Rocky Patel The Edge A-10: Gladiator 2 & Lost Films

Join Mike and Nate for the premiere of Season 4 of Nice Ashes! In this episode, they light up the Rocky Patel Edge A-10, a stunning barber pole cigar that combines a Connecticut wrapper with a Maduro leaf. With rich flavors and engaging conversation, they discuss the complexities of the stick while pairing it with Guinness and coffee.

The duo also dives into a spirited debate about Gladiator 2, sharing thoughts on its historical accuracy and character development compared to the original Gladiator. With various tangents through film history, they explore lost films and their rediscoveries, highlighting the cultural significance behind these cinematic gems.

Expect laughter, insights, and a deep dive into cigars and cinema! Don’t forget to check out their Instagram for some visuals and updates. Enjoy the show!

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Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Welcome to Nice Ashes, I'm Mike.

(00:05):
And I'm Nate.
What are we smoking for episode one of season four?
Episode one, we are going to smoke a nice stick.
It's the Rocky Patel, the Edge A10.
It's like the steak sauce, right?
Yeah, that's right.
10th anniversary Edge.
This is a beautiful barber pole with a Connecticut wrapped with a Maduro leaf.

(00:26):
It does look nice.
The packaging is intense.
Yes.
It's very good.
It feels not overly firm, but firm with a little sponge, which is kind of what you want.
I think Mike and I are in person, so we're just fondling our sticks and looking at each
other and also holding onto the cigar with the other hand.
Absolutely.
And we're both pairing this with some Guinness and Mike has a little bit of coffee left as

(00:48):
well.
It's typically earlier in the day than we typically record, which is fine.
It is.
And the coffee is a Nicaraguan dark roast with a shot of espresso in it.
Nice.
I'm liking the first few puffs of this, Mike.
Have you smoked this one before?
I have to admit, I got these cigars at an actual cigar lounge during my travels and

(01:08):
it was a place that looked like a head shop and it was.
We talked about it.
It had laughing gas and all these like kratom and things that used to be illegal for sure.
Like the Delta Vate stuff.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like edibles and glass and all this stuff.
But they had a massive humidor, probably the size of this room.
Oh, nice.
And I was like, I have never seen those, so I'm like five of them or whatever.

(01:31):
Yeah, for sure.
That was like a hundred and seventy dollar cigar trip.
Sarah found some Havana honeys and stuff.
But yeah, I did smoke one because I got it at a lounge.
Yeah, yeah.
Good deal.
Liking it so far.
It's got some spice, some good spice to it.
It has an upper spice profile and that Connecticut leaf is actually really coming through.
Yeah.
You can get that mellowness, but then it's got a top note of spice.

(01:51):
It's very interesting.
This is what you want a barbapole to be, like where it's complex, you know.
Not like the ogre.
No, not like the ogre.
I don't want to slam the ogre any more than we already did.
For the listeners, because we forgot and I remember, we both rated the ogre as a four,

(02:12):
which for a cigar that cost 15 bucks, wasn't that a 15 dollar cigar?
Yeah, somewhere between like I think the 13.99 and 14.99 range, somewhere in there.
That should be, I'm not saying it should be better than a four, but we've smoked so many
cigars that are five dollars that are fours and fives.
Fours and fives, yeah.
It's a little disappointing.
It was a little disappointing and you know, we did have the only other Asylum 13 we smoked,

(02:35):
we both loved so much that it probably colored our opinions of the cigars that they make
maybe.
And if we came in with not as high as expectations, because it was a really good looking barbapole,
we loved the previous cigar we'd smoked from them.
So our expectations, even if we weren't expecting it to be phenomenal, were like subconsciously
a little higher probably than normal.

(02:56):
It would have been, but that's the same for this.
I'm a big fan of the Rocky Patel Edge series and if this was bad, I would probably rate
it a two.
You know?
Yep, yep, yep.
For sure.
So what are we going to talk about?
Well, we started talking as we were setting up all the audio equipment, which is not that
much, but we were setting it up and talking and we had both seen, and this is now March

(03:18):
2025, so it's been out for months and I'm sure it's on streaming now and everything
like that.
But Mike and I had both seen, no, you haven't seen it.
I have not seen Gladiator 2.
I saw Gladiator 1.
Okay, we're talking about Gladiator 2 and he was telling me some of his friends had
some issues with it and I have some issues with it, though not the same as his friend
who was saying that they didn't like it wasn't historically accurate.

