Speaker 1: Oh geez bote, it's showtime.
Speaker 2: People say good money to see this movie.
Speaker 3: When they go out to a theater.
Speaker 4: They want cold sodas from a pot, popcorn, and no
Speaker 4: monsters in the protection booth.
Speaker 5: Everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring.
Speaker 3: Cut it off, la. Lots of ways a girl can
Speaker 3: get into trouble.
Speaker 1: Gimme kiss? What gimmy kiss?
Speaker 3: And the surest way is to be a lady.
Speaker 6: Captain, you have the right to remain side, but no lady.
Speaker 7: And have to take the ris like to ask a
Speaker 7: couple of questions.
Speaker 2: That's a taint it.
Speaker 3: This is whoopy?
Speaker 8: What kept you stopped to pick up a sailor?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 5: I almost had one too, but your mother beat me
Speaker 5: to him.
Speaker 7: You're no way of party talked hard meat it.
Speaker 3: She's got the moves, she's got the mouth. This place
Speaker 3: a real mess. You know where we can find a
Speaker 3: good maid.
Speaker 8: You know, people like you are the reason abortion is legal.
Speaker 3: She's got the badge.
Speaker 5: We talk the free, nice smooth honnie.
Speaker 3: But she's got to have his help.
Speaker 2: Let me follow you around for a little while.
Speaker 3: To stop a killer.
Speaker 1: What I'm sure they want, fatal beauty, What.
Speaker 8: The hell are you doing?
Speaker 9: Here.
Speaker 3: I've missed you too, but he go. Everything got a
Speaker 3: whip here. Perfume shot.
Speaker 6: Yes, honey, I know I shot you one word and
Speaker 6: I'm going to clear your signs.
Speaker 5: My cats, so you gotta shoot him.
Speaker 3: Well we go, Sam Elliott, I can't let you go
Speaker 3: anywhere that make anna Fatal Beauty. You're probably undercover, your
Speaker 3: lousy teste.
Speaker 8: Welcome to the projection booth. I'm your host. Mike White
Speaker 8: joined me once again. It's mister Rob say Mary.
Speaker 5: Everywhere I go people are dying to meet me.
Speaker 8: Also dragging me for this month long extravaganza is mister
Speaker 8: Kevin Layne.
Speaker 1: And don't call me bitch, Hi, Mike.
Speaker 8: We continue Whoop Brewery what they look in nineteen eighty
Speaker 8: seven's Fatal Beauty, Directed by Tom Holland and written by
Speaker 8: Hillary Henken and Dean Reiser and based on a story
Speaker 8: by Bill Spenno. The film stars Whoopy Goldberg, of course,
Speaker 8: as Rita Rizzoli. Of course. She's a smart, talking, street
Speaker 8: wise police detective who runs across the designer drug Fatal Beauty,
Speaker 8: and she has to take it off the streets to
Speaker 8: avoid unnecessary deaths. We will be spoiling this film as
Speaker 8: we go along. So if you haven't seen Fatal Beauty
Speaker 8: and don't want anything ruined, please turn off the podcast
Speaker 8: and come on back after you've seen it. We will
Speaker 8: still be here.
Speaker 3: Rob.
Speaker 8: When was the first time you saw Fatal Beauty and
Speaker 8: what did you think?
Speaker 5: Well, the first time seeing it all the way through,
Speaker 5: I think was for this episode. I think these Whoopy
Speaker 5: Goldberg comedies were often in rotation on TV in the
Speaker 5: nineties and that so I think I may have caught
Speaker 5: snippets of this one or Burglar or Jump a Jack.
Speaker 5: Flash is hard to remember, but to actually sit down
Speaker 5: and really watch it in her was this episode. I
Speaker 5: thought it was really good. It reminded me of its era,
Speaker 5: given that it was made eighty seven. As I was
Speaker 5: watching it, I got a lot of feeling that this
Speaker 5: is a female version of Beverly Hills Cop. Maybe that
Speaker 5: just has to do with certain sort of casting scenario.
Speaker 5: Obviously she's a comedian and Eddie Murphy as well, but
Speaker 5: just it's a good, little least procedural. And this was
Speaker 5: in that era when Sam Elliott was quite handsome and
Speaker 5: I remember as a.
Speaker 8: But it's okay, those those insurance commercials I'm seeing he's
Speaker 8: looking a little long in the tooth, but yeah, oh
Speaker 8: my god, what a cool drink of water this guy is.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and I remember it was around this time that
Speaker 5: I don't even think my mother had a photo of
Speaker 5: me on her desk, but she had a photo of
Speaker 5: Sam Elliott on her desk at around this time. So
Speaker 5: this just brought back my flashbacks to my mother and
Speaker 5: her loyalty to Sam Elliott. And I'm sure that if
Speaker 5: she hasn't seen this, I'll be buying her a copy
Speaker 5: on DVD.
Speaker 8: Most urgently, was Sam Elliott a rival for your mother's affections?
Speaker 5: I don't really want to get into that here because
Speaker 5: I'm afraid that my insurance won't cover those kind of.
Speaker 8: Discussions here mind, Yeah, it might be good to save
Speaker 8: that for your therapist. And Kevin, when was the first
Speaker 8: time you saw Fatal Beauty and what did you think?
Speaker 1: I saw this for the first time about a year
Speaker 1: ago or maybe two years ago, and the thing that
Speaker 1: jumped out at me on that first watch was it
Speaker 1: was a lot more straight and a lot more violent
Speaker 1: than I expected. It was a proper action adventure film,
Speaker 1: and it wasn't as comedic as I was expecting. From
Speaker 1: a Whoopi Goldburg film, and I had the last three
Speaker 1: of these films all scrambled together. They were all quite
Speaker 1: similar to me, and there were a lot of overlap
Speaker 1: with scenes with her taking on these different personas and
Speaker 1: Stufe it could be her character from Bergner, it could
Speaker 1: be her character from Jump with Jack Flash. But that
Speaker 1: was my main takeaway was that this was a really
Speaker 1: violent cop movie and not at all what I expected,
Speaker 1: and I enjoyed it then and on this rewatch I
Speaker 1: enjoyed it even more.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 8: Again, I don't know when I saw this one. Rob
Speaker 8: was saying, it was ever present, and like you, Kevin,
Speaker 8: I definitely scrambled up these things. But yeah, Fatal Beauty
Speaker 8: just stands apart for me like this is. And it's
Speaker 8: unfair because we've talked about two other movies before this,
Speaker 8: which were good. I really enjoyed both of those, but
Speaker 8: Fatal Beauty for me is like up on that pedestal.
Speaker 8: I really like this movie, and yeah, it is so
Speaker 8: freaking violent. I forget about how violent some of these
Speaker 8: movies were. It just works.
Speaker 5: It works.
Speaker 10: Yeah, it's so good, and it's so strange because Bill Spanno,
Speaker 10: as I said, wrote the original version of it, and
Speaker 10: we'll hear from him later and hear what that was like.
Speaker 10: It was called extreme Measures, and he really describes the
Speaker 10: character as being like a dirty Harriet type of character.
Speaker 10: But Hillary Henken, it feels like she is the one
Speaker 10: once she got assigned this that she took it across
Speaker 10: the finish line, because there's a draft out there from
Speaker 10: Milius which is even more violent and is pretty shocking
Speaker 10: when it comes to some of the violence in there.
Speaker 5: Millis Millius, I know it's crazy, right, I thought he
Speaker 5: you turn into a kids movie.
Speaker 1: It's not as good of a script.
Speaker 8: Though, no it's not.
Speaker 1: They made the better vversion.
Speaker 8: They definitely did, And but his version is weird because
Speaker 8: it says based on a screenplay by Hillary Hankin, and
Speaker 8: I'm like, oh, okay, not this is my draft. And
Speaker 8: there's even like a little note down there about who
Speaker 8: gets credit and these kind of things. And then the
Speaker 8: next draft I read it's pretty much the shooting script,
Speaker 8: and that's Hanken. That's a riser who he used, not
Speaker 8: the one that worked with her on Roadhouse. I'm trying
Speaker 8: to remember what else he wore. But then also I
Speaker 8: am pretty sure that Tom Holland, the director, not the
Speaker 8: actor who Rob and I were talking about how negative
Speaker 8: aged he must have been at this point, a young
Speaker 8: spider man. No, the director, Tom Holland. It seems like
Speaker 8: his mark is on there as well, because it feels
Speaker 8: like it's what ninety nine percent of what we see
Speaker 8: on screen. It's very close.
Speaker 1: Although where it differs, I think there are important differences
Speaker 1: between the script and the film that I'm hoping to
Speaker 1: talk about. But yeah, this is one of these films
Speaker 1: where almost every problem is solved with a gun. It's
Speaker 1: just shoot a door to open it, shoot a chart
Speaker 1: tire to stop someonech chasing you, shoot anyone that's walking
Speaker 1: away from if they turned their back and you shoot them.
Speaker 1: And I love it.
Speaker 5: It's funny that you said dirty Harriet and then Milius
Speaker 5: got involved, because of course he had some hand in that,
Speaker 5: and as Kevin, you were saying, this is just part
Speaker 5: of that era. That whole thing started in the seventies.
Speaker 5: Obviously Dirty Harry picture. But it seemed like as we
Speaker 5: got into the eighties and got into this sort of yeah,
Speaker 5: just violence solves everything, it just became light entertainment.
Speaker 1: Or putting on a persona acting out a fictional character
Speaker 1: version of yourself. You tend to do not a lot
Speaker 1: as well, walk in somewhere and just pretend to be
Speaker 1: somebody else and black out your way through. It's a
Speaker 1: staple of the genre.
Speaker 8: Oh, which is perfect for Whipopy Goldberg because that's what
Speaker 8: we've been talking about for these last two weeks, was
Speaker 8: just the way that she puts on these different personas
Speaker 8: and can do it at the drop of a hat.
Speaker 8: It's very similar to the whole asking Axel something and
Speaker 8: he turns around and suddenly is a completely different persona,
Speaker 8: like walking into the club where Victor Maitland is and
Speaker 8: suddenly he adopts that kind of fay homosexual persona that
Speaker 8: he's doing. And this movie starts with Whoopi Goldberg. This
Speaker 8: is so unusual for a female cop to play a prostitute.
Speaker 8: That never happens in the movie. So she is completely
Speaker 8: dulled up. And the way that she's fragmented during these
Speaker 8: opening credits where you see the shoes and then you
Speaker 8: get the ass, and then you get the glasses and
Speaker 8: then finally you get Whoopy And here she is putting
Speaker 8: on a complete character of this prostitute. But yet she's
Speaker 8: really torn because she's a prostitute, but she's really a cop.
Speaker 8: So when she sees violence happening in this bar where
Speaker 8: she's supposed to be making this drug deal, she has
Speaker 8: to step in and that really blows her cover. And
Speaker 8: it took me a long probably until the last time
Speaker 8: I watched this the other night to realize that one
Speaker 8: of the guys that sees her on the street makes
Speaker 8: her as a cop. When she says it freeze police,
Speaker 8: I know that that's when fred Asparagus realizes the gang member.
Speaker 8: I was like, oh, I didn't realize that this kid
Speaker 8: was here. And also at the end of the movie,
Speaker 8: I don't know what the hell was going on, but yeah,
Speaker 8: and then I just real quick, I have to call
Speaker 8: out fred Asteragus as dig Ado. I guess his name is.
Speaker 8: I just talked about him last month when we were
Speaker 8: talking about the Three Amigos, and he plays the bartender
Speaker 8: at the little sleepy town and he looks completely different.
Speaker 8: It's amazing the transformation of him from the skeezy bartender.
Speaker 5: Excuse us, we're not Mexicans, we're from out of town.
Speaker 5: We were wondering if you could tell us where the
Speaker 5: best hotel in town.
Speaker 3: Is there's no hotel in this town.
Speaker 8: Great, no hotel.
Speaker 5: I could kill somebody.
Speaker 2: We have heard of you, No kidding, I have a
Speaker 2: message for you.
Speaker 8: Germans says to wait here to this massive gay drug
Speaker 8: dealer with the wonderful like. I don't know what kind
Speaker 8: of hairstyle that is, but it's great in the little
Speaker 8: pinky ring and everything. I mean, hats off to him
Speaker 8: and every single character, every actor in here, even the
Speaker 8: guy that is doing the violence against the woman at
Speaker 8: the beginning, that's familiar face as well. That's the guy
Speaker 8: who was Michael Ironside's man at arms in total recall.
Speaker 8: I absolutely love that dude.
Speaker 5: One of the things that I really like about her
Speaker 5: character and here, and this becomes prominent a little bit
Speaker 5: more later, is that, like you said, part of what
Speaker 5: blows her cover is she sees this violence against someone
Speaker 5: one of the street people, and you learn her connection
Speaker 5: to those people in a way that they're her best informants,
Speaker 5: they're her best people. She has a humanity for them
Speaker 5: that I think might have been underwritten in if it
Speaker 5: was maybe a male character. I don't know. This is
Speaker 5: maybe some way in which there's some sort of community
Speaker 5: that's built with her character in that way, and I
Speaker 5: really like that. At the same time, I had a
Speaker 5: note here about in that opening because of some of
Speaker 5: the stereotypical pieces, and I was talking about the queer
Speaker 5: code character and things like that. As I wrote here,
Speaker 5: I go, is mega, I'm like anti Mexican talk heard
Speaker 5: the cheech as the bartender. So there are some kind
Speaker 5: of cringey racist jokes in here that but you have
Speaker 5: to remember it's nineteen eighty seven.
Speaker 6: I want to cut that blanchet please, and don't speak
Speaker 6: those fans because I don't understand what the fuck you're saying.
Speaker 1: Do you want a glass?
Speaker 8: So?
Speaker 5: What do you want a glass?
Speaker 11: Do?
Speaker 4: I want to know? Wrap it in the tap of
Speaker 4: dumb motherfucker?
Speaker 5: Yes, I want to go what is this Sto't be
Speaker 5: doing this shit to me, honey, because I know you people.
Speaker 5: You people come up here under the bushes and shit
Speaker 5: and then you want people like me, hard working people.
Speaker 8: Like me, to get down or you to get to
Speaker 8: you and got no teeth brushed.
Speaker 1: There's two things I noticed from the opening. One is
Speaker 1: that it appeared to me that she's wearing like the
Speaker 1: Dorothy Ruby red slippers and she's walking on the streets
Speaker 1: because they're like the same look, they're bejeweled, and that's
Speaker 1: a choice. You could pick anything, but you chose those.
Speaker 1: And the other thing is that her introduction to the script
Speaker 1: is the same scene, but in the film when she
Speaker 1: walks into the bar, she starts monologue again, she starts
Speaker 1: putting on a persona and that's all ad libbed based
Speaker 1: on the differences between the script and the film, and
Speaker 1: that immediately just puts me at ease. It's, Oh, she's
Speaker 1: having fun, she's here, And I just say it is
Speaker 1: a bit of a safe the cap moment where she
Speaker 1: sees somebody in danger or indeed, and she blows a
Speaker 1: cover to protect them. But yeah, I was instantly on board.
Speaker 1: I was like, I like this. I like the vibe,
Speaker 1: I like the look of it, I like the tone,
Speaker 1: and I like the character that she's putting on.
Speaker 8: This done and she doesn't do a ton of character work,
Speaker 8: but she does it at times. She'll get back in
Speaker 8: that outfit later on in the film, which was surprising
Speaker 8: me because I thought it was a one and done
Speaker 8: type of thing, But she actually dons those glasses, that wig,
Speaker 8: all that stuff later on, and I like that at
Speaker 8: her desk in the police headquarters, that she's got all
Speaker 8: of these cyrofom heads there with wigs on it. So
Speaker 8: you're like, oh, she's the undercover person. She likes to
Speaker 8: do this kind of stuff, and it's just fitting for
Speaker 8: her and for the whoopee persona that we've seen built
Speaker 8: over these last few films.
Speaker 5: In the shootout opening here and Kevin used it as
Speaker 5: his opening line on the show is she really has
Speaker 5: a problem with the B word, But here I wrote,
Speaker 5: she doesn't have a problem with the N word. No,
Speaker 5: that really kind of threw me. I was like, Wow, okay,
Speaker 5: which then, and this is before obviously we'll get a
Speaker 5: bit into the backstory. But I was thinking about this
Speaker 5: and when I realized that she has this Italian last name,
Speaker 5: I thought, okay, this is Gean Carlos Fasito. Maybe kind
Speaker 5: of scenario. Or then I sorted to think to myself,
Speaker 5: I'm like, maybe Dennis Hopper was right in True Romance.
Speaker 1: So I, okay, I'll see what you're doing here.
Speaker 5: No, wow, wow, anyway, that's a deep cut for the kid.
Speaker 1: Problematic, but I'm not.
Speaker 5: Going to I'm not going to say the word. But anyway, wow.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 1: I wasn't quoting the film though, I was just that
Speaker 1: was just something I wanted to say up front.
Speaker 8: Yeah, we've had incidents in the past.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, I know you too.
Speaker 1: I did love her little what would you call it?
Speaker 1: What's that move? That that Texas switch type move that
Speaker 1: she does where they're in the alley and he's looking
Speaker 1: for she's basically just disappeared behind him to some sort
Speaker 1: of magic of the movies and has a nice move asshole.
Speaker 1: I was like, Oh, I'm into this film. It's good crack.
Speaker 1: It's working for me. It's the smoothest of the three
Speaker 1: so far.
Speaker 8: Yeah, and the script is the one that makes the
Speaker 8: most sense to me, even though it had gone through
Speaker 8: a bunch of writers. And you can see in that
Speaker 8: Millius draft, and I don't know the draft before that,
Speaker 8: but you can see echoes of what this film becomes
Speaker 8: in that Millius draft where oh, this is the scene
Speaker 8: where the drug deal happens. This is a scene where
Speaker 8: this happens, and but you get it in a much
Speaker 8: different way. Like with Millius, he sets it up so
Speaker 8: that she's more of a hot shot and she ends
Speaker 8: up buying the bad drugs. I believe now please correct
Speaker 8: me if I'm wrong, but I want to say she
Speaker 8: ends up getting the bad drugs and then is going
Speaker 8: to take them to headquarters, and this land mover or
Speaker 8: dump truck or one of these type of industrial machines
Speaker 8: crashes into her car and they steal the drugs. They
Speaker 8: end up kidnapping her, tying her up arms of kimbo.
Speaker 8: The first time I read it, I thought they actually
Speaker 8: raped her, but it's just the Brad Dwarf character, yeah,
Speaker 8: who comes over with like I was going to rape
Speaker 8: you or whatever, and I was like, oh shit, this
Speaker 8: is like a rape prevenge film, but it's not quite that.
Speaker 8: But it is her fucking up and allowing these drugs
Speaker 8: to go on the street. That does not happen in
Speaker 8: the final movie, which I'm glad for because she's already
Speaker 8: got a lot of emotional baggage in this and I
Speaker 8: appreciate it that she is such a well rounded character
Speaker 8: in this film. Even though this is a cartoon shoot
Speaker 8: them up ultraviolet movie from the late seven sorry late eighties,
Speaker 8: when this was de rigueur. I'm sure this kind of
Speaker 8: got lost in the shovel of all of the action
Speaker 8: films that were happening at this time.
Speaker 5: I love how that reveal of her background is later.
Speaker 5: I'm glad that they didn't put it in the first act,
Speaker 5: and that was the driver of everything. I like that
Speaker 5: it sits in the background and you're like, Okay, why
Speaker 5: is this? Why does this person have no life? Because
Speaker 5: at one point it's there's the cliche scene with the
Speaker 5: captain where it's like the Starsky and Hutch scene where
Speaker 5: they get pulled in in the procedural and it's like, God,
Speaker 5: damn it, what.
Speaker 9: Are you doing to me?
Speaker 3: Huh no money, no dope, no, don cadillo.
Speaker 11: I have a perfectly reasonable explanation.
Speaker 5: I don't need explanations, I need results. Do you know
Speaker 5: what Captain McKay is going to do to me?
Speaker 9: And all over some two bid hooker?
Speaker 2: Not a two bit hooker, Not a two bit hooker.
