September 25, 2025 • 37 mins
As a senior in high school, Michael got a huge opportunity: the chance to star in a big-budget movie. Shooting wrapped; a premier date was set. And then he found out that his lucky break was all based on a lie.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin, Happy birthday to me.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
It was your birthday.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
It was your birthday last week, wasn't it.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
That's kind of why I was phoning. I.
Speaker 4 (00:34):
I'm sorry, buddy.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
It lose to something when you have to call a
week later to receive to get your own your own
birthday wish from someone you know, it hurts.
Speaker 3 (00:42):
Okay, Honestly, I feel like your birthdays is that important
to you?
Speaker 4 (00:46):
Am I wrong?
Speaker 1 (00:47):
Well, it's not as important to me as the first
night of Kanka and the second night, not the third night.
I hate the third night. You know what, As a
birthday present to myself, I'm going to hang up on you.
Happy birthday to me indeed from Pushkin Industries. I'm Jonathan Goldstein,
(01:15):
and this is Heavyweight Today's episode The Messenger right after
the Break. As a kid growing up in Cleveland, Michael
(01:38):
loved acting. The only problem I wasn't very good. In fact,
he stank in every summer camp show. He was placed
in the back row. In a children's production of The
Hobbit the Musical. Backstage, a kid dressed as a dwarf
told Michael, my mom says, you're singing is awful. But
it didn't stop Michael. He nursed his acting bug all
(02:02):
the way through senior year, when one day he heard
about a movie being filmed in Cleveland and the director
needed lots of teens to be extras. Straight after school,
Michael made his way to the auditions. He was shown
into a room with the director and some of the crew.
They gave him a script and he started acting.
Speaker 5 (02:22):
And their eyes lit up, and I was asked to
keep reading, and so we did the scene again.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
We did it again and again and again, and all
the while Michael was overcome by a curious feeling.
Speaker 5 (02:37):
I was doing a good job.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Had you ever experienced this before, like, been in an
audition where people were responding this way?
Speaker 5 (02:45):
No, No, I was usually in auditions where they're like,
we can make him a tree.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
At the end of the audition, the director told Michael
that he was not going to be an extra. Michael
was going to be the star of the whole movie.
Why was he going to be the star of the
whole movie? Was it his brando esque brooding, his Shia
la Buffian intensity.
Speaker 5 (03:13):
They showed me the storyboard and I looked exactly like
the kid in the drawings of the storyboard. That's the
reason I got it. They were just like you look
like the kid we drew.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
The film was called The Messenger, based on a true story,
and the true story it was based on was a
little known World War II anecdote about a teenager named
Thomas E. Jones. Jones was a telegram messenger in Washington, DC.
On August fourteenth, nineteen forty five. He was sent to
(03:47):
deliver the telegram that announced Japan's unconditional surrender to the Allies,
but on the way to deliver the message, he got
pulled over for an illegal U turn, and thus the
end of World War Two was delayed by ten minutes.
Michael played the role of Thomas as he navigated that
fateful day.
Speaker 5 (04:08):
I show up to set and I just was immediately
involved in the magic of film. And they had to
fake the daylight by putting lights outside the window. And
I remember being like, Oh, you're not just like capturing
a moment, You're creating a moment.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
And the custodian of this exciting new world. The director
of the movie was a twenty five year old wonder
kid named Quincy. Quincy took to Michael immediately. Throughout the production,
he check in with Michael on the phone and take
him out for wings. Michael looked up to Quincy to.
Speaker 5 (04:40):
Meet someone who was orchestrating this giant production and then
for him to take time talk to me.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
I felt part of Even after filming wrapped, Quincy stayed
in touch, calling Michael with updates about the movie's release.
Speaker 5 (04:56):
We were going to premiere at the Philadelphia Film Festival.
I learned that it was a big production, one hundred
thousand dollars short film, which is a lot of money
for a short movie. The executive producer was this man
named Pat.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
Croche Pat pad Pad if you don't know the name.
Pat Croche was a media presence, an entrepreneur, famous in
the world of sports because he owned the Philadelphia seventy
six ers in the late nineties. He was a motivational speaker.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
I get up, I slap my palms together, It's going
to be a great.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Day, a noted pirate enthusiast.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
People ask me if I'm a pirate, and I say yes,
but three hundred years too late.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
And the kind of beloved pre me too, macho man
who'd show up unannounced on the set of the local
news just to scoop the anchor woman up into his arms.
Speaker 5 (05:49):
Accident on the jersey term.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
I guess, oh my god, because when you have that
much joi de vivre, what choice do you have?
Speaker 6 (05:59):
You know, whatever Pat comes in the room, you never
know what's.
Speaker 5 (06:01):
Gonna happen, rules because Pat crochy, because he's involved. The
movie gets a lot.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
Of press for a short film by an unknown director.
The Messenger received an unheard of amount of press. ESPN
carried a story with footage of Michael on set, and
there was a huge write up in USA Today. My
dad was.
Speaker 5 (06:24):
Flying that day. You know, he's in an airport. He
picks up the USA Today. He flips it open and sees,
you know, a two page spread with my picture on it.
So the family's excitement, the friend's excitement. Everyone starts to
just be like, this is a very big deal.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
Michael was planning on college in the fall, but as
anticipation around the movie grew, he started to reconsider.
Speaker 5 (06:49):
Leading up to the Philadelphia Film Festival, talking to Quincy,
He's like, Tom Hanks wants to meet with you. This
is a real chance, this is a real opportunity. This
is bigger than I imagined. I was like, maybe maybe
I try and pursue acting.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
Maybe Michael had been wrong all these years everyone had
been Maybe he really was a good actor, and it
took Quincy to discover it. Michael couldn't wait to walk
the red carpet, see himself on the big screen, and
enjoy a virgin appleteini with Tom Hanks.
Speaker 5 (07:26):
Did your parents come with you to the premiere? Well,
we didn't make it to the premiere. The movie was canceled.
So the week before the Philadelphia Film Festival premiere, I
got a phone call from Quincy and he was clearly crying,
(07:50):
and he told me that the movie wasn't going to
come out and nobody was going to see it. Because
it turns out that Quincy had lied and had told
a really big lie.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
The lie Michael's referring to had nothing to do with
his historical anecdote itself. That part was true, But over
the end credits, Quincy played footage of the actual present
day Thomas E. Jones being interviewed on his deathbed. The
only problem.
Speaker 5 (08:22):
That guy was an actor.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
It seems Quincy had just found a random old man,
slipped him into a gown, strapped him into a hospital bed,
and christened him Thomas e Jones. But there was one
thing Quincy wasn't counting on.
Speaker 5 (08:39):
Because the movie had received so much attention, Thomas E
Jones's real family found.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
Out, and Thomas E Jones's real family wasn't happy because,
as it turned out, the real Thomas E Jones was
very much alive, breathing, eating, sleeping, and not on a
deathbed but just a regular old bedbed, and so Pat
Crochey decided to pull the movie.
Speaker 5 (09:04):
I mean, it was crushing disappointment. I had the ticket
to go, I had the suit, I had all the
expectation I had in my brain, everything that could be
possible after and it's all gone, it's all it vanishes.
And then it's a wave of embarrassment because I have
to tell everybody.
Speaker 1 (09:25):
Michael had to go back to his friend's family, his
grandmother who'd been clipping every article about the movie, and say,
remember how I was going to be a big movie star.
