
Speaker 9: say that this is a request to listeners of the
Speaker 9: Projection Booth podcast to become patrons of the show via
Speaker 9: Patreon dot com p A T eo n dot com
Speaker 9: slash Projection Booth.
Speaker 2: That's pretty simple. I think you can do that.
Speaker 9: It's a great show and Mike he provides hours of
Speaker 9: great entertainment. So now it's time to give back my
Speaker 9: little drovies. Settle down and take a listen and have
Speaker 9: a sip of the old Molocco and then you'll be
Speaker 9: ready for a little of the.
Speaker 2: Old in Out, in out real horror show. Bye bye.
Speaker 5: All right, welcome to the interview portion of the show.
Speaker 5: First that you're going to hear from Peggy Risky, who
Speaker 5: was one of the producers of the film. Taught to
Speaker 5: her about this movie as well as her work on
Speaker 5: the Trevor Project. How did you get interested in filmmaking
Speaker 5: as a kid?
Speaker 4: I remember watching Saturday Mornings TV where they had all
Speaker 4: these old movies programmed, so there'd be the old serials,
Speaker 4: there'd be those great black and white romantic comedies from
Speaker 4: the forties and thirties, and Charlie Chaplin and a bunch
Speaker 4: of other stuff, and I was just fascinated by a
Speaker 4: world way beyond mine. I grew up in a small
Speaker 4: town in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, so seeing these whether it
Speaker 4: was The Thin Man or Casablanca, whatever, all of those
Speaker 4: worlds seemed exotic and radically different than my own. But
Speaker 4: I think movies really helped me see and introduced me
Speaker 4: to the wider world in a way that got planted
Speaker 4: very early for me. So filmmaking fell into it. There
Speaker 4: was actually a teacher in high school who had us
Speaker 4: make super eight films, and it was very odd. This
Speaker 4: was unusual at the time, but mister Fitzpatrick, there you go,
Speaker 4: and we'd have fun making them. And I made a
Speaker 4: little stop action thing of shot glances dancing to the
Speaker 4: song Tequila. I wish I could still find it. And
Speaker 4: then as I went to college in undergrad our town
Speaker 4: had just started a cable television station, Public Access, so
Speaker 4: we got to make programming for that, and I started
Speaker 4: to begin to know more about storytelling, and we also
Speaker 4: I had film production classes again. Another wonderful professor there
Speaker 4: named Roger bullis very supportive and helpful. And then I
Speaker 4: went to graduate school. It was video TV film got
Speaker 4: to keep doing more stuff and more narrative based productions,
Speaker 4: and all I can say is, I knew I wanted
Speaker 4: to make movies, really wanted to make movies at that point,
Speaker 4: but I have no idea how I go about it.
Speaker 4: But I didn't know I wanted to go to New York.
Speaker 4: I thought New York City was just the coolest place
Speaker 4: in the world you could be, and I really just
Speaker 4: followed my instincts. I'm sure much more logical choice would
Speaker 4: have been Los Angeles, but the big city to Big
Speaker 4: Apple called, and I went. When I started working in
Speaker 4: New York, I actually got a job. My first job
Speaker 4: was as a receptionist for a company that made corporate films,
Speaker 4: and within a year I was working as a producer
Speaker 4: director for them. And all that background and experience I
Speaker 4: had making films all through those college years actually paid off.
Speaker 4: There were a lot of people who worked on stuff
Speaker 4: but had no idea how this was. Like when videotape
Speaker 4: was just coming. I'm really strong, and nobody knew how
Speaker 4: to run a tape recorder, handing that stuff and go
Speaker 4: to college, and the jobs that I had working through
Speaker 4: college all involved me dealing with that kind of stuff.
Speaker 4: That's how I got involved. Starting out, while I was
Speaker 4: in New York, I met other people involved in the
Speaker 4: film business, and after a couple of years I was
Speaker 4: able to cross over into working on narrative stuff. And
Speaker 4: then oddly enough I transitioned from doing industrials into helping
Speaker 4: people prep feature films like for free, helping to learn
Speaker 4: the skills involved in breaking down movies and strip boards
Speaker 4: and all the things you do to create a production
Speaker 4: shooting schedule. And one night I go to a party
Speaker 4: and I meet John Sales and Maggie RAMSI there and
Speaker 4: John had recently made Return of the Sacocca seven, which was,
Speaker 4: as we know, very popular and tied into the burgeoning
Speaker 4: start of the independent film movement. John Cassabetti's was one version,
Speaker 4: and then the next generation was people like John Sales,
Speaker 4: the Coen Brothers, Jim Jarvish, and I was in New
Speaker 4: York and started working with John in that period of time.
Speaker 4: This was in the eighties, and life happens. There was
Speaker 4: no big plan. It was an accident. We hit it
Speaker 4: off that They told me they were making another movie,
Speaker 4: and I said, if you need somebody to help sign
Speaker 4: me up, And they asked me to come in and
Speaker 4: production manage this low budget film called Leanna, which we
Speaker 4: had fun making in and Hullboken for really a small
Speaker 4: amount of money. And then after that was done, Magie,
Speaker 4: who's John's life partner and has been a producer of
Speaker 4: his films his whole career. Meggie said, Hey, we've got
Speaker 4: this other movie when we want to make, called mate One.
Speaker 4: Would you like to produce it with me?
Speaker 2: Sure?
Speaker 4: So after making one other film, I got to be
Speaker 4: a producer. But the truth is it took seven years
Speaker 4: to make mate Wan, and in the middle of that
Speaker 4: process we actually thought we had the financing. It fell
Speaker 4: apart overnight and we were sitting around depressed, and John said,
Speaker 4: I've always had this idea about a movie about a
Speaker 4: black extraterrestrial who winds up in New York and starts
Speaker 4: to read secret messages in graffiti in the subway. And
Speaker 4: so that went from a dream and that one line
Speaker 4: concept to John go's ave got two hundred and fifty grand.
Speaker 4: Do you think we could get a movie like that
Speaker 4: in the canon. I'm sure we could figure it out.
Speaker 4: And we made The Brother from Another Planet. Six weeks
Speaker 4: later we were shooting that was it. That was my
Speaker 4: first official producing credit, and I just kept going.
Speaker 5: Since why did it take so long for Maytwan to
Speaker 5: nder fruition?
Speaker 4: Think about it, Here's a movie about truly one of
Speaker 4: the bloodiest conflicts in American labor history. But it wasn't
Speaker 4: exactly the most popular topic at the time. And John
Speaker 4: writes sophisticated films that are about class, culture and capitalism.
Speaker 4: May One was not a ringing endorsement for any of
Speaker 4: those things. What finally happened is that we made that
Speaker 4: film for a very low budget given the scope and
Speaker 4: scale of it, which was a period nineteen twenty epic
Speaker 4: and Virginia, and we got the financing largely based on
Speaker 4: John's reputations of foreign sales based on what he could
Speaker 4: bring in. And then God bless we got James Earl
Speaker 4: Jones to start in a supporting role as the leader
Speaker 4: of the black miners who are brought in to be
Speaker 4: scabs but wind up joining up with the union the
Speaker 4: local coal miners who are out on strike, and we
Speaker 4: cast people who were not well known yet like David
Speaker 4: stuthan new Oscar winner, was in one of the very
Speaker 4: strong supporting roles. Chris Cooper never been a lead in
Speaker 4: a film. He was the lead in Mate One. It
Speaker 4: wasn't a movie that you sold on names particularly. It
Speaker 4: mostly wrote on John's reputation and previous track record. And
Speaker 4: the truth is, by that point he had Skaka seven
Speaker 4: and Brother from Another Planet, both of which were very
Speaker 4: successful at the box office, and that helped us get
Speaker 4: the financing. But it took seven years from me wanting
Speaker 4: to get financed in John's next movie after that, Eight
Speaker 4: min Out, which I also helped produce, was made a
Speaker 4: year later, and that had taken eight years to get financed.
Speaker 5: Phillah, tell me about The Grifters, How does that come
Speaker 5: into your life?
Speaker 4: The Grifters was honestly one of the best experiences making
Speaker 4: a film I've ever had, and I think that it
Speaker 4: was partly where I was in the trajectory of my life.
Speaker 4: It was also branching out into making a film that
Speaker 4: was a little more high profile. Martin Scorsese and Barbara
Speaker 4: Defina were the producers. But what happened is by the
Speaker 4: time The Grifters was getting ready to go, they were
Speaker 4: going off to make Last Temptation of Christ. They needed
Speaker 4: someone to produce the film in their stead, at least
Speaker 4: through the production period. I get a call one day,
Speaker 4: did I want to come in and talk to Stephen
Speaker 4: Prayers about this movie he was going to make? And
Speaker 4: this was when I was living in New York. I
Speaker 4: go to I forget if it was the Algonquins Hotel
Speaker 4: and meet with Stephen and it was the most fascinating
Speaker 4: interview ever because all we did was just chat about movies,
Speaker 4: favorite films, things that had to do with family relationships,
Speaker 4: the weird overtones sometimes and on who was a little
Speaker 4: too flortacious with one of my brothers, all the stuff
Speaker 4: that starts to touch on incest in a way, but
Speaker 4: he can't really tell for sure if that's what's going on.
Speaker 4: And he never asked me anything, particularly about what do
Speaker 4: you know about production? It was like and this was
Speaker 4: actually one of the great things I admired about Stephen.
Speaker 4: He clearly knew my credits and that I had history
Speaker 4: before I was coming in. He knew that I had
Speaker 4: made some kind of mark as a producer in the
Speaker 4: independent film world, and he respected that. And the dynamic
Speaker 4: between a producer and a director is a lot about
Speaker 4: understanding of shared vision. Do you understand as a producer
Speaker 4: what the director's going for how can you help support
Speaker 4: translating that into the actual film and all the many
Speaker 4: decisions that have to be made along the way about
Speaker 4: where do you put the money? And I don't know.
Speaker 4: At a certain point, it's do a sense you can
Speaker 4: get along, communicate well, and do you have enough experience
Speaker 4: to do what's required. All I can tell you is
Speaker 4: whatever that magic combination is supposed to be, it seemed
Speaker 4: to happen, and I walked out a little stun going.
Speaker 4: That was the oddest kind of It was just a
Speaker 4: great conversation. And the same thing happened with other people.
Speaker 4: I know because I recommended a friend to be the
Speaker 4: script supervisor and she came out saying the same thing.
Speaker 4: Like they started talking about famous Polish filmmakers. Her last
Speaker 4: name was Polish. All this kind of stuff, and that
Speaker 4: was just Steven. And part of the way he treated
Speaker 4: people on the crew was about respecting what they brought
Speaker 4: to the table and trusting it. And somehow that just
Speaker 4: came through without him ever giving you a compliment. He's
Speaker 4: not prone to compliments, but he felt it more than
Speaker 4: you needed to hear it, and so people would really
Speaker 4: do whatever to help support him getting what he wanted
Speaker 4: on screen.