Speaker 4: Charlie far As a friend of mine.
Speaker 6: She has to be the best ear I have on
Speaker 6: the streets, and she gave me them a to have
Speaker 6: a bus last month.
Speaker 5: I don't care that says, I mean, you have no life,
Speaker 5: You have nothing besides this job. All you do is
Speaker 5: your job. So the question is why are you driven
Speaker 5: to do the jobs? So that plants the question in
Speaker 5: our head as the audience, going, Okay, why is this
Speaker 5: person so maniacal on their job. Is it just I
Speaker 5: don't know, bride and self satisfaction or is there something
Speaker 5: else going on here?
Speaker 8: Well, it just through luck that she ends up being
Speaker 8: assigned to the murder of Digadillo or gets called to
Speaker 8: that scene, and that ends up kicking off the whole mystery.
Speaker 8: But she had that connection to him before goes back
Speaker 8: figures out that he's dead, and then once we get
Speaker 8: tied into drugs, then it becomes a real Now it's
Speaker 8: personal thing for her, especially when she sees the van
Speaker 8: and it has Kroll's name on it and she's, Okay,
Speaker 8: this respectable businessman is completely dirty and I'm going to
Speaker 8: basically take him down. It becomes a real vengeance type
Speaker 8: of story for her, And I like to your point
Speaker 8: that we don't know why she's that driven until towards
Speaker 8: the end, and then that scene. That scene just can
Speaker 8: got you. She is such a great actress and just
Speaker 8: shows it in that one particular scene. Especially.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's one of those pieces that kind of sneaks
Speaker 5: up on you on an eighties movie that you're not expecting.
Speaker 5: And I talked about this before on the First Blood
Speaker 5: episode where I'm like, I didn't expect to start crying
Speaker 5: when Stallone starts giving that monologue at the end of
Speaker 5: First Rambo film. It's the same thing with this, where
Speaker 5: you're like, Wow, that's deep. I wasn't expecting that for
Speaker 5: kind of an actioner, and.
Speaker 1: It's not in the script. That was one of the
Speaker 1: big key changes between the draft that I read, the
Speaker 1: shooting script draft, and the film itself. Should we tell
Speaker 1: people what it is? It basically is that she's lost
Speaker 1: a child through her own neglect of allowing. She's taken
Speaker 1: the job Homebrew and her young toddler, I believe, got
Speaker 1: into the drugs, took them odd and died. So she's
Speaker 1: basically lost her child. And in the script there's a
Speaker 1: couple of things, a couple of changes. There's three major
Speaker 1: changes that they make that I think one of them
Speaker 1: is good, which is that change that they make with
Speaker 1: their personalize her reason for wanting to take down this
Speaker 1: whole empire. But the other two I think are solely
Speaker 1: missed and I'll talk about them later. But in the script,
Speaker 1: she talks about her sister and it's something that happened
Speaker 1: to her sister that made her want to be a cop,
Speaker 1: which is confiding all this into Marshak, the Sam Elliott character.
Speaker 1: But in the film, it seems they must have written
Speaker 1: that on the day, or they must have rehearsed or something,
Speaker 1: because that's not there at all in the draft. There's
Speaker 1: nothing about her having lost a kid. And the thing
Speaker 1: that I noticed is that she feels a little skitzo
Speaker 1: in the film because of that, because she's so glib,
Speaker 1: she's so enjoying her job, bantering with all the guys.
Speaker 1: She seems to be a carefree character. And then that
Speaker 1: reveal where she's no, she's somebody who's having a deep
Speaker 1: wound that she's masquerading, and that this is very personal
Speaker 1: for it's a big change. And I noticed as well
Speaker 1: that in the Cisco A Needbit review that I saw
Speaker 1: that's the scene that Ciskel highlights as the saving grace
Speaker 1: of the whole film. That it really reminds people that,
Speaker 1: regardless of what you think of these films, what po
Speaker 1: go Bog is a great actress.
Speaker 8: You said, she takes the job home with her, that
Speaker 8: is she a cop at that point, because it sounds
Speaker 8: like she got mixed up in drugs when she was younger,
Speaker 8: and she had the kid when she was fourteen.
Speaker 5: You're right, Actually, yeah, My memory of it is that
Speaker 5: she had a rough youth, she was an addict, she
Speaker 5: had this kid, the kid dies, and that kind of
Speaker 5: appears to have set her straight and to go, Okay,
Speaker 5: I got to get my shit together, because you know
Speaker 5: this is serious, this isn't It's not just me anymore.
Speaker 8: I can see where you're coming from, Kevin, because it
Speaker 8: goes from her being a drug addict to her becoming
Speaker 8: a police detective. And you're curious about how that transition happened.
Speaker 8: So it would have made just as much sense had
Speaker 8: she brought the evidence home or something.
Speaker 1: What I tend to do is I tend to read
Speaker 1: the shooting script while I'm watching the film for the
Speaker 1: second time, so I'm like going straight through it. And
Speaker 1: it started to deviate quite drastically at that period where
Speaker 1: the marsh that character. He had a whole other scene
Speaker 1: where he was going back to Kroll and he was
Speaker 1: laying the plan and he knew quite clearly that he
Speaker 1: was setting her up and he was trapping her, and
Speaker 1: it was playing against these scenes where he was falling
Speaker 1: for her, and I do love the relationship that they have.
Speaker 1: It's nice to see her falling for somebody. And they've
Speaker 1: got some great pattern as well that isn't in the script.
Speaker 1: These these funny little back and forth where he's inelegantly
Speaker 1: flirting with her and she's trying to bat them away.
Speaker 1: I loved all that stuff, which again feels like it
Speaker 1: was ad libbed on the day, But those changes, I
Speaker 1: was like, what's going on here? This is a huge
Speaker 1: change to the character that they seem to have made
Speaker 1: while in production.
Speaker 8: And as far as I remember, there is no Mike
Speaker 8: Mark Shack in that Millius draft. It feels like he's
Speaker 8: very much a later invention.
Speaker 1: I couldn't track any of the characters from the Millius
Speaker 1: drafted this because it seems like they only kept to
Speaker 1: read a name. So some of the set pieces with
Speaker 1: similar reports. Who are all these guys?
Speaker 5: Granted I only watched this once, but I had moments
Speaker 5: at times, and I think it becomes more It evens
Speaker 5: out as the film goes, But in the beginning, I'm
Speaker 5: trying to figure out beyond kind of the meet cute
Speaker 5: and they start to develop. There's part of me That's
Speaker 5: what I'm not understanding. If this is your job and
Speaker 5: you're trying to be a serious person doing your job,
Speaker 5: this guy is dirty. I don't understand why you're getting involved.
Speaker 5: There's almost a feeling that maybe in my first viewing,
Speaker 5: i'd say early on, there's this little thing where it's
Speaker 5: and it could just be a little scene, it could
Speaker 5: be a line. I don't know that could have sured
Speaker 5: that up just a little bit. For me, it just
Speaker 5: felt like, I don't understand why you would allow yourself
Speaker 5: to drop the professionalism here with this person that obviously
Speaker 5: you're I don't know. I don't know what your take
Speaker 5: on that was. Later it's fine, Like when you get
Speaker 5: towards the third act and all that, I'm like, I
Speaker 5: can buy it there, But in the early go I'm like,
Speaker 5: I'm not getting it.
Speaker 8: I like that she basically humiliates him the first time
Speaker 8: that they meet, Like the way that he comes out
Speaker 8: from behind the gate. She's going to go see Kroll
Speaker 8: played by Harris Eulin in here and she's up at
Speaker 8: the gate. It's very actual trying to see Victor Maitland
Speaker 8: type of thing. To your point, Rob and he walks
Speaker 8: out and he starts flirting with her big time, especially
Speaker 8: when he finds out that her last name is Rosoli.
Speaker 2: That's Italian, isn't it. M I always had a weakness
Speaker 2: for Italian ladies school. There was this one that rose
Speaker 2: I'm off Fatano got those eyes. She had one problem
Speaker 2: shut out those big beautiful brown as or as a
Speaker 2: get or anything she wanted. Maybe all pretty Italian ladies
Speaker 2: feel that way.
Speaker 9: Figure, is here a point to this start point?
Speaker 3: Is this is private property.
Speaker 2: If you want to come call in and show me
Speaker 2: a piece of paper that says warn on it otherwise,
Speaker 2: or even dare chain.
Speaker 8: And for all this we had to go through Rosa Malfatana's.
Speaker 2: Trying to be friendly.
Speaker 3: Officer.
Speaker 8: Oh, he's just flirting big time, and I'm like melting
Speaker 8: there looking at nineteen eighty seven Sam Elliot just oh gosh,
Speaker 8: whatever man and that more black scent and everything, and
Speaker 8: she ends up Okay, we'll see you later, and it
Speaker 8: takes herself out of there. But then she ends up
Speaker 8: breaking into Kroll's place anyway, and he gets pissed off
Speaker 8: at Marshack and it's just like, yeah, the thing of
Speaker 8: follow her and make sure nothing happens to her is
Speaker 8: weird flecks to have there, but it just you have
Speaker 8: to go with it for the movie to work. I think.
Speaker 1: I think that's what he tells her. What he's really
Speaker 1: doing is he's making sure that she's not getting too close. True,
Speaker 1: so he's informing them. But the dialogue that they have
Speaker 1: that I wanted to mention because I was like jotting
Speaker 1: down all these lines and I'm like, I'm loving this.
Speaker 1: This is the stuff that I would be aiming to
Speaker 1: work myself. He apologizes to her a moment later on
Speaker 1: in the film in the car and he's I'm sorry
Speaker 1: for being such an asshole, and she's like, it's all right,
Speaker 1: I'll get used to it. I just love that kind
Speaker 1: of like back and forth for it's just an acknowledging. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I still think you're an asshole, but I'm sure I'll
Speaker 1: get used to it.
Speaker 5: In the back and forth and the banter are there.
Speaker 5: This is where I was like, you're not gonna mention
Speaker 5: the mismatch, Like you were saying, I have a thing
Speaker 5: for Italian ladies.
Speaker 1: Wasn't meant to be share.
Speaker 8: It was meant to be share. Yeah, she was as
Speaker 8: reader Resoli. And so it's funny because Kevin. We've gone
Speaker 8: through gender swaps, racial swaps, ages, all of these different things.
Speaker 8: This is the first time we're talking about a movie
Speaker 8: that was written for a female character but written for
Speaker 8: an Italian female character. So we're so close. We are
Speaker 8: so close to actually having a movie written for Whoopy Goldberg,
Speaker 8: but we're still far away from that. And apparently at
Speaker 8: one point it was supposed to be Sharer and then
Speaker 8: they changed it to Whoopy Goldberg, and then the Marshak
Speaker 8: character was supposed to be Billy d Williams, and so
Speaker 8: it was like, okay, good, no misagenation. We can't have
Speaker 8: that because people think, oh, of course, interracial kisses have
Speaker 8: been fine since Kirk and Aura all that time back. Yeah,
Speaker 8: Beverly Hills cop perfect example. We're taking this romance. Write
Speaker 8: the fuck out of here. It's amazing that there is
Speaker 8: romance in this at all, that there is a kiss
Speaker 8: at the end, and there was supposed to be apparently
Speaker 8: a sex scene at one point. It's note, we can't
Speaker 8: have that. They were going to give this movie an
Speaker 8: X rating if there's going to be a sex scene
Speaker 8: between Sam Elliott and Whoopee Goldberg. How do you like that?
Speaker 8: Nineteen eighty.
Speaker 5: I read some coverage on this before I watched it,
Speaker 5: and I can pick up on where that scene was.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 5: It's my understanding that they actually shot it and then.
Speaker 1: After the big hot to hot moment where she tells him,
Speaker 1: she basically reveals who what's driving her.
Speaker 5: It came there, and it's my understanding that it was
Speaker 5: in the preview version and the audience didn't like.
Speaker 8: It, so they cut it didn't test well.
Speaker 5: I'm actually amazed by this, and I don't want to
Speaker 5: get too deep into this, but culturally, I think that
Speaker 5: maybe white Americans could accept Sam Elliott and a black woman,
Speaker 5: but if it was a black man and a white woman,
Speaker 5: I think that really would have been problem. I think
Speaker 5: it's still a problem.
Speaker 1: Didn't they have the issue with Hitch where Rosario Dawson
Speaker 1: was cast opposite Will Smith. They could go with a
Speaker 1: Latin X person on a black guy, but it couldn't
Speaker 1: be a white woman opposite Will Smith in not film anyway,
Speaker 1: So it was still going on like into the early
Speaker 1: two thousands.
Speaker 5: That's wowd It makes me a little sad to see that.
Speaker 5: It's not that I needed it per se, but now
Speaker 5: that I know that it was cut for that reason.
Speaker 5: It's just damn really.
Speaker 8: The relationship between Rita and Mike that really drives the
Speaker 8: second half of the film. When she confronts him and says,
Speaker 8: you work for this guy who sells all of these drugs.
Speaker 8: She knows that Kroll is bad. How can you justify that?
Speaker 8: And ask him flat out, how can you live with yourself?
Speaker 8: And sometimes I let it slide? And that becomes the
Speaker 8: big thing, and she just picks up on that let
Speaker 8: it slide thing and just hammers him with it. And
Speaker 8: when you see that scene of her talking about her backstory,
Speaker 8: it's basically like, how can you let this slide? Marshack?
Speaker 8: Look at what drugs have done to this woman who
Speaker 8: you are falling in love with, who we are about
Speaker 8: to have sex with in one version of it, how
Speaker 8: can you let this happen? And I love that. It's
Speaker 8: just she hits him a few times and she's really
Speaker 8: angry and mean about it, and I'm glad because he
Speaker 8: deserves that. He's the dynamic character in the second half
Speaker 8: of the film, changing his ways from working for a
Speaker 8: drug dealer to helping out Risoli and taking a bullet
Speaker 8: for literally taking a bullet for her.
Speaker 1: The other thing where the film is strengthened by rewatching
Speaker 1: it and knowing what's motivating her truth is the scene
Speaker 1: that she has with Zach's murdor, where she's confronting another
Speaker 1: murderer who doesn't care what happens to her son, who's
Speaker 1: washed her hands with him, And when you realize that
Speaker 1: she's someone who doesn't have that anymore, she's not a
Speaker 1: motor anymore, it makes more sense why they would get
Speaker 1: into an actual fistfight altercation where in the film it's
Speaker 1: played kind of fun and it's it's almost like a
Speaker 1: class thing. But when you realize that she's coming from
Speaker 1: a place of I cannot understand you. Why would you
Speaker 1: be that way? You want son, you're more concerned about
Speaker 1: playing tennis? The rage is justifoied Oh.
Speaker 8: And Jennifer Warren as this mother character, as what's her name,
Speaker 8: Cecily Jaeger, She's in here for two scenes and it's
Speaker 8: just amazing. She is so good. Well, of course I
Speaker 8: mostly know her from Night Moves and Slapshot, and there's
Speaker 8: a lot of slap Shot crossover between Fatal Beauty and Slapshot,
Speaker 8: but yes, she is amazing, just in those two scenes
Speaker 8: and to go from that hoity toity if what you
Speaker 8: can do with him? And I have to get back
Speaker 8: to tennis, and I have to how dare you come
Speaker 8: into my house? And especially when Rizzoli touches her, and
Speaker 8: you just get the feeling that there is a massive
Speaker 8: racist thing going on. Not only is it how dare
Speaker 8: this cop touch me? How do this other woman touch me?
Speaker 8: But how dare this black person touch me? Is how
Speaker 8: that moment feels to me, and that she has to
Speaker 8: overcome all of that in order to see what's right.
Speaker 8: And it takes her own son, the James Lgrow character
Speaker 8: off screen committing suicide or attempting suicide. Sorry that it
Speaker 8: takes that to wake her the fuck up and finally
Speaker 8: allow that the last little bit of connection from the
Speaker 8: drugs to this what's his name? Denny Mifflin. I kept
Speaker 8: thinking of dunder Mifflin to Denny and then to Kroll.
Speaker 8: She's that lynchpin for it. But it takes so much
Speaker 8: to get that information out of her.
Speaker 1: She thinks she's to help the first time that she
Speaker 1: sees her, oh.
Speaker 8: Man, yeah, my skin crawled at that moment. And yeah,
Speaker 8: there's a lot of racial stuff that goes on in
Speaker 8: this movie. And yeah, though to your point, Rob, it's
Speaker 8: pretty funny that the N word doesn't get her nearly
Speaker 8: as upset as bitch. But then towards the end of
Speaker 8: the movie, brad Dorf's just calling her bitch all over
Speaker 8: the place. What's your last line going to be? The
Speaker 8: last line needs to be don't call me bitch. But no,
Speaker 8: you said Smith and Wesson asshole, And I'm like, that's
Speaker 8: the wrong line to me.
Speaker 5: It was just the logic of it, where it's if
Speaker 5: you're going to change the character, if you're obviously going
Speaker 5: to make them, it's going to be a black woman's whoopy.
Speaker 5: Those things now need to be in there, either a
Speaker 5: subtext or text so that way, like if someone does
Speaker 5: say the N words, he has to react to that,
Speaker 5: if you have to react to the fact that someone's
Speaker 5: calling you out. I actually think it would be a
Speaker 5: good thing for it to be more prominent because you
Speaker 5: have these double like you were talking about, there's double
Speaker 5: or triple layers there in which this character has to
Speaker 5: move within the world and how they do their job
Speaker 5: and how they live their life. And I think that's
Speaker 5: more accurate of how someone would be a navigating world.
Speaker 1: She did it in burglar I remember where the police
Speaker 1: detective guy calls were picking and then she goes into
Speaker 1: a sarcastic portrayal of a slave. The brad Dorf character,
Speaker 1: he pretty much takes over in terms of the villains
Speaker 1: in the story and he becomes the main bad guy
Speaker 1: that she's got to take down, which surprised me when
Speaker 1: I was watching the film, because I thought it's not
Speaker 1: usual that you have the henchman be the big bad boss.
Speaker 1: But that was another change from the script. And I
Speaker 1: don't know if you guys noticed that as well, but
Speaker 1: I found that quite notable. Where it feels like that
Speaker 1: was probably change because of test screenings as well, where
Speaker 1: it felt like it's much more impactful to end on that,
Speaker 1: even though it's a weaker line, but that sort of
Speaker 1: kiss off line of Smith and Weston asshole than what
Speaker 1: was in the script. But I loved that scene in
Speaker 1: the script.
Speaker 5: Yeah, anytime brad Dorffe shows up, I'm there. I love
Speaker 5: him in here, I think as a bad guy. Sure
Speaker 5: it's a little over the top, but it's fun a little.
Speaker 1: It got him chucky.
Speaker 5: I was thinking that right before this was what Blue Velvet. Probably, Yeah, I.
Speaker 8: Think you're right eighty six that would have been.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 8: Him and that crazy hair that he's got. I just
Speaker 8: I love it. And he's got the he's got two
Speaker 8: henchmen at the beginning, and there's a whole thing in
Speaker 8: the script I want to say where it's oh, we
Speaker 8: know this guy isn't going to make it. Basically, they
Speaker 8: end up killing the third guy, so it's just him
Speaker 8: and this other dude and the other dude who can
Speaker 8: chew on glass and.
Speaker 1: A bond villain, oh.
Speaker 8: Yeah, in order to impress that real preppy asshole, plus
Speaker 8: a very young Mark Pellegrino with that wild blonde hair
Speaker 8: and they call him Frankenstein and he just, oh my god,
Speaker 8: he looks like a freaking teenager in this movie. I've
Speaker 8: always followed Pellegrino and just always love when he shows
Speaker 8: up and stuff. Speaking of David Lynch, that was he
Speaker 8: was in mahalland Drive the last time I really remember
Speaker 8: seeing him. But he's great as Thug number two in
Speaker 8: The Big You know, he plays dumb really well. So
Speaker 8: it's really nice that he's in here as this henchman
Speaker 8: character and that they get the other guy taller than him.
Speaker 8: Pellegrina already looks tall, and then the other dude, the
Speaker 8: glass chewer guy, is even taller than him, and I'd
Speaker 8: like that. It's Dorf just basically, oh, he's the muscle.