It was all a fraud. And the guy who thought
I had talent also a fraud.
Speaker 5 (09:40):
And I never talked to Quincy again.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
Michael abandoned his dream of becoming an actor, but his
time on The Messengers still had its impact. It allowed
him to realize how much he loved being on a set,
loved the magic of creating a whole world from thin air,
and that pushed him towards a career in TV, writing
for shows on Disney and Nickelodeon. Meanwhile, Quincy's IMDb credits
(10:05):
have grown sparse.
Speaker 5 (10:06):
I always wondered what happened to Quincy becau to him.
There was part of me that wanted to tell him
that I've like succeeded, that I've pursued movies because of him.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
But along with that, Michael has a lingering question for Quincy.
Speaker 5 (10:21):
I never understood why you would take such a big
risk like that to make such a big line. It's
like you've set up a film crew to film this
guy on his deathbed and it wasn't like it just
seems like a bad plan.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
As Michael has climbed the ranks of show business, this
question has only gained in poignance. Why risk your reputation,
especially when the story was good enough as it was.
Speaker 5 (10:47):
Why did you lie.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
After the break searching for Quincy to become the messengers messenger?
But first, the best messages of all promotional messages from
our cherished sponsors, We really do love you guys ill
two gross. It's a little gross, eh, keep it in.
(11:28):
Why did Quincy lie? The more I think about it,
the less sense it all makes. Why go to the
trouble of hiring an old man and building a hospital set?
Why not just use the real Thomas E Jones?
Speaker 7 (11:44):
Hello?
Speaker 1 (11:45):
Oh, hello, my name is Jonathan Gould. I've so far
been unable to contact Quincy, so I reach out to
someone else who might have the answer. I was looking
for a Thomas E. Jones.
Speaker 7 (11:56):
He's deceased.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
Oh, I'm very sorry.
Speaker 7 (12:00):
Yes, I'm his widow. When he died, we would have
been married almost seventy years.
Speaker 1 (12:08):
Thomas's widow, Nancy, is eighty nine years old. She says
she doesn't know why Quincy didn't just go to Thomas himself,
But we get to talking and she tells me the
story of how she first met Thomas. It was through
his work as a messenger. It turns out Nancy's father
was Thomas's boss at the telegram office. She tells me
how in nineteen forty five, there was a dedicated telegraph
(12:31):
machine standing by for the sole purpose of awaiting the
Japanese surrender.
Speaker 7 (12:36):
And when that machine started ticking my father. He handed
his message first to my husband, who was a bicycle
messenger at sixteen years of age.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
Since the bike was too slow for such an important message,
a coworker agreed to drive Thomas in his car. Unfortunately,
he set out in the wrong direction, and thus the
most famous U turn in American history, or at least
the only one I've ever heard of, and I've read
my Howard Zinn. The U turn got Thomas and his
(13:07):
driver pulled over by a cap Of course.
Speaker 7 (13:10):
They were saying, we've got the Japanese piece a render
message here. Yeah, I've heard a lot of stories. But
the police realized it was the truth. They just pore
up the ticket.
Speaker 1 (13:19):
Wow, what a story is. Yeah, and it's a pretty
different story than the one in the Messenger. Not only
were the Joneses angry about the fake Thomas, but they
were also angry about what they considered the fake story.
In Quincy's version of events, Thomas is in no hurry
to deliver the message. He makes a casual pit stop
(13:39):
at a diner, where he hits on the waitress and
enjoys a large breakfast of pancakes, all while the war
rages on the Jones has read about that scene in
the media coverage of Quincy's movie, Newspaper write ups with
headlines like boys, pancake breakfast delayed the end of World
War Two.
Speaker 7 (14:01):
Well, you know, my kids were just serious about that.
Talking about kids, We're talking about people now sixty years old.
Speaker 3 (14:10):
We were outraged. The kids were outraged.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
This is Victoria Jones. She's one of Thomas and Nancy's
six children, all of whom when it came to the messenger,
were in agreement.
Speaker 8 (14:22):
Which was unusual for the six of us.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
This is Thomas's son, Mike Jones. He says that the
only one inclined to let the whole thing go was
Thomas himself.
Speaker 8 (14:33):
That was kind of my dad's attitude, like, oh, don't
make a big deal, don't get this person in trouble.
Speaker 3 (14:37):
We said, no, this is altering history.
Speaker 8 (14:41):
It just kind of portrayed him like as the slacker,
you know, like, oh, the heck with that, I'm going
to go and flirt and eat pancakes.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
Victoria says that although Quincy never reached out to her father,
he easily.
Speaker 3 (14:56):
Could have, just like you found my mother by getting
a few phone calls, Quincy could have found my father,
and he never tried.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
When she found out about the movie, Victoria messaged Quincy
several times, but she says he grew defensive and eventually
stopped answering.
Speaker 3 (15:12):
And then when my father died, I sent him a
message and said my father is now deceased.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
Huh. And he did not respond to that.
Speaker 3 (15:22):
No, I should go back and look. He might have said,
I'm sorry, and that was it.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
I tell the Joneses the story about Michael and how
I'm trying to reach Quincy myself.
Speaker 3 (15:32):
Good luck with that one.
Speaker 7 (15:34):
I'm sure he'll take this better left of dead story
out too.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
It turns out Nancy Jones is right. When I finally
get through to Quincy via email, his response is emphatic.
I'm not interested in talking about that project anymore, he writes,
And that's the last I hear from Quincy. What happens
(16:06):
next is years go by, unrelated to my failure to
speak with Quincy. But you never know. Heavyweight is canceled
and I lose my job. And while the story never
entirely leaves my mind, without an ergonomic office chair and
a long distance phone plan, there's not much I could
do about it. And then one day, while trying to
(16:27):
decide on a fun font for my resume, I receive
a message from Michael. He says he has an important
update to share. Hey Jonathan, Hey Michael, how are you good?
Speaker 5 (16:38):
How are you doing?
Speaker 1 (16:39):
It's been almost three years since Michael and I have spoken.
You have a son.
Speaker 5 (16:43):
Now, I've got a wife, I've got a son.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
The whole family is currently in New York, where Michael's wife, Katie,
is producing a movie. It turns out that Katie's movie
is the reason for Michael's update.
Speaker 5 (16:55):
He's the associate producer on the movie. His Name's Dan.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
Michael explains that while out for dinner with Dan, they
started talking about the industry, by which I mean the
show business industry. And one of the things people in
the indie enjoy chatting about most is how they got
into the industry industry. So Michael told Dan the story
of the Messenger, about the director Quincy, about the producer
(17:19):
Pat Crochy.
Speaker 5 (17:20):
And Dan is from Philly. Dan's parents are family friends
with the Crochies.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
You're kidding. Show biz connections in this life, There's not
a thing that doesn't come down to show biz connections.
It's not what you know when you know where you
know it or why you know it, but whom you know.
Pat Crochy was the executive producer on the movie, the
one who ultimately shut it all down. So, with Quincy
(17:51):
unwilling to talk, he's our best shot at figuring out
why Quincy had lied. At some point Pat had to
have demanded an explanation from Quincy. Dan agrees to talk
to his mom, who agrees to talk to Pat's daughter,
who agrees to talk with Pat, who then agrees to
talk with me. Mister Crochy, call me Pat. This is
(18:14):
Pat Pat Pat Crochy.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
One thing I like to say about your Heavyweight podcast
is that it always inculcates a high vibrational frequency.