Speaker 5: Was the film cast by the time he came aboard,
Speaker 5: or were you just forming the crew at that point.
Speaker 4: By the time I came on board, Cusack was attached.
Speaker 4: I think a net Benning was attached, but I still
Speaker 4: had to cast Lily. And that was when they were
Speaker 4: still interviewing actresses for the part. And I remember that
Speaker 4: there was a moment that Marty came into town to
Speaker 4: meet with the three finalists for the role of Lively,
Speaker 4: and I do remember Stephen saying he was sitting in
Speaker 4: the room with Angelica, Houston and Marty and of course himself,
Speaker 4: and it's not going well. It's whatever was happening. Angelica
Speaker 4: seemed very what I suspected. She was nervous, but not
Speaker 4: particularly forth company talking bus and I wish I could
Speaker 4: remember what happened. But some question he placed because he,
Speaker 4: I think, really felt strongly about Angelica forever. All something
Speaker 4: he said flipped the switch and all of a sudden
Speaker 4: they just went the right direction and was very engaging,
Speaker 4: and Marty came out agreeing that she would be the
Speaker 4: best choice for the role, and.
Speaker 5: She was, yeah, I can't imagine anybody else playing that role.
Speaker 4: No, I still think It's one of the best performances
Speaker 4: by each of those actors, by John Cusick and Nim
Speaker 4: Benning and Angelica.
Speaker 5: Houston on such a strong supporting cast too. I love
Speaker 5: Pat Hinkle. He's always so great to watch.
Speaker 2: I know.
Speaker 4: I tell you Vicky Thomas did the casting out of
Speaker 4: Los Angeles. And Vicky she has I think a box
Speaker 4: of cards she started collecting at eleven or twelve where
Speaker 4: she'd write notes about favorite actors from her TV.
Speaker 2: Shows and stuff.
Speaker 4: Vicky knew actors that Marty wasn't even familiar with that
Speaker 4: came in.
Speaker 2: She knew all.
Speaker 4: Those actors from the forties and the fifties in the
Speaker 4: sixties who are still kicking around, these really great character actors.
Speaker 4: And VICKI I think her stamp is on that film
Speaker 4: in all those wonderful phases supporting characters.
Speaker 5: I had heard that Timothy Carey was in contention at
Speaker 5: one point.
Speaker 4: I don't know about that one. Maybe Barbera. Well you
Speaker 4: look at his face and you go, yep, does he
Speaker 4: belongs in that film? Oh yeah, But I don't know
Speaker 4: what really happened.
Speaker 5: So were there any challenges of updating a book that
Speaker 5: was set in earlier time to this more modern era
Speaker 5: where people don't really even use the term grift that much.
Speaker 5: Maybe now, maybe since twenty sixteen with our former president,
Speaker 5: but now we know all about grifting.
Speaker 4: In terms of translating the film from the period it
Speaker 4: was written in to a more contemporary setting, Stephen took
Speaker 4: a very conscious approach to wanting to help it feels
Speaker 4: and worked with I think tuly one of the best
Speaker 4: production design teams ever that was led by Dennis Gasner,
Speaker 4: with incredible support from Leslie McDonald and with Nancy Hay
Speaker 4: who are just incredible art director and set decorator. There
Speaker 4: was nothing in that film that wasn't at least ten
Speaker 4: years old, so it without ever going black and white
Speaker 4: and literally that noir ish look. I think he created
Speaker 4: a beautiful with a great production team, neo noir look
Speaker 4: that makes that film when I look at it, and
Speaker 4: I saw it recently, it still holds up. You can't
Speaker 4: quite figure out when and where it was set, so
Speaker 4: it doesn't age itself. Stephon was in love with the
Speaker 4: language from the book and so all that stuff that
Speaker 4: would have seemed anachronistic to us. It was like put
Speaker 4: it in and that great line get off the griff Ry,
Speaker 4: you haven't got the stomach for it. Loved all that,
Speaker 4: and I do think it exsolutely brought that word back
Speaker 4: into the lex Acount. I never heard it before before,
Speaker 4: seen the book, and of course reading a screenplay.
Speaker 5: From what I understanding, Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Speaker 5: One of the main jobs of a producer is to
Speaker 5: solve problems. What kind of problems did you have to
Speaker 5: solve on this one?
Speaker 4: It's true that a big part of a producer's job
Speaker 4: is problem solving. That in helping ensure that the whole
Speaker 4: ship is moving in the right direction right and that
Speaker 4: everybody the right hand is talking to the left hand,
Speaker 4: et cetera, et cetera. One of the challenges, and this
Speaker 4: is not in common, is you find you never quite
Speaker 4: have as much money as you would like to make
Speaker 4: a film. And so we got to a point where
Speaker 4: we realized that we weren't have quite as many days
Speaker 4: as we wanted, and that this did not really get
Speaker 4: understood until after the fact. But the financier was actually
Speaker 4: getting into trouble. I didn't know that, but I didn't
Speaker 4: know all of a sudden the movie was getting cut back,
Speaker 4: shipped away at by a couple hundred dollars, And what
Speaker 4: happened is we discovered later they went bankrupt. But in
Speaker 4: this period of time, we're just like, Okay, there's a squeeze.
Speaker 4: We've got to figure out how we're going to adjust.
Speaker 4: And one of the things you always look at is
Speaker 4: are there any scenes that can be cut? Because as
Speaker 4: soon as you cut scenes, you can save on shooting time,
Speaker 4: and you can try to nickel dime your way through it,
Speaker 4: which you do, but you really at some point go
Speaker 4: can you cut scenes? Can you compress shooting? Can you
Speaker 4: save on gays with actors? Those are the big things
Speaker 4: you tend to look at. And so there had been
Speaker 4: a couple of flashbacks written into the script that, personally
Speaker 4: and lovely as they were, I thought were probably extraneous,
Speaker 4: that they would probably never wind up in the final
Speaker 4: cut of the film. And I went back and forth
Speaker 4: with Stephen about that for a while, and he, like
Speaker 4: every good director should, wanted to fight for everything, but
Speaker 4: at a certain point he saw that the writing was
Speaker 4: on the wall and if we didn't come back with
Speaker 4: an adjustment to close the gap of a couple hundred
Speaker 4: thousand dollars, And so I finally was like, okay, we'll
Speaker 4: cut a couple of these flashbacks, So that helped. And
Speaker 4: then the other thing is always having a good relationship
Speaker 4: with the people who are heads of the department and
Speaker 4: to really genuinely create a relationship where they know you're
Speaker 4: pulling for them. You want them to look good, you
Speaker 4: want them lovely, to look good. But then there becomes
Speaker 4: this assessment you have to do about where do you
Speaker 4: invest it, where do you want to impress the most
Speaker 4: with production value, and then where do you know you
Speaker 4: can cheat it. And with movies like The Grifters and
Speaker 4: several other particularly period films they've worked on, you realize
Speaker 4: you got invested in the beginnings of the movie where
Speaker 4: you're trying to sell the period and really get the
Speaker 4: audience bought in, and then you can cheat later on
Speaker 4: and put corners once you've established.
Speaker 2: The world and they're really in it.
Speaker 4: And we did that with The Grifter to some extent.
Speaker 4: The Grifter was both interior a lot of ways, and
Speaker 4: yet it had these racetrack scenes and two different racetracks
Speaker 4: and required traveling to reshout one near Los Angeles and
Speaker 4: the other one in Phoenix, and so you still had
Speaker 4: a somewhat ambitious scope to do with certain things, but
Speaker 4: there's also tricks you try to do when the money
Speaker 4: is tight, and that's a lot in the area of
Speaker 4: location scouting married to the production design, try to find
Speaker 4: places that bring a lot of the look already to
Speaker 4: the table. For example, one of those great last shots
Speaker 4: where Lily's going down in the elevator through that old
Speaker 4: elevator that was over on wheel Share the east side
Speaker 4: of town was great Bryce and Something apartments and there
Speaker 4: it is. I think of the Grifters every time I
Speaker 4: drive by them. Wonderful.
Speaker 10: So that was it.
Speaker 4: But you're always trying to figure out and you can
Speaker 4: only do that in consultation with the director and trying
Speaker 4: to get a buy in from the director about really
Speaker 4: what do you care about? And my job is to
Speaker 4: give you options for where we preserve the most important stuff.
Speaker 4: And here's one, two or three different ideas about where
Speaker 4: we could maybe scrape compromise, do we really need x
Speaker 4: amount of critain days. These are the kind of things
Speaker 4: you wind up talking about. But it also has to
Speaker 4: be put within the context of what is the most
Speaker 4: important for the movie and telling this story, and that's
Speaker 4: also your job as the producer.
Speaker 2: Is to protect.
Speaker 5: You said that this was one of your favorite films
Speaker 5: to have worked on. What were some of the better
Speaker 5: memories that came out of this?
Speaker 4: For me making The Grifters, it was the first time
Speaker 4: I shot a film in LA and to come to
Speaker 4: LA with that grifter world as part of the introduction
Speaker 4: to really getting grounded in Los Angeles, it was pretty great.
Speaker 4: It's a wonderful metaphor for Hollywood in subplays. The Grifters
Speaker 4: was one of my favorite experiences because of the extraordinarily
Speaker 4: gifted group of people who worked on it in key
Speaker 4: capacities who are also manages.
Speaker 2: And just people you like.
Speaker 4: And you did feel like you were all pulling together
Speaker 4: towards the same end goal, which means egos were kept
Speaker 4: largely in check. And I love people who fight for
Speaker 4: their department and what they need to do. You always
Speaker 4: have to negotiate and you can't always give. But I
Speaker 4: love people who have a clear vision but also get
Speaker 4: involved with you as a partner and problem solving and
Speaker 4: figuring out what can we trade up to make this work.
Speaker 4: I always felt like we were all pulling in the
Speaker 4: same direction. But you look, you had Dennis Gassner, one
Speaker 4: of the best production designers in the world making that movie,
Speaker 4: designing that film earlier on in his career, surely one
Speaker 4: of the most gifted costume designers I ever met. Richard Horning,
Speaker 4: who regrettably is no longer with us, Oliver Stapleton, who
Speaker 4: shot a bunch of Stephens films and is great. Mick Budsley,
Speaker 4: who's cut almost all of Stephen's films that he's directed,
Speaker 4: who is a gem and very good at his job
Speaker 4: of storytelling in the editing room. Vicky Thomas and I
Speaker 4: have remained friends to this day. I loved what she
Speaker 4: brought to it now. She also worked with Marty's legendary
Speaker 4: casting director in New York as well. But this was
Speaker 4: a great moment in all of our lives. I think
Speaker 4: where we were still early enough in our careers that
Speaker 4: The Grifter was a real feather in our caps for
Speaker 4: moving on from there. And I think that's part of
Speaker 4: why I remember it so fondly. And you look at
Speaker 4: that film, It's crameless, and the story holds up, the
Speaker 4: telling of the story holds up. It had high production value.