Speaker 8: I'm the one in control. It's almost like a master
Speaker 8: blaster situation. I'm surprised he doesn't right on top of
Speaker 8: this guy's shoulders and just like, oh yeah, kill that guy,
Speaker 8: open that door, twist this person's neck off, like those
Speaker 8: kind of things, because Dorf is just fricking wild. And yeah,
Speaker 8: to your point, mark the change in the script of
Speaker 8: because Dorof does not kill the Harris Ulen character. He
Speaker 8: ends up. Ulen or Kroll just shows up out of
Speaker 8: nowhere in this movie. It's just like, oh yeah, I
Speaker 8: happen to be here too. It's oh okay. And then
Speaker 8: Brad Dorpe kills him. Because there's a whole extra scene
Speaker 8: at the end of the script where.
Speaker 1: You which is a great scene.
Speaker 8: Yeah, oh yeah, it's a great scene.
Speaker 1: At the very end of the film where the freeze frame.
Speaker 1: It's quite an awkward ending the freeze frame on her
Speaker 1: saying you're going to be all right. The movie continued
Speaker 1: where she walked back into the crowd and the cal character,
Speaker 1: the guy who was always fiddled with his tie. He's like,
Speaker 1: where are you going? She goes up to Kroll's office
Speaker 1: and she basically gets him through a back and forth.
Speaker 1: She gets him to take the drugs, the laced drugs,
Speaker 1: and he dies through his own supply. But there was
Speaker 1: another thing that I want to mention as well, which
Speaker 1: was shocking to me. That the drugs are laced with fentanyl.
Speaker 1: And I didn't know that fentanyl was such a big
Speaker 1: thing until the last four or five years. And it's
Speaker 1: going back to the eighties where it's whoa. This is
Speaker 1: as timely as ever thanks to that one edition. But
Speaker 1: that's the big dangerous element that adding to the drugs
Speaker 1: is cut fifty to fifty with fentanyl and some PCP.
Speaker 8: Which feels really bizarre because fifty percent fentanyl. True confession time,
Speaker 8: I have yet to do fentanyl. I probably have. It's great,
Speaker 8: Oh is it okay?
Speaker 1: I had a decoration and they give it to you,
Speaker 1: and it's all I've never felt more warm, cozy, like chill.
Speaker 1: And they only gave it to me twice. They wouldn't
Speaker 1: give me any more than that. It's a painkiller, like
Speaker 1: would they administered in the hospital, and I loved it
Speaker 1: and it was like, no, no, that's enough. Now I
Speaker 1: totally get white people would be trying to sneak some
Speaker 1: of that stuff. It's lovely, but don't do drugs.
Speaker 8: No, don't do drug But they always show like this
Speaker 8: much can kill a person, and it's like a grain.
Speaker 8: Oh two grains and you're dead. So I'm like, they're
Speaker 8: cutting this with fifty percent. And now they don't say
Speaker 8: fentanyl in the Wikipedia. They just say it's fifty percent
Speaker 8: purity and cut with fin cyclodine, which is basically PCP.
Speaker 8: So I'm like, okay, well that makes sense when a
Speaker 8: PCP plus cocaine. I'm like, all right, that that's a
Speaker 8: great designer drug. And you see the one the black
Speaker 8: guy walking out of the apartment building and they're just bubba, Yeah,
Speaker 8: they're just shooting all of shooting them so much. And
Speaker 8: then even actually I take it back because I thought
Speaker 8: Dwarff had taken it and that's why he was indestructible
Speaker 8: at the end, but then he's kevlar bitch.
Speaker 5: That scene that you brought up about the guy that
Speaker 5: they just unload on and all of that. I remember
Speaker 5: those stories from when we were young when we were kids,
Speaker 5: that there was this fear that there were these street
Speaker 5: drugs and originally it was crack or it was PCP
Speaker 5: or whatever that would turn these people into like superhuman strength,
Speaker 5: and therefore you had to be really rough with them.
Speaker 5: And one thing I also noticed about the cops in
Speaker 5: here is that the cops actually look like cops. We
Speaker 5: haven't gotten into the swat team era of cops in America.
Speaker 5: Like I was looking at footage of the white riots
Speaker 5: in San Francisco. Harvey Milk was killed just for fun,
Speaker 5: just happened to be part of a documentary. I think
Speaker 5: I was watching Lifetime to Harvey Milk, and I was like,
Speaker 5: look at those cops. They look like regular cops, just
Speaker 5: blue shirts. Sure like they're gonna wear like a motorcycle
Speaker 5: helmet to deal with the rioting. But they don't look
Speaker 5: like they just got off the plane from Iraq or Afghanistan.
Speaker 5: And I was just like, wow, I'm like, now cops
Speaker 5: in America look like super soldiers. They don't look like
Speaker 5: normal people.
Speaker 1: I don't know if it's true, but don't they say
Speaker 1: that New York has the sixth largest standing army in
Speaker 1: the world.
Speaker 5: It's probably true.
Speaker 1: Mike, you were gonna say something where you had a
Speaker 1: personal experience with Fenton and like cut you off.
Speaker 8: Oh no, I haven't. I just was talking about the
Speaker 8: grains and just how oh we always talking about how
Speaker 8: like this much and they'll show like a close up
Speaker 8: electron microscope almost of them. This much can kill you.
Speaker 5: And I remember there was a fear story kind of
Speaker 5: like wild in the Streets where they were worried of Oh,
Speaker 5: terrorists are gonna dump and it's only gonna take a pound.
Speaker 5: Only takes a pound of fentanyl and they can put
Speaker 5: it in the local water supply and it'll fucking kill
Speaker 5: thousands of people. So yeah, actually you know what you
Speaker 5: were saying.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but it.
Speaker 1: Makes this film very timely, just that it's.
Speaker 8: This bad batch that's going around anything that's stamped incorrectly
Speaker 8: thanks to that one Asian kid who O deed like
Speaker 8: on the own supply. And it's just what a great
Speaker 8: scene to have him laughing through the whole thing while
Speaker 8: this We talked about the violence before, but like Dwarf
Speaker 8: and his boys coming in with machine guns and just
Speaker 8: shooting every fucking thing. They talk about how they unloaded
Speaker 8: a clip and a Digadio's face and stuff. And I
Speaker 8: think that's even in the script, is them shooting this
Speaker 8: guy in the fucking face, but just massive violence. Meanwhile,
Speaker 8: this kid is laughing his head off through the entire scene.
Speaker 8: I thought that was a great touch that it almost felt
Speaker 8: almost like a Tony Scott kind of thing. Had there
Speaker 8: been feathers flying or something, I guess that would have
Speaker 8: been more of a Tony Scott thing.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you need those chefs of light.
Speaker 8: But yeah, talking about the cops, John p. Ryan as
Speaker 8: the lieutenant who's always great and always such a good yeller.
Speaker 8: You get Charles Hallahan, who most people know for having
Speaker 8: his chest split open and a fucking thing coming out
Speaker 8: of it from the thing. Mc gainey in here as
Speaker 8: one of the cops. Ruben Blades in here and I'm
Speaker 8: trying to remember who plays Shahida Steve aka Hoshi. So
Speaker 8: you get this great mix of all these people and
Speaker 8: Ruben Blades and I had to look it up. I
Speaker 8: wanted to make sure he's fine. He says, Blades is
Speaker 8: his last name, not necessarily blot As. He'll accept Blatas,
Speaker 8: but Blades. I love when he gives that little thing
Speaker 8: where he tells someone to freeze and if they run
Speaker 8: and he goes man they never stop. And then later
Speaker 8: on in the movie he says freeze and these two
Speaker 8: kids stop and he gets that little quick smile on
Speaker 8: his face.
Speaker 3: Oh fuck it.
Speaker 8: Actually, that's like such a great moment in this movie
Speaker 8: for me, those.
Speaker 1: Are the moments which punctuated and just keep it bubbling along.
Speaker 1: There's another moment which I noticed as well, wasn't in
Speaker 1: the script, and it's an ad lib where they turn
Speaker 1: up at the house at read his house, and the
Speaker 1: cat is on the roof and he goes to her,
Speaker 1: Your cat's on the roof, so what are you gonna do?
Speaker 1: Shoot him because she's got a gun in her hand.
Speaker 1: Nice little additions to the dialogue, but it have been
Speaker 1: so functional and expository I enjoy it. But yeah, I
Speaker 1: like that a moment at the end he got his
Speaker 1: little arc as well. Someone took him seriously for once.
Speaker 8: Or the lady who's talking Chinese and I think it's
Speaker 8: Hallahan says. What she's saying is I don't know, I'm Japanese.
Speaker 5: Talking about the cops in the way cop process is
Speaker 5: done in the film. There's a lot of things like
Speaker 5: I talked about the being hauled before the captain scene,
Speaker 5: which we've seen in ten thousand police procedurals before.
Speaker 1: They're off the case mcgarnagal.
Speaker 5: But I wrote here and you can pick out who
Speaker 5: he is. But I wrote, like Richard Gear lookalike guy
Speaker 5: talking to her. This is where she's under cover. They
Speaker 5: go to that like restaurant Jimmy Silver, and there's this
Speaker 5: whole thing where she hangs them up in the freezer
Speaker 5: and tortures him, to which I wrote here. Of course,
Speaker 5: if you torture people, they'll give you the information you want.
Speaker 5: That always works to see reservoir dugs.
Speaker 8: This is America.
Speaker 5: This is where you can play with gender. There's this
Speaker 5: whole thing where she starts grabbing at his genitals and
Speaker 5: all of that stuff. And then there's a later scene
Speaker 5: with reminded me of the RoboCop rights. You have the
Speaker 5: right to remain silently like blast bottiker through the window
Speaker 5: and all that stuff, where she's beating up the one
Speaker 5: guy and she's reading him his rights at the same time.
Speaker 5: So there's scenes like this where yeah, we're gonna do
Speaker 5: the dirty hairy thing.
Speaker 1: We're gonna Sennamentoza is one of the most respected citizens
Speaker 1: in the statement, Bang and you ran his little off
Speaker 1: a cliff, broke the necks of three of his bodyguards
Speaker 1: and drove a bus to his front door.
Speaker 9: A Cup and Nile have proof that he's head of
Speaker 9: an international door. You don't want to hear it, McBain.
Speaker 1: The shootout in the boy House with all those scribs
Speaker 1: and explosions and shit going off, that was an excellent
Speaker 1: action sequence. Or I felt proper Jeopardy and I thought
Speaker 1: Sam Maniot was gonna get killed at that point. He's
Speaker 1: here to get fridged. But yeah, the action is a
Speaker 1: lot more narrowly than I expected, like blood packs going
Speaker 1: off all over the place and people getting blasted in
Speaker 1: all types of like weaponry getting unloaded. It doesn't pull
Speaker 1: its punches. I can see why it almost got an
Speaker 1: X rating.
Speaker 8: No, and I love when they're going down the hallway.
Speaker 8: They're almost back to back at one point and I'm
Speaker 8: just like, oh, this is very Butcher and sun Dance
Speaker 8: and to see.
Speaker 1: I would love to have had a sequel with the
Speaker 1: tour of them.
Speaker 8: Oh yeah, gosh, yeah. The chemistry that they have is
Speaker 8: fantastic and it's just on paper. It doesn't seem like
Speaker 8: it's going to make sense when you go, WHOOPI Goldberg
Speaker 8: and Sam Elliott are going to be lovers, partners kicking
Speaker 8: ass and taking names. And I'm just like, yeah, okay,
Speaker 8: that doesn't sound like it's gonna work. But then you
Speaker 8: see it on screen, You're like, oh, fuck, yeah, this
Speaker 8: seems like the most natural thing in the world. And yeah,
Speaker 8: them trading clips back and forth, very clever stuff.
Speaker 1: I was surprised that he felt that he was miscastle.
Speaker 1: I'm not he really is a mistake to do the film. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he felt that he wasn't right for the part, that
Speaker 1: he didn't do a good job and that was a
Speaker 1: mistake in his career. And I was like, no, this
Speaker 1: is no. It looks like you're having fun and you
Speaker 1: have a great report together. So I don't know what
Speaker 1: he was feeling in a moment to feel like that
Speaker 1: was a mistake from but I thought he was good
Speaker 1: in there.
Speaker 8: The next script that Hanken wrote or co wrote that
Speaker 8: comes up is Roadhouse, which to me is one of
Speaker 8: Sam Elliott's best characters ever. And he does eat shit,
Speaker 8: doesn't it. The sense gets killed in that film.
Speaker 1: All I remember from that film is I used to
Speaker 1: fuck guys like you in prison.
Speaker 5: Talking about the room to rooms shootout and then she
Speaker 5: gets wounded because the ceiling falls in on her. Happens
Speaker 5: twice and then ends up in the hospital. Now this
Speaker 5: is part of me that and I understand it's we
Speaker 5: need it for the script. Stop with trying to handle
Speaker 5: the film logic is that there's a newspaper story, and
Speaker 5: that's how Durris's character finds out she's in the hospital
Speaker 5: and goes after unlike she was undercovered. There wouldn't be
Speaker 5: a story in paper wounded.
Speaker 1: Oh, he didn't think it has.
Speaker 5: From there, it's really where you start to build the
Speaker 5: tenderness with the Mic character, where it's like he visitors
Speaker 5: in the hospital, he gets through the dress. She was
Speaker 5: looking at things like that, can't accept it. It's a bribe,
Speaker 5: so that she's still trying to keep this professional distance
Speaker 5: while at the same time getting pulled in.
Speaker 1: They really played it open the script as well as
Speaker 1: shooting draft with the dress where he gets sort of
Speaker 1: actually put it on and she doesn't want to wear
Speaker 1: it because he'll see her scars, and he convinces her,
Speaker 1: and it felt a little bit more like a pretty
Speaker 1: woman type back and forth where I could imagine this
Speaker 1: playing where it's more romantic writer or like the weapon
Speaker 1: would rende Russo and Gibs and showed each other our scars.
Speaker 11: You want to drink, drink your leg and drink to
Speaker 11: your leg.
Speaker 6: Okay, so we drink her legs.
Speaker 1: I thought it was a better change in the film
Speaker 1: because the relationship is based on empathy rather than sensuality,
Speaker 1: which is what the script was going for. That was
Speaker 1: one of the changes where I was like, I'm glad
Speaker 1: you made those changes because it would felt like too
Speaker 1: much of a tonal change.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 8: I love the scene where she sees the dress the
Speaker 8: first time and you would think, again, it's here's a
Speaker 8: five thousand dollars dress. But I love that when she
Speaker 8: because this is all done, no dialogue, it's just her
Speaker 8: mouthing words and signaling, and she's signaling to a shop
Speaker 8: girl inside who's like fixing up the window display. And
Speaker 8: I love when she's five thousand dollars, five thousand dollars
Speaker 8: for that dress and the woman gives her a little
Speaker 8: sympathetic I know, it's crazy, right, And I was so
Speaker 8: afraid that the one was going to be like if
Speaker 8: you can't afford it, get the fuck out of here.
Speaker 1: Kind of thing.
Speaker 8: But I love that she's just like, I know this
Speaker 8: is nuts, so but yeah, when he comes to her
Speaker 8: with the dress, and I'm glad that they he didn't
Speaker 8: have the put on the dress for resolely type of thing,
Speaker 8: because that would have felt very controlling, and that doesn't
Speaker 8: seem like the way that Marshak is And it doesn't
Speaker 8: feel like she would take orders or suggestions from fucking anybody.
Speaker 8: She is so in control. I love how cool she
Speaker 8: plays it when Zach the James LaGrow character acosts her
Speaker 8: at the deli, and that scene is they're in the
Speaker 8: Millia's version and it's so different. There's there isn't a deli.
Speaker 8: But I love the whole thing of her interacting with
Speaker 8: the guy behind the deli kuind of Max I think
Speaker 8: his name is, and just there back and forth and
Speaker 8: you can tell she's been there a thousand times. And
Speaker 8: how cool she plays it with pickpocketing the grow taking
Speaker 8: his knife, and I want to say, when she shows
Speaker 8: a little bag of drugs, I'm like, oh, I think
Speaker 8: she just had that and just did a real quick
Speaker 8: press the digitation. I don't think that was inside of
Speaker 8: La Girl's pocket at all, and she just was like,
Speaker 8: oh look what I found. I'm like, yeah, she's in
Speaker 8: complete control of the situation. She's laughing at this kid
Speaker 8: who thinks he's such a badass, even though he's coming
Speaker 8: at her with a knife, just bursts out laughing. I'm like,
Speaker 8: this is She's a cool cucumber.
Speaker 1: She's also being maternal. She's seeing a teenager who is
Speaker 1: probably reminds her a little bit of the people that
Speaker 1: she probably would have ruan around with. And she's not
Speaker 1: gonna book him. She's not going to bring him, bring
Speaker 1: him in, and she's not gonna handcuff him. She's gonna
Speaker 1: humiliate him and just tell him fuck off, don't bother me.
Speaker 1: And I like that. I like that her humanity and
Speaker 1: the humanity between her and sam Eliot comes through in
Speaker 1: those scenes. They don't play it for the little hanging fruit.
Speaker 1: They go for a little bit more of a Groun
Speaker 1: did softer approach. That really balances out the more grubby
Speaker 1: and gnarly aspects of the shoot outes and the violence.
Speaker 8: It makes you feel for Lagroux too, and especially that
Speaker 8: scene later on where he tells that story about how
Speaker 8: he went out for swim. He had drugs with him,
Speaker 8: and he'said, oh, let's do these drugs. But at first
Speaker 8: I'm going to go off for a swim. He comes
Speaker 8: back in all of his friends are dead, and you
Speaker 8: get to see all of these dead teenagers there, and
Speaker 8: I'm like, wow, I was tempted to laugh when I
Speaker 8: first they had that hard cut to the teenagers, just
Speaker 8: because it is a funny situation for me seeing all
Speaker 8: of these dead teenagers all in like their party and everything.
Speaker 8: But he sells it. When Lagro starts to tell that story,
Speaker 8: he really sells it and makes me care for this
Speaker 8: kid who could have just been a complete punk, Like
Speaker 8: you don't want you don't give a shit about this
Speaker 8: guy because he's just a little privileged white boy. But no,
Speaker 8: I actually cared about him and I care for him
Speaker 8: when they said that he tried to commit suicide, because
Speaker 8: can you imagine the survivor's guilt that this kid's going
Speaker 8: to have for the rest of his fucking life.
Speaker 1: I'm just on a how prescient the film is that
Speaker 1: those see things that are still going on with people
Speaker 1: taking dodgy cork and just dropping dead is part of
Speaker 1: a plotline for a mid eighties movie. It feels eerie
Speaker 1: in some respects, but maybe it was always going on
Speaker 1: and maybe it's only just caught fire in the last
Speaker 1: few years.
Speaker 5: But yeah, sadly, it's much worse now than I think
Speaker 5: it was then. If you were to go back and
Speaker 5: look at the OD statistics for the late eighties, by comparison,
Speaker 5: I think, what is it in the last ten years,
Speaker 5: It's been about roughly the amount of Americans dying in Vietnam,
Speaker 5: about fifty thousand or more a year dying from od's
Speaker 5: in the US. So it's and it has been that
Speaker 5: way for the past ten years.
Speaker 1: Still, I enjoyed my fentanel.
Speaker 5: You did it in the way it was supposed to
Speaker 5: be done, under supervision and for a particular reason, not
Speaker 5: because you got a hot dose on the street. Sadly.
Speaker 8: Yeah, speaking of cops, I forgot that. Larry Hankin also
Speaker 8: plays a cop in here, very muller ish to his
Speaker 8: role from Running Scared, where he just shows up for
Speaker 8: a few minutes, comes in, talks about the bad batch
Speaker 8: of Fatal Beauty, and then he goes on his way,
Speaker 8: like how he showed up and worked on their undercover
Speaker 8: police car, made that crazy taxi for Billy Crystal and
Speaker 8: Gregory Hines and then goes on his way with that.
Speaker 8: We talked about how she plays characters and how she
Speaker 8: doesn't play a ton of characters in here, but the
Speaker 8: other one I forgot. You mentioned the Richard Gear drug dealer.