(03:40):
And my point was the first one wasn't terribly historically accurate either and so the second
one kind of follows that same kind of veering off the main timeline alternate multiverse
in ancient Rome, I guess.
Pretty much.
That's fairly accurate.
Yeah, yeah.
And I...
It's like historical fiction, you know?
Yeah, it's historical fiction.
It's loosely based on real people and things, but...

(04:01):
It's totally fine to veer off and they're using real characters.
I from what I understand, Demsel Washington's character was actually a real character.
Yeah.
Obviously this Lucius guy, the name is real, but...
Well, he was real, but he died.
And then Maximus from the first one was kind of similar to Jesus in some scholars' eyes
where he's kind of a combination of multiple people that were alive at the time.

(04:24):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Maximus was...
Yeah, that's a good way to put it.
Yeah, some scholars also believe that about the character of Jesus where it was kind of
they took several traveling preachers and kind of molded them into one to kind of unify
behind.
Yeah, and that wouldn't be the first instance of that happening in the ancient period.
Not trying to piss everyone off episode one, but...

(04:44):
No, no, no, no, no.
History is weird because Gladiator and Gladiator 2 take place in the year 100 or something.
So...
180 should be right in there.
Yeah, somewhere in there because...
So I went to go see Gladiator and the night before I went to go see Gladiator, I watched...
Or Gladiator 2.
The night before I watched Gladiator 2, I was at home and I watched Gladiator Extended
and then I went and watched Gladiator 2.

(05:07):
And then the night after that, I watched the Extended Cut of Kingdom of Heaven.
So it was like a three night Ridley Scott night.
Sure.
And not like Kingdom of Heaven 2, which I'm sure is not particularly historically accurate,
but...
Yeah, I mean, you know, I don't know.
I feel that it was less about the actual history.
I mean, it takes place during one of the Crusades.
It takes place a thousand years after Gladiator.
It's just like 1100 something like that.

(05:28):
Well, yeah, Saladin was a character.
I think he was 1200s, 1100s.
So they take, you know, I'm sure they take liberties as they always do.
And I guess watch the Extended.
I'd never seen it before and everything I read online was the theatrical is terrible.
Watch the Extended, which adds about 45 minutes.
So you're sitting at a three hour movie, but it's got Orlando Bloom, Liam Neeson, other
people that are famous that I can't remember right now.

(05:49):
Did that one have Omar Sharif?
I can't remember.
Of course, I'm going to be called names because I can't remember who played Saladin, but I
thought it was Omar Sharif.
Yeah, it was like, there was a great cast all around and a good story.
I don't know that I'll watch it again because of it, because it's three hours and it's not
as exciting as Lord of the Rings Extended.
So probably devote my longer movie nights to that.

(06:09):
But the point is in the first Gladiator, and this is where I really want Mike's opinion
because this is the part that really kind of got me going against Gladiator 2.
Gladiator 2 is a fine movie.
The battle scenes are great.
The CGI is not great, which is kind of silly because one of the trivia points for Gladiator
was Ridley wanted to use a rhinoceros, but they didn't have any trained rhinoceros.

(06:29):
CGI wasn't good enough, so they used the tigers in the Gladiator ring for the first one.
Now CGI should be good enough to render a believable rhinoceros, and yet they chose
not to.
So what do you do?
That's an interesting criticism, I guess, or whatever.
I had less issue with the rhino.
I had more issue.
I mean, the rhino didn't, rhino was not, but they put sharks in the Colosseum and the sharks

(06:53):
looked really, really fakey.
And it reminds me of that scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom where you've
got that bridge.
It's like 500,000 feet above the ocean, not the ocean, the river in this gorge.
It's not really 500,000 feet, but it's like way up there, right?
And they got this rope bridge across this canyon.