Speaker 4: My god, we made it look more than it cost.
Speaker 4: I think he got to meet Ricky Jay who was
Speaker 4: the consultant on the Grifter schemes? Who is could you
Speaker 4: get anything better than that? You had Elmer Bernstein doing
Speaker 4: the score. I still can go that ditty of the Grifter,
Speaker 4: which that thing starts so fun in the beginning, and
Speaker 4: then it just gets darker and darker. Another one of
Speaker 4: my very strong memories from The Grifters was the scene
Speaker 4: towards the end of the film wax Roy is manipulating
Speaker 4: him to try to get the money she needs to
Speaker 4: run away and winds up killing him by whacking that
Speaker 4: piece of glass and inadvertently into his neck. And there
Speaker 4: she is keening over the body and has to pull
Speaker 4: herself together to leave. Big shot, big scene, climatic moment,
Speaker 4: three cameras on it, do it all, And so it
Speaker 4: was done largely with the coverage of the three cameras.
Speaker 4: In one take when Stephen coult cut I remember Angelica
Speaker 4: was sobbing she could not pull herself together, and Stephen basically,
Speaker 4: I shouldn't be and patted me on the shoulder. Go
Speaker 4: in and talk to her and help her, and I'm like, okay.
Speaker 4: And I remember going in and sitting with her. It
Speaker 4: must have been there was a bedroom on the side,
Speaker 4: sitting on the bed, and she just said it reminded
Speaker 4: her father had not died that long, much before this,
Speaker 4: and she just kept thinking about her father, and that
Speaker 4: grief just came over her fully in the moment. And
Speaker 4: I remember sitting there just trying to listen and be
Speaker 4: of some comfort and a witness to the moment.
Speaker 5: How was the film received when it came out.
Speaker 4: The reception to The Grifters was really positive critically, but
Speaker 4: it was not a knockout at the box office. In
Speaker 4: the years since, I really do think it's become esteemed
Speaker 4: and is considered a classic, a neo noir classic. Even
Speaker 4: with the critical support, it did not break over into
Speaker 4: wide success. But again you've got Steven his reputation and
Speaker 4: did well in Europe. It just didn't break out at
Speaker 4: the American box office in a great sense. But the
Speaker 4: thing about The Grifters now, I think is that it
Speaker 4: has just grown and grown in its appreciation. There were
Speaker 4: a lot of leather neil noir films made right around
Speaker 4: the time The Grifters. There were about three or four,
Speaker 4: and I don't think anybody respectfully recalls the other ones much,
Speaker 4: But most books remember the grifters, and it continues to
Speaker 4: be rediscovered with new generations, so I think it has
Speaker 4: become a contemporary classic.
Speaker 5: You said that you saw it recently. Are you seeing
Speaker 5: that with an audience or was that just on your own.
Speaker 4: I did see it big theater a while ago, and
Speaker 4: let me say it still holds up. That film was
Speaker 4: shot really well. Oh yeah, and I'll just say it again.
Speaker 4: Stephen is an amazing director who knows how to use
Speaker 4: the language of cinema and every tool at a director's disposal.
Speaker 4: I learned a lot about filmmaking working with him. Every
Speaker 4: time it pops up, if I'm run across it on TV,
Speaker 4: I just think, oh, I'll just watch a minute or two,
Speaker 4: and I allays be looking.
Speaker 2: To the end.
Speaker 4: Honestly, I can tell you how many times I've seen
Speaker 4: it by now. A boy still holds up. Also, one
Speaker 4: of the great things about working on that film was
Speaker 4: Stephen is his prodigious knowledge of film history and really
Speaker 4: talking about the other noir films that were evocative of
Speaker 4: what he was going for with this, but really finding
Speaker 4: out about some of the best Robert Mitchin There's Katee Fear,
Speaker 4: but all that stuff about how those male characters very
Speaker 4: often get undone by women. Sometimes if you're Bobie, you
Speaker 4: are smart. The woman you've fallen in love with, who,
Speaker 4: by the way, has turned out to kill your best friend.
Speaker 4: But what was great about Stephen in that story is
Speaker 4: he always said, it's actually not qsx's characters story, it's
Speaker 4: not Roy's story, it's Lily's. And that was what O'donald
Speaker 4: West like into writing script once he said it was Lily's.
Speaker 4: Donald's like, Okay, I got it. And that's the thing
Speaker 4: about Stephen's stuff. I think that it is in its
Speaker 4: own way very feminist, but no one would ever describe
Speaker 4: the film as that. But even in little things in
Speaker 4: the background, like that wonderful Henry Jones character actor that
Speaker 4: is at the hotel when you check in and all that,
Speaker 4: he's well, i'd always pontificating. And if you just look
Speaker 4: in the background, you see a woman just working mopping
Speaker 4: the floors, doing the hard work while he's there pontific
Speaker 4: So even in that that was intentional in a statement
Speaker 4: that Stephen, I know consciously put in women are always
Speaker 4: doing the work and the cleanup in the back.
Speaker 5: Did you get to work much with Donald Weslake Oh.
Speaker 4: Donald came out to location and while we were doing rehearsals,
Speaker 4: he would sit in on rehearsals and help tweak stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 4: but I wish I had more time with him, and
Speaker 4: I wish i'd had Honestly, I wish I had more
Speaker 4: or you'd take him more of an opportunity to get
Speaker 4: to know him better. But he was only out here
Speaker 4: a short period of time, so I didn't get to him.
Speaker 4: Barbara will have spent more time, I think Donald. What
Speaker 4: I will say is, when Stephen wanted to commit to
Speaker 4: the film, he wanted Donald, and he's the one who
Speaker 4: really I think pursued Donald. Didn't help convince Donald to
Speaker 4: do the screen.
Speaker 5: I had heard that he wanted Donald to use the
Speaker 5: Richard Stark pseudonym for the screenplay.
Speaker 4: That's very Stephen. I must say that I'm happy Donald put.
Speaker 5: His own name.
Speaker 2: Mother.
Speaker 4: I will say that, man, it was stunning. I hadn't
Speaker 4: realized the pseudonyms Donald dues, and how many books that
Speaker 4: man actually wrote. It's stunning. That's where he reminds me
Speaker 4: of John Sales. John Sales was just always knocking stuff
Speaker 4: up again, Like John Sales wrote The Brother from Another
Speaker 4: Planet in less than six weeks. We were fighting locations, casting,
Speaker 4: figuring out the budget, all that without a script. Wow,
Speaker 4: we have had the script, I think two weeks before
Speaker 4: we started shooting. Wo we would write out on outline
Speaker 4: of this is what's going to happen here all that,
Speaker 4: and we went okay, author from what we needed.
Speaker 5: Tell me about your film, Trevor, and how that kind
Speaker 5: of changed thejectory of your life a little bit.
Speaker 4: I love my Trevor. Let's see where do we start.
Speaker 4: I had directed second unit on several of the films
Speaker 4: I produced, and it's appointed, but I'd like to direct
Speaker 4: a movie or something. I just don't know what it is,
Speaker 4: and I guess i'll know when it shows up. And
Speaker 4: I actually cut to me being in New York. I
Speaker 4: had just finished up producing a film that actually turned
Speaker 4: out to be not a pleasant experience for me, and
Speaker 4: I even got to the point of, oh lord, I
Speaker 4: don't know if I if this is what it's going
Speaker 4: to be, I don't know that I want to keep going.
Speaker 4: It was really difficult in culture, and unlike any of
Speaker 4: the other films I had made up to that point,
Speaker 4: which were all really wonderful, collaborative, all on the sun
Speaker 4: page kind of experiences. But while I was in New York,
Speaker 4: I met a very accomplished writer named Eve Ensler who
Speaker 4: wrote for the stage, the woman who went on to
Speaker 4: do the Vagina Mounta Logs and all that. And she
Speaker 4: told me she actually had directed a little show downtown,
Speaker 4: a one man show called Word of Mouths, and she
Speaker 4: thought I'd like it, that I should go see it.
Speaker 4: Snowy night in December, I truned the land and the
Speaker 4: show was remarkable for many reasons, but within it was
Speaker 4: this seven minute sketch.
Speaker 2: As one.
Speaker 4: WOTON shows are comprised of about a thirteen year old
Speaker 4: boy named Trevor who the world gets turned upside down
Speaker 4: overnight when word spreads at school that he's gay. And
Speaker 4: Trevor is this a brilliant kid who just loves musical theater,
Speaker 4: he loves Diana Ross sent nineteen eighty one, and he
Speaker 4: just this charming kid because he's so in the sickcansiastic
Speaker 4: about everything. And what the writter had done that was
Speaker 4: so remarkable is he made it funny and heartbreaking at
Speaker 4: the same time, because the character does at a certain
Speaker 4: point think he should check out and makes an attempt
Speaker 4: to take his online and so here's this little, heartwarming,
Speaker 4: poignant comedy about suicide. I can only tell you it
Speaker 4: marked me. I loved it. I am a white, cis
Speaker 4: gender heterosexual woman, but I understood that kid, and I
Speaker 4: understood how it feels and the price of shame and
Speaker 4: how much SHAMEE can kill. I just loved it. I
Speaker 4: had my producing partner and friend, Randy Stone, come in
Speaker 4: to see if Randy and I had met making Little
Speaker 4: Man Take together produced that he was THEEP on it,
Speaker 4: and Randy, a game man, came out and I could
Speaker 4: see the same thing had happened to him, laughing, and
Speaker 4: he could still see he had cried, and he just said, look,
Speaker 4: we got to make a film out of that. And
Speaker 4: it was like, okay, it was avaran for both of us.
Speaker 4: Randy and I had both worked in the film world producing.
Speaker 4: Randy was a very accomplished casting director in television. He
Speaker 4: cast Expiles a bunch.
Speaker 11: Of other great shows, and we really took it on
Speaker 11: as a bit of a fluke, and luckily, because we
Speaker 11: both had decades of working with people in the business,
Speaker 11: we called in every favor in.
Speaker 4: The book to get this film made. We met with
Speaker 4: the writer who had never written for film before and
Speaker 4: worked with them too, I think wound up creating a
Speaker 4: beautiful screenpi and in the course of that I just
Speaker 4: realized I could see every shot. So at the moment
Speaker 4: it came to say going to direct it, I just said,
Speaker 4: I want to. I really see it. It's so clear
Speaker 4: to me what it should be. And Randy, who had
Speaker 4: seen some of my work as a sainame unit director,
Speaker 4: just said, love it, go for it. I think that's
Speaker 4: a great idea. So that's what we did, and so
Speaker 4: off we went. We raised money. What the writer Celestiless
Speaker 4: Scene had shared with us is that part of what
Speaker 4: motivated him to write that sketch in the first place
Speaker 4: is that he had just heard a report on MPR
Speaker 4: about the higher rate of suicidal risk among LGBTQ plus suits,
Speaker 4: and it turned out that the government itself had documented
Speaker 4: that queer youth were three to four times as likely
Speaker 4: to make an attempt on their life as they're straight peers.