Speaker 1: And she's want to be actress.
Speaker 8: Oh yeah, actress, what did you know? Of course, it's
Speaker 8: almost that same wig where she was the entertainment from
Speaker 8: Jump to Jack Flash.
Speaker 5: Like I said, when I saw him, I'm just like,
Speaker 5: I don't know who this guy is, but he looks
Speaker 5: like a Richard Gear lookalike, which would have worked in
Speaker 5: this period.
Speaker 1: She comes in love on screen as well, when she's
Speaker 1: caught loose like that, where you can tell it's not scripted.
Speaker 1: It's just convinced this guy that you are want to
Speaker 1: be actors. And I always love her when she does that,
Speaker 1: So I can see why it keeps coming up in
Speaker 1: the films where she keeps adopting these other personas, but
Speaker 1: I always enjoy it. She's such a charismatic character. The
Speaker 1: thing that I noticed as well from reading a book
Speaker 1: that I think maybe is worth mentioning, is that she
Speaker 1: was dealing with substance abuse herself at this time, and
Speaker 1: that's why she was so skinny. She was doing coke
Speaker 1: and she knew that if she gave up the coke,
Speaker 1: she was going to gain weight, and she thought at
Speaker 1: some stage the trade off was, Okay, if I gained
Speaker 1: twenty pounds, it's worth it, rather than my daughter finding
Speaker 1: out that her mother was an addict find out that
Speaker 1: her daughter was an addict. But when you see how
Speaker 1: I think she is in this film, how spry she is,
Speaker 1: and she's playing this character where she's talking about having
Speaker 1: lost her child to coke and it's not in the script,
Speaker 1: I'm wondering how much that was weighing on her that
Speaker 1: she felt the need to put it through this character's
Speaker 1: point of view before she processed it herself. But she
Speaker 1: talks about in the book where she's very forecoming. It's
Speaker 1: a brilliant book, actually her book, bits and pieces, but
Speaker 1: she talks about how she was always the second choice
Speaker 1: in all these films, that it was never anyone wanted
Speaker 1: her that she would come in, and she was constantly
Speaker 1: trying to convince people that she was good enough, and
Speaker 1: she just felt that she could never get the same
Speaker 1: respect that others would get as a lead, like they
Speaker 1: didn't have the right makeup people, they didn't have the
Speaker 1: right hair people, and did come in and they spray
Speaker 1: her hair with water and she'd be like, oh my god,
Speaker 1: you do not know what you're doing. And meanwhile she
Speaker 1: was like doing lines and lines of coke in order
Speaker 1: to stay thin. It adds to the performance.
Speaker 5: I think in this period. All I can think of
Speaker 5: is in the mid and late eighties is how she
Speaker 5: was so connected to Robin Williams and understanding his own
Speaker 5: substance use and if they were paling around. It doesn't
Speaker 5: surprise me in the least that she was up to
Speaker 5: her elbows and cocaine when that guy was no the same.
Speaker 1: She said they all were. She said that bell Air
Speaker 1: of Beverly Hills, you go into a party, people would
Speaker 1: hand to your choice of coeludes, and there was just
Speaker 1: rails of coke on every table, and it felt so
Speaker 1: normalized that she didn't see it as dangerous because everybody
Speaker 1: was doing it and they were all successful and they
Speaker 1: were all protected, and so she thought, oh, I'm going
Speaker 1: to fit in. And then she made the choice to
Speaker 1: cut with all those friends and move in different spaces
Speaker 1: and make that departure from that life soole that she
Speaker 1: was living. But yeah, it's interesting. It's a very good book.
Speaker 1: I enjoyed her.
Speaker 5: We were talking about with the racial politics then, not
Speaker 5: to say things are absolutely better some I don't know,
Speaker 5: almost forty years later on from this film, it was
Speaker 5: much harder in that era. There was not a lot
Speaker 5: of black leading actors in that period. The only like
Speaker 5: constant blackface on TV in America at least was and
Speaker 5: now we know how he turned out. Sadly is was
Speaker 5: Bill Cosby because I I don't know what he got
Speaker 5: a bad case of pudding pups. I just remember being
Speaker 5: I don't know, six seven years old and talking to
Speaker 5: a neighbor kid. And I grew up in a working class,
Speaker 5: working poor neighborhood, but it was still like I didn't
Speaker 5: realize that the time is rather segregated. And I remember
Speaker 5: talking to as kids do you're six, seven, eight years old,
Speaker 5: and it's what is it? Do you watch? It's oh,
Speaker 5: we like the show and that, and I would talk about, oh,
Speaker 5: we watched Cosby show. And I remember the kid just said,
Speaker 5: as playing as day, like you were telling the time
Speaker 5: or the weather. It's Oh, we don't watch that show
Speaker 5: because there's blanks on it.
Speaker 8: Oh wow.
Speaker 5: And I remember going to my dad and talking about that.
Speaker 5: He's like, yeah, we don't use that word in this house,
Speaker 5: like we don't act like that here. And I am
Speaker 5: and my dad explaining to me, like I said, I
Speaker 5: was only like six or seven years.
Speaker 1: Old and learned behavior.
Speaker 5: But the way I think about it is that kid
Speaker 5: is probably more mainstream of what most people thought at
Speaker 5: the time where I was growing up, as opposed to
Speaker 5: my parents. So for someone to try to have an
Speaker 5: acting career, to try and be to get lead roles
Speaker 5: in this period, who is black, it had to be
Speaker 5: such a struggle. Today, Yeah, you got Will Smith and
Speaker 5: things like that, and things are much more normalized in
Speaker 5: that way along racial lines.
Speaker 8: Ish ish because you still get all of this stuff
Speaker 8: where it's, oh, how dare you recast Johnny Storm to
Speaker 8: be a black guy? It's like how you Oh, it's
Speaker 8: so woke you have to have this DEI thing and
Speaker 8: bring all these black characters in it. Have you looked
Speaker 8: at America? Do you see the racial makeup of our country?
Speaker 8: And also there is a thing about representation where it's
Speaker 8: just like, yeah, to your point. If I was a
Speaker 8: little black girl at this point, like in the early
Speaker 8: to mid eighties, I got nothing, like I'm not gonna
Speaker 8: i have no other than maybe one person or two
Speaker 8: people on Sesame Street. I had nobody who I'm looking at. Like,
Speaker 8: until The Cosby Show came along, it was really tough
Speaker 8: to see black people on television other than the very
Speaker 8: menior roles or the one of a group of people
Speaker 8: like Ron Harrison, Barney Miller. Yeah, there wasn't that, and
Speaker 8: that's a black man. I'm trying to think of the
Speaker 8: last time i saw black woman on Barney Miller. It's
Speaker 8: very rare.
Speaker 5: Or if they were the lead roles were poor people,
Speaker 5: so you had like in the ghetto with like Good
Speaker 5: Times or the Jeffersons. Yeah, but they also it was
Speaker 5: like evolved out of that or Sanford's Son, So you
Speaker 5: had this thing with it's like poor people, non professionals.
Speaker 5: It wasn't until The Cosby Show came along that you
Speaker 5: had black professionals where it was like, no, black people
Speaker 5: can be doctors and lawyers, and because that's what the
Speaker 5: two of them were, and they can be everything in
Speaker 5: that way. And so I always posited that for US
Speaker 5: gen xers that it was the Cosby Show that changed
Speaker 5: the culture a bit, that allowed something like Obama to
Speaker 5: be elected president because people could visualize and go, oh,
Speaker 5: black guy could be president too. Even my grandfather, who
Speaker 5: was in his eighties and was casually racist, said yeah,
Speaker 5: I got to vote for the colored fella instead of
Speaker 5: voting for John McCain. So it showed this evolution. I
Speaker 5: don't think people understood how representation changed the way in
Speaker 5: which people engaged in media. That became a cultural crossover.
Speaker 5: And like he we was saying, if you can't see it,
Speaker 5: then you can't be it. And there was part of that.
Speaker 5: And even for me growing up working poor, where it
Speaker 5: was like, I want to be a writer. I want
Speaker 5: to have a creative life. And wasn't that my parents
Speaker 5: and had books in the house. They did, but I
Speaker 5: may as well have told him I wanted to be
Speaker 5: a fucking astronaut. Because they didn't know anyone who was
Speaker 5: a writer, and they didn't know anyone who was an astronaut,
Speaker 5: so they had no vision for how you could live
Speaker 5: a creative life. They were like, just don't work in
Speaker 5: the factory. Just go do something else. It's interesting to
Speaker 5: see the dynamics through that lens. I don't think that
Speaker 5: if a younger person was watching this movie today that
Speaker 5: they would even maybe pick up on those kind of things.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I think you're right, And I don't think they
Speaker 8: would realize just what a rarety a black female action
Speaker 8: star was, and that all of those dark.
Speaker 1: Skins female actress as well, because even today, the majority
Speaker 1: of the black actresses who are leading ladies, they're lighter skinned.
Speaker 1: It's notable. See. The thing that I find fascinating is
Speaker 1: that the race issue is it's very specific to America.
Speaker 1: While everywhere has got its racial issues, America still seems
Speaker 1: to be grappling with it in a way that the
Speaker 1: rest of us just don't understand why it's such an
Speaker 1: issue for you guys. And maybe it just has to
Speaker 1: do with your history and it has to do with
Speaker 1: segregation and all that stuff. But we grew up just
Speaker 1: loving black culture and loving the black exports we're watching
Speaker 1: like Fresh Prince of bel Air and not batting an
Speaker 1: eyelid about it, or kidd and Play or whatever music was.
Speaker 1: It always just felt normalized. And that was in a
Speaker 1: country which was predominantly white Catholic. It's an interesting difference.
Speaker 5: For me growing up. I grew up around a lot
Speaker 5: of kids who were like Pino and do the right thing.
Speaker 5: And there's that scene where Spike's character pulls them aside
Speaker 5: and says, you keep saying this word all the time.
Speaker 5: You keep talking about how awful black people are. But
Speaker 5: your favorite sports heroes and your favorite musicians and your
Speaker 5: favorite you're so in our culture, but you don't respect us.
Speaker 5: And I grew up around so many kids like that
Speaker 5: who had no respect for black people and on the whole,
Speaker 5: but they would just eat their culture with a spoon
Speaker 5: daily anyway. So yes, welcome to three white guys talking
Speaker 5: about racism a racial politics.
Speaker 1: You're white. I had my camera off.
Speaker 5: Sadly, I don't like to equate myself to that of
Speaker 5: my cultural ethnic background, much like you, a bit of
Speaker 5: the Irish and the Celts who were not considered white
Speaker 5: for a long time.
Speaker 8: PARTI O'Malley table morning tea. You know, it just doesn't
Speaker 8: look like any party I've ever seen before.
Speaker 9: Man, you never heard no black Irish Irish?
Speaker 8: That's right?
Speaker 3: Who do you think of it? In the mac Rea?
Speaker 3: Look it's on huh so Rocky, that's.
Speaker 1: Ow We're trying to not use that too much anymore
Speaker 1: because now we legitimately have a lot of amazing black
Speaker 1: Irish people, so it doesn't really dilutes it and confuses it.
Speaker 1: But yeah, we consider ourselves as Irish people to be
Speaker 1: very liberal, very progressive. We're all about equality and all that.
Speaker 1: But we don't claim the Irish Americans.
Speaker 9: What.
Speaker 1: No, this has got to get so many downvotes, people
Speaker 1: are going to seek seek me out. I'm not going
Speaker 1: to find our podcast and are just going to review bombus.
Speaker 5: Uh, well, we're all getting duxed. We're all getting duxed.
Speaker 1: I love Trump Piece, I love the Went Home Alone too,
Speaker 1: I love The Apprentice.
Speaker 5: Yeah, wrapping it up here, the ending and such, is
Speaker 5: there anything that we're missing?
Speaker 8: I also wonder where that car is going at the
Speaker 8: very end we talked about the freeze frame, but the
Speaker 8: credits take place over a car and I'm guessing it's
Speaker 8: her Resolute and Mike in the car. I think it's
Speaker 8: her piece of shit car that's going, and then we're
Speaker 8: following that for a while as the end credits are going.
Speaker 8: Then we pull out and it carries on its way.
Speaker 8: I don't know if it is her piece of shit
Speaker 8: car though, because it's not her what Axle drives a
Speaker 8: crappy blue Chevy Nova, but she's got hers where you
Speaker 8: can hear the yeah, just whineing like crazy.
Speaker 5: It's a beat up old sixties Mustang.
Speaker 1: Of the fact as well that it's a shabby car,
Speaker 1: that it's not gleaming, it does set her apart from Axel,
Speaker 1: where she's not flash. She's actually just a working cop.
Speaker 1: But it's a dirty pink and I like it. It
Speaker 1: gives a character, and it's a great poster as well,
Speaker 1: like the artwork for the film is great for reclining
Speaker 1: in the car with the gun and the Hollywood sign
Speaker 1: behind her. It's cool. But I do think they should
Speaker 1: have stuck to the ending in the script. That the
Speaker 1: ending in the script was just it tied up a
Speaker 1: lot of loose ends, and I liked it rather than
Speaker 1: that freeze frame, where I guess they just thought, look,
Speaker 1: cut your losses, now we don't get out.
Speaker 5: They're like it worked for truefo four hundred blows. Get
Speaker 5: them that freeze frame, let him think about it, and
Speaker 5: then send them off into the night.
Speaker 8: I mean, it was such a cop, such a TV trope,
Speaker 8: but especially like for Cop shows where you get that
Speaker 8: last freeze. Of course, we all remember how they would
Speaker 8: parody that in Police Squad the Zaz Show where they
Speaker 8: would freeze but the criminal didn't know that they were
Speaker 8: supposed to freeze.
Speaker 5: Don't they freeze at the end of Beverly Hills Cop
Speaker 5: Because if I remember, isn't it like this? Yeah?
Speaker 8: Oh yeah, okay, yeah, I.
Speaker 1: Can't remember what Van Dam is a double impact, is
Speaker 1: it or no? It's the Van Dam one where he
Speaker 1: gives the thumbs up at the end.
Speaker 8: Years ago, I saw a super cut of all the
Speaker 8: ends of Chips and every single freeze frame. It would
Speaker 8: be like the last joke and then the freeze. Oh
Speaker 8: my god, it was wonderful. Sot yes, and then they
Speaker 8: would freeze and credits. It's like if somebody did that
Speaker 8: for the opening of CSI Miami, that would be great too.
Speaker 8: And I'm sure they have.
Speaker 1: One with David Cruso taking off his glasses constantly detective.
Speaker 8: The victim has seamen in her ears. I guess she
Speaker 8: got to hear her killer coming.
Speaker 5: I don't know. That just reminds me of and I
Speaker 5: think you still do this on Facebook where you have
Speaker 5: the through the legs posters, just the cliche use of image.
Speaker 8: Yeah, we're going to take a break and play a
Speaker 8: pair of interviews. First up, you'll hear from the original
Speaker 8: author of Fatal Beauty, Bill Speno, and we'll follow that
Speaker 8: up with an interview with director Tom Holland. And we'll
Speaker 8: be back with both of those right after these brief messages.
Speaker 5: I don't know how he does it. I mean, the
Speaker 5: guy does books, he writes reviews, he's on the show
Speaker 5: every week with me. I'm talking about my Humble podcast partner,
Speaker 5: Mike White from the Projection Booth. Hey, it's Rob Saint Mary.
Speaker 5: I just wanted to let you know Cinema Detours. Mike's
Speaker 5: new book is out. It collects a bunch of reviews
Speaker 5: that he's done over the past decade or so for
Speaker 5: various places here and there, and you basically want to
Speaker 5: pick it up. And I'll tell you why, because some
Speaker 5: of those older reviews the movies that you have seen,
Speaker 5: it's kind of like chatting with an old friend. And
Speaker 5: then the movies that you haven't seen yet. Well, Mike
Speaker 5: will add about another one hundred to one hundred and
Speaker 5: fifty movies that you're going to have to see before
Speaker 5: you die, you can give him a wedgie or something.
Speaker 5: Next time you see them, thank them for that one.
Speaker 5: It's Cinema Detours. You can get it over at our website,
Speaker 5: projection dashbooth dot com. You can get it at Amazon
Speaker 5: dot com, and you can get it in either payper
Speaker 5: form if you're old school, or you can get it
Speaker 5: for your kindle, your e reader. So there's no reason
Speaker 5: to detour. Cinema Detours from Mike White. And of course
Speaker 5: you can always learn more about what we do about
Speaker 5: the books and everything else at projection dashbooth dot com.
Speaker 8: Before we even talk about your career in screenwriting, I'm
Speaker 8: so curious. Can you tell me a little bit more
Speaker 8: about you and how you got into entertainment overall.
Speaker 7: You know, I did a lot of theater when I
Speaker 7: was in college, and what got me into this charter
Speaker 7: was that my friend and I had a singing group
Speaker 7: that had a number one hip record Walk right in
Speaker 7: and we toured around the world and I like the performing.
Speaker 7: And then we were doing a tour to introduce the
Speaker 7: Mustang to the world College Tour and this is nineteen
Speaker 7: sixty four, obviously, and we traveled by bus for only
Speaker 7: out of time we ever traveled by bus. We traveled
Speaker 7: by plane or drove by car, and I needed some time.
Speaker 7: I hated just sitting in the bus hour on end.
Speaker 7: So I started writing a play and don't ask me why,
Speaker 7: I just did. And I found I liked writing. So
Speaker 7: I wrote some plays, had a couple things done off
Speaker 7: off Broadway. And then a friend of mine an ancent
Speaker 7: in California, I knew who was originally started in the theater.
Speaker 7: He says, why don't you write a screenplay? So I
Speaker 7: checked out what screenplays were and wrote one. Find out
Speaker 7: found out I really liked it, and so I went
Speaker 7: from there. And then my wife and I went to
Speaker 7: California to seek fame and fortune and spent about a
Speaker 7: year there, couldn't get anything to happen, went back to
Speaker 7: our home in Cape Cod and then my wife got
Speaker 7: a television series, so he went back to California. And oh, meanwhile,
Speaker 7: also I worked. I worked as an assistant on a
Speaker 7: movie for American International, and I was just a kind
Speaker 7: of general go for a shot in New Mexico. And
Speaker 7: at that time I got to know a lot of
Speaker 7: people on the film, and so I still didn't know
Speaker 7: I wanted to break into the screenwriting business, but I
Speaker 7: had no idea how to do it. But then one
Speaker 7: day I was going to go play tennis at a
Speaker 7: public art but there was too long a wait, so
Speaker 7: I said, I'm just going to go over and talk
Speaker 7: to my friend Norman at AIP and we sat down
Speaker 7: and we were talking, and he said, Bill, listen, you
Speaker 7: know they were known for low budget pictures, and you know,
Speaker 7: under people like Roger Corman, they started you know, you know,
Speaker 7: the story Scorsese and Nicholson and a lot of other
Speaker 7: He said, Bill. You know, he knew I was a writer,
Speaker 7: and he said, have you gotten the ideas? And so
Speaker 7: out of the top of my head, I said sure,
Speaker 7: and I gave him a one liner, which was Hatfields
Speaker 7: and the McCoy's as a rival stock car racing families,
Speaker 7: and he said, I can sell that. So that was
Speaker 7: my first job, was out of the blue. They offered
Speaker 7: me minimum and I took it and I had a
Speaker 7: lot of fun writing it, and looking back, it was not,
Speaker 7: I don't think a very good script. There wasn't enough
Speaker 7: action and enough wasn't exploitative enough. But the reason it
Speaker 7: didn't get made, as a matter of fact, when I
Speaker 7: had the script and Jim Nicholson, he and Sam Arkoff
Speaker 7: owned the company and Lee had a disagreement about whether
Speaker 7: to do this picture or not, and Jim Nicholson was
Speaker 7: the champion of my script. But I remember meeting in
Speaker 7: their office and saying, listen, I've got a good friend
Speaker 7: who was looking for his first directing job, and I
Speaker 7: know he's going to be big in this town, and
Speaker 7: you ought to consider him. His name is Steven Spielberg,
Speaker 7: and he had one credit, which was a two TV movies,
Speaker 7: one called Duel, which was they got great ratings, and
Speaker 7: Stephen and my wife Joan and I were good friends,
Speaker 7: and he said, oh, yeah, no, I'd like to do that.