(07:13):
Way down there's like real sharp rocks and a river.
And you're like, well, hitting water at that height is concrete.
You're going to die.
And what did the filmmakers decide to do?
They put in a bunch of alligators twisting and gnashing their teeth down there as if
like the two things that would kill you, the rocks or the water, you need a third thing
to make it more dangerous so you, the viewer at home knows it's bad to fall off of this

(07:33):
thing.
Yeah, you got to up the danger level.
Yeah.
So they put, they put, that's what they did in Gladiator 2 is they had like little ship
replicas that they rode out into the thing and they had like 15 great white sharks, CGI
swimming around terribly so that if you fell in the water, the shark would get you.
And it's like, well, you're probably already have like an arrow or a sword through your
skull.
So how much of the shark do you need?

(07:55):
And I don't know if that's historically accurate.
How would they catch sharks?
I don't know if the sharks are historically accurate.
I know that they did flood the Colosseum.
Oh, I know that too.
I just don't know that they put sharks in there.
They did have Greek fire and they did use Greek fire in the Colosseum to my understanding,
which we don't know the exact, it's kind of like ancient napalm.
Okay.
So they would light the ships on fire and they would light the top of the water on fire.

(08:15):
Yeah.
That would have been cooler to see.
Right.
And that would be slightly more accurate.
Yeah.
So in the first Gladiator and Mike, you can tell me if you remember differently, because
I had a little discussion with my buddy where he was leaning one way and I was leaning the
other way.
The between, is it Lucila?
Commodus' sister.
Yeah.
Yes.

(08:36):
Now her son Lucius, she kept saying his father is dead.
And one of the very first scenes that we see her, it's on the battlefield when Commodus
and Lucila come to the battlefield to see Marcus Aurelius, the general who's dying or
being killed.
And-
Which never happened, by the way.
Commodus never went to the battlefield.
No.
And actually Commodus and Marcus co-ruled for several years before Marcus Aurelius did

(08:59):
die in his military tent.
The cause is yet unknown.
It could have been the plague, which was on at the time.
Yeah.
It could have been that he was old.
Could have been murdered.
Yeah.
Could have just been old too.
Yeah.
He lived a long life.
That's some speculation.
The moral of the story is that Commodus was nowhere near.
Yeah.
And the other moral of the story is the first thing, one of the first things Maximus says

(09:21):
to Lucila is, I'm sorry to hear about your husband who had just apparently died or recently
died.
Sure.
And then they're talking about whatever.
And you can kind of get the inklings a little bit of, like there's a history there, but
you don't really know what the history is.
And then he goes, how old is your son now?
And she goes, oh, he's about eight.
And he says, same age as my son.
Right.

(09:42):
And then of course she kind of comes onto him more throughout the movie, but they made
the very conscious decision according to the commentary and other statements that they've
made to not make it a sexual relationship because they wanted to have the murdered wife
and son and him trying to get back to see them in the afterlife, the forefront of the
story and not trying to-

(10:03):
Do some sex intrigue.
Sex intrigue or they wanted him to be unlike the rest of Rome, which is pure and morally
straight and whatever.
Right.
They wanted Maximus to be the only good guy in the bad system.
The ideal.
Yeah.
And in the second one, so we know Lucius is eight in the first one, according to the dialogue

(10:24):
in the first one.
Right.
In the second one, Lucille is saying, oh yeah, when Maximus was doing all the Maximus stuff,
Lucius was only 12.
So they're adding four years onto him.
See, that to me is problematic because now you have a history that is a canon, if you
will, in your fake universe.
Yeah.
If you can't follow your fake rules-
You have to have rules in your story.

(10:45):
Why are you making the second one?
Yeah.
Otherwise, nothing makes sense.
And then they not only doubled down, but they triple quadrupled down on saying that Lucius
is honest to God, Maximus's son, which had been a fan theory since the first movie came
out, but there was no real proof.
And my buddy was saying like, well, at the end of the first one, he asks if Lucius is
safe.

(11:05):
So it must be his son.
I said, man, this is a guy that lost his wife and his child and he has no child and his
dying thoughts are of his child.
And he's of course, he's going to ask about somebody else's child, especially since that
child came and saw him in the gladiator cage.
Right.
I agree with your interpretation.
This is a phenomenon and I know you've heard of it.
It's called shipping.
We had a whole episode on shipping.

(11:26):
Yeah, it's called shipping.
You have a memory except for the stuff we talk about on the show.
With my defense, I'm not always in the clearest frame of mind at times when we do the show.
Same.
Short term memory loss and all that, if you know what I mean.
But shipping.
Shipping, yeah, it's shipping.