Speaker 1 (18:25):
Can you say more about the high frequency?
Speaker 2 (18:28):
Well in the realm of form? If we're going to
transcend form.
Speaker 1 (18:31):
Pat Crochy has a white goatee that ends in a
point at his chest. He's in the Zenden, a large
room above the barn on his fifty three acre estate.
His walls are covered in Chinese and Tibetan calligraphy. He
says that these days he seldom makes any media appearances.
Is there any reason for that?
Speaker 2 (18:52):
Ah, it's a great question, you interviewer you well. Ten
years ago, something happened. My mind cracked.
Speaker 1 (18:59):
Pat's mind cracked in a meeting for one of his
restaurants he owned several, among them the Rum Barrel, which
is pirate themed.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
And I'm sitting there think it to myself, what the
hell am I doing here? I don't really give a
shit about the next great group or sandwich. This is
just more. I always was seeking more, another win, another
standing ovation, another best seller, another another more more. There
was never enough. Never.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
What Pat realized was that in spite of all his successes,
he wasn't really happy, and so he tried to change
his way of thinking. But it was a slow process.
Speaker 2 (19:40):
The ego in the was if I can change my mind,
that'd be another great bestseller and I would go back
on the speaking gain. It was all ego, all commercial,
but that's how Grace hooked me. Everything that unfolds is perfect.
I have this adage, the past has served his purpose perfectly,
(20:04):
But most people are cherry pickers. Where I wish that
would have changed, or I wish this, or no. The
purpose of the past, Jonathan, There's only one purpose to
bring you and me right here and now. Okay, the
past is smoke off the end of my cigar.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
For me, the past is also smoke off the end
of my cigar, juicy wafts of precious smoke to be
hysterically clod at, like a rabid raccoon attacking a helium
filled garbage can. And so I asked Pat to go
back to the past and explain how he became involved
with Quincy, Michael and the Messenger. He says it all
(20:42):
began in Key West at the pirate themed museum he
owned that sat beside the pirate themed restaurant he also owned.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
And you get to know all the piratical personalities on
that island, one of which was Reef. And Reef is
a salvager and he's really got a piratical nature. He
would even dress as a part and I really loved him.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
One day, Reef ast Pat for a favor. Could Pat
meet with his son, Quincy, who wanted to make a movie.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
And we got talking and he turned me on to
this script that he has been writing.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
And you liked it?
Speaker 2 (21:16):
Oh? Sure, are you kidding me? It's talking about this
young boy who has an effect on the ending of
World War two?
Speaker 1 (21:22):
And you hadn't known that story. I hadn't known that story.
Speaker 2 (21:25):
Oh no, I had never heard of it.
Speaker 1 (21:27):
What was your impression of Quincy when you first met him?
Speaker 4 (21:29):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (21:29):
I liked him and so and I believed everything Quincy
told me.
Speaker 1 (21:33):
When Quincy's lie came out, Pat was furious prior to.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
Ten years ago before you know, my minecrack. He's lucky
he didn't cross my path, or else he wouldn't be walking.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
Do you mean that you mean that literally?
Speaker 2 (21:47):
Uh, let's say no, since this is being taped. I'm
pretty street savvy. I couldn't believe that I got buffalo
(22:09):
like this as someone I thought was a friend, you know,
a friend, a Key West friend. I was so hurt
that I was angry. And when I'm angry, the old
Pat crocheap, the old corner guy man. Not only did
I lose the money, but all the contacts that I
made for him to get him in USA. Today, I
(22:30):
opened all these doors, through all my relationships, and then
all of a sudden, when I realized that it was
a fraud, that it was phony. I mean I had
to go and apologize to everyone.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
But Pat says that these days he doesn't have time
for rumination or regret.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
And even though I am here at peace. My body
has bell marrow cancer. I'm on chemo every twelve hours
of chemo mets incurable. However, I don't regret that. I
don't nothing. Oh wow, Jonathan, it's only my body, It's
(23:07):
not me.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
Before we get off, I ask Pat Michael's burning question,
why did Quincy lie? But Pat says he doesn't ask
the why questions only Quincy. Pat says, if he goes deep,
can answer that. Patt and Quincy haven't spoken for decades.
Their last interactions were angry ones. Right after Quincy's lie
(23:36):
came out all the same, Pat offers to reach out
to Quincy. He contacts a friend who he thinks might
have Quincy's phone number. I don't have high hopes, but
Patt and Quincy do end up speaking, and afterwards, for
reasons I can't discern, Quincy agrees to speak with Michael.
(24:11):
A video call between Michael and Quincy is arranged, and
while we wait for Quincy, I asked Michael the opening
question I learned in jayschool. Are you in a bathroom now?
Speaker 5 (24:23):
This is our tiny little kitchen in our apartment.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
It's late at night, and Michael gives me a tour
of his darkened New York apartment.
Speaker 5 (24:31):
And there's our Carson's little lunchbox.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
Very sweet. Where is he right now?
Speaker 5 (24:36):
Carson is asleep.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
What a lazy bones? And then Hello. Quincy enters the chat.
It's been almost twenty years since he and Michael were
together on set. Quincy was twenty five at the time.
He's in his forties now.
Speaker 6 (24:52):
It's nice to see Michael's face. I haven't seen his
face in a long time.
Speaker 5 (24:56):
And it was good to see you.
Speaker 1 (24:58):
Michael and Quincy begin by reminiscing about their time together
about making the movie.
Speaker 6 (25:02):
There are two scenes that really stand up for me.
One is when all the kids are in the.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
Diner and the exchange memory from what feels like unfraught
territory stuff like the casting and the fun of being
on set.
Speaker 5 (25:14):
My favorite scene was doing doing the U turn. You
had me drive stick shift and I lied when I auditioned.
You're like, can you drive stick And I was like,
I can drive stick. I couldn't drive stick I was
I never heard that, I know, and I was like
stalling out, like grinding the gears.
Speaker 1 (25:35):
It feels like Michael is trying to make Quincy comfortable,
show that Quincy wasn't the only one capable of lie
was a fraud.
Speaker 6 (25:44):
Into the car from like pulling his hair out to
I thought the kids could drive.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
But it doesn't take long before the conversation turns to
the elephant in the room, and it's Quincy who brings
it up.
Speaker 6 (25:56):
I remember wanting to reach out to you in years
the past. Yeah, I felt a lot of guilt because,
like this film, everybody had put so much sweat and
tears into it, and uh, it was just nothing like evaporated.
And I thought, my god, I failed every single person.
And then I became like national news, and then the
(26:18):
blogs were writing about.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
Me because The Messenger got a colossal amount of press.
When the truth came out, Quincy received a proportional amount
of backlash, similar to how the tidal wave of The
Messenger's success hit Michael, the bad news about The Messenger's
failure hit Quincy. He was at the airport reading that
(26:40):
day's newspaper over someone's shoulder and.
Speaker 6 (26:43):
They were reading the article about me and how I
had lied, and that hit me like I'd say a
ton of bricks, But a ton of bricks would have
felt like a pillow compared.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
To what that was how are you coping?
Speaker 6 (26:59):
I was in denial. I kept going back to this
like excuse of well, the Titanic, right, the Titanic, it's
a fake movie. It's based on a true story. There
was no Jack and Rowe, and yet what I had
done was totally different. I mean I was literally trying
to pretend that this other actor i'd hired was Thomas Jones.