Speaker 4: We know now in the years since that risk goes
Speaker 4: up to it at least ten times as high as
Speaker 4: raight peers if you'd come from an unaccepting family way.
Speaker 4: That was shocking to me. And when we made the film.
Speaker 4: I contacted friends who did educational distributor, and I knew
Speaker 4: that we would be able to use the film to
Speaker 4: get it out there in schools as like a teaching
Speaker 4: kid to help support mental health and talk about wanting
Speaker 4: to create more accepting environments for gain questioning. That was
Speaker 4: the coming together of it. We were lucky enough to
Speaker 4: raise money, friends, family, and we go ahead and we
Speaker 4: make the film. The film goes on, it starts winning
Speaker 4: awards at all these short film festivals and voila, oh
Speaker 4: my lord, we get a Tenny Award nomination for Best
Speaker 4: Short and even better when it was quite a remarkable
Speaker 4: night and I must say a very proud directorial debut
Speaker 4: for me.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So we're celebrating our soul, happy, all this stuff, and
Speaker 4: then this remarkable thing develops two years later, which is
Speaker 4: that we were able to secure and this has never
Speaker 4: been done, a unique slot to present Trevor with an
Speaker 4: introduction and wrap around by Ellen DeGeneres. And this was
Speaker 4: a ninety eight and it was the urgit. Ellen had
Speaker 4: just come out as Gate. So there we're going to
Speaker 4: be tons of people watching it, and we knew we'd
Speaker 4: get a lot of press around it. All, which turned
Speaker 4: out to be two. But I'm sharing the good news
Speaker 4: about this event with a friend who just says, there's
Speaker 4: probably going to be a lot of kids who feel
Speaker 4: like Trevor watching it. You should put up a number
Speaker 4: for them to call. And it was like a bolt
Speaker 4: of lightning hit me and I went, Oh, my god,
Speaker 4: she's right. And I thought, oh God, I just have
Speaker 4: to find one. There must be one knowing one a
Speaker 4: mental health crisis. There must be one in existence. Looked
Speaker 4: all around and I found two lines that said they
Speaker 4: were open on the weekend targeting, or rather set up
Speaker 4: to serve. If I called both them, didn't get an
Speaker 4: answer at either. And it was at that moment I said,
Speaker 4: if there isn't, then we'll just have to create. And
Speaker 4: that's where the producing chops come in. Producing is the
Speaker 4: word producings, make something, not nothing. And that's how the
Speaker 4: Trevor Project came to be and the driver helpline. So
Speaker 4: again I found somebody who was an expert in mental
Speaker 4: help and in sucide prevention. They were running one of
Speaker 4: the best services actually here in Los Angeles and nationally recognized.
Speaker 4: Wound up making a deal to piggyback with their counselor
Speaker 4: the head of it was gay. He had always wanted
Speaker 4: to do something like this for gay youth, and he
Speaker 4: was like, Okay, I'll train the counselors if you can
Speaker 4: find the funding to pull this off. And that's how
Speaker 4: we got it off the ground in three months time.
Speaker 4: In the years since, we were able to build up resources,
Speaker 4: bring the counselors in house, and up to the pandemic,
Speaker 4: we had offices and call centers in both Los Angeles
Speaker 4: and New York. Now we're fully remote, which I think
Speaker 4: is actually great because you can now champ people and
Speaker 4: entrained counselors remotely, and we have people who bring all
Speaker 4: different walks of life in different areas to working on
Speaker 4: the crisis center. One of the most striking things about
Speaker 4: the HBO experience for me, I was actually at the
Speaker 4: call center the night the film aired and premiered on HBO.
Speaker 4: I was standing there at five o'clock when the film
Speaker 4: ended and Ellen did a wonderful wrap up about it,
Speaker 4: and the number came on screen and the phones started
Speaker 4: ringing off the hook. Immediately, I started shaking, and over
Speaker 4: fifteen hundred calls came in that first night, and honestly
Speaker 4: have not stopped since Trevor's much bigger now it's a
Speaker 4: five hundred plus organization. I'm actually in a weird full
Speaker 4: circle moment serving as the interim CEO right now, and
Speaker 4: I have been doing that for about the last year
Speaker 4: and a half as we transition to our next leader.
Speaker 4: And it's extraordinary to me to be in this position.
Speaker 4: I've done with it for the twenty five years. It
Speaker 4: actually started around my dining room table, so it's been
Speaker 4: a really long journey I never saw coming, never anticipated,
Speaker 4: but it has truly turned out to be one of
Speaker 4: the most fulfilling and rewarding experiences of my life. And
Speaker 4: at this juncture, I've had a really wonderful career producing film,
Speaker 4: got to direct few things, which I love. I think
Speaker 4: producing made me a better director when I started, and
Speaker 4: directing made me a better producer after I had done it.
Speaker 4: I took that accrude knowledge and I actually was invited
Speaker 4: to come set up the creative producing program at NYU
Speaker 4: Grad Film and I did that and taught at.
Speaker 2: M YU for a while.
Speaker 4: Immensely talented people that came out of there, including people
Speaker 4: like Chloe Jah Ray Green in that period of time,
Speaker 4: and then I also served as a dean of a
Speaker 4: top ten wrining film school here in Los Angeles for
Speaker 4: a couple of years, and now I'm a CEO West
Speaker 4: in a transition period at the Trevor Project. So all
Speaker 4: I can say is life has fall surprises and I
Speaker 4: feel very blessed. There were lots of ups and downs
Speaker 4: along the way, but I'm grateful to be at this
Speaker 4: position now. I also still work with the me I've
Speaker 4: been an Academy member since the late eighties and I
Speaker 4: now serve as the chair of the Student Academy Awards Committee,
Speaker 4: and I also sit on the executive committee for the
Speaker 4: Producer's Branch. So I love I still have my foot
Speaker 4: in the door with the film business, and in some
Speaker 4: different ways.
Speaker 5: These days it sounds like you are a very busy person.
Speaker 2: I have been.
Speaker 4: And one of the other things I do that I
Speaker 4: just absolutely love is I've taught workshops for film independence
Speaker 4: global media makers, like I went to Tunisia and taught
Speaker 4: a week long workshop there on pitching and producing and
Speaker 4: I love it, And really, to be honest, I'm at
Speaker 4: the point where I get so much out of you
Speaker 4: call it giving back, but you always get fed by it.
Speaker 4: So It's definitely a win when exchange. But I'd love
Speaker 4: mentoring the next generation of filmmakers. I just and what
Speaker 4: you always try to do, and every good teacher that
Speaker 4: I know does this. You just try to help them
Speaker 4: not make the same mistakes you did. They'll make their own,
Speaker 4: but you just try to help them shortcut not to
Speaker 4: repeat some of the gaps. I try to fill in
Speaker 4: the gaps in my knowledge that I wish i'd had
Speaker 4: when I was starting out.
Speaker 2: That's what I try to.
Speaker 4: Imbue the folks I'm lucky enough to work with and teach.
Speaker 5: Ms RISKI thank you so much for your time. This
Speaker 5: has been wonderful.
Speaker 2: Hope you got some stuff you can use.
Speaker 10: All right.
Speaker 5: Up next we have producer Barbara Defina. We started the
Speaker 5: conversation by me telling her just how many movies that
Speaker 5: she's produced that I've loved over the years.
Speaker 10: I was like a fly on the wall. I was
Speaker 10: like a production coordinator or assystem production coordinator. The first
Speaker 10: movie I ever worked on was a Sydney Lamet movie.
Speaker 10: It was called blood Kin, but I think it had
Speaker 10: another name when they released it. But it was great
Speaker 10: to see and James Wangou was the DPA who is
Speaker 10: amazing Academy Award winner, and I'm sure Robert Hooks was
Speaker 10: in it and Lynn Redgray. I had no idea. I
Speaker 10: thought it was just it was a great job. And
Speaker 10: then Little Murders of course with Alan Arkin and Elliott,
Speaker 10: and I think it was Marsha Rod was a great
Speaker 10: fun movie. I was coordinator again, and it's hard to
Speaker 10: remember all of the every once in a while and
Speaker 10: one of them pops up. Oh yeah, I remember that
Speaker 10: Interiors with what He was the only Woody Allen movie
Speaker 10: I ever did, and he and the DP were fighting.
Speaker 10: We were trapped out in the Hampton's in the winter.
Speaker 10: So it was I think that was the last coordinator
Speaker 10: job I did. But at that point I said, maybe
Speaker 10: I can do I'll do something else. I'll try, and
Speaker 10: so I did. But that was the end for.
Speaker 2: Me on that.
Speaker 5: How did you even get into that type of work?
Speaker 10: It was by chance. I wanted to work in the
Speaker 10: theater and I was always interested in sort of costumes
Speaker 10: and design and stuff. I'd been to the theater a lot,
Speaker 10: but I had no idea how you got a job there.
Speaker 10: So I got the closest job I could get, which
Speaker 10: was working for television. Commercial production company, and as secretary.
Speaker 10: It turned out that they had a little studio that
Speaker 10: I guess used to be an old stable or something.
Speaker 10: Now I think it's a grocery store, but they used
Speaker 10: to do commercials. Then you shoot the commercials there and
Speaker 10: for some reason, after a couple of weeks, somebody must
Speaker 10: have quit or something, and they sent me over there
Speaker 10: to work, and I met a bunch of the union
Speaker 10: crew and the place, of course went bankrupt several months later,
Speaker 10: but one of them said, Hey, my brothers the business
Speaker 10: agent makeup and hair, so i'll introduce you. He's looking
Speaker 10: for someone. So I worked at the makeup and hair
Speaker 10: local the IA for maybe six months or a year,
Speaker 10: and then the deal was he was going to introduce
Speaker 10: me to someone else to help me get into the business,
Speaker 10: which he did, and he took me down to the
Speaker 10: actually it was the script supervisors and production coordinators local,
Speaker 10: and I was lucky. It was busy and they had
Speaker 10: a spot for me. So they put me on the
Speaker 10: City Lammett movie and that was how I got in.
Speaker 10: So it was completely by chance.
Speaker 5: I know you produced the Last Temptation of Christ, but yeah,
Speaker 5: it took so long for that movie to get made.
Speaker 5: When did you first get involved with that.