(11:49):
That's not cool.
Or you want characters that don't have anything going on, but you want them to be in a relationship
and then you create a whole fan fiction story of that.
Sometimes just in your head, it's not really like a full story to be published, but you're
just like, oh, that'd be so hot if those two were like.
Oh, sure.
In Harry Potter when we were younger, that was a huge, the shipping was a huge online

(12:11):
fan fiction writing thing, which I used to read Harry Potter fan fiction.
Used to?
What's that over here on the table?
Snape's secret chamber.
Snape and Hermione everybody, it's real.
And it was interesting because right before they fully came out and said it multiple times,
there were two other characters.

(12:32):
It doesn't really matter.
If you've seen the movie, great.
But there's two other characters and they were kind of, well, one was Denzel Washington's
character and one of the other, I don't know, senators or statesmen or something.
They were talking about Lucius and they were like, well, I heard.
Then they were saying that Lucilla was forced into an arranged marriage when she was 14
years old and she was already pregnant or something.

(12:54):
And the husband they chose for her didn't like women.
And then they suspected that it was Commodus that was actually the father because he had
a really weird incestuous fascination with her through the first film.
Yes.
So they took the characteristics from Caracalla and put it onto Commodus from what I understand.
This is of course my memory serving me because I believe Caracalla did actually marry his

(13:14):
sister.
Could be.
I know Commodus was actually liked by the people for a bit until he started using grain
to pay for gladiator games and stuff like that.
Yeah.
He was pretty popular when he first started.
And then he got kind of egotistical and started naming things after himself.
Yeah.
There's speculation that he might've had a disease that caused him to lose his mind

(13:35):
somewhere during the middle part of his reign because he was emperor for like 10 years.
He continued doing the Marcus Aurelius stuff for the first five years and then it went
downhill.
Yeah.
So there was that speculation put out in there because I'm sure they wanted to nip that fan
theory in the bud so they could drop their big bombshell which is Lucius's Marcus Aurelius's

(13:56):
or not Marcus Aurelius, Maximus, I can't remember the full name.
And it's weird because every time they say anything about Lucius's father, they use Maximus's
full fucking name.
Right.
The full one, not just Maximus, the full one.
And it's very kind of like distracting because you're sitting there and then it's like, okay,
Lucius's father is Maximus blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

(14:19):
And you're like, okay, I saw the first one.
You can just say Maximus.
But every single time either Lucius or Lucilla or anybody talked about Maximus, it was the
full fucking name.
Maximus Decimus Meridius.
Yes.
I mean, I knew it was something like that, but I didn't want to say Aurelius because
all the Antinine Emperors, there was a series of five, they all had the last name Aurelius

(14:42):
which they were all adopted.
Real history is all interesting.
Way too confusing to put into a movie.
Probably yes.
So they made all this and then so you're sitting there and I'm sure everybody else is just
like, oh, I knew it, I knew it.
That's what Ridley's hoping everybody thinks.
And I'm like, okay, so if the kids are the same age, is he just banging two women at

(15:02):
the same time?
Then why did he, like, what's the story of how they weren't together anymore?
And they were civil to each other the whole first film.
So what the-
Right.
Well, and in Rome, you would never name a son after the mother.
The son would be named after the father or after a male relative that was famous.
It'd be Marcus.
They would name their son Marcus after her father.

(15:23):
You know what I mean?
Or whatever.
And then they added all this extra political stuff.
And the first movie is very subtly political.
There's a lot of politics moving going on in the first Gladiator.
And they tried to add all this like kind of superficial politics.
And what happens is after the events of the first one, they show you through de-aging

(15:43):
and using other actors, maybe, or maybe it's a deleted scene from the first one or something.
Right after Maximus, Decimus, what have you, dies, Lucille takes Lucius and they run outside
the Colosseum and she gives him to like a Roman guard and says, take him away.
He's got to go because he's at risk right now.
And then the movie Gladiator 2 starts with this character who's obviously Lucius, but

(16:04):
he goes by a different name.
And then he has a fucking flashback showing his mom, which is obviously her.
And then she comes to confront him and say she's his mother.
And he goes, I have no mother.
And then later there's a big like, it feels like it was meant to be a gotcha moment.
Like it totally is Lucius.
We all know it now.
And it's like, no, that was known from like the first frame of the film.