And it took me a year or two to sort
(27:21):
of come to terms and just be like, man, I
really fucked up.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
Which brings us to the question of why why swap
a random old man for Thomas E. Jones? To explain
Quincy starts with how he came to the story of
the Messenger in the first place.
Speaker 6 (27:38):
I'd been working that summer at the Truman Little White
House in q Wes, and sort of in my onboarding
at that museum, they told us to read David McCullough's
Truman biography, and it was in that book that I
saw this one sentence about Thomas E. Jones and The Messenger, And.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
It was literally one sentence, one sentence in parentheses, in
the middle of a thousand page book.
Speaker 6 (28:01):
And I thought, God, what an amazing story.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
But Quincy thought, you know what would make it an
even more amazing story if he could find Thomas E. Jones,
interview him and include that interview in the movie. And
in Quincy's telling, he did look for Thomas Jones.
Speaker 6 (28:18):
I had hired literal investigators to go find this person,
two different guys, and they both said, like, you know,
we can't. We can't find them, but we found these
two death certificates that kind of match up.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
So the death certificates felt like enough. Quincy concluded that
the Thomas E. Jones he was looking for probably was dead.
Speaker 6 (28:39):
And I didn't share that with anybody because in my head,
I just saw the story rolling out. He's like, we
were going to tell the story and then the end
you saw the real guy and that I couldn't get
away from that story.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
And in the absence of the real guy, the next
best thing was a fake guy.
Speaker 6 (28:55):
Oh well, that decease Thomas Jones will never know and
anybody that sees the movie, it's gonna be so great
and they're gonna be crying and laughing at the end
of it that they won't care.
Speaker 1 (29:05):
For this role. There was no casting, no auditions. In fact,
the part of Thomas E. Jones wasn't played by an
actor at all.
Speaker 6 (29:13):
He was actually a tour guide at the Truman Little
White House.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
Quincy had asked a work friend from the museum to
do the job.
Speaker 6 (29:23):
And then the real Thomas Jones found me. And I
certainly remember that feeling. It was like a disgust I
felt for myself.
Speaker 1 (29:35):
In the aftermath, Quincy left the film world for many years.
He was fired from his job at the Truman Museum.
He eventually found work clerking in a bookstore and making
wedding videos. Well, this was the first time a live
Quincy's had been so brutally exposed. He admits that the
lying itself was something he'd been leaning on since his
teen years.
Speaker 6 (29:56):
You know, I had come from a fairly poor family
in Key West, and I had attended a very exclusive
prep school up in western Massachusetts called Deerfield Academy, where
I had no business being there, And so I I
felt this like sense of just like always needing to exaggerate.
People would be like, oh, I'm going to Paris for
want or break, and I'd be like, oh, gosh, you know, Paris,
(30:18):
It's great. I didn't even know what country it was.
In it was like a daily thing. Freshman year, someone
had a picture Jimmy Hendrix a poster and I remember
looking at his name and thinking it looked kind of French,
and I was like, oh, I love Gym Hendrye. And
I remember him looking at me and being like, what.
Speaker 1 (30:44):
For Quincy. Lies became a beautiful wall between himself and
everyone else. Lies protected him but also isolated him. It
took the collapse of The Messenger to finally get him
to stop, and.
Speaker 6 (30:56):
It was actually very relieving because it took a lot
of weight off my shoulders that I didn't have to
make every story ten percent better. I didn't have to.
As hard as that was, that was the most important, lesson,
full stop period of my life.
Speaker 5 (31:19):
After we did The Messenger, I didn't take that as
anything that stopped me.
Speaker 1 (31:25):
When Quincy is done sharing the effects The Messenger had
on his life, Michael shares the role that played for him.
Speaker 5 (31:31):
Seeing the camera, seeing the crew, it blew my mind.
I didn't know that this was possible. I didn't know
that this is what it looked like.
Speaker 1 (31:41):
And I was in It's Quincy and The Messenger that
inspired Michael's career, but it isn't just that Quincy gave
him a professional life. He gave him a life.
Speaker 5 (31:51):
I married this beautiful person who she's a movie producer,
and we have this amazing kid called Carson who's two
and a half years old. And all of this life
that I have, this partner, of this career, this kid,
it comes from this wild, weird, random moment in Cleveland,
Ohio where you decided to cast me in this short film.
(32:14):
And it's all this to say, like I never got
to just thank you. I've always appreciated that door that
you showed to me and allowed me to walk through
that moment, that time, that invitation that you gave me
to be on set changed the entire direction of my life.
Speaker 6 (32:40):
That means a lot to me. I I look back
on that time and totally with totally different eyes. It
was one of the most difficult things in my life.
And I can't tell you like how meaningful it is
(33:01):
to me to hear that someone had something good come
out of it, because it certainly didn't feel like that.
I was convinced that it would ruin everyone's life, because
that's what I was feeling at that moment.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
Quincy just assumed anyone involved with the messenger would still
be furious with him, and so a few weeks back,
when he saw Pat Croche's name pop up on his phone,
he says he almost felt too scared to pick up,
but when they spoke, instead of yelling at him, Pat
told him it was time to let it go.
Speaker 6 (33:37):
As soon as he said that those words let it go,
I just sat out in front of my house and
cried for a good twenty minutes. I didn't know before
we talked today, actually genuinely what you were going to
say today.
Speaker 5 (33:54):
You know you were I met you as this person
I looked up to.
Speaker 6 (33:58):
You're gonna make me cry. I'm really, really genuinely happy
for you.
Speaker 5 (34:07):
Thank you for taking time just to talk to me.
It really thank you for the life I got to
have because of it.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
Recently I got to share in that life. One day,
leaving our New York studio, Michael says he's off to
meet his wife Katie. Her crew is filming just a
few blocks away, and Michael asks if I'd like to come,
and I say sure. On the corner of twentieth Street
and Seventh Avenue, shooting is in full swing. The movie
(34:43):
stars John Tatruro as an aging pickpocket who ends up
with a thumb drive containing a crypto wallet on it.
Michael and I are waved past the protected perimeter and
Katie gives me a pair of small headphones as I
watch take after take of John Totruro slamming down a
payphone and screaming fuck in fake fury. I feel like
(35:03):
a ten year old on a field trip. All around us,
the city bustles as normal. We are tucked away in
our make believe world, watching make believe things. It's all
a lie, of course, but one that we're all in on.
Speaker 9 (35:19):
And how good.
Speaker 4 (35:55):
Now that the fern ures returning to it's goodwill home,
Now that the last month's raft is scheming.
Speaker 2 (36:09):
The damage to possum.
Speaker 4 (36:11):
Take this moment to desolee too felt around for five team.
Speaker 1 (36:24):
From Things That Accident Lee. This episode of Heavyweight was
produced by Khalila Holt and me Jonathan Goldstein, along with
Moheeny mcgauker and Phoebe Flanagan. Our supervising producer is Stevie Lane.
Editorial guidance from Emily Condon. Special thanks to Lucy Sullivan,
(36:46):
Karen Chakerjee and Nazanine RAFs and Johnny Our production council
is Jake Flanagan. Emmamonger mixed the episode with original music
by Christine Fellows, John K. Sampson and Bobby Lord. Additional
scoring by Blue Dot Sessions, Bobble Principal and Shanghai Restoration Project.
Our theme song is by the Weakerlands, courtesy of Epitaph Records.