Speaker 10: I got involved toward the end just before. Yes, they
Speaker 10: had problems and their threats of violence, and the theater
Speaker 10: owners wouldn't take the movie. So every time they would
Speaker 10: make a deal then that people would pull out because
Speaker 10: they couldn't make their money back because they couldn't put
Speaker 10: it in a theater, and Cineplex Odeon said they would
Speaker 10: take it. And meanwhile, Marty had been I don't know
Speaker 10: if he was with an agency, but he was introduced
Speaker 10: to Mike Ovidz at CIA, and Mike talked Tom Pollock
Speaker 10: into making the movie, and so Marty's out of gratitude,
Speaker 10: signed with CIA, and that's how the movie got made.
Speaker 10: And it was just when Tom Pollack had started at
Speaker 10: He was a great lawyer and had just started with
Speaker 10: the studio. I don't want to say naive, but freedom
Speaker 10: of speech, and as a lawyer, I think he had
Speaker 10: no idea what problems he had inherited. But we went
Speaker 10: to Morocco and we made the movie for a very
Speaker 10: reduced price. Part of the problem was that before I started,
Speaker 10: the budget was much too high and it was just
Speaker 10: too much to risk. So we had to do indie
Speaker 10: budget and do it offshore, and so that's how it
Speaker 10: got made. Still have problems in the theaters, but Cineplex
Speaker 10: Audion did deliver and it did get some theatrical release.
Speaker 10: But there were people out lined up outside. There were
Speaker 10: some women in blue who were lined up outside praying
Speaker 10: every day. Most of the people that were really angry
Speaker 10: had never seen the movie or read the book. They
Speaker 10: were just in theory, very upset by it. They also
Speaker 10: thought there were sex scenes and all sorts of stuff
Speaker 10: which aren't in the just nothing like that in the movie.
Speaker 10: But that's what happens.
Speaker 5: How did the Grifters come to you?
Speaker 10: It came from I forget who gave it to Marty
Speaker 10: to direct. There were two producers, Jim Payton and now
Speaker 10: I'm blanking on the other one Jim something. I can
Speaker 10: look them up, but I got my book out. So
Speaker 10: they brought it to Marty and they wanted him to direct,
Speaker 10: and he couldn't direct it, but he said he would
Speaker 10: stay on it and got Stephen Friers involved, who I
Speaker 10: think has just finished My Beautiful Wanderette. It was an
Speaker 10: early movie for him and at the time I think
Speaker 10: we had a deal at Disney, which was when you
Speaker 10: think of the material, Probably not a good place, but
Speaker 10: we might have just optioned it because we had the deal,
Speaker 10: and we might have had a discretionary fund. By that point,
Speaker 10: the deals were a very lush and we had discretionary
Speaker 10: money and you had overhead, and it's not so much
Speaker 10: like that today. And Disney decided not to make it,
Speaker 10: and so Cineplex Odeon stepped in the production part of
Speaker 10: it and they raised the money again, very small budget,
Speaker 10: about the same Stephen was great because he came from
Speaker 10: smaller budget movies and he did a wonderful job with it.
Speaker 5: Mccasting, it must have been quite a coupe to get
Speaker 5: Donald Westlake to write the script.
Speaker 10: I'm trying to remember how that happened. I don't know.
Speaker 10: We all became very great friends after that when Dora,
Speaker 10: because he was wonderful spirit, but I'm not quite sure
Speaker 10: we worked together after that. Maybe Steven got him. I'm
Speaker 10: not sure how we've wound up with Donald, but perfect
Speaker 10: person to write it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, definitely. In that cast is spectacular, especially Jelica Houston.
Speaker 10: Angelica was wonderful, Annette, They're all so very young, and
Speaker 10: John was very young. John Cusack was very young. I
Speaker 10: remember having conversations with his I think was his manager
Speaker 10: because he had value at that point. But he was
Speaker 10: still very young to take on a role like that.
Speaker 10: But they were all wonderful. They're all fearless, and Steven too.
Speaker 4: You could.
Speaker 10: I don't think you could make that movie today. I
Speaker 10: think it's too dark, you know, a little gnarly. But
Speaker 10: I just watched it again because I hadn't seen it
Speaker 10: thirty years, and it was just I'd forgotten a lot
Speaker 10: of the crazy stuff. But it was really he really did.
Speaker 10: They all did. It's a great job.
Speaker 5: What were some of your favorite memories of making the movie.
Speaker 10: I don't know a favorite. Working with Steven and the actors.
Speaker 10: I remember these long conversations we had and there were
Speaker 10: a lot of rewrites, apparently because I was looking at
Speaker 10: the script and it was like every color. And I
Speaker 10: remember these long, complicated conversations about how to explain to
Speaker 10: the audience about the odds, how she was changing the
Speaker 10: odds and people get to't understand what she's doing. And
Speaker 10: the more we worked on it, and the more we
Speaker 10: tried to explain the worse of God, so we decided,
Speaker 10: well just say it and forget it, and people will
Speaker 10: get she's doing something bad and understand eventually what's going
Speaker 10: on or not, but that she's doing something that's making
Speaker 10: it the board change. But I remember going on and
Speaker 10: on about that, and I asked, one of my fun
Speaker 10: things is I asked, because it looks sort of period,
Speaker 10: but it's not. And I said to Steve and I said, so,
Speaker 10: what year is it? And he said it's every year,
Speaker 10: which is a total career's answer. It could be any time.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it doesn't really seem to age. I rewatched it
Speaker 5: again recently and it feels very contemporary. Yeah, of course
Speaker 5: there's the cars. Yeah, not everybody drives at twenty twenty four.
Speaker 10: Let's I think in a way what he was saying.
Speaker 10: If you look around you, it's everything isn't from now.
Speaker 10: Everything is developed in their layers and layers of different periods.
Speaker 5: How often is the producer Are you on the set?
Speaker 5: Are you working like on a daily basis, or do
Speaker 5: you have several projects that you're monitoring all at once.
Speaker 10: It depends on the movie. I wasn't on the set
Speaker 10: every day on Grifters. I was back and forth from
Speaker 10: New York because they were in LA But there are
Speaker 10: other movies that I am on the set all the
Speaker 10: time time, but I've noticed that the longer I do this,
Speaker 10: the less time. I always go to the set, but
Speaker 10: don't necessarily sit there all day. Depends on the director,
Speaker 10: but sometimes it's better to make an appearance as opposed
Speaker 10: to just being hanging out.
Speaker 5: I imagine you probably do a lot more work before
Speaker 5: the cameras even start to roll.
Speaker 10: Oh yeah, the movie we just finished. It's finished, but
Speaker 10: the legal and the paperwork goes on and on. The
Speaker 10: financing was complicated. If you're in a studio and they
Speaker 10: fund you, it's easy. You do a budget, they end,
Speaker 10: they send the money in a cash flow. But this
Speaker 10: was with a bank loan and a completion bond and
Speaker 10: an acquisition agreement. The beginning of this took longer than
Speaker 10: actually shooting because we had to deal with so many
Speaker 10: different entities.
Speaker 5: Sounds like that was the case for the grifters too,
Speaker 5: trying to get the money in line.
Speaker 10: It was, but the people at Odeon were very experienced
Speaker 10: at doing this, and also Cineplex Odio, and they might
Speaker 10: have sold off some pieces, but from our point of view,
Speaker 10: we just delivered the movie and they took over and
Speaker 10: they owned it and this case that I just did. Now,
Speaker 10: we didn't sell it out right. It's a fifteen year license,
Speaker 10: which is a long time, but then after fifteen years
Speaker 10: the rights come back. So we're trying to figure out
Speaker 10: what do we do on the fifteen years, what do
Speaker 10: we do with the LLC, and what do we do
Speaker 10: with because I've never had that experience before.
Speaker 5: How have you seen the business change over the years,
Speaker 5: Because you've been doing this for a little bit now.
Speaker 10: It's changed dramatically in the last I don't know, since
Speaker 10: just before the pandemic. I think the pandemic sort of
Speaker 10: set the streaming thing off. But in some ways I
Speaker 10: miss film. I know it took a little time waiting
Speaker 10: for it to come through the lab, but I don't
Speaker 10: find digital any easier. In some ways it's harder. We
Speaker 10: had to send print to Venice, and when it was film,
Speaker 10: you just call up and say make up a print
Speaker 10: and send it. And this is like digital. So we
Speaker 10: had to do the digital thing, and then we had
Speaker 10: to upload it and there were like three people uploading it,
Speaker 10: and otherwise it was just send the print. It's really
Speaker 10: hard sometimes, but I find I think there that a
Speaker 10: lot of movies don't get the theatrical releases. They don't
Speaker 10: all have to, but some of them this really should,
Speaker 10: and I think I'm hoping that might change a little.
Speaker 10: The Academy changed the rules so it's not so easy
Speaker 10: to qualify now as it was. I think it was
Speaker 10: just a week in the theater, and now it's different.
Speaker 10: It's more complicated to actually qualify, which I may be
Speaker 10: happy to see that. I think everybody was hoping that
Speaker 10: would happen. I have trouble with streaming. I hear about
Speaker 10: a great show and then I don't know how to
Speaker 10: I kn'd find it, and then when I find it,
Speaker 10: I forgot. But then I think there's going to be
Speaker 10: some contraction there. Maybe there won't be so many streamers
Speaker 10: and there won't also be so much material. I think
Speaker 10: the sort of economics have caught up with some of them.
Speaker 5: I totally agree. It feels like a bubble is about
Speaker 5: to burst.
Speaker 10: I hope it died. People hate it when you say that,
Speaker 10: but I think, because there'll be less jobs, and there
Speaker 10: might be, but there'll be better quality and they'll be less.
Speaker 10: It'll just be better for everyone. I think in the
Speaker 10: long run.
Speaker 5: Do you mind if I ask you about your experience
Speaker 5: on Goodfellas.
Speaker 2: Oh no, sure, yeah, I would love.
Speaker 5: To know what that was like making that, because that's
Speaker 5: one of my favorite films.
Speaker 10: When we made it, we had a decent budget, but
Speaker 10: it wasn't huge, and the actors other than Ray unknown.
Speaker 10: The studio I forget who they wanted, but they are
Speaker 10: also stories about who they wanted, but they finally said
Speaker 10: okay for Ray. But Ray was terrific and he wasn't
Speaker 10: a known actor at the time, and Bob got it
Speaker 10: made It's Warner Brothers. But it was a modestly budgeted movie.
Speaker 10: We made it all in New York and it was fun.
Speaker 10: The guys were everybody got along, thank god, and Paul
Speaker 10: Serbino was like the master and he was breaking to
Speaker 10: opera any chance he got, and everybody was having a
Speaker 10: good time. It was very violent, but and yet when
Speaker 10: you're making the movie, it's not violent. You see it,
Speaker 10: it's not real, and so it gets sometimes it gets funny. Yeah,
Speaker 10: but it was a good experience, and posts was calm.