Speaker 7: So I told him the basic story and we went
Speaker 7: out to Riverside and watched the races, and I had
Speaker 7: a whole bunch of it. Used to Super eight films,
Speaker 7: They used to put them in a little little boxes
Speaker 7: like this, and so I run along about four of
Speaker 7: these Super eight boxes and gave them to Steven and
Speaker 7: he shot the race and I wish I had those.
Speaker 7: I wish I talked with him to say, you know,
Speaker 7: I wish I'd saved those. He said, probably they really
Speaker 7: would have been bad, he said, because we didn't have
Speaker 7: a very good angle on the race. But anyway, needless
Speaker 7: to say, because of a dispute with Nicholson, the movie
Speaker 7: never got made, but it got me publicity, got me
Speaker 7: an agent, and then I went on from there and
Speaker 7: again I had a script that I'd written about. It's
Speaker 7: called Siege originally, and I sold it to CBS with
Speaker 7: the help of a good friend who was an agent.
Speaker 7: An interesting story and it's not a complaining one, because
Speaker 7: it all turned out great for me. Was that they
Speaker 7: offered me. The studio offered me less than minimum for
Speaker 7: the script, and then they finally agreed to it. And
Speaker 7: then the producer on the script and there was that
Speaker 7: go project at this point said well we can't afford
Speaker 7: to do. And this was the guy who was very,
Speaker 7: very wealthy, one of the heirs of the Max Sycture fortune.
Speaker 7: He said, well then, Gus, you know I was being
Speaker 7: paid fifteen thousand dollars. He said, unless you take ten
Speaker 7: thousand dollars, we can't do the show. I knew it
Speaker 7: was much more important to get a credit, and he said,
Speaker 7: but don't worry, he said, you know, when the profits
Speaker 7: the movie come in, you'll get your extra five thousand,
Speaker 7: so I knew it was born. I got a credit.
Speaker 7: The movie came on the air, not only had great ratings,
Speaker 7: but I got specifically mentioned as the writer. And after
Speaker 7: that my career took off. You know, I wrote a
Speaker 7: lot of television movies, and I wrote a bunch of
Speaker 7: spec scripts and then without going through the years, because
Speaker 7: this was nineteen seventy three, I think, and literally just
Speaker 7: after the my movie aired and everybody was looking for
Speaker 7: me to be a writer, and I had an agent
Speaker 7: call me up the right six months writer strike happened,
Speaker 7: so couldn't do anything, and I thought, well, you know,
Speaker 7: this is a business. It's ups and downs. So you know,
Speaker 7: my wife and I had just agreed to buy a
Speaker 7: house on Mulholland, so we spent the six months. She
Speaker 7: taught her acting class and I worked on renovating the house,
Speaker 7: and the strike was over. It seemed to just take forever,
Speaker 7: and you know, like what happens in a strike, a
Speaker 7: lot of my other fellow writer friends couldn't write, so
Speaker 7: we would do things like go bowling or talk about
Speaker 7: the business. But once the strike was over, I got
Speaker 7: all kinds of offers to write TV shows, TV long form,
Speaker 7: and so you know, I did that for a few
Speaker 7: years and had a lot of fun doing it. I
Speaker 7: got to be known as a writer because I also
Speaker 7: turned down a lot of things because ethical reasons, Like
Speaker 7: they wanted me to write the script about Charles Manson
Speaker 7: and I read his self aggrandizing biography and realized, there's
Speaker 7: no way making a movie about this isn't going to
Speaker 7: make him important in some way because he's the protagonist.
Speaker 7: So I said, no, forget it, I'm not going to
Speaker 7: do it. Movie never got made. But anyway, I was
Speaker 7: in the screenwriting loop and I was the go to
Speaker 7: writer for long form, and I turned a lot of
Speaker 7: things down, either because I didn't feel I could do
Speaker 7: a good job, but it was nice to be in
Speaker 7: a position. And it was also nice to be where
Speaker 7: I would, you know, sit at my desk writing and
Speaker 7: the checks would come in the mail because this is
Speaker 7: way before a direct deposit, and I stick them in
Speaker 7: the drawer. I didn't even have time to put them
Speaker 7: in the bank. You know, it was fun and I
Speaker 7: really enjoyed the writing. But after a while I realized
Speaker 7: that writing for television, either if you were writing a
Speaker 7: prestige show, it wasn't really what I wanted to do.
Speaker 7: I wanted to write screenplays. So that's kind of the
Speaker 7: height of my being offered things. I said to my agents, Listen,
Speaker 7: I always want to write scripts and then spec scripts,
Speaker 7: and they said, okay, we'll support you, which meant a
Speaker 7: big cut in commission for them, but they supported me.
Speaker 7: I guess. The second or third script I wrote was
Speaker 7: optioned by twentieth Century Fox, but again that they signed
Speaker 7: me a producer, and it got caught in the mill
Speaker 7: that the East Coast wanted to do it, the West
Speaker 7: Coast didn't, and so it didn't get made. But I'm
Speaker 7: you know, it was still a good script. And so
Speaker 7: that's pretty much what I kept doing. And then two
Speaker 7: years later, Steven Spielberg we were good friends. We hung
Speaker 7: out together, and we saw him through the staggering success
Speaker 7: of Jaws and also him going into and into fame,
Speaker 7: and he used to have a we had a boat
Speaker 7: in the marina which we spent weekends on and Steven
Speaker 7: would come down and we'd hang out, and I remember
Speaker 7: him telling us that they wanted him to do the
Speaker 7: sequel to Jaws, and he knew instinctively it was the
Speaker 7: wrong thing.
Speaker 2: To do.
Speaker 7: And then he said to me one day because I'd
Speaker 7: showed him a couple of my spec scripts, and he said, Bill,
Speaker 7: he said, you said, you're really a classy writer, he said,
Speaker 7: but you're not going to get to be known. He said,
Speaker 7: you should just figure out what's the most commercial script
Speaker 7: you can think of and write it just to get noticed,
Speaker 7: which was great advice. So I thought and thought about
Speaker 7: what's the most commercial thing I can write. I was
Speaker 7: a big fan of the Clint Eastwood movies, the Dirty
Speaker 7: Harry movies, so I thought, huh, dirty Harriet, and I'll
Speaker 7: write I accept on making I'll make her a woman,
Speaker 7: a liberal, and I said it in the Houston Police Force.
Speaker 7: And I went in and tried to sell it to
Speaker 7: Fox and a couple of others and they were interested.
Speaker 7: You know, I pitched it, so I said, well, okay,
Speaker 7: So I wrote the script and then I knew I
Speaker 7: needed a better agent for selling a script. So this
Speaker 7: is way before the big spec script craze happened. And
Speaker 7: I found an Asian named Melinda Jason, who was really
Speaker 7: just what you want. I mean, she was classic, you know, pushy,
Speaker 7: over the top, but I knew she could sell the script.
Speaker 7: So she did the classic thing, which has sent the
Speaker 7: script out on a Friday and saying, you know, you've
Speaker 7: got a chance here. We want to see bids on
Speaker 7: Monday morning. And I was back and we were back
Speaker 7: in our place in Vail, Colorado, which is where I
Speaker 7: was mostly living, and I remember sitting there and Melinda
Speaker 7: called me up and said, well, Bill, we got some bites.
Speaker 7: And the one who came up with the most money,
Speaker 7: which was really life changing money at that point, was
Speaker 7: twentieth Century Fox, and they said, we'll give you a
Speaker 7: certain amount of money, you know, several hundred thousand dollars
Speaker 7: for an option on the script, but if we buy
Speaker 7: it outright, will give you more money. I said, I
Speaker 7: wrote this script to sell it, and so I sold
Speaker 7: it outright, and that was really thrilling moment because it
Speaker 7: bruty did change our life. And I forever thanked Spielberg
Speaker 7: for saying you ought to do that, Bill. And of course,
Speaker 7: then the story because that script, which my title was
Speaker 7: Extreme Measures, we eventually became Fatal Beauty after the long
Speaker 7: But if we you know, talking about the whole process
Speaker 7: of Fatal Beauty, my main thing is is that script
Speaker 7: accomplished exactly what I did wanted. It raised my profile
Speaker 7: enormously and I got offers to, you know, to write
Speaker 7: all kinds of movies do rewrites, were lots of money,
Speaker 7: but that wasn't what I wanted to do. I didn't
Speaker 7: want to write Beverly Hills Cop too. And when the
Speaker 7: business was changing, and when writers like Shane Black and
Speaker 7: Steve Desosa came in, I knew they could write this
Speaker 7: stuff much better than I could. That wasn't my metier
Speaker 7: writing you know, an action action comedy script. And of
Speaker 7: course when Lethal Weapon came out and Beverly Hills Cop,
Speaker 7: you know, action comedy scripts with a lot of real
Speaker 7: action but also comedy, especially the kind of ironic approach
Speaker 7: of Shane Black's. I said, well, I'm glad I turned
Speaker 7: it down because those guys are better than I would be.
Speaker 7: It's not my thing, and I'm they're writing I really admire.
Speaker 7: But it got me to where I got a lot
Speaker 7: of rewrite jobs and writing jobs. But the experience of
Speaker 7: working on Fatal Beauty, as I said, I don't know
Speaker 7: what information you want, but my overwhelming feeling about it,
Speaker 7: no matter the fact that script that was made into
Speaker 7: Fatal Beauty was nothing like my original script. I remember
Speaker 7: sitting in the screening room with my wife at Fox,
Speaker 7: and they were they expecting this, you know, because it
Speaker 7: was supposed to start somebody like Christine Lottie, not somebody
Speaker 7: like Whoopi Goldberg, who I would admire a lot as
Speaker 7: an actor and as a person, but totally wrong casting.
Speaker 7: But they said, you know, they shot the movie and
Speaker 7: they said, well, by contract, we have to write high
Speaker 7: are you to write the sequel? And we know this
Speaker 7: is going to be a big movie. So I watched
Speaker 7: the movie Fatal Beauty in a screening room at Fox,
Speaker 7: and I turned to Joe and said, I don't know.
Speaker 7: They think it's going to be a hit. I think
Speaker 7: this is a terrible movie. And but I don't pretend
Speaker 7: to know. There are movies that were hits that I
Speaker 7: didn't understand, and movies that bomb that I thought were wonderful.
Speaker 7: It's like all of us. So but I said, sure,
Speaker 7: I'll write the sequel. And then of course the movie
Speaker 7: came out and the movie to John Goldwin was the
Speaker 7: producer working for Fox, and she said, well, the movie
Speaker 7: didn't open, and it didn't, I mean, it had a
Speaker 7: terrible opening, and he said, well, you know, we're just
Speaker 7: going to pay you off because there's not going to
Speaker 7: be any sequel. And I said, Marie, I'm so surprised.
Speaker 9: So that was that.
Speaker 7: And originally when they hired, they hired the writers they
Speaker 7: wanted to. Wanted me to work with some more seasoned
Speaker 7: writer writing this genre. I'm doing a rewrite for the movie.
Speaker 7: And I said, who did you have in mind? And
Speaker 7: they said John Mealyus and I said, no, I don't
Speaker 7: like him, but more importantly, I don't like his writing,
Speaker 7: and I know and working with him would be a
Speaker 7: nightmare because I knew a lot of people who'd worked
Speaker 7: with him. And they said, well, okay, and you know,
Speaker 7: they hired some other writers to do it. But when
Speaker 7: I saw the movie, I realized one, you know, a
Speaker 7: completely different plot, essentially different characters. And the movie bombed.
Speaker 7: And I regretted the fact that my name was going
Speaker 7: to be all over it. But the fact was it,
Speaker 7: really I did accomplish what I wanted. One they had
Speaker 7: They paid me a really good sum because before the
Speaker 7: movie opened they had to buy contract or great a
Speaker 7: price for the for the sequel, and so between the
Speaker 7: original price and the sequel and the reruns. I you know,
Speaker 7: I shared credit with with other people, but of course
Speaker 7: I did, because they really wrote the script that shows
Speaker 7: up on the screen, you know. I know years later
Speaker 7: people would say to me, oh, I really liked that
Speaker 7: line in Fatal Beauty and I saw your name was
Speaker 7: on it, and I said, no, that goes to the
Speaker 7: rewrite rye. That wasn't one of my lines. It was frustrating,
Speaker 7: but it's also not an unusual tale for a professional screenwriter,
Speaker 7: and it reaccomplished exactly what I wanted, so I have
Speaker 7: mostly I would have loved if the original script had
Speaker 7: been shot. And as matter of fact, a couple of
Speaker 7: people hired me, some readly at the same studio that
Speaker 7: eventually made it. They said, Bill, and they'd hired me
Speaker 7: to do a rewrite on a movie or something, and
Speaker 7: theson Bill, I read the original script one of the
Speaker 7: extreme measures, and he said, why didn't I make it?
Speaker 7: That's a great script, And I said, I agree, but
Speaker 7: I'm not an executive. I don't know why. But the
Speaker 7: fact is, my original script got me a lot of
Speaker 7: other work, so to me, it accomplished exactly what I wanted.
Speaker 7: And even though the work that I was mostly offered.
Speaker 7: At that point, writing scripts or rewriting was not stuff
Speaker 7: I wanted to do. I know I'd done a good job,
Speaker 7: and because the script sold and a lot of people
Speaker 7: read the script, and a lot of fellow writers looked
Speaker 7: at it and said they couldn't understand they paid you
Speaker 7: all this money for that, And I said, well, but
Speaker 7: I analyzed what the business was. They needed humor, it
Speaker 7: needed to be frank and just skirting the edge of
Speaker 7: what was possible at the time. But also especially the
Speaker 7: women executives loved it because Harriet, I believed, which was
Speaker 7: her name, was a very strong, independent woman. I didn't
Speaker 7: take shit from anybody and was excellent at her job.
Speaker 7: But as I said, it's exactly the opposite of Clint
Speaker 7: Eastwoods dirty Harry, and I like that character. I you know,
Speaker 7: it was just an old fashioned Western kind of thing,
Speaker 7: you know. So that that was pretty much the story
Speaker 7: of it. I don't know how much detail I can
Speaker 7: give you, because once I didn't agree with to work
Speaker 7: with Melius, they hired They hired actually a couple of
Speaker 7: good writers to work on the script, but they wanted
Speaker 7: to go a completely different direction, and having subsequently and
Speaker 7: previously been hired to rewrite other people's scripts. I was
Speaker 7: aware sometimes the scripts were really terrible scripts but a
Speaker 7: writer had a good idea, But other times they were
Speaker 7: the prescribed scripts I was rewriting were really pretty good.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 7: The thing is the if a producer has a heavy
Speaker 7: hand in the project and is pushing it forward, he
Speaker 7: wants to see his ideas, and so that's just the
Speaker 7: nature of professional script writing. But the whole experience is
Speaker 7: great for me because they got my name out. And
Speaker 7: also I became known as a really good writer and
Speaker 7: a very fast writer. So if somebody needed a rewrite,
Speaker 7: and I wasn't getting the kind of payment that some
Speaker 7: of my friends got. A few years later, after the
Speaker 7: big Spece script craziness, where the money? I mean, my
Speaker 7: friend Tom Shulman got a package for his agency CAA
Speaker 7: where he got a million dollars for a script that
Speaker 7: it was a package for CIA. The movie didn't go anywhere,
Speaker 7: wound up being called This was Sean Connery, and I
Speaker 7: can't remember who the woman wind up starring in it,
Speaker 7: but of course I can't remember the name of it.
Speaker 8: I believe that's medicine man.
Speaker 7: Anyway, there was the whole vogue, and I'm sure you
Speaker 7: know the history the preedy, big money respects scripts. And
Speaker 7: also when people like Shane Black and Steve Desoza and
Speaker 7: came along, and then there was the whole Diehard craze.
Speaker 7: At one point they asked me to write to work
Speaker 7: on a Diehard and I said, no, that's I don't
Speaker 7: want to do that. I did that, and I said, also,
Speaker 7: there are guys and women who can do it much
Speaker 7: better than I can, because that's not my I was
Speaker 7: known for character driven stories and good characters and good dialogue,
Speaker 7: and that's not really needed or even though I feel
Speaker 7: that Shane Black and Desusa and some others I've done
Speaker 7: a really good job and write terrific dialogue, and it's
Speaker 7: then it's been proven by you know, things they've written
Speaker 7: later on. But it was it was a great time
Speaker 7: for me. But I also I didn't like having my
Speaker 7: scripts just not done the way I wanted them. So
Speaker 7: I had some lucky breaks. But you know, I had
Speaker 7: people who wanted to buy scripts, but I said, but
Speaker 7: I said, well, I don't want to hear to turn
Speaker 7: this into this, and they said, well, that's pretty much
Speaker 7: what we want to do. Just independently based on a
Speaker 7: spicscript I'd written that never got done. But Dustin Hoffman
Speaker 7: hired me to write a script, and I worked with
Speaker 7: the Richard Gear on a script, and I ultimately those
Speaker 7: movies didn't get made. But also then when you work
Speaker 7: with a big star, there's a lot of other things
Speaker 7: going on, you know there. And when I got to
Speaker 7: know Robert Redford pretty well, you know there, some of
Speaker 7: them are incredibly talented, like Dusty Hoffman or Richard Gear.
Speaker 7: I really like Richard Gear as a terrific person. But
Speaker 7: things that happened, you know, he and also he said,
Speaker 7: you know, my profile isn't high enough. I just can't
Speaker 7: get this movie going on my own. It was before
Speaker 7: just before Officer and a Gentleman and between Officer and
Speaker 7: Gentleman and Pretty Woman. So once Pretty Woman came out,
Speaker 7: you know, he was he was back on the a
Speaker 7: list that I have absolutely no complaints, And I don't
Speaker 7: want to be in a process of gossiping negatively about
Speaker 7: anybody who works on a script. Has so many factors
Speaker 7: come into play, so many people have different agendas. You know,
Speaker 7: sure I would have liked it if my script that
Speaker 7: turned out to be Fatal Beauty was the original script.
Speaker 7: I'm convinced it would have been a very successful movie
Speaker 7: and maybe even a franchise. But you never know. I mean,
Speaker 7: the movie business is very strange business, and the kind
Speaker 7: of magic you know. I mean, I know guys like
Speaker 7: Alan Ball who come into town with a script and
Speaker 7: the you know, Steven Spielberg's ambulance buys it, shoots it
Speaker 7: American Beauty almost like he wrote it, and he goes
Speaker 7: on to have a terrific career. That's not usually what happens.
Speaker 7: And you know, I got to know people like he said.
Speaker 7: I was at a writing meeting at Columbia and the
Speaker 7: secretary says, you know, my copy machine maker just sold
Speaker 7: a script for two million dollars. And I said, really,
Speaker 7: And I knew what the script was. It was under
Speaker 7: siege by one it was you know, it was it
Speaker 7: was die Hard on the boat, of course, but he'd
Speaker 7: come up with a clever And I said, no, you
Speaker 7: don't understand. This guy is a screenwriter who's working as
Speaker 7: a copy machine repairer. He's been working for years trying
Speaker 7: to get things going. But to them, what they saw
Speaker 7: was it was like when I went to the secretary
Speaker 7: to pick up the check for selling Extreme Measures, which
Speaker 7: became Fatal Beauty, and the secretary looked at him, says,
Speaker 7: you got How long did it take you to write this?
Speaker 7: I said three and a half weeks and they said,
Speaker 7: you got that many thousand dollars a day. I said, no,
Speaker 7: I've been doing this now for fifteen years. You know,
Speaker 7: that's the nature of this business. And I know a
Speaker 7: lot of writers, really good writers, who never catch a break.
Speaker 7: It was like when when we had the number one
Speaker 7: hit record in the world. People said, Wow, you guys
Speaker 7: are lucky, they said, and you already know what to do.