(37:06):
Follow us on Instagram at Heavyweight Podcast, or email us
at Heavyweight at Pushkin dot Fm. We'll be back next
week with a new episode.
Pushkin, Happy birthday to me.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
It was your birthday.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
It was your birthday last week, wasn't it.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
That's kind of why I was phoning. I.
Speaker 4 (00:34):
I'm sorry, buddy.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
It lose to something when you have to call a
week later to receive to get your own your own
birthday wish from someone you know, it hurts.
Speaker 3 (00:42):
Okay, Honestly, I feel like your birthdays is that important
to you?
Speaker 4 (00:46):
Am I wrong?
Speaker 1 (00:47):
Well, it's not as important to me as the first
night of Kanka and the second night, not the third night.
I hate the third night. You know what, As a
birthday present to myself, I'm going to hang up on you.
Happy birthday to me indeed from Pushkin Industries. I'm Jonathan Goldstein,
(01:15):
and this is Heavyweight Today's episode The Messenger right after
the Break. As a kid growing up in Cleveland, Michael
(01:38):
loved acting. The only problem I wasn't very good. In fact,
he stank in every summer camp show. He was placed
in the back row. In a children's production of The
Hobbit the Musical. Backstage, a kid dressed as a dwarf
told Michael, my mom says, you're singing is awful. But
it didn't stop Michael. He nursed his acting bug all
(02:02):
the way through senior year, when one day he heard
about a movie being filmed in Cleveland and the director
needed lots of teens to be extras. Straight after school,
Michael made his way to the auditions. He was shown
into a room with the director and some of the crew.
They gave him a script and he started acting.
Speaker 5 (02:22):
And their eyes lit up, and I was asked to
keep reading, and so we did the scene again.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
We did it again and again and again, and all
the while Michael was overcome by a curious feeling.
Speaker 5 (02:37):
I was doing a good job.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Had you ever experienced this before, like, been in an
audition where people were responding this way?
Speaker 5 (02:45):
No, No, I was usually in auditions where they're like,
we can make him a tree.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
At the end of the audition, the director told Michael
that he was not going to be an extra. Michael
was going to be the star of the whole movie.
Why was he going to be the star of the
whole movie? Was it his brando esque brooding, his Shia
la Buffian intensity.
Speaker 5 (03:13):
They showed me the storyboard and I looked exactly like
the kid in the drawings of the storyboard. That's the
reason I got it. They were just like you look
like the kid we drew.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
The film was called The Messenger, based on a true story,
and the true story it was based on was a
little known World War II anecdote about a teenager named
Thomas E. Jones. Jones was a telegram messenger in Washington, DC.
On August fourteenth, nineteen forty five. He was sent to
(03:47):
deliver the telegram that announced Japan's unconditional surrender to the Allies,
but on the way to deliver the message, he got
pulled over for an illegal U turn, and thus the
end of World War Two was delayed by ten minutes.
Michael played the role of Thomas as he navigated that
fateful day.
Speaker 5 (04:08):
I show up to set and I just was immediately
involved in the magic of film. And they had to
fake the daylight by putting lights outside the window. And
I remember being like, Oh, you're not just like capturing
a moment, You're creating a moment.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
And the custodian of this exciting new world. The director
of the movie was a twenty five year old wonder
kid named Quincy. Quincy took to Michael immediately. Throughout the production,
he check in with Michael on the phone and take
him out for wings. Michael looked up to Quincy to.
Speaker 5 (04:40):
Meet someone who was orchestrating this giant production and then
for him to take time talk to me.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
I felt part of Even after filming wrapped, Quincy stayed
in touch, calling Michael with updates about the movie's release.
Speaker 5 (04:56):
We were going to premiere at the Philadelphia Film Festival.
I learned that it was a big production, one hundred
thousand dollars short film, which is a lot of money
for a short movie. The executive producer was this man
named Pat.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
Croche Pat pad Pad if you don't know the name.
Pat Croche was a media presence, an entrepreneur, famous in
the world of sports because he owned the Philadelphia seventy
six ers in the late nineties. He was a motivational speaker.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
I get up, I slap my palms together, It's going
to be a great.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Day, a noted pirate enthusiast.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
People ask me if I'm a pirate, and I say yes,
but three hundred years too late.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
And the kind of beloved pre me too, macho man
who'd show up unannounced on the set of the local
news just to scoop the anchor woman up into his arms.
Speaker 5 (05:49):
Accident on the jersey term.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
I guess, oh my god, because when you have that
much joi de vivre, what choice do you have?
Speaker 6 (05:59):
You know, whatever Pat comes in the room, you never
know what's.
Speaker 5 (06:01):
Gonna happen, rules because Pat crochy, because he's involved. The
movie gets a lot.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
Of press for a short film by an unknown director.
The Messenger received an unheard of amount of press. ESPN
carried a story with footage of Michael on set, and
there was a huge write up in USA Today. My
dad was.
Speaker 5 (06:24):
Flying that day. You know, he's in an airport. He
picks up the USA Today. He flips it open and sees,
you know, a two page spread with my picture on it.
So the family's excitement, the friend's excitement. Everyone starts to
just be like, this is a very big deal.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
Michael was planning on college in the fall, but as
anticipation around the movie grew, he started to reconsider.
Speaker 5 (06:49):
Leading up to the Philadelphia Film Festival, talking to Quincy,
He's like, Tom Hanks wants to meet with you. This
is a real chance, this is a real opportunity. This
is bigger than I imagined. I was like, maybe maybe
I try and pursue acting.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
Maybe Michael had been wrong all these years everyone had
been Maybe he really was a good actor, and it
took Quincy to discover it. Michael couldn't wait to walk
the red carpet, see himself on the big screen, and
enjoy a virgin appleteini with Tom Hanks.
Speaker 5 (07:26):
Did your parents come with you to the premiere? Well,
we didn't make it to the premiere. The movie was canceled.
So the week before the Philadelphia Film Festival premiere, I
got a phone call from Quincy and he was clearly crying,
(07:50):
and he told me that the movie wasn't going to
come out and nobody was going to see it. Because
it turns out that Quincy had lied and had told
a really big lie.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
The lie Michael's referring to had nothing to do with
his historical anecdote itself. That part was true, But over
the end credits, Quincy played footage of the actual present
day Thomas E. Jones being interviewed on his deathbed. The
only problem.
Speaker 5 (08:22):
That guy was an actor.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
It seems Quincy had just found a random old man,
slipped him into a gown, strapped him into a hospital bed,
and christened him Thomas e Jones. But there was one
thing Quincy wasn't counting on.
Speaker 5 (08:39):
Because the movie had received so much attention, Thomas E
Jones's real family found.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
Out, and Thomas E Jones's real family wasn't happy because,
as it turned out, the real Thomas E Jones was
very much alive, breathing, eating, sleeping, and not on a
deathbed but just a regular old bedbed, and so Pat
Crochey decided to pull the movie.
Speaker 5 (09:04):
I mean, it was crushing disappointment. I had the ticket
to go, I had the suit, I had all the
expectation I had in my brain, everything that could be
possible after and it's all gone, it's all it vanishes.
And then it's a wave of embarrassment because I have
to tell everybody.
Speaker 1 (09:25):
Michael had to go back to his friend's family, his
grandmother who'd been clipping every article about the movie, and say,
remember how I was going to be a big movie star.
It was all a fraud. And the guy who thought
I had talent also a fraud.