Speaker 10: Selma was there, of course, Selma schoonmaker. Most of the time.
Speaker 10: I think we're in Queens And it's a story about
Speaker 10: how the studio were angry I forget what they were
Speaker 10: angry about. I think we were over scheduled, but not
Speaker 10: much over budgets. And they said we couldn't go to
Speaker 10: Florida because there was a scene in Tampa at the zoo.
Speaker 10: And in fact is we never really we're going to
Speaker 10: go to Florida. It was toward the end of the
Speaker 10: schedule and it was a little couple of little scenes,
Speaker 10: and so we just did it here in New York
Speaker 10: and the zoo. I forget. Maybe it was I forget
Speaker 10: which sue Brooklyn. I think it was the Brooklyn sue.
Speaker 10: And they got a lot of plants from like tropical plants,
Speaker 10: and there was a vacant lot and they put filled
Speaker 10: it up with these tropical plants. And that was Florida
Speaker 10: and it worked. It was fine. The whole point of
Speaker 10: it was hanging him over the cage. It wasn't really
Speaker 10: about seeing the zoo. It's just sometimes the imagination in
Speaker 10: the audience is more than you need. So, you know,
Speaker 10: I think we had a good time with it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that shot of the lion is what really sells
Speaker 5: it for me.
Speaker 10: You not need to know see the tropical but yeah,
Speaker 10: I think everyone had a good experience. No one expected
Speaker 10: it to do any real business. A studio was on.
Speaker 10: They didn't know what to make of it, and they
Speaker 10: didn't say anything bad, but they didn't say anything like
Speaker 10: really good when they saw it. Finally, so we did
Speaker 10: those preview screenings and they went really they really didn't
Speaker 10: go well. And we did a couple and then we
Speaker 10: went to in La. We went to an area just
Speaker 10: outside Redundo Beach, I think it was, and we had
Speaker 10: a screening there and first of the projector broke twice.
Speaker 10: And finally we finished the movie and there was a
Speaker 10: point in the movie that women used to walk out.
Speaker 10: I think it was when Henry was really all wired up,
Speaker 10: and they would just say I can't take anymore and
Speaker 10: they would leave. And so that happened, and then it
Speaker 10: was over and we gave out the cards and people virtual.
Speaker 10: People were really riled up about the film breaking and
Speaker 10: people started writing FU all over the cards. The crowd
Speaker 10: was not pleased, they're happy. So we were like, this
Speaker 10: is really bad, and we hit it. We went next
Speaker 10: door there was a bowling alley, so we went and
Speaker 10: sat in the bowling alley while they got the audience out.
Speaker 10: We wouldn't know what was going to happen. There wasn't
Speaker 10: any violence that I remember, but it turned out. And
Speaker 10: then we were terrified, of course, and they had the
Speaker 10: first screenings that invited some critics, and it's the very
Speaker 10: first small group and we were waiting. We think, oh,
Speaker 10: this is going to be like a blood bath, and
Speaker 10: in fact they were really good. They liked it. So
Speaker 10: everybody was shocked, especially the studio. But they would say
Speaker 10: things like, we really got a lot for our money
Speaker 10: and okay, but it worked out.
Speaker 5: Yeah, speaking of money, I've always been curious. The music
Speaker 5: budget must have been huge for that moment.
Speaker 10: Yes, I think he broke a record, and then I
Speaker 10: think he broke that record and maybe Casino, but it
Speaker 10: was I think we might have hit a million. I'm
Speaker 10: not sure, but it all worked. I think it helped
Speaker 10: the movie a.
Speaker 5: Lot, oh one hundred percent. I hear these songs now
Speaker 5: and I can't help but think of Goodfellas.
Speaker 10: I the Christmas song, I think it was the Rods,
Speaker 10: and yeah, it was just great stuff, great fun.
Speaker 5: I'll hear the end of Layla and I think of
Speaker 5: the guy floating through the trash kind of thing.
Speaker 10: Yeah, and Layla. They turned us down originally, and finally
Speaker 10: the agreement was he could only use the instrumental part.
Speaker 10: He couldn't use any of the lyric.
Speaker 5: I think that works.
Speaker 10: It worked right, So, yeah, it's the movie now. When
Speaker 10: we did it, I think the violence was really shocking.
Speaker 10: Now I think the audience has become so used to
Speaker 10: the violence and stuff. It still works. It's still great.
Speaker 10: Every time you turn on the TV. It's been shown
Speaker 10: somewhere and it's chopped up, but it works.
Speaker 1: I know.
Speaker 10: It's just it still draws you in. It's interesting. It's
Speaker 10: interesting how somehow a lot of it is the music
Speaker 10: and maybe the memory of having seen it before.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and now the violence, some of it almost seems funny,
Speaker 5: especially with the stomping on Billy Batts and just seeing
Speaker 5: Joe Peshi getting so into it and Robert de Niro
Speaker 5: as well, just they're so excited to be kicking that guy.
Speaker 10: Yeah, we always thought it was. The script originally started
Speaker 10: with Little Henry, and we're worried because nobody came to
Speaker 10: see Little Henry the first fifteen minutes of Little Henry
Speaker 10: growing up. So we started, let's pick out something in
Speaker 10: the script and bring it forward. That's really shocking and
Speaker 10: really grabs your attention. So that's when we did this.
Speaker 10: That But when you look at the movie, when I
Speaker 10: look at it now, I think the most disturbing part
Speaker 10: is not the first time he shoots him in the foot,
Speaker 10: but the second time when he actually shoots him in
Speaker 10: the chest and kills him. To me, that's the most shocking.
Speaker 10: And that's when the movie turns because up until then
Speaker 10: we're laughing. They're doing terrible things, but we're laughing, and
Speaker 10: then reality sets in. So that's why the Billy batchling
Speaker 10: is up front.
Speaker 5: That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, and when he
Speaker 5: says that he comes from a whole family of rats
Speaker 5: with Spider, Oh yeah, this guy's got a whole family,
Speaker 5: Like they're probably counting on this guy to bring home
Speaker 5: the tips from the club, and yeah, starts your mind.
Speaker 5: In all these different directions.
Speaker 10: It's some interesting written, very reality based.
Speaker 5: I think you've done so many projects over the years.
Speaker 5: What have been some of your favorites to do?
Speaker 10: Actually, Grifters is one of my favorites. I liked you
Speaker 10: can count on me. It was when we read the
Speaker 10: scripture and this is really nice, sweet little and no
Speaker 10: one had any idea that it would do so well
Speaker 10: and touch so many people. Yeah, I wish Kenny would
Speaker 10: direct more, but I think it's I don't know. I
Speaker 10: won't speak for him, but he doesn't seem happy and
Speaker 10: he's directing.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I can see that. So it sounds like you're
Speaker 5: still going big time with their new projects and everything.
Speaker 10: I have a few things that I want to get
Speaker 10: done and I'm not really taking on much more. But
Speaker 10: there's one thing I shouldrive even crazy to do a
Speaker 10: movie about Tommy James and the Chundells. I won't go
Speaker 10: through the whole thing, but he actually, when he was
Speaker 10: very young, had a hit and just the tour in
Speaker 10: Manhattan and the music industry at that point they all
Speaker 10: loved and said we'll call you back, and the next
Speaker 10: morning all of them passed except Roulette Records. And they
Speaker 10: found out later that the guy who ran Roulette, Morris Leavey,
Speaker 10: was mobbed up and it was run by the Genovezi
Speaker 10: family and he had told everybody to back off. So
Speaker 10: Tommy's like a kid from the Midwest. He signs thrilled,
Speaker 10: and then he finds out he's working for the mob
Speaker 10: and so it's about all of the great music he
Speaker 10: did in that period. Because Morris was very generous with
Speaker 10: studio time and also creatively let him do what he wanted.
Speaker 10: He gave him a lot of hit but he also
Speaker 10: just kept all the money, so Tommy never got unless
Speaker 10: when they were on the road that got paid. Otherwise
Speaker 10: he never got paid. And so it's that's part of
Speaker 10: the story anyway, And we get a little bit into
Speaker 10: the de story how they actually sold the music, and
Speaker 10: also there was a mob war and Tommy had to
Speaker 10: go into hiding, so he decided at one point he says,
Speaker 10: I got to get out of here. But his music
Speaker 10: is just you hear it on TV and it's everywhere
Speaker 10: and other artists have covered it all. It's just great again,
Speaker 10: great energetic music that really moves things along.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And to find out more about how that was created.
Speaker 5: I've always been curious about that kind of weird moment
Speaker 5: in Crimson and Clover where the voice is fluttering and everything.
Speaker 5: That's fascinating to find out more.
Speaker 10: Oh and Crystal, it's funny Crystal persuasion. People think it's
Speaker 10: about drugs and stuff. He said, Actually it was about
Speaker 10: the sun coming up. It's actually this glorious sun rise instead.
Speaker 10: People we all think I have to breaking bad. It's
Speaker 10: got to be about bloom about mass is it? But
Speaker 10: you never know actually what the music is really about
Speaker 10: when they wrote it.
Speaker 5: Well, mster Fena, thank you so much for your time.
Speaker 2: This has been great. Thank you. That's right, we're back.
Speaker 5: And we're talking about the Grifters. And I do have
Speaker 5: to say I know that neither of you guys had
Speaker 5: a chance to watch this one, but a really good
Speaker 5: double feature with the Grifters. Apart from people still lye
Speaker 5: in Liverpool, people are still having sex in Liverpool. What
Speaker 5: is it?
Speaker 2: No, stars don't to die in Liverpool.
Speaker 5: Oh okay, film stars much.
Speaker 2: Blossier than that, bock.
Speaker 5: Come on, okay, all right. Other than film stars don't
Speaker 5: die in Liverpool, you might want to check out the
Speaker 5: two thousand and four Spanish film in Cautos, which translates
Speaker 5: either as suckers or swindled. I found it under the
Speaker 5: title Swindled. Really well done con Men movie. There are
Speaker 5: some scenes that feel very much right out of this one,
Speaker 5: but it feels more like a tribute than a lift,
Speaker 5: let's say. And I thought it was very well put together.
Speaker 5: I think it's a really good con person film. Do
Speaker 5: you guys have any favorite con films that you go
Speaker 5: back to.
Speaker 2: I don't think you'd go wrong with those David mammontt
Speaker 2: con movies like House of Games and that Andrew Brought
Speaker 2: Up a Spanish Prisoner. I think Heist counts as a
Speaker 2: con film too controversial because it is a heist film.
Speaker 2: There is like an armed robbery and things like that.
Speaker 2: But they're running cons constantly in the movie, for up
Speaker 2: against the guard at the airport, or they're just constantly
Speaker 2: running little grifts, little cons as part of their haste.
Speaker 2: And so I think I think those three Manmett movies.