Speaker 7: You really understand the business. I said, no, lucky is
Speaker 7: what we were. We were in the right place at
Speaker 7: the right time, with the right song. It's a fairly
Speaker 7: simple song. You could dance to it, you could sing it,
Speaker 7: and it was an incredibly lucky break. That's why there's
Speaker 7: a sign over my wife and I's bedroom door that's
Speaker 7: says gratitude, because I feel incredibly fortunate, especially because I
Speaker 7: wasn't willing to take every job that came along, and
Speaker 7: I feel fortunate I had the luxury I didn't because
Speaker 7: I vowed when we came to California. I was not
Speaker 7: going to get involved in a lifestyle that I had
Speaker 7: to work to support. So we never got a huge,
Speaker 7: fancy house. We never wound up, although we did go
Speaker 7: to Chasen's a lot just because we liked it. Well,
Speaker 7: we never wound up, you know, spend lots of money
Speaker 7: and things. We didn't give huge, large parties. And I'm
Speaker 7: so glad because maybe because I had a degree in economics,
Speaker 7: I realized that this may go on for a while,
Speaker 7: it may not. Both with the with the hit record
Speaker 7: and both of the screenwriting success and I've both were
Speaker 7: incredibly lucky breaks at the right place at the right time,
Speaker 7: And I'm forever grateful for that. And that's why I
Speaker 7: only have good things to say about the whole experience,
Speaker 7: which turned out to be fatal beauty, because you know,
Speaker 7: I would grouse to my wife sometimes though I wish
Speaker 7: they'd made the original movie, and anytime somebody unearthed the
Speaker 7: original script, they would say things like, well, why wasn't
Speaker 7: this made? And of course, you know, you have to
Speaker 7: really be deep into the screenwriting game to understand what
Speaker 7: can happen to scripts. And you don't have to talk
Speaker 7: to too many writers. Most of them successful ones. It's
Speaker 7: like still Owne said once that anybody who's trying to
Speaker 7: make it in this business is covered with scar tissue,
Speaker 7: because when I used to teach, I would say, you know,
Speaker 7: if you're not getting a lot of no's in this business,
Speaker 7: you're not working hard enough, because it's not with rare exceptions.
Speaker 9: I mean.
Speaker 7: And you know, the actor Lee Majors was on a
Speaker 7: series with my wife Joan, And this was a guy,
Speaker 7: a football player in Tennessee, came to town. Now his
Speaker 7: second cousin was Rock Hudson, but Rock Hudson didn't have
Speaker 7: anything to do with him. He just said, you know,
Speaker 7: why don't you come to town. And he got a
Speaker 7: job first working for the parts the LA Parks Department,
Speaker 7: and then he started hanging out with a bunch of
Speaker 7: stump men who playing touch football. And then one day
Speaker 7: a friend of Rock Hudson said to him, listen, they're
Speaker 7: looking for a guy who looks like you to fill
Speaker 7: out the cast of a new tub television seria of
Speaker 7: Barbara Stanley called Big Valley. So he went up and
Speaker 7: read for it. No acting experience at all, never acted
Speaker 7: in high school, but he was a good looking guy. Engaging,
Speaker 7: and he got the part, and he was never out
Speaker 7: of work for the next twenty plus years. You know,
Speaker 7: had three or four series. You know, you know how
Speaker 7: unusual a story that is compared to all these talented actors.
Speaker 7: The same thing I think of all the incredibly talented
Speaker 7: musicians and songwriters who never make it. You know, they
Speaker 7: can run rings around me in terms of music, certainly
Speaker 7: in terms of guitar playing, but they weren't in the
Speaker 7: right place at the right time. So that's why. And
Speaker 7: the whole Fatal Beauty experience provided exactly what I wanted
Speaker 7: to which it gave us my wife and I financial
Speaker 7: freedom and to do the things that I want, did
Speaker 7: not have to do things I didn't want.
Speaker 8: I mean, this might be a little bit unfair since
Speaker 8: you were writing Extreme Measures back in almost forty years ago,
Speaker 8: but can you tell me a little bit more about
Speaker 8: the story itself, and even if you have to tell
Speaker 8: it in terms of differences between what we eventually saw,
Speaker 8: but I'd love to know what that original script was like.
Speaker 7: The original script was as I said it was. The
Speaker 7: character was named Harriet Casey, and she was in the
Speaker 7: police department. And I knew how these scripts went. So
Speaker 7: the opening shot of the original script was, you see, Harriet.
Speaker 7: There's an attractive policewoman and she's standing with a bunch
Speaker 7: of obvious police recruits in a you know, kind of
Speaker 7: pretty much standard building and she's lecturing them on how
Speaker 7: to deal with the perpetrators. And we don't know who
Speaker 7: she is, we just see her. And she says to
Speaker 7: one of the recruits, you know, the hall, tall, handsome guy.
Speaker 7: So first she says, listen, you know, hold the gun
Speaker 7: on me and threaten me. And so the guy holds
Speaker 7: the gun and she said, act real mean, like you're
Speaker 7: going to shoot me. She just talks to him a
Speaker 7: little bit, and suddenly she know, she closes the distance
Speaker 7: and grabs the gun with her finger on the trigger,
Speaker 7: him firing it. But he manages to pull a trigger,
Speaker 7: but the gun is pointing at the ceiling. When the
Speaker 7: cameras up to the ceiling, it shows a whole bunch
Speaker 7: of holes in the ceiling. Obviously she's done this many times.
Speaker 7: And now, of course it's well known you don't get
Speaker 7: too close, but in those days, something that if every
Speaker 7: policeman knows, but it wasn't something that was in the
Speaker 7: film language at the time, and so you know, Harry,
Speaker 7: we follow Harriet. She goes from there and somebody calls
Speaker 7: her on her pager. This is before cell phones working,
Speaker 7: and said, listen, Harriet, we got a situation. And she said, okay,
Speaker 7: I'll be right there. So she said. He said somebody
Speaker 7: is holding people hostage in an elevator. She said, okay,
Speaker 7: I'll be there, so she comes. He walks in, that says,
Speaker 7: a tall high rise building in a shopping mall. And
Speaker 7: she walks into the building, looks around and somebody says, oh,
Speaker 7: here comes Derry. Harriet. Get out the body bags. And
Speaker 7: that's another fellow policeman. And they don't know what to do,
Speaker 7: and she says, okay, give me a minute. She walks
Speaker 7: into the sundry store and says to the guy, I
Speaker 7: want a really large, ugly purse and a real silly
Speaker 7: floppy hat. So she puts it on, walks back and says,
Speaker 7: so where's the where's the elevator? And they said he's
Speaker 7: holding people there. So she goes to the elevator, presses
Speaker 7: the button, and the elevator down and there's this guy
Speaker 7: holding the people with a gun on them, and she
Speaker 7: gets in pretending to be this so fluttery, really confused woman.
Speaker 7: She says, oh, I'm so sorry, and I'll wait for
Speaker 7: another elevator, and the gunman says, no, you get on, lady.
Speaker 7: So she gets on with her purse and her silly
Speaker 7: floppy hat, and the elevator rises up, and it's one
Speaker 7: of those things with the glass elevator. It's open and
Speaker 7: you can see the whole of the shopping mall, kind
Speaker 7: of like the Century City mall. And as the elevator's rising,
Speaker 7: the guy gets more and more frightened and more and
Speaker 7: more menacing. And we'd seen Harriet put the gun in
Speaker 7: the purse, her gun in the purse, this horrible floppy purse,
Speaker 7: and the guy more and more menacing, and he looks
Speaker 7: like he's going to go for somebody. So she shoots
Speaker 7: through the purse and blows the guy right out the window,
Speaker 7: which wouldn't happen, but and he fallsid to the floor,
Speaker 7: and so she turns around, gets rid of the hat
Speaker 7: and then leaves. You know, later she had met a
Speaker 7: guy in the sundry store who really came on to her,
Speaker 7: and you know, she really liked the looks of the guy.
Speaker 7: Without going through too much detail. She winds up in
Speaker 7: a hotel in a hotel room with him a little
Speaker 7: later in the day, and of course he hasn't seen
Speaker 7: the news or anything, and you know, they're about they're
Speaker 7: in bed in in the hotel room, about to get
Speaker 7: it on when the on the television comes Harriet. They're saying, well,
Speaker 7: you know, he really saved the day, and she says
Speaker 7: they bleep it out. She says, I just trying to
Speaker 7: keep the ship ship rising below chin level. And she
Speaker 7: just goes, oh my god. And of course the guy
Speaker 7: she's about to get into bed with, you know, nothing's
Speaker 7: going to happen. So she picks up her clothes and
Speaker 7: leaves and the guy I sort of stares open mouth.
Speaker 7: But that's how they introduce into the character. And the
Speaker 7: next day it turns out she's kind of has a
Speaker 7: you know, a dirty Harry approach to She doesn't like
Speaker 7: to work with inexperienced partners and she likes to go
Speaker 7: along alone. But the Houston police chief said, listen, Harry,
Speaker 7: I we didn't need you to take care of this guy.
Speaker 7: He's kind of a special hire, so I want you
Speaker 7: to partner with him. And so she says, okay, so
Speaker 7: she meets the guy and is a young black guy, nervous,
Speaker 7: and so they're walking, you know, to the shape up
Speaker 7: and she says, listen, let's get this straight right away.
Speaker 7: You don't call me gash hunt pussy, he said, And
Speaker 7: I won't call you nigger, dinger, darkie. All right, and
Speaker 7: he goes all right, But that sets the tone. In
Speaker 7: other words, she very frank, I'm not concerned about what
Speaker 7: we now call political correctness. But she gets the job done.
Speaker 7: And so the story of the movie is about very
Speaker 7: clever murder that's going on serial because it turns out
Speaker 7: it's two twins and what's called a foaliadeu or working together,
Speaker 7: and they're inseparable, and so, you know, she and her
Speaker 7: partner track it down, and there's a whole lot of
Speaker 7: things that go on. But what's so the script is
Speaker 7: the combination of the action and the humor. They're sent
Speaker 7: out of town to check on a lead, and she
Speaker 7: goes to this small town in Texas where there's the
Speaker 7: typical you know Virgil Timbs Virgil, I forget that, I
Speaker 7: mean not a Virgil's the Rod Steiger character and Chable
Speaker 7: Knight and anyway, you know, Harriet comes in and he
Speaker 7: doesn't want to give much and he said, listen, he said,
Speaker 7: you know, around these parts of the country, we feel
Speaker 7: about women in our police force like we feel like
Speaker 7: shit in our apple pie. And Harriet says, well, I
Speaker 7: won't ask if you're any recipes and leaves. But the
Speaker 7: people who are reading that spec script, they like that
Speaker 7: kind of language because it was pushing the boundaries of
Speaker 7: what you could do. And they like the character because
Speaker 7: she has a great sense of humor. But also the
Speaker 7: position se'es in is realistic. You know, she has a
Speaker 7: lot of admirers, but a lot of envious policemen on
Speaker 7: the on the force, but because she gets the job done,
Speaker 7: and you know, there's a lot of excitement, a lot
Speaker 7: of them. There's a big shootout at the end and
Speaker 7: very dramatic and where Harriet gets the part and her
Speaker 7: partner get the the purpse car. They're in are in
Speaker 7: a classic location. They're in a big warehouse and she
Speaker 7: manages to hook the purpse car on a on a
Speaker 7: huge chain and it winds up being hoisted above the
Speaker 7: air with the with the purp playing. You know, it
Speaker 7: was a very visual I knew what it was. I
Speaker 7: didn't pretend that it was some kind of amazing piece
Speaker 7: of writing. It was meant to be an action comedy
Speaker 7: with a female protagonist. And you know, a lot of
Speaker 7: the actresses of the day heard about it and wanted
Speaker 7: to play it. But once they they put John Mealyus
Speaker 7: on his rewriting, and then another writer, and then and
Speaker 7: then they started changing the script and they changed it
Speaker 7: into a very ordinary drug story. And of course then
Speaker 7: none of the actresses who wanted to play the original
Speaker 7: character wanted to play it, but Whoopy Goldbert was looking
Speaker 7: to do something different. And I remember this was before
Speaker 7: I saw what they'd done with the script. I remember
Speaker 7: seeing on the Tonight Show talking about how much fun
Speaker 7: she was having playing a cop and you know, using
Speaker 7: a big gun. And they had some pretty good They
Speaker 7: had Reuben Blades, and they had Sam Elliott. They had
Speaker 7: a pretty good supporting cast. I thought the movie was
Speaker 7: was nonsense. It still could have been nonsense in to
Speaker 7: beg a big hit. You know, nobody knows anything to
Speaker 7: code Bill Goldman, which is really true. But Tamir, it
Speaker 7: was just a miracle that I accomplished what I wanted
Speaker 7: to do, and I learned very quickly the movie did
Speaker 7: good for me. I didn't want no point in trashing
Speaker 7: writers who were hired to work on it, no point in,
Speaker 7: you know, when people would see the movie and see
Speaker 7: my name and say, oh, you know, I enjoyed that
Speaker 7: was fun, I would say thank you. I wouldn't say, oh,
Speaker 7: you should have seen my script, you know, because that
Speaker 7: then they deflates the people who are complimenting you, because actually,
Speaker 7: if it's a civilian, a regular person, they're really excited, Oh,
Speaker 7: your name's on a movie. And Opie Goldberg was in it.
Speaker 7: And of course, once the movie came out on TV
Speaker 7: and you know, ran, of course nobody remembered that it
Speaker 7: was a flop, except, of course, twentieth Century Fox. But
Speaker 7: over the years, I'm sure they've made their money back
Speaker 7: because it plays an awful lot, and you know, they
Speaker 7: sold it with a basket of movies, and I still get,
Speaker 7: you know, an occasional twenty thirty forty dollars residual. But
Speaker 7: I realized it's you know, that was nineteen eighty four
Speaker 7: or five. It was made, you know, forty years later.
Speaker 7: You know, I just dealt with the fact that it
Speaker 7: did what I wanted and that I would never show
Speaker 7: it to anybody as an example of my work. Oh,
Speaker 7: you ought to see this movie. I mean, a lot
Speaker 7: of my contemporaries, their scripts were made into really good movies.
Speaker 7: It'd be proud to show it. Some of my television
Speaker 7: movies turned out pretty good, some not so much. But
Speaker 7: I said, I basically feel about my career very fortunate.
Speaker 7: And there's a lot of very talented writers who never
Speaker 7: really wound up getting a break, And especially now and
Speaker 7: now when everybody has two businesses, theres and show business
Speaker 7: and everybody, you know, there's endless you know. I had
Speaker 7: a lot of students I sometimes taught at festivals or
Speaker 7: or movies that I taught for seven years the University
Speaker 7: of North Carolina, teaching screenwriting and playwriting. And you know,
Speaker 7: the kids have in most cases delightfully unrealistic views of,
Speaker 7: you know, how they're going to make it in Hollywood.
Speaker 7: And a couple of times I got some of my
Speaker 7: students' intern jobs. But then they found out how much
Speaker 7: work it is if you start at the bottom. And
Speaker 7: they thought they were going to go out there and
Speaker 7: they'd have a script and you know, people would fall
Speaker 7: all over them, and they said, well, I'm you know,
Speaker 7: I'm being a gopher for. And I said, who are
Speaker 7: you being a gopher for? And I said, well, I'm
Speaker 7: working for Scott Free And I said, these guys are
Speaker 7: a major production company. Just look around and get to
Speaker 7: know people. There's lots of opportunities. They didn't want to
Speaker 7: do that. I was really surprised, and I was aware
Speaker 7: of it when I was trying to sell anything my
Speaker 7: first couple of years, you know, went on endless interviews
Speaker 7: to try and sell, you know, show for them originally
Speaker 7: and shows like Benicheck or The Original Mission Impossible. And
Speaker 7: I did write a couple of things for television, but
Speaker 7: I really didn't like it because the formula was so rigid,
Speaker 7: there was limited what you could do. And the TV movies,
Speaker 7: some of them which came out really well, I just
Speaker 7: got tired of the restrictions in the in the act
Speaker 7: format because in those days, this is way before you
Speaker 7: could write a series or a movie for you know,
Speaker 7: HBO or Apple or any of the others. I would
Speaker 7: be fun to written in those times. And also I
Speaker 7: dispect scripts that I had that everybody said were absolutely
Speaker 7: great never get made. But there are a lot of writers,
Speaker 7: some of them extraordinarily successful could never get their pet
Speaker 7: script made. But again I just had no complaints, And
Speaker 7: I don't really have a lot of gossip because I
Speaker 7: wasn't around the production of Fatal Beauty, and I just
Speaker 7: know from you know, people at Fox who hired me
Speaker 7: to do other projects were around the project and saw
Speaker 7: it going what they thought was in the wrong direction.
Speaker 8: But who knows.
Speaker 7: I mean, there's you know, if especially you're a student
Speaker 7: of the film industry, many movies people thought were going
Speaker 7: to be absolute bombs weren't. We're surprise hit, never mind
Speaker 7: real oddball things like the Blair Witch Project or things
Speaker 7: that just came over the transom, and nobody can figure
Speaker 7: out why was that his success? And then why do
Speaker 7: movies like Porky's or you know, American Pie, why do
Speaker 7: they become huge hits and other either outrageous comedies. I
Speaker 7: remember I was they wanted to hire me if somebody
Speaker 7: had written a script that eventually became something about Mary
Speaker 7: and they said, you know this is this is not
Speaker 7: a good script.
Speaker 3: What can you do with it?
Speaker 7: So I read it and said there were a lot
Speaker 7: of things I came up with, and they didn't like
Speaker 7: any of them. They would have made a good movie.
Speaker 7: But then I saw the Fairly Brothers movie. I thought,
Speaker 7: good thing they didn't harre me because the Fairly Brothers
Speaker 7: got that kind of outrageous, ridiculous in maywey Case's childish approach.
Speaker 7: I never would have thought of that, and never would
Speaker 7: have wouldn't have been a giant hit, you know, and
Speaker 7: especially some of these site gags. But they were the
Speaker 7: right people. And that's the coda line from one of
Speaker 7: the Dirty Harry movies. The man's got to know his limitations.
Speaker 7: And I knew what my strengths were and what my
Speaker 7: weaknesses were, because what I never wanted to do was
Speaker 7: take a thing just for the money, knowing I couldn't
Speaker 7: really do a good job with it. You know, the
Speaker 7: things that I took, either rewrites or originals that they bought,
Speaker 7: I knew by my standards I could do a good job.
Speaker 7: Sometimes they came out well, sometimes they didn't like I
Speaker 7: was hired to do a major rewrite on a ge
Speaker 7: movie Theater, which was a prestigious CBS to our movie,
Speaker 7: and the woman who read the original script way missed
Speaker 7: the mark and they were right about it. So I
Speaker 7: did a you know, major rewrite on it. And interestingly enough,
Speaker 7: the movie won a Peabody Award. I didn't get any
Speaker 7: credit at all. When the arbitration or the thing came through,
Speaker 7: I didn't bother putting in. I said, well, you know,
Speaker 7: it wasn't my idea. And I don't know how much
Speaker 7: I did or I don't know what the criteria was.
Speaker 7: But what happened was when the my name didn't show
Speaker 7: up on the script, and a woman named Judith somebody
Speaker 7: or other, you know, she got the credit, she got
Speaker 7: all the residuals and and but the New York Times
Speaker 7: was really i'd have to say, outraged, because they ferreted
Speaker 7: out the real story of what I did with the script.
Speaker 7: I think they talked to the producer and they wrote
Speaker 7: an article which was unheard of, saying Bill Swano, you know,
Speaker 7: should have had credit on this. And then when it
Speaker 7: won an award, the producers of the movie insisted that
Speaker 7: I get on an award also because I'd done they
Speaker 7: thought i'd done, which I thought was an incredibly decent
Speaker 7: thing and really surprised me because but I never you know,
Speaker 7: I remember sometimes writers called me up if I worked
Speaker 7: on their script or they worked on mine, and they'd
Speaker 7: say listen, I need to get mostly close to the
Speaker 7: credit for this, because I did an awful lot of work,
Speaker 7: and I said, it's not my decision to make. If
Speaker 7: he wanted, I'll just let it go to arbitration. Sometimes
Speaker 7: I lost, sometimes I didn't, but I I didn't know.