Speaker 5 (09:40):
And I never talked to Quincy again.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
Michael abandoned his dream of becoming an actor, but his
time on The Messengers still had its impact. It allowed
him to realize how much he loved being on a set,
loved the magic of creating a whole world from thin air,
and that pushed him towards a career in TV, writing
for shows on Disney and Nickelodeon. Meanwhile, Quincy's IMDb credits
(10:05):
have grown sparse.
Speaker 5 (10:06):
I always wondered what happened to Quincy becau to him.
There was part of me that wanted to tell him
that I've like succeeded, that I've pursued movies because of him.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
But along with that, Michael has a lingering question for Quincy.
Speaker 5 (10:21):
I never understood why you would take such a big
risk like that to make such a big line. It's
like you've set up a film crew to film this
guy on his deathbed and it wasn't like it just
seems like a bad plan.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
As Michael has climbed the ranks of show business, this
question has only gained in poignance. Why risk your reputation,
especially when the story was good enough as it was.
Speaker 5 (10:47):
Why did you lie.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
After the break searching for Quincy to become the messengers messenger?
But first, the best messages of all promotional messages from
our cherished sponsors, We really do love you guys ill
two gross. It's a little gross, eh, keep it in.
(11:28):
Why did Quincy lie? The more I think about it,
the less sense it all makes. Why go to the
trouble of hiring an old man and building a hospital set?
Why not just use the real Thomas E Jones?
Speaker 7 (11:44):
Hello?
Speaker 1 (11:45):
Oh, hello, my name is Jonathan Gould. I've so far
been unable to contact Quincy, so I reach out to
someone else who might have the answer. I was looking
for a Thomas E. Jones.
Speaker 7 (11:56):
He's deceased.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
Oh, I'm very sorry.
Speaker 7 (12:00):
Yes, I'm his widow. When he died, we would have
been married almost seventy years.
Speaker 1 (12:08):
Thomas's widow, Nancy, is eighty nine years old. She says
she doesn't know why Quincy didn't just go to Thomas himself,
But we get to talking and she tells me the
story of how she first met Thomas. It was through
his work as a messenger. It turns out Nancy's father
was Thomas's boss at the telegram office. She tells me
how in nineteen forty five, there was a dedicated telegraph
(12:31):
machine standing by for the sole purpose of awaiting the
Japanese surrender.
Speaker 7 (12:36):
And when that machine started ticking my father. He handed
his message first to my husband, who was a bicycle
messenger at sixteen years of age.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
Since the bike was too slow for such an important message,
a coworker agreed to drive Thomas in his car. Unfortunately,
he set out in the wrong direction, and thus the
most famous U turn in American history, or at least
the only one I've ever heard of, and I've read
my Howard Zinn. The U turn got Thomas and his
(13:07):
driver pulled over by a cap Of course.
Speaker 7 (13:10):
They were saying, we've got the Japanese piece a render
message here. Yeah, I've heard a lot of stories. But
the police realized it was the truth. They just pore
up the ticket.
Speaker 1 (13:19):
Wow, what a story is. Yeah, and it's a pretty
different story than the one in the Messenger. Not only
were the Joneses angry about the fake Thomas, but they
were also angry about what they considered the fake story.
In Quincy's version of events, Thomas is in no hurry
to deliver the message. He makes a casual pit stop
(13:39):
at a diner, where he hits on the waitress and
enjoys a large breakfast of pancakes, all while the war
rages on the Jones has read about that scene in
the media coverage of Quincy's movie, Newspaper write ups with
headlines like boys, pancake breakfast delayed the end of World
War Two.
Speaker 7 (14:01):
Well, you know, my kids were just serious about that.
Talking about kids, We're talking about people now sixty years old.
Speaker 3 (14:10):
We were outraged. The kids were outraged.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
This is Victoria Jones. She's one of Thomas and Nancy's
six children, all of whom when it came to the messenger,
were in agreement.
Speaker 8 (14:22):
Which was unusual for the six of us.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
This is Thomas's son, Mike Jones. He says that the
only one inclined to let the whole thing go was
Thomas himself.
Speaker 8 (14:33):
That was kind of my dad's attitude, like, oh, don't
make a big deal, don't get this person in trouble.
Speaker 3 (14:37):
We said, no, this is altering history.
Speaker 8 (14:41):
It just kind of portrayed him like as the slacker,
you know, like, oh, the heck with that, I'm going
to go and flirt and eat pancakes.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
Victoria says that although Quincy never reached out to her father,
he easily.
Speaker 3 (14:56):
Could have, just like you found my mother by getting
a few phone calls, Quincy could have found my father,
and he never tried.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
When she found out about the movie, Victoria messaged Quincy
several times, but she says he grew defensive and eventually
stopped answering.
Speaker 3 (15:12):
And then when my father died, I sent him a
message and said my father is now deceased.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
Huh. And he did not respond to that.
Speaker 3 (15:22):
No, I should go back and look. He might have said,
I'm sorry, and that was it.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
I tell the Joneses the story about Michael and how
I'm trying to reach Quincy myself.
Speaker 3 (15:32):
Good luck with that one.
Speaker 7 (15:34):
I'm sure he'll take this better left of dead story
out too.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
It turns out Nancy Jones is right. When I finally
get through to Quincy via email, his response is emphatic.
I'm not interested in talking about that project anymore, he writes,
And that's the last I hear from Quincy. What happens
(16:06):
next is years go by, unrelated to my failure to
speak with Quincy. But you never know. Heavyweight is canceled
and I lose my job. And while the story never
entirely leaves my mind, without an ergonomic office chair and
a long distance phone plan, there's not much I could
do about it. And then one day, while trying to
(16:27):
decide on a fun font for my resume, I receive
a message from Michael. He says he has an important
update to share. Hey Jonathan, Hey Michael, how are you good?
Speaker 5 (16:38):
How are you doing?
Speaker 1 (16:39):
It's been almost three years since Michael and I have spoken.
You have a son.
Speaker 5 (16:43):
Now, I've got a wife, I've got a son.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
The whole family is currently in New York, where Michael's wife, Katie,
is producing a movie. It turns out that Katie's movie
is the reason for Michael's update.
Speaker 5 (16:55):
He's the associate producer on the movie. His Name's Dan.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
Michael explains that while out for dinner with Dan, they
started talking about the industry, by which I mean the
show business industry. And one of the things people in
the indie enjoy chatting about most is how they got
into the industry industry. So Michael told Dan the story
of the Messenger, about the director Quincy, about the producer
(17:19):
Pat Crochy.
Speaker 5 (17:20):
And Dan is from Philly. Dan's parents are family friends
with the Crochies.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
You're kidding. Show biz connections in this life, There's not
a thing that doesn't come down to show biz connections.
It's not what you know when you know where you
know it or why you know it, but whom you know.
Pat Crochy was the executive producer on the movie, the
one who ultimately shut it all down. So, with Quincy
(17:51):
unwilling to talk, he's our best shot at figuring out
why Quincy had lied. At some point Pat had to
have demanded an explanation from Quincy. Dan agrees to talk
to his mom, who agrees to talk to Pat's daughter,
who agrees to talk with Pat, who then agrees to
talk with me. Mister Crochy, call me Pat. This is
(18:14):
Pat Pat Pat Crochy.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
One thing I like to say about your Heavyweight podcast
is that it always inculcates a high vibrational frequency.
Speaker 1 (18:25):
Can you say more about the high frequency?