Speaker 1: Count as interesting the great films with good My guy
Speaker 1: is so cool. When Cheap go to Sleep, they count him.
Speaker 1: I think The Sting, which I mentioned already, is a
Speaker 1: great film. I'm a big fan of Catch Me if
Speaker 1: you Can Works Bielberg, the Three Film.
Speaker 2: I think that's actually works really well as a con
Speaker 2: man film. Are there any classic noir?
Speaker 1: There must be classic noirh Convent Nightmare Rally arguably a
Speaker 1: comp but that's more as a corn film, but of
Speaker 1: course classic film.
Speaker 2: Are there any other classic film? No, there must be
Speaker 2: other film con films.
Speaker 5: There might, I mean some, I don't know. How much
Speaker 5: of a con you have to have to consider it
Speaker 5: the con film. But it feels like you mentioned the
Speaker 5: whole idea of like the twist at the end type
Speaker 5: of thing, and there's so many like the Italian Job.
Speaker 5: And I don't know if the original was like this,
Speaker 5: but the remake definitely felt like there was a twist
Speaker 5: writing them towards the end, which made it more of
Speaker 5: a con film. This whole idea of and I know
Speaker 5: it's more of a heist film, but the idea of
Speaker 5: at the end of the heist film, you get the
Speaker 5: moment where you find out that your partner has been
Speaker 5: tricking you the entire time and they're about to take
Speaker 5: the money. And so there's the con at the end
Speaker 5: that that little pardon the expression, sting seems to be
Speaker 5: coming in to a lot of the heist movies now,
Speaker 5: where it's okay, the heist is done, and either you
Speaker 5: get caught or you find out that your partner's ripped
Speaker 5: you off and now you have to go after them.
Speaker 5: It's a cliche too, that this was an independent film,
Speaker 5: that this was Mirrormax putting this out rather than it
Speaker 5: being a big studio thing, which was the same thing
Speaker 5: for reservoir dogs. And yeah, I would be very curious
Speaker 5: to look into more because I've talked a lot about
Speaker 5: the Tarantino clone films, but this precedes Tarantino for me.
Speaker 5: It helps open up, but then Tarantino also does help
Speaker 5: open up this neo noir. And we've had neo noirs
Speaker 5: forever since Noir was over, there were neo noirs, but
Speaker 5: it really started to come in for me in the
Speaker 5: early nineties with things like and then I'd say, is
Speaker 5: this a Tarantino clone or is this a neo noir?
Speaker 5: Like something like Romeo is Bleeding, which I have very
Speaker 5: fond memories of. I should probably go back and rewatch
Speaker 5: it just to make sure that it's as good as
Speaker 5: I remember it. Just even things like Palmetto, the one
Speaker 5: with Woody Harrelson, and just there were like as the
Speaker 5: tarant you know, wave crashed against the shore, a lot
Speaker 5: of really good neo noirs were on the Sandy beach
Speaker 5: and surviving and thriving very well. So yeah, I'd be
Speaker 5: curious to see where those intersections are because I know,
Speaker 5: like the whole thing of the suits with the skinny
Speaker 5: ties that's coming in from a better tomorrow and a
Speaker 5: better Tomorrow too. John Cusack's wearing the exact same thing.
Speaker 5: It looks like you could be part of the Reservoir
Speaker 5: Dogs crew at the end of this movie.
Speaker 2: Just because I am partial to frime movies and heist
Speaker 2: movies and con movies, I can appreciate and enjoy a
Speaker 2: lot of them, the not great offerings that came out
Speaker 2: of that time that I know, people who have fire
Speaker 2: taste like yourselves can turn your noses up faster than
Speaker 2: I do.
Speaker 5: Hey, it's fine. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot
Speaker 5: of those movies you're talking about star John Cusack, because
Speaker 5: he's gotten into almost a Nicholas h type rut of
Speaker 5: making a lot of movies. But I think every once
Speaker 5: in a while he actually hit some of those out
Speaker 5: of the park.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I don't know about his kind of director red
Speaker 2: box and streaming phase crime movies. I watched a lot
Speaker 2: of John Cusack movies this year and was pleasantly surprised
Speaker 2: that he continues to make every few years, has got
Speaker 2: another one that I go, Wow, that was really good.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I loved him in Shiraq, the Spike Lee movie, and
Speaker 2: I know there's been something. Oh the Kronerberg film Maps
Speaker 2: to the Stars.
Speaker 5: I thought he was great, right.
Speaker 2: I know you go a long way too for Cornee.
Speaker 2: Oh hell, yes, I love that area.
Speaker 5: I would fight anyone who does not like that movie.
Speaker 5: It's so good.
Speaker 2: I can. Yeah, I will say I did not like
Speaker 2: kan Air when it came out. I was pretty disappointed
Speaker 2: by it when it came out. The fifteenth ray wall
Speaker 2: that you started to sink quickly, And that's where I
Speaker 2: keep rewatching them because it's like going back to the
Speaker 2: fridge every five minutes. My way, what are you doing?
Speaker 2: It hasn't changed. It's like, but I have my standards
Speaker 2: have lowered, and now I have and eventually I will
Speaker 2: really enjoy it.
Speaker 5: Pretty soon I'll be eating that American cheese and think
Speaker 5: that is the best.
Speaker 10: It is.
Speaker 1: Actually what a lot of filmmaking these days really just
Speaker 1: American cheese. There's reduced standards. Keep coming back and get that. Yes,
Speaker 1: those predative films will get better.
Speaker 3: P s.
Speaker 1: If I watch every single Resident Evil film, I'll start
Speaker 1: liking them.
Speaker 5: There are a couple that are somewhat decent.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: The Ocean's eleven films, The Oceans thirteen, The Oceans whatever
Speaker 1: I checked don't mind those films. I quite then already
Speaker 1: con caper films. And I still think that scene in
Speaker 1: what is the Second Ocean? Is it Oceans twelve with
Speaker 1: Julia Robertson.
Speaker 2: Oh playing herself and they're playing herself as she umps
Speaker 2: into Bruce Willis.
Speaker 1: I still think that's funny.
Speaker 2: It's in a film.
Speaker 1: I just love that film, Like I watched that scene
Speaker 1: forever and I have on YouTube.
Speaker 5: Wow, I am so the opposite of that.
Speaker 2: I love. Then the old guy who's the old con
Speaker 2: man comes it, puts that phone down, don't you know's it?
Speaker 2: Phone waves? Damn into the ute us. There wasn't a
Speaker 2: bad Carl Rainer impersonation of a German. That's true.
Speaker 1: Really talk about freez, Come on, this guy's got a
Speaker 1: really strange but from where I'd see it, spotty up
Speaker 1: and down filmography and a guy that has just made films,
Speaker 1: and this is a good, a positive thing, has made
Speaker 1: lots of different kinds of good films. This film is
Speaker 1: very different to Dangerously aisons to high fidelity to this
Speaker 1: film isn't.
Speaker 5: That different from Dangerously Asons? The whole idea of the
Speaker 5: Frio of people fucking each other over, ruining each other
Speaker 5: in society. It feels very grifty to me.
Speaker 1: Well high fidelity, which I know you don't like. But
Speaker 1: also the film that really got Stephen Freers, Oh, I
Speaker 1: didn't get me out. I didn't get Stephen Frees on
Speaker 1: my radar because I didn't really think about who made it.
Speaker 1: But the first Threeers film I saw was nineteen eighty five.
Speaker 1: My Beautiful Word Drets, which was hugely influential, was my
Speaker 1: second year of university, is hugely influential in that sort
Speaker 1: of the menu I was in at university because it
Speaker 1: was certainly one of the first films I can remember
Speaker 1: seeing that was a consciously overtly gay film, had a
Speaker 1: gay romance in it, and the gay romance was between
Speaker 1: a working class Anglo British guy and a sort of
Speaker 1: up and coming aspirational, entrepreneurial Indian child of the British
Speaker 1: Indian parents. It did come from India to and I
Speaker 1: thought that was a Marvels film. I really watched that
Speaker 1: recently and I just think it's still quite a masterbl film,
Speaker 1: but at the very and then prick up areas, which
Speaker 1: is this weird kind of film without John Orton, the
Speaker 1: British writer, so he's made lots of different.
Speaker 2: Types of films.
Speaker 1: I think I'll stand by that statement, and I will
Speaker 1: die on that hill.
Speaker 5: I don't think anybody would fight you about He's made
Speaker 5: all kinds of different films for sure.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah. I think about things like The Hit and Gum Shoe,
Speaker 5: and I don't know how big Gumshoe is. I think
Speaker 5: I just happened to own that on VHS for a while,
Speaker 5: so I thought it was a big movie. I even
Speaker 5: like stuff like Pricapriers, which was one of the first
Speaker 5: times I saw Gary Oldman, and it was the first
Speaker 5: time I realized how versatile Alfred Molito is, because I
Speaker 5: really I remember he was making a lot of stuff
Speaker 5: at one point and I was just like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 5: this alpham Miliana guy's pretty good. And then I see him.
Speaker 5: It's just he's looked like a giant in that movie
Speaker 5: and was completely bald. And then, for whatever reason, it
Speaker 5: was around that same time that I learned that he
Speaker 5: was in Raiders of the Lost arc too, as a
Speaker 5: what I thought was a smaller Latin American gentleman. I'm
Speaker 5: just like, how does this work? How does this tall,
Speaker 5: bald British guy become this little Latin American job. Hey,
Speaker 5: this is wild, and I was like, Okay, Molina's got
Speaker 5: the goods. And I remember really enjoying that film as well.
Speaker 5: But yeah, he's so eclectic. And there's that documentary from
Speaker 5: the BBC director for Hire. I think it might be
Speaker 5: called because he is all over the map and but
Speaker 5: yet he can really hit some of these incredible highs.
Speaker 5: I think the last thing I saw of his theatrically
Speaker 5: on way back in two thousand and two with Dirty
Speaker 5: Pretty Things. It might have been the first time I
Speaker 5: ever saw chew Hotel Edgia four and wow again talk
Speaker 5: had the performances and who's the woman in that? Was
Speaker 5: that Juliet Binoche Audrey Tattoo, oh ad Tattoo. Yeah, that
Speaker 5: was right after Amlay. That's right that it's an amazing film.
Speaker 2: I really love that one, and I do it's funny.
Speaker 2: The first time I saw it, I thought it was
Speaker 2: very Jim Thompson. The whole setting, the underworld at the
Speaker 2: hotel reminded me of Thompson and the hit The Grifters.
Speaker 2: Dirty Pretty Things are my favorites of his filmography, his
Speaker 2: best crime films. I just watched a very British Scandal,
Speaker 2: the mini series with Hugh Grant and I Forget Then
Speaker 2: We Shaw. That was pretty funny. Another story of a
Speaker 2: homosexual relationship in two different classes in Britain. That was
Speaker 2: pretty good. Bike. He brought up the Gun for Hire
Speaker 2: documentary and in it he is pretty so of deprecating
Speaker 2: talking about his approach that he just takes on jobs.