Speaker 7: You know, there were writers I knew who would handle
Speaker 7: the arbitrations, but I did. This wasn't something I wanted
Speaker 7: to do, and I didn't want to get knowledgeable enough
Speaker 7: to do it, so I would just let it go,
Speaker 7: and sometimes it went my way, like it certainly went
Speaker 7: my way in the ge theater was called Miles to Go,
Speaker 7: starting Marty Balsen and interestingly enough, McKenzie Phillips, a John
Speaker 7: Phillips's daughter. You know, I knew John Phillips really well
Speaker 7: because he and Scott mackenzie, both of them went on
Speaker 7: for considerable fame, had a folk trio and used to
Speaker 7: hang around us in the village trying to figure out
Speaker 7: how we played what we played, so I knew him.
Speaker 7: And of course when I knew him, John Phillips was
Speaker 7: this absolutely straight laced guy wearing a suit and singing
Speaker 7: preppy songs. So when I saw him and the mom
Speaker 7: was in the Poppas, which I thought was great. I
Speaker 7: loved their music. I thought they were a fabulous group,
Speaker 7: but unfortunately they were you know, at the dysfunctional hell
Speaker 7: hole in terms of lifestyle. But it was kind of
Speaker 7: you know, like I the way the paths crossing the business.
Speaker 7: This is off the topic, but you know, I was
Speaker 7: in graduate school studying economics, and I used to go
Speaker 7: to a little cafe in the place they called Dinky
Speaker 7: Town in Minneapolis, which is where a university students hung out.
Speaker 7: Then there was this kid wearing a red beanie, singing
Speaker 7: and playing songs, and he and I would trade sets,
Speaker 7: and he was a surly young kid. He didn't particularly
Speaker 7: like me. I was doing a lot of American blues
Speaker 7: and blassic and he was doing traditional songs but also
Speaker 7: some songs he'd written. And of course that guy was
Speaker 7: Bobby Zimmerman, soon to be known as Bob Dylan. So
Speaker 7: when we both showed up in the village a few
Speaker 7: years later trying to be singers, and he was suddenly
Speaker 7: Bob Dylan, not from Hibbing, Minnesota, but from calub New Mexico.
Speaker 7: And you know, having claimed gone to visit Woody Guthrie
Speaker 7: and I was pretty contemptuous, and I really didn't like
Speaker 7: his first year songs. But then all of a sudden,
Speaker 7: he wrote a couple of songs and I went, wait
Speaker 7: a minute. I mean, I like this guy, but he's
Speaker 7: a fucking genius. This guy really is great. So I've
Speaker 7: been in a huge appreciation of his music, not of him.
Speaker 7: And he tried to pretend he didn't know me when
Speaker 7: we first showed up in New York. Right, I was
Speaker 7: gonna bust his chops because I knew who he was,
Speaker 7: but I never said anything.
Speaker 8: You know, I was, and then he was. I mean,
Speaker 8: he went on to be you know, well.
Speaker 7: I guess when you win the prizes. He's won. You know,
Speaker 7: I still don't know that. I disagree over his winning
Speaker 7: the Nobel Prize.
Speaker 8: So how about you? Are you still teaching, are you retired,
Speaker 8: or what are you up to these days?
Speaker 7: I'm pretty much retired. I found, you know, I had
Speaker 7: a lot of scripts, play scripts and movie scripts, but
Speaker 7: I just what I'm interested. I'm just I just don't
Speaker 7: have an interest anymore of writing them. I still love movies,
Speaker 7: and occasionally I do some teaching on zoom or from consulting,
Speaker 7: just pro bono for friends. But also I'm aware that
Speaker 7: the business has changed incredibly amount and the things that
Speaker 7: I like to teach about the fundamentals of storytelling and
Speaker 7: the fundamental bricks of constructing a good story are still valid,
Speaker 7: and they're valid for a lot of other things. I
Speaker 7: remember when I was teaching in North Carolina, I had
Speaker 7: the students who came to my class, but they wanted
Speaker 7: to be lawyers. But they're learning how to organize a story,
Speaker 7: which if you're going to be a trial lawyer. And
Speaker 7: I thought, well, that's the terrific idea. And you know,
Speaker 7: I also taught playwriting and I had some really talented
Speaker 7: people who I'm really pleased with because a lot of
Speaker 7: the teachers who are teaching these talented people wanted to
Speaker 7: mold them into what they thought what a good writer
Speaker 7: should be. And I would just say, you know, this
Speaker 7: is your and they want to do projects that their
Speaker 7: other teachers would say, that's wild.
Speaker 3: Nobody likes that.
Speaker 7: And one of them was Becker Brunsteadter, who went to
Speaker 7: New York, had a few small plays down in a
Speaker 7: couple published, but then she was part of the writing
Speaker 7: staff of This Is Us and has now gone on
Speaker 7: to a well deserved really good career as a writer.
Speaker 7: I'm very, very talented, but she had her own unique
Speaker 7: approach to things, and I encouraged her, you know, no,
Speaker 7: go with that weird godball approach. You've got the things,
Speaker 7: because that's you know, somebody who's not trying to imitate
Speaker 7: but is trying to be themselves is really rare. And
Speaker 7: her teachers had told her. I encouraged her to write
Speaker 7: a play which was very scattered and a lot of
Speaker 7: different stories, and they said, well, don't write that play,
Speaker 7: you know, And it turns out, out of thousands of entries,
Speaker 7: it won the college wide play contest and she got
Speaker 7: a full production. And you know, she was just she
Speaker 7: was just different.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 7: She was a big woman, a lesbian but not out
Speaker 7: as one, but everybody knew, and a real oddball tattoos
Speaker 7: and but just incredibly smart. People used to say, well,
Speaker 7: you know you taught Becker right, and did you help her?
Speaker 7: I said no, I just let her go the way
Speaker 7: she wanted to go, which is which I think is
Speaker 7: in a way it's helped. But I wouldn't claim somebody
Speaker 7: with that kind of talent. I feel hopefully they'll.
Speaker 3: Find their way anyway.
Speaker 7: But I really enjoyed the teaching, and I have a
Speaker 7: lot of you know, I taught for seven years and
Speaker 7: then I did a lot of festivals and teaching and
Speaker 7: both my wife and I and my wife is Joan.
Speaker 7: Joan Darling is a world renowned teacher. And we still do,
Speaker 7: you know, some zoom classes our case occasionally go to
Speaker 7: a festival or a place, you know, and I don't
Speaker 7: do as much because either of us want to travel.
Speaker 7: Like we used to go to film festivals and it
Speaker 7: was fun. They treat you well and you don't have
Speaker 7: to work too hard and you get to see a
Speaker 7: lot of interesting movies. But now ever since the pandemic,
Speaker 7: traveling is really onerous. That's pretty much my story. Do
Speaker 7: you have any other questions or did I answer what you.
Speaker 8: I think you gave me everything that I was hoping for.
Speaker 8: So thank you so much for.
Speaker 7: This my pleasure and nice to meet you and talk
Speaker 7: with you.
Speaker 8: Tell me a little bit more as far as like
Speaker 8: where were you in your career when this project crapped up?
Speaker 8: And where was the project? Because like you said, share
Speaker 8: was cast in it. I know it went through many writers,
Speaker 8: Like where was that when you got to it?
Speaker 9: I got to it after Dean Reichter had done the
Speaker 9: most recent draft and one good thing is out of it.
Speaker 9: I became very I became very good friends with Dean Rocher,
Speaker 9: who was a wonderful man, a terrific writer.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 9: I mean he did the polishes on Dirty Harry, you know,
Speaker 9: I mean it just was everything and he had just
Speaker 9: done it was a very coherent script. But it was
Speaker 9: a coherence script for you know, you know, for share,
Speaker 9: you know. And it was not funny, that was the thing.
Speaker 9: It wasn't funny. Then I started to work with with
Speaker 9: with woofe of Sam. I think I think I got
Speaker 9: three four five days of rehearsals. It wasn't funny. It
Speaker 9: wasn't like, you know, it wasn't Eddie Murphy and you know,
Speaker 9: and Beverly Hills cop her personality came through, but it
Speaker 9: wasn't formed yet. I mean not as the movie personality
Speaker 9: wasn't formed yet. That if she played the script, that
Speaker 9: would have been a rich for so that she so
Speaker 9: she made the script come to her, if that makes sense.
Speaker 9: If it came in. There were there were moments when
Speaker 9: it was then when it was funny, but it also
Speaker 9: you know, got it got edgy too, you know, there's
Speaker 9: a little bit of race baiting in there. I had
Speaker 9: a terrific experience with her forty five years forty years ago,
Speaker 9: forty years ago on Fatal Beauty. It's just that it's
Speaker 9: just the whoopee has become such a public personality. I
Speaker 9: don't want to say the wrong thing. But then she
Speaker 9: was she was an actress. She was coming off Color
Speaker 9: Purple and the and the series two or three Burglar
Speaker 9: what have two or three comedies that she'd done, you
Speaker 9: know what I mean. I thought she was extremely talented.
Speaker 9: I think she was miscast in Fatal Beauty. I made
Speaker 9: the mistake of being convinced by Laddie Ellen ladd Junior
Speaker 9: to use her to replace Believe it or not, Share
Speaker 9: Fatal Beauty had started out to be of the genre
Speaker 9: that they then called guns and garter belts, and it
Speaker 9: was meant to have a serious to have share player,
Speaker 9: a serious badass, you know, along with being very sexy,
Speaker 9: and then you know, and then having some kind of
Speaker 9: a relationship with Sam Elliott and Shaer bailed a lot
Speaker 9: smarter than me. The arguably and Cher went and did moonlighting.
Speaker 9: So I started to back out and I had a
Speaker 9: house to deal with. MGM. Lottie just really twisted my
Speaker 9: arm and kept insisting that she would make it funny
Speaker 9: Whoopy and you know, and I kept saying, but it's
Speaker 9: not a funny script. It's it's a shoot him up
Speaker 9: with a female lead and a little bit of sex
Speaker 9: throw And then I mean, but there's no there's no
Speaker 9: funny lines in here. The conception is not funny. Anyway,
Speaker 9: Lottie said she'd do it, and I don't know why,
Speaker 9: but I agreed. I thought I Whoopy was a terrific talent.
Speaker 9: And you know, there there were there were a few
Speaker 9: bumps along the way. Once she bailed because she she
Speaker 9: went to a prize fight in Vegas during the night
Speaker 9: shoot and left me hanging. She wasn't a professional yet
Speaker 9: in the sense of, you know, being a trained actor.
Speaker 9: She was a personality, and she wasn't funny on her
Speaker 9: on her own. She wasn't funny in the sense that
Speaker 9: she was verbally going to come up with her own
Speaker 9: funny lines. You know, I think that if I'd had
Speaker 9: other actors with her, maybe I could have tried for
Speaker 9: some improvisation.
Speaker 3: But it was hard.
Speaker 9: What she was great at was mimicking people, especially you
Speaker 9: know people you knew, politicians and stars. I mean, it was,
Speaker 9: it was, it was she could grab a piece of
Speaker 9: it and you didn't catch a little bit of them.
Speaker 9: So she was terrific with that. But you know, we
Speaker 9: never got into politics. I never thought about politics, you know.
Speaker 9: And then you know, in some ways she's smarter than
Speaker 9: all of us because she took you know, she jumped
Speaker 9: off She was brilliant a ghost, and she jumped off
Speaker 9: of that into into being a public personality and a
Speaker 9: talk show and it has become something totally different and
Speaker 9: Fatal Beauty because it doesn't fit the political stream of
Speaker 9: the how do you say the temper of the day.
Speaker 9: Back then, they didn't they didn't want to hard a
Speaker 9: hardcore black killer cop female. They wanted you know, they
Speaker 9: wanted the color purple. But anyway, so it got, it got.
Speaker 9: It got bad reviews, and it didn't do well. But
Speaker 9: it played like crazy when we when we previewed it,
Speaker 9: it blew out, it blew out the numbers on all
Speaker 9: black audiences, and it did very well with white audiences. Male.
Speaker 9: Because who she is, I think in Fatal Beauty doesn't
Speaker 9: it was what the atmosphere of the time throughout the country.
Speaker 9: Political media, major media. They didn't want to see Whoopee
Speaker 9: the way she was in Fatal Beauty. They wanted to
Speaker 9: see her in a way which I guess promoted a
Speaker 9: racial healing. I don't know, so it it sort of
Speaker 9: became forgotten Fatal Beauty, and I happened to think it's
Speaker 9: an extremely well made movie, and I think she did
Speaker 9: a terrific job, and Sam did a great job, and
Speaker 9: you know, I have only good things to say about people.
Speaker 9: Except the schedule was deadly because oh it went for
Speaker 9: day to night and there was damn there was damn
Speaker 9: little day. So I mean it was you know, It's
Speaker 9: just it was, you know, a week after week of
Speaker 9: long nighters. God damn near killed me. I ended up
Speaker 9: walking away from him with walking pneumonia. The film basically
Speaker 9: has disappear from my over where I was. I was
Speaker 9: very hot off of Fright Night, so you know, and
Speaker 9: you know, and I was already established as a writer
Speaker 9: in Hollywood, and I went from that into a little
Speaker 9: film called Child's Play. I was firing on all four cylinders,
Speaker 9: but I needed I needed the material there, you know,
Speaker 9: and I got it because I wrote Child's Play.
Speaker 8: Was this your first time working with Brad Dwarf?
Speaker 9: Yes, that's why I hired Brad as Charles Lee Ray
Speaker 9: and why I've created a legacy with Brad, who make
Speaker 9: more want than all the rest of us doing voiceovers
Speaker 9: as Chucky. Yeah right? God who knew? Now Brad's an
Speaker 9: Academy Award would he have?
Speaker 3: Actor?
Speaker 9: And I saw that in uh in Fatal Beauty, And
Speaker 9: I had him in my mind when I wrote Charles
Speaker 9: Lee Ray, which is who's only in the opening scene, Brad,
Speaker 9: But it also informed what I did with the character
Speaker 9: of Chucky because I knew I had Brad Brad's voice,
Speaker 9: but that l came off of Fatal Beauty. So there's
Speaker 9: an argument for you. If I hadn't, if I hadn't
Speaker 9: done Fatal Beauty, I wouldn't have worked with Brad Durffe,
Speaker 9: And I wouldn't. I wouldn't have I wouldn't have used
Speaker 9: him in Child's Play. So there you go.
Speaker 8: Did I ever tell you the story about going to
Speaker 8: Las Vegas and going to Planet Hollywood and staying there
Speaker 8: and we got put each room has a theme to it,
Speaker 8: and we got put into the Chucky room.
Speaker 5: Uh, huh.
Speaker 8: Tell me they have a table with a good guy
Speaker 8: doll inside of it. They've got the outfit, like the
Speaker 8: overalls and stuff in a hanging on the wall like
Speaker 8: behind glass. They're huge pictures. There was a huge picture
Speaker 8: of Brad Dworf above the tub. And I'll tell you,
Speaker 8: my wife does not like horror films. She was so
Speaker 8: tempted to go down and just complain and get us
Speaker 8: mood too.
Speaker 5: And I.
Speaker 3: That's so funny.
Speaker 9: Well, I mean, it's amazing. The Chucky has to be
Speaker 9: one of the most successful merchandising campaigns of all time.
Speaker 9: And that's a tip of that. The David Kirshner or
Speaker 9: was the producer. He made the film because he saw
Speaker 9: that potential. And of course I was totally didn't understand
Speaker 9: that at all. I was doing a throw I was.
Speaker 9: I was doing the prototypical killer doll film. I don't
Speaker 9: know if I've ever been a killer doll film before,
Speaker 9: before Child's Play. I mean I knew. I took it
Speaker 9: off the one of the episodes that Dan Curtis did
Speaker 9: for Trilogy of Terror, which the TV movie in nineteen
Speaker 9: sixty eight.
Speaker 8: Yeah, the Zuni fetished all that little bit that knife.
Speaker 9: Yeah, but it was the way he shot it. He
Speaker 9: shot that on a skateboard, put a sixty milk camera
Speaker 9: on it to shoot the dolls point of view, and
Speaker 9: that's what made it work. And I had seen a
Speaker 9: lot of things came together. I had seen The Shining
Speaker 9: and Kubrick's use of setikam in that, and they invented
Speaker 9: what they call a low boy off the steady cam
Speaker 9: which got you down on the floor. And I'll think
Speaker 9: that I hadn't seen it before until until Shining, which
Speaker 9: I got nineteen seventy nine. But so I wrote that
Speaker 9: script and designed all of that with the doll because
Speaker 9: of what I'd seen with Dan Curtis and the Prey
Speaker 9: and the zuomidaland then what I saw on the Shining,
Speaker 9: And if I got it worked visually, it worked, you know.
Speaker 9: I mean that Dolphon turned into something terrifying. That's what
Speaker 9: I was doing. David Kirschner was looking for ways to
Speaker 9: merchandise everything Chuck ate, and you know, I mean in
Speaker 9: the combination of a movie the scared living hell out
Speaker 9: of you with a merchandising campaign that reached into every
Speaker 9: imaginable place you know, age And I mean, so Chuck
Speaker 9: is going to bury us all. Chuck is gonna be
Speaker 9: going long after we're both gone. You know. It's just
Speaker 9: so just amazing. And no I did not see it.
Speaker 9: I did beyond what I did, beyond the first movie
Speaker 9: to stand alone, you know.
Speaker 8: Going back to the fatal beauty in the cast, I mean,
Speaker 8: the cast is just amazing to have, like you know,
Speaker 8: John p. Ryan or Harris Eulen or Jennifer Warren. I mean,
Speaker 8: these are all just people that knock it out of
Speaker 8: the park every single time.
Speaker 9: Terrific cast. I think it's an excellent movie in Dean
Speaker 9: Reisner thought it was thought it was terrific, you know,
Speaker 9: and you know, and he surely did all the touch up.
Speaker 9: And the gal I don't know, the gal who rode
Speaker 9: over the original draft that it didn't Hillary Henkin, I think, yes,
Speaker 9: oh yeah, I don't know. But Dean I got to know.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I've read one of her and Dean Reisner's drafts,
Speaker 8: and then one that Millius was taking a swag at
Speaker 8: as well.
Speaker 9: Well. Millius was on it before I was, and I
Speaker 9: took over his office there it was MGM then now
Speaker 9: Sony and in his office police piece supply wood screwed
Speaker 9: to the to the back of the door, and it
Speaker 9: was marked up with all these with all these knife marks.
Speaker 9: And what he'd done is he said it is that
Speaker 9: I was told. He said it his death and take
Speaker 9: it a knife, throw her right head of the door.
Speaker 9: Ain't bety been able to get it? So this so
Speaker 9: it's sinking in the back of the door to the
Speaker 9: plywood thinging for the put up. So I don't think
Speaker 9: he was thinking about a romantic comedy when he was
Speaker 9: doing Fatal Beauty, but he was on it before I was. Yeah,
Speaker 9: And then they toned it down. They toned it down
Speaker 9: for me, but then they took Whoopy and put her
Speaker 9: into that, and I don't I don't think I was
Speaker 9: as sophisticated then as I like to think I am now.
Speaker 9: Maybe if it had Norman Tanamar or comedy director. But
Speaker 9: I don't see how it. I never saw any way
Speaker 9: to turn that. There was there was no funny bone
Speaker 9: at its core was with Fatal Beauty. And so what
Speaker 9: you have is yet you should you should have a
Speaker 9: bit of Millius's vision, and you know, and the polishing
Speaker 9: by Dean rised her and then the personality the Whoopy
Speaker 9: paid put into it. But she played it, you know
Speaker 9: she did, and I thought she sold the violence pretty well.
Speaker 9: And I hope more people discover the film. But of
Speaker 9: all my films, it's it's it's probably the along with
Speaker 9: the TEMP, is the least mentioned. So there you go.
Speaker 9: The ending got screwed up. I don't want to get
Speaker 9: into it. But that was Bob who was that? That
Speaker 9: was Stanley Jaffey. They'd had he'd had success changing the
Speaker 9: ending on Fatal Attraction, was it? And then so we
Speaker 9: went crazy changing changed the end, not not the films,
Speaker 9: but the ending, and then changed the ending on John
Speaker 9: millis Is World War two film Navy, I think. And
Speaker 9: then then that I got I got hit on the TEMP.