Speaker 2 (18:28):
Well in the realm of form? If we're going to
transcend form.
Speaker 1 (18:31):
Pat Crochy has a white goatee that ends in a
point at his chest. He's in the Zenden, a large
room above the barn on his fifty three acre estate.
His walls are covered in Chinese and Tibetan calligraphy. He
says that these days he seldom makes any media appearances.
Is there any reason for that?
Speaker 2 (18:52):
Ah, it's a great question, you interviewer you well. Ten
years ago, something happened. My mind cracked.
Speaker 1 (18:59):
Pat's mind cracked in a meeting for one of his
restaurants he owned several, among them the Rum Barrel, which
is pirate themed.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
And I'm sitting there think it to myself, what the
hell am I doing here? I don't really give a
shit about the next great group or sandwich. This is
just more. I always was seeking more, another win, another
standing ovation, another best seller, another another more more. There
was never enough. Never.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
What Pat realized was that in spite of all his successes,
he wasn't really happy, and so he tried to change
his way of thinking. But it was a slow process.
Speaker 2 (19:40):
The ego in the was if I can change my mind,
that'd be another great bestseller and I would go back
on the speaking gain. It was all ego, all commercial,
but that's how Grace hooked me. Everything that unfolds is perfect.
I have this adage, the past has served his purpose perfectly,
(20:04):
But most people are cherry pickers. Where I wish that
would have changed, or I wish this, or no. The
purpose of the past, Jonathan, There's only one purpose to
bring you and me right here and now. Okay, the
past is smoke off the end of my cigar.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
For me, the past is also smoke off the end
of my cigar, juicy wafts of precious smoke to be
hysterically clod at, like a rabid raccoon attacking a helium
filled garbage can. And so I asked Pat to go
back to the past and explain how he became involved
with Quincy, Michael and the Messenger. He says it all
(20:42):
began in Key West at the pirate themed museum he
owned that sat beside the pirate themed restaurant he also owned.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
And you get to know all the piratical personalities on
that island, one of which was Reef. And Reef is
a salvager and he's really got a piratical nature. He
would even dress as a part and I really loved him.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
One day, Reef ast Pat for a favor. Could Pat
meet with his son, Quincy, who wanted to make a movie.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
And we got talking and he turned me on to
this script that he has been writing.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
And you liked it?
Speaker 2 (21:16):
Oh? Sure, are you kidding me? It's talking about this
young boy who has an effect on the ending of
World War two?
Speaker 1 (21:22):
And you hadn't known that story. I hadn't known that story.
Speaker 2 (21:25):
Oh no, I had never heard of it.
Speaker 1 (21:27):
What was your impression of Quincy when you first met him?
Speaker 4 (21:29):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (21:29):
I liked him and so and I believed everything Quincy
told me.
Speaker 1 (21:33):
When Quincy's lie came out, Pat was furious prior to.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
Ten years ago before you know, my minecrack. He's lucky
he didn't cross my path, or else he wouldn't be walking.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
Do you mean that you mean that literally?
Speaker 2 (21:47):
Uh, let's say no, since this is being taped. I'm
pretty street savvy. I couldn't believe that I got buffalo
(22:09):
like this as someone I thought was a friend, you know,
a friend, a Key West friend. I was so hurt
that I was angry. And when I'm angry, the old
Pat crocheap, the old corner guy man. Not only did
I lose the money, but all the contacts that I
made for him to get him in USA. Today, I
(22:30):
opened all these doors, through all my relationships, and then
all of a sudden, when I realized that it was
a fraud, that it was phony. I mean I had
to go and apologize to everyone.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
But Pat says that these days he doesn't have time
for rumination or regret.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
And even though I am here at peace. My body
has bell marrow cancer. I'm on chemo every twelve hours
of chemo mets incurable. However, I don't regret that. I
don't nothing. Oh wow, Jonathan, it's only my body, It's
(23:07):
not me.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
Before we get off, I ask Pat Michael's burning question,
why did Quincy lie? But Pat says he doesn't ask
the why questions only Quincy. Pat says, if he goes deep,
can answer that. Patt and Quincy haven't spoken for decades.
Their last interactions were angry ones. Right after Quincy's lie
(23:36):
came out all the same, Pat offers to reach out
to Quincy. He contacts a friend who he thinks might
have Quincy's phone number. I don't have high hopes, but
Patt and Quincy do end up speaking, and afterwards, for
reasons I can't discern, Quincy agrees to speak with Michael.
(24:11):
A video call between Michael and Quincy is arranged, and
while we wait for Quincy, I asked Michael the opening
question I learned in jayschool. Are you in a bathroom now?
Speaker 5 (24:23):
This is our tiny little kitchen in our apartment.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
It's late at night, and Michael gives me a tour
of his darkened New York apartment.
Speaker 5 (24:31):
And there's our Carson's little lunchbox.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
Very sweet. Where is he right now?
Speaker 5 (24:36):
Carson is asleep.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
What a lazy bones? And then Hello. Quincy enters the chat.
It's been almost twenty years since he and Michael were
together on set. Quincy was twenty five at the time.
He's in his forties now.
Speaker 6 (24:52):
It's nice to see Michael's face. I haven't seen his
face in a long time.
Speaker 5 (24:56):
And it was good to see you.
Speaker 1 (24:58):
Michael and Quincy begin by reminiscing about their time together
about making the movie.
Speaker 6 (25:02):
There are two scenes that really stand up for me.
One is when all the kids are in the.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
Diner and the exchange memory from what feels like unfraught
territory stuff like the casting and the fun of being
on set.
Speaker 5 (25:14):
My favorite scene was doing doing the U turn. You
had me drive stick shift and I lied when I auditioned.
You're like, can you drive stick And I was like,
I can drive stick. I couldn't drive stick I was
I never heard that, I know, and I was like
stalling out, like grinding the gears.
Speaker 1 (25:35):
It feels like Michael is trying to make Quincy comfortable,
show that Quincy wasn't the only one capable of lie
was a fraud.
Speaker 6 (25:44):
Into the car from like pulling his hair out to
I thought the kids could drive.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
But it doesn't take long before the conversation turns to
the elephant in the room, and it's Quincy who brings
it up.
Speaker 6 (25:56):
I remember wanting to reach out to you in years
the past. Yeah, I felt a lot of guilt because,
like this film, everybody had put so much sweat and
tears into it, and uh, it was just nothing like evaporated.
And I thought, my god, I failed every single person.
And then I became like national news, and then the
(26:18):
blogs were writing about.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
Me because The Messenger got a colossal amount of press.
When the truth came out, Quincy received a proportional amount
of backlash, similar to how the tidal wave of The
Messenger's success hit Michael, the bad news about The Messenger's
failure hit Quincy. He was at the airport reading that
(26:40):
day's newspaper over someone's shoulder and.
Speaker 6 (26:43):
They were reading the article about me and how I
had lied, and that hit me like I'd say a
ton of bricks, But a ton of bricks would have
felt like a pillow compared.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
To what that was how are you coping?
Speaker 6 (26:59):
I was in denial. I kept going back to this
like excuse of well, the Titanic, right, the Titanic, it's
a fake movie. It's based on a true story. There
was no Jack and Rowe, and yet what I had
done was totally different. I mean I was literally trying
to pretend that this other actor i'd hired was Thomas Jones.