(16:28):
Basically, he's credited as Lucius in the movie.
Like you look at the IMDB page and go, oh, who's in this movie?
Oh yeah, so and so Lucius.
Like it's not really a secret.
Right.
Unless you're not going to reveal the cast before the film comes out or whatever.
Or bill him, credit him as the other name.
And then nobody knows who it is until later.
But one, why would he be at risk?
He was the, with the passing of Commodus, he was the emperor.

(16:49):
Yeah, he would have been.
Yeah.
And the royal guard would have been true to him.
Right.
He would have been.
And then his mother would have been the regent.
The acting regent until he became of age to take full control or whatever.
Right?
Right.
This is not how real history turned out, by the way, everybody.
But real history is Commodus was killed by the head of the Praetorian guard.
Yeah.
Who then took over for a bit.

(17:10):
Who then took over and so on and so forth.
But yeah, if the story, in the universe of the story, the child would have been the new
emperor.
Yeah, it's the new emperor and there wouldn't have been anything.
And people would have likely been pretty happy because the child probably wouldn't have kept
the games going or his mother's counsel.
And this is the grandson of the greatest emperor that the empire had ever had.
Yeah.

(17:31):
It was extremely popular.
Yeah.
Extremely popular.
So then Lucius has to come back and go through the exact same plot points as the first gladiator.
So he gets captured after a battle and has to go through the gladiator ring and blah,
blah, blah and all that stuff.
And it's like, well, one, it doesn't matter who his father is.
You should have done the Blade Runner.

(17:51):
Does it matter if Deckard's a replicant or not?
No.
And thank God Blade Runner 2049 didn't come down on either side of the line.
They kept it gray on purpose.
I never watched the Blade Runner 2049.
Okay.
I should have watched it.
It's really good.
Yeah, I should have watched it.
It's really good.
That's one sequel that's really good.
Like, you know, sequel with a long time span in between.
Right.
I try to get my wife into watching old school sci-fi and she doesn't have the attention

(18:15):
span to pay to the details.
Yeah.
The older, the more classic sci-fis are a lot less action and a lot more like intrigue
and dialogue and what's going on.
I had her watch Soylent Green with me and she was like, it's okay.
It's payfall.
What do you mean it's okay?
It's one of the greatest movies ever.
Did you do Logan's Run?
No, I should never watch it.

(18:36):
Yeah.
But yeah, so anyway, then they were trying to make this whole point and they were trying
to make him being Maximus's son very important.
And I'm sitting here the whole time going, this is Marcus Aurelius's grandson for God
sakes.
He's the rightful heir to the throne.
Right.
He has a built in power base for sure.
He doesn't need to be Marcus's son.
Right.

(18:56):
He can still be a fan of Marcus because he met him as a child, right?
He can still idolize Marcus and do all the Marcus things that he does in the film.
But Marcus doesn't have, or not Marcus, I'm sorry, Maximus.
But Maximus doesn't have to be his dad.
He can still idolize Maximus and what he did in the Coliseum and not have to be related
to him.
He's already related to Marcus Aurelius.
He doesn't need an additional like badass relationship.

(19:19):
Yeah.
His backstory is he's the grandson of the greatest emperor who's ever lived.
Right?
Like that's...
Yeah.
Yeah.
And the way the movie ended, because he of course wins and takes power and reverts everything
back to the Senate, power of the Senate.
And they did a little like title card at the beginning, kind of setting the stage for the
historical whatever, right?
And they did the same thing with gladiator, you know, Marcus Aurelius was fighting this

(19:40):
war, blah, blah, blah.
And I have expected, because it was such like a feel good, happy, happy ending.
I want, I was expecting them to put up a little title card that said, and there were no wars
or pain or suffering ever again in Rome.
It's like they finally achieved the vision of Rome that Marcus Aurelius' dying wish in
gladiator one was.

(20:01):
Right.
It's like, oh, now we're in utopia and nothing bad will ever happen again.
And we're all happy.
So it just didn't make sense for them to shoehorn in that kind of relationship with Maximus
because he already had acclaimed everything.
He can still idolize Maximus.
Well, and they had a built in story, let's just say in this fake universe where they
were fighting the Germans who were fighting the Saracens on their border.