Speaker 9: And then he also went after Sliver, so he got
Speaker 9: four or five films in a row. The endings got
Speaker 9: mauled by by Stanley Jeffy. I don't know if anything
Speaker 9: were successful beyond Fatal Attraction, but I don't know in
Speaker 9: terms of changing the ending adding that much more. But
Speaker 9: what he did is he softened it in uh in
Speaker 9: the TEMP. Well, thank you so much, this is great
Speaker 9: talking with you, we too, thank you very much.
Speaker 8: All Right, we are back and we were talking about
Speaker 8: Fatal Beauty and it is next week, which will play
Speaker 8: the preview in a little bit. Next week is going
Speaker 8: to be interesting because we've talked about these films three
Speaker 8: in a row with Jump and Jack, Flash, Burglar and
Speaker 8: Fatal Beauty, and these for me have always been and
Speaker 8: you were talking to earlier, Kevin Hike mash all of
Speaker 8: these things up in your head. There's a real flow
Speaker 8: to these films. But after this we get the Telephone,
Speaker 8: which is I want to say, based on a play,
Speaker 8: and it feels completely different. This is the last time
Speaker 8: we really get Whoop as a action hero for I
Speaker 8: think forever. You could make an argument that her character
Speaker 8: from Sister Act is a little bit of an action hero.
Speaker 8: There's a little bit of crossover with some of the
Speaker 8: stuff as far as her with her early character and
Speaker 8: then her nun character.
Speaker 3: But this is it.
Speaker 8: This was quite a little run for her with these
Speaker 8: three films, and I wish that she had stuck with
Speaker 8: being an action hero. I think she does a great
Speaker 8: job of it.
Speaker 1: Although she runs very funny. Whenever I see a running
Speaker 1: she waggles.
Speaker 8: I never noticed that before. Who runs funnier? Her Tom Cruise, Oh,
Speaker 8: Tom Cruise is a boss.
Speaker 1: He runs like a cheetah. Keep running, Tom Cruise. I
Speaker 1: just watched him yesterday in a few Good Men because
Speaker 1: we're doing courtroom dramas. I like stunned that he went
Speaker 1: through the eighties, which was an incredible run for him,
Speaker 1: winning an Oscar. He is a fucking phenomenal actor, like
Speaker 1: way better than his persona would have you believe, or
Speaker 1: his recent a decade a plus of outpush. But yeah,
Speaker 1: he was a great actor in the eighties, like back
Speaker 1: to back, like such charismatic, brilliant performances. But WHOOPI ones like,
Speaker 1: it's funny.
Speaker 5: When you talk about what Obviously there's this stand up era,
Speaker 5: there's her TV work, the Star Trek stuff that she
Speaker 5: did that endeared her to so many, and then you've
Speaker 5: got things like the Color Purple and Ghosts, which are
Speaker 5: her high the high level Academy stuff, the Sister Act movies,
Speaker 5: people like those are good crowd pleasers. So she has
Speaker 5: this range. That's the thing. I really like, I have
Speaker 5: a lot more respect. When I sat down I thought
Speaker 5: about it, I was like, here's someone who's been around.
Speaker 5: I don't know how much it crossed over into Ireland
Speaker 5: and the UK with her, but beyond the film piece,
Speaker 5: but just been in the culture for like over forty
Speaker 5: years when you think about it, and there always just
Speaker 5: seem to be something on with her. And then still
Speaker 5: she's got the view like the talk show panel stuff.
Speaker 5: So I've got a lot of respect for her and
Speaker 5: her opinions on things, and her willingness to be out
Speaker 5: there and to take chances too. I think that's a
Speaker 5: great thing.
Speaker 1: I also want to just sing the prices of her
Speaker 1: book again, because I was very surprised at how touching
Speaker 1: it was. She's a great storyteller as well. She has
Speaker 1: this book that's about her mother and her brother when
Speaker 1: she both lost them and how much it destabilized her
Speaker 1: and that the people that knew her most intimately and
Speaker 1: could confirm all of her recollections were gone, and her
Speaker 1: trying to basically navigate life without them. And she talks
Speaker 1: about growing up in the projects with a single mother,
Speaker 1: and it's a really fantastic book. It's so touching. But
Speaker 1: she's just a great storyteller as well. Do you forget
Speaker 1: that she wrote all of her plays and her one
Speaker 1: woman shows and stuff, So she's a great writer as well.
Speaker 8: I wish that she had an even better run. She's
Speaker 8: great in some of the things that she did after this,
Speaker 8: like Clara's hard or there's a couple of weird missteps
Speaker 8: with Homer and Eddie. I know people love soap dish.
Speaker 8: I actually want to go back and rewatch that.
Speaker 1: I loved Made in America. I thought that was funny.
Speaker 8: I have not seen that yet.
Speaker 1: I was a kid in that. I remember Jennifer Tilly
Speaker 1: as well, and where she was a hyperactive like bimbo
Speaker 1: and she can't whel naked across the bedroom in front
Speaker 1: of Ted Danson where he couldn't keep up with her.
Speaker 8: That's a selling point right there.
Speaker 1: Okay, it's a funny film, and will Smith that as well.
Speaker 1: It was good crack. But yet to your point, Rob,
Speaker 1: she wasn't as well known for all of her ancillary stuff.
Speaker 1: It was the movies, and only some of the movies,
Speaker 1: like these last three didn't really cross over. They weren't
Speaker 1: theatrically released over here. So there were like films that
Speaker 1: you might catch if they were on TV or in
Speaker 1: the video shop, but they didn't have any big public
Speaker 1: the push behind them. There was nobody marketing them. They
Speaker 1: just appeared one day and you eat a sort of
Speaker 1: but you didn't.
Speaker 5: The only thing I can really think of when it
Speaker 5: comes to this, and we brought it up already, is
Speaker 5: that it does live within this continuum, and someone would
Speaker 5: I'm sure there's a book some film researchers looked at
Speaker 5: it of cup procedurals and certain cliche elements or blending
Speaker 5: of elements that they just kept recycling these from the
Speaker 5: early seventies through. You still have them today to a
Speaker 5: certain extent. It seems like they've moved more onto TV
Speaker 5: though as you get into the nineties. But there just
Speaker 5: seemed to be a whole maybe like twenty years where
Speaker 5: these kind of films you get several of them a year,
Speaker 5: kind of standard fair. You know, usually every action star
Speaker 5: had at least one of them. There was, you know,
Speaker 5: like we talked about with her Eddie Murphy, it was
Speaker 5: like it was a way to try and get comedians
Speaker 5: up to the next echelon or something. I just find
Speaker 5: them an interesting document of an era, you know, really
Speaker 5: beyond they're just pure entertainment value, but meaning what do
Speaker 5: they represent in terms of the time. And one of
Speaker 5: the things that I wrote in my notes for this
Speaker 5: movie was shoot Out at the Mall totally Eighties.
Speaker 8: Yeah, immediately I was thinking of Commando or gosh, even
Speaker 8: Police Story three. There's so much broken glass in this,
Speaker 8: or not Police Story three, Police Story the original, there's
Speaker 8: so much broken glass in this film. I was like, Wow,
Speaker 8: this is They're really going for it. They really are
Speaker 8: going to blow the shit out of this mall. And yeah,
Speaker 8: that is such an eighties thing.
Speaker 1: Blues borders with the cop cat chase, true to mail,
Speaker 1: it was.
Speaker 5: The era of the malls, at least in America.
Speaker 8: Whenever I hear Rossoli, of course, I think of Rossoli
Speaker 8: and Iles, the TV show that was from the twenty
Speaker 8: tens where Andrew Harmon was Jane Rossoli. I was hoping
Speaker 8: it might have been a sequel where Rita comes back,
Speaker 8: but no, she's Jane Rizzoli. And then there's Sasha Alexander
Speaker 8: is Mora Isles. And that's the the id and the
Speaker 8: super ego type of thing, which I guess plays also
Speaker 8: into the whole thing of the Kroll versus the Brad
Speaker 8: Duraff character, where it's like Kroll is so super cool
Speaker 8: and super calm and just very matter of fact with
Speaker 8: Whoopee as Resoli, and then Dorf is just completely whacked
Speaker 8: out through the whole thing that Milius draft. Again going
Speaker 8: back to that, the three guys in that one they
Speaker 8: wear what was it like, a Hitler mask, a wolf mask,
Speaker 8: and a porky pig mask. Through the opening heist that happens,
Speaker 8: and it's fucking crazy, blood, blood, wolf and step.
Speaker 1: It begins with her beating up a couple of nuns.
Speaker 8: Because she noticed their shoes and they're like, She's like, oh,
Speaker 8: those are way too good a shoes for nuns to
Speaker 8: be wearing.
Speaker 1: They're wearing Adie, which apparently were the shoes of drug dealers.
Speaker 1: I could not imagine Share in this film though, even
Speaker 1: though she's a great actress and I was imagining her
Speaker 1: in the Ear of Suspect and things like that, but
Speaker 1: it just it wouldn't work for me. It wouldn't have
Speaker 1: the same bounce to.
Speaker 8: It Share was doing. Okay, I think she took Moonstruck instead,
Speaker 8: So good for her. Yeah, I don't know if you
Speaker 8: guys speaking of would be Goldberg vehicles, but the one
Speaker 8: that she made in ninety five called Boys in the Side,
Speaker 8: Did you guys ever see that?
Speaker 1: I have seen it. I thought that was cute. She
Speaker 1: sings in that.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I really like that. I thought it was a
Speaker 8: great movie. I haven't seen it since it's probably ninety six,
Speaker 8: but I remember really liking that.
Speaker 1: And it's rare for a road trip movie that isn't
Speaker 1: film and Louise. That's more of a chase movie, but
Speaker 1: a road trip movie that has three female leads. It's
Speaker 1: riding the line between something like Beaches and something like
Speaker 1: the majority of other Yeah, but it's that kind of
Speaker 1: thing where one of the characters ends up dying. And
Speaker 1: but yes, sweet story. We watched a load of world
Speaker 1: movies recently and that was one of the rare outliers
Speaker 1: because I had women in it.
Speaker 8: I almost for this series. I almost said that we
Speaker 8: should do the Associate from ninety six.
Speaker 3: How do you succeed in business?
Speaker 8: Try showing some cleavage.
Speaker 5: Joined the Boys Club?
Speaker 11: Men like doing business with men.
Speaker 5: By becoming a man.
Speaker 8: I need a new look, Old White and Man.
Speaker 5: On October nineteen, my name is Robert County, don't miss
Speaker 5: a sleek.
Speaker 9: Review of The Boy.
Speaker 4: Critics are calling an outrageously funny comedy man as Whoopy
Speaker 4: Goldberg makes a killing.
Speaker 1: In the market.
Speaker 3: I can't afford to have a term The Associated.
Speaker 5: Britty PG thir D special sneak review this Saturday.
Speaker 8: I really like that movie. I especially like the Diane
Speaker 8: Waste character in there. But Whoopee is really good in
Speaker 8: that and we keep talking about how she put on
Speaker 8: these characters to go in drag and turn white in
Speaker 8: that movie. Normall, Oh, it's a great one. But for
Speaker 8: the reason why I didn't choose it was because it's
Speaker 8: a remake. And it's actually like the fifth remake or
Speaker 8: fifth adaptation of a story from I want to say,
Speaker 8: like the nineteen thirties, written by I want to say,
Speaker 8: an Italian author, and they made so many different versions.
Speaker 8: It's basically somebody anybody who sets up a fake person.
Speaker 8: It's very Captain Tuttle, right. It's like I set up
Speaker 8: this fake person and they're the one who's really in charge,
Speaker 8: and I'm just following orders. And but I'm the smart person,
Speaker 8: and I'm just giving the fake person all the good ideas,
Speaker 8: and the good ideas come from them, and they're somebody
Speaker 8: of much higher status, or in Whoopee's case, it's an
Speaker 8: old white guy. So she's, oh, mister so and so
Speaker 8: is an available right now. But she's giving all of
Speaker 8: this stuff and basically creating an empire with this fake person.
Speaker 8: And of course at the end it's we have to
Speaker 8: see this person that this is necessary that we do this.
Speaker 8: And she's great. But like I said, Day and West,
Speaker 8: throughout that movie you find out, oh, she's actually the
Speaker 8: power behind the throne at this other company and she
Speaker 8: comes over with and works with Whoope, and you're just like, oh,
Speaker 8: she's These two women could take on the entire fucking world.
Speaker 3: And I really like that.
Speaker 5: I'm actually amazed that you didn't do this because, as
Speaker 5: Kevin said, he loves Donald Trump, and I guess he's
Speaker 5: in it.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Oh, I mean, I just love his character. I just
Speaker 1: think he's he speaks to me such a decent person
Speaker 1: and he has such great ideas. I really think him
Speaker 1: and Musk are going to save the world.
Speaker 9: Really, be careful.
Speaker 8: People are gonna think you're.
Speaker 5: You're gonna go.
Speaker 1: Slash my wrists. But what do you say that, Mike?
Speaker 1: I was thinking of American fiction where Jeffrey Wright creates
Speaker 1: this fictional lower class ghetto author in order to appeal
Speaker 1: appeal to like these medical lost white readers.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 8: I have yet to find an English translation of that
Speaker 8: original book, but I really want to and that I
Speaker 8: have found a couple versions of this movie, the different
Speaker 8: adaptations of it. But there was a seventies one I
Speaker 8: want to say that.
Speaker 1: Was just a bit like A Star Is Born.
Speaker 8: Yeah, exactly, And I want to say that it was
Speaker 8: your friend Rob. Jean Claud Carrier was one of the
Speaker 8: authors of that seventies one.
Speaker 5: I pulled it up and it says here it was
Speaker 5: Renee Gainville The Associate seventy nine French film. Yeah, Jean
Speaker 5: Claud Carrier did the adaptation on that.
Speaker 8: But yeah, if you look at the author it goes
Speaker 8: back even further, which is crazy. It's the Gennaro Prieto
Speaker 8: book that goes back to the early part of the centuries. Yeah, twenties. Okay,
Speaker 8: I thought it was thirties, but apparently I spoke with
Speaker 8: somebody recently. Oh, I spoke with Nick Thiel, who wrote
Speaker 8: the screenplay for the at the adaptation for the American stuff,
Speaker 8: And apparently Donald Petrie, the director of the Associate, really
Speaker 8: did not get along with Whoopee at all. So I'm like,
Speaker 8: I probably won't be able to talk with him. But
Speaker 8: THEO was very open and you'll hear that interview when
Speaker 8: we talk about v I Warshowski much later in the
Speaker 8: year in November. Is that noir is neo noir. We're
Speaker 8: doing a lot of neo noirs this year.
Speaker 5: We don't make distinctions metals metal. You want to get
Speaker 5: into black metal or doom or sludge or speed metal.
Speaker 5: It's all metal.
Speaker 8: So it's not Cookie Monster singing. I really can't stand
Speaker 8: that cookie monster voice. All right, We're going to take
Speaker 8: another break and play a preview for next week's show
Speaker 8: right after these brief messages.
Speaker 4: Coming from New Line Home Video Academy Award winner Whoopi
Speaker 4: Goldberg stars home video exclusive for the entire family. I'm
Speaker 4: back Theodore Rex from the People that Brought You Monkey
Speaker 4: Trouble and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Movies. Whoopee is
Speaker 4: Katie Coltrane, a futuristic, wise cracking cop who's a heartbeat
Speaker 4: away from losing her job until she's forced to team
Speaker 4: up with a new wave in law enforcement.
Speaker 5: It's a dinosaur, you too solve this case again.
Speaker 7: It's a dinosaur new partner, Coltrane.
Speaker 5: To solve a crazy crime, you gotta make them look
Speaker 5: like a real cop.
Speaker 4: And together they're hitting the streets to have a good time,
Speaker 4: You Cannot eat our only suspect, and save the world
Speaker 4: from a colossal crime caper. My Powers from the creative
Speaker 4: team of Honey, I Shrunk, The Kids Who Framed Roger Rabbit,
Speaker 4: and Televisions Hit Showed Dinosaurs, he.
Speaker 6: Booking, Your Mind shut Down, and your glands have taken over.
Speaker 4: Whoopy's films deliver big time. These films alone have sold
Speaker 4: over six million in video units.
Speaker 6: Oh Hey, God, is hey y'all doing?
Speaker 5: And you think You're gonna get somebody?
Speaker 4: Nando Marketing support includes a three sided standee with Rumble
Speaker 4: in the Bronx and Bed of Roses, and a Dino
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Speaker 4: never forgetting at the table.
Speaker 11: Just clacked the day out leaf with woo Can you
Speaker 11: just slide your button?
Speaker 5: In?
Speaker 4: Nineteen ninety six is best family comedy.
Speaker 9: Theodore Rex love when he does that.
Speaker 8: That is right. We are wrapping up Wooperary next week
Speaker 8: with a look at Theodore Rex. Until then, I want
Speaker 8: to thank my co host Robin Kevin. So, Rob, what's
Speaker 8: been going on with you, sir.
Speaker 5: I'm just enjoying my time up in the high desert
Speaker 5: and getting out into nature doing some hikes. Hope to
Speaker 5: do some traveling in the coming months. And I'm probably
Speaker 5: within i don't know, a couple of thousand words, a
Speaker 5: couple of more pages on first draft of a novel
Speaker 5: I've been working on for the last couple of months.
Speaker 5: So I'm pretty happy about that. So not much beyond that.
Speaker 8: Oh, not much. Just writing a book, that's all.
Speaker 5: Yeah, with no plans to ever release it. I'm just
Speaker 5: writing for the sake of writing. I have no contract.
Speaker 5: I'm just doing it for myself.
Speaker 8: Kevin, When you're not writing your pro Trump blog, what
Speaker 8: else are you up to?
Speaker 1: Well, I'm in the middle of a script right now
Speaker 1: and I'm stuck overout fifty pages into it. So I'm
Speaker 1: looking forward to watching Theodore Rex. No, I'm still I'm
Speaker 1: over with my co host Will on the Best Bits
Speaker 1: podcast where we just talk about different topics each episode,
Speaker 1: and we have the Crack and so you're welcome to
Speaker 1: come and check us out over there. It's a very
Speaker 1: different kind of podcast where we're much more about having
Speaker 1: the crack and poking fun at the business that we
Speaker 1: unfortunately working.
Speaker 8: So you're smoking crack over there, is that what you're saying.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we can't get our hands off Fentinel at the
Speaker 1: moment because there's a shortage. Yeah, Crack is freely available
Speaker 1: and thanks.
Speaker 8: Again guys for being on the show. Thanks everybody for listening.
Speaker 8: If you want to hear more of me shooting off
Speaker 8: my mouth, check out some of the other shows that
Speaker 8: I work on. They are all available at weirdingwaymedia dot com.
Speaker 8: Thanks especially to our Patreon community. If you want to
Speaker 8: join the community, visit patreon dot com slash Projection Booth.
Speaker 8: Every donation we get helps the Projection Booth take over
Speaker 8: the world.
Speaker 9: You can't.
Speaker 5: I think he's sprainingen say spinning. You doesn't lay it one.
Speaker 6: Time you never got a seven for us a.
Speaker 1: Time where.
Speaker 5: You brought up in the world.
Speaker 8: But when the loose us up the sun.
Speaker 5: Spinning in the world, seen.
Speaker 6: Don'ts you know you can't stand the fall.
Speaker 1: I think he's spending move.
Speaker 6: Don't spread enough.
Speaker 11: So you wort twice to me, tell me fyce because
Speaker 11: they got me a dance.
Speaker 6: The wall, the aim, no got no to fat baby.
Speaker 6: It's my there to gun, next job at the time,
Speaker 6: you say, and my mom.
Speaker 5: But maybe.
Speaker 6: I think explaining, yeah, say, displaying no smock give a sun.
Speaker 1: Maybe some friends shine, so.
Speaker 6: Snif say.
Speaker 11: Student snipe bon, students sign.
Speaker 6: And snipe sh