And it took me a year or two to sort
(27:21):
of come to terms and just be like, man, I
really fucked up.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
Which brings us to the question of why why swap
a random old man for Thomas E. Jones? To explain
Quincy starts with how he came to the story of
the Messenger in the first place.
Speaker 6 (27:38):
I'd been working that summer at the Truman Little White
House in q Wes, and sort of in my onboarding
at that museum, they told us to read David McCullough's
Truman biography, and it was in that book that I
saw this one sentence about Thomas E. Jones and The Messenger, And.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
It was literally one sentence, one sentence in parentheses, in
the middle of a thousand page book.
Speaker 6 (28:01):
And I thought, God, what an amazing story.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
But Quincy thought, you know what would make it an
even more amazing story if he could find Thomas E. Jones,
interview him and include that interview in the movie. And
in Quincy's telling, he did look for Thomas Jones.
Speaker 6 (28:18):
I had hired literal investigators to go find this person,
two different guys, and they both said, like, you know,
we can't. We can't find them, but we found these
two death certificates that kind of match up.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
So the death certificates felt like enough. Quincy concluded that
the Thomas E. Jones he was looking for probably was dead.
Speaker 6 (28:39):
And I didn't share that with anybody because in my head,
I just saw the story rolling out. He's like, we
were going to tell the story and then the end
you saw the real guy and that I couldn't get
away from that story.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
And in the absence of the real guy, the next
best thing was a fake guy.
Speaker 6 (28:55):
Oh well, that decease Thomas Jones will never know and
anybody that sees the movie, it's gonna be so great
and they're gonna be crying and laughing at the end
of it that they won't care.
Speaker 1 (29:05):
For this role. There was no casting, no auditions. In fact,
the part of Thomas E. Jones wasn't played by an
actor at all.
Speaker 6 (29:13):
He was actually a tour guide at the Truman Little
White House.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
Quincy had asked a work friend from the museum to
do the job.
Speaker 6 (29:23):
And then the real Thomas Jones found me. And I
certainly remember that feeling. It was like a disgust I
felt for myself.
Speaker 1 (29:35):
In the aftermath, Quincy left the film world for many years.
He was fired from his job at the Truman Museum.
He eventually found work clerking in a bookstore and making
wedding videos. Well, this was the first time a live
Quincy's had been so brutally exposed. He admits that the
lying itself was something he'd been leaning on since his
teen years.
Speaker 6 (29:56):
You know, I had come from a fairly poor family
in Key West, and I had attended a very exclusive
prep school up in western Massachusetts called Deerfield Academy, where
I had no business being there, And so I I
felt this like sense of just like always needing to exaggerate.
People would be like, oh, I'm going to Paris for
want or break, and I'd be like, oh, gosh, you know, Paris,
(30:18):
It's great. I didn't even know what country it was.
In it was like a daily thing. Freshman year, someone
had a picture Jimmy Hendrix a poster and I remember
looking at his name and thinking it looked kind of French,
and I was like, oh, I love Gym Hendrye. And
I remember him looking at me and being like, what.
Speaker 1 (30:44):
For Quincy. Lies became a beautiful wall between himself and
everyone else. Lies protected him but also isolated him. It
took the collapse of The Messenger to finally get him
to stop, and.
Speaker 6 (30:56):
It was actually very relieving because it took a lot
of weight off my shoulders that I didn't have to
make every story ten percent better. I didn't have to.
As hard as that was, that was the most important, lesson,
full stop period of my life.
Speaker 5 (31:19):
After we did The Messenger, I didn't take that as
anything that stopped me.
Speaker 1 (31:25):
When Quincy is done sharing the effects The Messenger had
on his life, Michael shares the role that played for him.
Speaker 5 (31:31):
Seeing the camera, seeing the crew, it blew my mind.
I didn't know that this was possible. I didn't know
that this is what it looked like.
Speaker 1 (31:41):
And I was in It's Quincy and The Messenger that
inspired Michael's career, but it isn't just that Quincy gave
him a professional life. He gave him a life.
Speaker 5 (31:51):
I married this beautiful person who she's a movie producer,
and we have this amazing kid called Carson who's two
and a half years old. And all of this life
that I have, this partner, of this career, this kid,
it comes from this wild, weird, random moment in Cleveland,
Ohio where you decided to cast me in this short film.
(32:14):
And it's all this to say, like I never got
to just thank you. I've always appreciated that door that
you showed to me and allowed me to walk through
that moment, that time, that invitation that you gave me
to be on set changed the entire direction of my life.
Speaker 6 (32:40):
That means a lot to me. I I look back
on that time and totally with totally different eyes. It
was one of the most difficult things in my life.
And I can't tell you like how meaningful it is
(33:01):
to me to hear that someone had something good come
out of it, because it certainly didn't feel like that.
I was convinced that it would ruin everyone's life, because
that's what I was feeling at that moment.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
Quincy just assumed anyone involved with the messenger would still
be furious with him, and so a few weeks back,
when he saw Pat Croche's name pop up on his phone,
he says he almost felt too scared to pick up,
but when they spoke, instead of yelling at him, Pat
told him it was time to let it go.
Speaker 6 (33:37):
As soon as he said that those words let it go,
I just sat out in front of my house and
cried for a good twenty minutes. I didn't know before
we talked today, actually genuinely what you were going to
say today.
Speaker 5 (33:54):
You know you were I met you as this person
I looked up to.
Speaker 6 (33:58):
You're gonna make me cry. I'm really, really genuinely happy
for you.
Speaker 5 (34:07):
Thank you for taking time just to talk to me.
It really thank you for the life I got to
have because of it.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
Recently I got to share in that life. One day,
leaving our New York studio, Michael says he's off to
meet his wife Katie. Her crew is filming just a
few blocks away, and Michael asks if I'd like to come,
and I say sure. On the corner of twentieth Street
and Seventh Avenue, shooting is in full swing. The movie
(34:43):
stars John Tatruro as an aging pickpocket who ends up
with a thumb drive containing a crypto wallet on it.
Michael and I are waved past the protected perimeter and
Katie gives me a pair of small headphones as I
watch take after take of John Totruro slamming down a
payphone and screaming fuck in fake fury. I feel like
(35:03):
a ten year old on a field trip. All around us,
the city bustles as normal. We are tucked away in
our make believe world, watching make believe things. It's all
a lie, of course, but one that we're all in on.
Speaker 9 (35:19):
And how good.
Speaker 4 (35:55):
Now that the fern ures returning to it's goodwill home,
Now that the last month's raft is scheming.
Speaker 2 (36:09):
The damage to possum.
Speaker 4 (36:11):
Take this moment to desolee too felt around for five team.
Speaker 1 (36:24):
From Things That Accident Lee. This episode of Heavyweight was
produced by Khalila Holt and me Jonathan Goldstein, along with
Moheeny mcgauker and Phoebe Flanagan. Our supervising producer is Stevie Lane.
Editorial guidance from Emily Condon. Special thanks to Lucy Sullivan,
(36:46):
Karen Chakerjee and Nazanine RAFs and Johnny Our production council
is Jake Flanagan. Emmamonger mixed the episode with original music
by Christine Fellows, John K. Sampson and Bobby Lord. Additional
scoring by Blue Dot Sessions, Bobble Principal and Shanghai Restoration Project.
Our theme song is by the Weakerlands, courtesy of Epitaph Records.
(37:06):
Follow us on Instagram at Heavyweight Podcast, or email us
at Heavyweight at Pushkin dot Fm. We'll be back next
week with a new episode.
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