Speaker 2: But I do think that there's a real through line
Speaker 2: to a lot of who he is or what he's
Speaker 2: interests in. So many of his films are about women
Speaker 2: and their place in the world, even something like The Queen,
Speaker 2: where it's hard to feel sorry for one of the
Speaker 2: most rich, powerful people in the world, presented very much
Speaker 2: how she deals with life, the expectations both of a
Speaker 2: monarch and of a woman, contrasts that to Philomena or
Speaker 2: pretty things and dangerous liaisons too. There's a whole lot
Speaker 2: of good stuff. Of his more recent ones called The
Speaker 2: Lost King Stirring for Sally Hawkins was good. It was
Speaker 2: a true Story's done a lot of true stories recently
Speaker 2: about recent history. I think that was the one I
Speaker 2: watched that I said, Oh, he's really got this thing
Speaker 2: about women being very underestimated and pushed down but pressing
Speaker 2: on and certainly ties into the Grifters if you think
Speaker 2: of it as Lily's story, how she's very much under
Speaker 2: the sum of Bobo and bides her time and plays
Speaker 2: her part until it's time to make a move. And
Speaker 2: I do think that's a through line in his work.
Speaker 2: She'll never be able to get out. You know, this
Speaker 2: whole thing with Moira is a blessing for her, that
Speaker 2: she suddenly can have a new life, and that she
Speaker 2: can pin everything on Moira, even when she kills Roy.
Speaker 2: Henry Jones is like, oh, hello missus Langtree. No, that's
Speaker 2: not her.
Speaker 5: Yeah, So everything goes back and even leaves her car
Speaker 5: Weiver's car there.
Speaker 1: I do wander to what you say, Jed to whether
Speaker 1: don't tend to be a lot of I'm not saying
Speaker 1: it's a good or a bad thing. I'm just speculating now.
Speaker 1: It just seems to me the directors do a certain
Speaker 1: stick of film, like they do horror, or they do
Speaker 1: films about deck and sex workers, or they do certain.
Speaker 2: Things, whereas the prize is one of those directors.
Speaker 1: As you say, job Gunfy could turn his attention to anything,
Speaker 1: which is something that we don't seem to see as
Speaker 1: much as we used.
Speaker 2: To know that we celebrated so much. I just think
Speaker 2: I think that the people who specialize in a genre
Speaker 2: tend to make bigger names because yeah, maybe more visible.
Speaker 2: I think that people who you know, like a Frears
Speaker 2: or an Alan Parker or a somebody who keeps doing
Speaker 2: work in multiple genres and multiple things, is we don't
Speaker 2: think of them like, well, it's the same who made
Speaker 2: this one, it's the same go who made this one,
Speaker 2: because they are different enough.
Speaker 1: That's the other thing that I found really interesting about
Speaker 1: that lengthy documentary you sent us. The gun for hire
Speaker 1: or director for higher Freez has really got no idea
Speaker 1: about this film when he starts making it.
Speaker 2: He's got a copy of The Griffins that hasn't read it.
Speaker 1: He really doesn't have any great big ill or he's
Speaker 1: not a lot lot freaks, but Noir or Thompson like
Speaker 1: we are, or that kind of crime films. He's and
Speaker 1: he's he talks about the fact that all these people
Speaker 1: come and talk all these people, Tim Robbins and Sissy
Speaker 1: space It, they all come and talk to me about
Speaker 1: the film, and they want to be in the film
Speaker 1: and I'm considering them, and he's not really actually got
Speaker 1: no idea what he's doing it first, and it takes
Speaker 1: him a while till he starts to cast people.
Speaker 2: He gets Kuzak first.
Speaker 1: I think he gets Houston second, or ever it goes,
Speaker 1: and then they do Benning and I'm probably fill out
Speaker 1: all the other bits. But it takes a while for
Speaker 1: him to get into it, which I found quite quite
Speaker 1: an interesting perception, because interesting revelation, because I suppose the
Speaker 1: perception is that we would You'd think I'd be so
Speaker 1: into it and love the book, he'd want to do
Speaker 1: this film.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's great, you know, right into it from the
Speaker 2: get go.
Speaker 1: But no, we'll actually got no idea at first, and
Speaker 1: I have to feel my way into how I make
Speaker 1: this film and what the look of the film is,
Speaker 1: and how we incorporate the nineties, a nineteen ninety aesthetic
Speaker 1: with a nineteen fifteen film noir aesthetic at all.
Speaker 5: That I guess the older filmmakers feel to me to
Speaker 5: be the ones that will move around in genres, and
Speaker 5: even some of the classics like Martin Scorsese's Steven Spielberg.
Speaker 5: If you look at these guys and it's Martin Scorsese.
Speaker 5: Everybody's oh, he makes all these gangster films. It's like
Speaker 5: what I think he made, like three or four. But
Speaker 5: it's not like his whole uvra Age of Innocence and
Speaker 5: The Aviator, all of these different films that he can make.
Speaker 5: But he's Martin Scorsese's one guy who's doing all these things.
Speaker 5: He's one of those let's go see the new Scorsese film.
Speaker 5: I don't know how many people are saying, let's go
Speaker 5: see the new Frears film. But to your point, you
Speaker 5: don't necessarily realize, oh, it's the same guy that did
Speaker 5: this one as well. I appreciate that kind of journeyman
Speaker 5: approached the things. Even some of the biggest names of
Speaker 5: all times, like Kubrick. Every single movie is a different genre.
Speaker 5: It's not like he's making, Yeah, there's a couple of
Speaker 5: science fiction films in there. I guess you could say
Speaker 5: that Clockworkcorns's science fiction, and AI was his idea. But
Speaker 5: it's just like to make the war film, to make
Speaker 5: the heist film, to make the horror film. He was
Speaker 5: hopping genres all over the place. He wanted to be perfect,
Speaker 5: said every single genre. Maybe that was one of his motivators.
Speaker 1: And it gets them all much an anonymity, I think
Speaker 1: because I was constantly the director, I always confuse Priyas
Speaker 1: with his Mike Figus. There's another British director who's jumped
Speaker 1: around a bit in terms of genre. And there was
Speaker 1: another director that you talked about earlier, Neil, Yeah, that
Speaker 1: you mentioned. I think Jed you mentioned one too that
Speaker 1: you got on perker Me.
Speaker 2: I can't remember who it was.
Speaker 1: But yeah, anyway, these guys they're not big nice, They're
Speaker 1: just they're out, they're behind the scenes, and you when
Speaker 1: you dig down into one of their films, obviously you
Speaker 1: start to associate the thematic similarities maybe between some of
Speaker 1: their work. But they remained behind the camera, don't they.
Speaker 5: Even with our last conversation, Jedi mentioned Peter Hyams because
Speaker 5: I brought up Narrow Margin and some of these neo
Speaker 5: noirs and noir remakes that were happening around this time.
Speaker 5: And yeah, Hyams is another guy. I like Hyams. I
Speaker 5: follow his career, But I think a lot of people
Speaker 5: wouldn't realize that the same guy who did The Relica
Speaker 5: did Running Scared. It was just like very different films
Speaker 5: and wide expands in so many years he's had. He
Speaker 5: had a career that spanned so many decades ago, making
Speaker 5: science fiction classics like Outland all the way up to
Speaker 5: that absolute science fiction shit of Sound of Thunder. But
Speaker 5: he was working for a long damn time. It did
Speaker 5: a lot of different movies, Time Top, Time Cop. There
Speaker 5: you go, fucking classic cap Cornwill bought good stuff.
Speaker 2: I've come around on Time Cop. By the way you
Speaker 2: and I brought up when we did our Outland episode,
Speaker 2: I've come around Time Cops another one. I hated it
Speaker 2: when it came out, but I've become I still don't
Speaker 2: think it's great in its treatment of time travel, which
Speaker 2: is what really hung me up the first time I
Speaker 2: saw it.
Speaker 1: But you wanted a realistic depiction of Tom Cable. Yeah right, yeah,
Speaker 1: but no, it's a It is a film, Lane Joy.
Speaker 2: Now I'm doing a John claud Van damn podcast soon
Speaker 2: and oh nice.
Speaker 3: So.
Speaker 2: Bring your podcast fives around.
Speaker 5: Yeah, he's spreading his seed.
Speaker 1: Shaking his selling his little toush.
Speaker 5: See you could plug that at the end of this
Speaker 5: episode if you want so. Feel free. Okay, all right,
Speaker 5: all right, guys, let's go ahead and take another break
Speaker 5: and play a preview for next week's show. Right after
Speaker 5: these brief messages.
Speaker 1: If you guess Madam that commission again Smith ven photos invention,
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Speaker 12: Only mine man hun los exact. This is stilly cut
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Speaker 4: In your hand.
Speaker 12: If it hit me, Bas acting for you and the
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Speaker 5: Best man and.
Speaker 12: Bas shtoya hint bugle fighting. It has tivy Ramos fightsak.
Speaker 5: Tifi Ramos. That's right. We're back next month with another
Speaker 5: bunch of Patreon requests, including Downtown from Jess Franco. Until then,
Speaker 5: I want to thank my co host Jededian Andrew. So, Andrew,
Speaker 5: what is the latest with you, sir?
Speaker 1: I have a new book out with Sam Deagan, who
Speaker 1: is another Projection Boost co host regular and it's called
Speaker 1: Revolution in thirty five millimeter Political violence and Resistance in
Speaker 1: Cinema from the Art House to the Grindhouse nineteen fifty
Speaker 1: to nineteen ninety. It's out through PM Press. It's in
Speaker 1: all good bookstores, and Beachure is a host of great writing.
Speaker 2: On cinema, including an essay by your good self, Mike,
Speaker 2: I'm in there, You're in there, You're in the shit.
Speaker 5: I made the cut, all right.
Speaker 2: I made the cut. That's what's happening.
Speaker 5: And Jedediah, how about yourself.
Speaker 2: I'm just thread around watching movies so I can be
Speaker 2: on podcasts like this and by the time this one
Speaker 2: comes out. Probably my latest episode on the Watch with
Speaker 2: Gen podcast, focusing on the career of Jean Claude van
Speaker 2: Demm with co hosts Jordan Harper and Priscilla Page, should
Speaker 2: be out. Jen jo Hans podcast Watch with Jen. I'm
Speaker 2: on there sometimes. Sorry, Mike, I'm not only on the
Speaker 2: projection poost. Follow me on Twitter and I'll let you
Speaker 2: know when that's out.
Speaker 5: Thank you so much guys 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 that I work on. They are
Speaker 5: all available at Weirdingwaymedia dot com. Thanks especially to our
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