(20:24):
Yeah.
Right.
And they're just pushing migration and they could have done a historical action film based
on more real events and not shoehorned in modern politics.
Well, and I don't even care.
I don't even care if they wanted to do a gladiator two and close out the story of Lucius and,
you know, Lucilla, Lucia, whatever.
And that's fine.
And like close it out.

(20:44):
But you don't have to shoehorn in and change the age of the kid from the first one to try
and make your shipping thing work.
Right?
Right.
Like maybe they did have a relationship, but the other possibility is Marcus Aurelius viewed
Maximus as a son.
So he's obviously been around the family for a long period of time.
Right.

(21:05):
Potentially.
Potentially.
You could make that part of the story.
Now in gladiator one, Marcus asks Maximus to describe his home.
So he's never been to his house, but that doesn't mean they haven't been together for
a long time.
He's a general, so they could know each other from work.
Yeah, from work.
They stop off for beers after slaying the Germans.
In real life, Marcus Aurelius lived, what, like 20 years on the battlefield?

(21:28):
Most of his life was spent fighting wars actively.
So there's no reason for him to have gone to Spain to the plantation of his general.
So he viewed him as a son, and of course through the 20 years or whatever of battle, that's
still a long time and whatever.
That's enough for him to be a family friend and to possibly potentially have seen Lucius

(21:50):
be born.
For sure.
There's no reason to think that they wouldn't have met each other because Spain to the Danube
River is a long distance on horseback.
It's a car trip now.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I mean, there's all sorts of other explanations that make way more sense than Marcus Aurelius
was banging two women at the same time, but he really liked the one versus the other.

(22:13):
They both had sons, but he only liked the one that got killed and didn't like the other
one.
That doesn't even make any sense.
That's so out of character for how they portrayed Maximus in the first one.
It's out of character and-
It doesn't even make any sense.
Your mistress is not going to be the daughter of the emperor.
That's not how that works, right?
Yeah.
It's the other way.
It's the other way.
Yeah, the other way is how it works.

(22:36):
So at any rate, Gladiator 2 puts a bad taste in my mouth because it's like trying to drag
Gladiator 1 through the mud a bit, or like he's not being faithful to his own story in
the first one.
Right.
Gladiator 1 is on the edge of being a classic film.
And Gladiator 1 doesn't need a sequel.
Just like, guess what else doesn't need a sequel?
Braveheart.
What are they going to do?

(22:56):
They're making a sequel to Braveheart?
They're not making a sequel to Braveheart, but it's like your main character from your
movie dies.
Let's make a sequel.
Right.
Who wants to see that?
I mean, the sequel is about Robert the Bruce.
I mean, it's the same with Gladiator because Maximus dies.
And then they're like, years later, 24 years later, let's make a sequel to Gladiator.
Oh, but our badass main character is dead.
So let's just reinvent him as the son of Lucilla and go from there.

(23:22):
And it's like, okay, but you could make a really interesting story or you could do what
you did and make it not good.
Right, right, right.
And people, this is a total aside, I guess.
They criticized the grandson of the emperor marrying some random woman who is the only
woman in the Roman army, which at the time, the Saracens were still active and they did

(23:42):
have women in their armies, most likely.
Right.
It's pretty rare.
Yeah.
Well, and I did read that the female archers in Gladiator 1 riding on the chariots was
historically accurate.
Oh, yeah.
They did have female archers.
Oh, yeah.
It's not that they didn't exist.
But I think that it's rare in the historical record to have it happen.
Yeah.
So we've been talking for about half an hour about Gladiator 2, which is actually not the

(24:05):
topic of the episode.
We're going to get there.
And you got some weird canoeing.
I got some weird, it's uneven.
The first half of the cigar, I kind of didn't rotate it.
So it's my fault.
So now I'm kind of smoking off.
I'm getting it even by smoking.
Yeah.
I'm going to get a picture.
You get your face in there.
People want to see you.
Our Instagram followers want to know.

(24:25):
Okay.
Check our Instagram for that spicy pic from Mike.
Yeah, exactly.
And yeah.
So anyway, the whole point of this is we just happen to be talking about Gladiator 2 before
we started recording.
And my topic is on movies anyway.
And I don't want to go through all of the topic because there's so many of these films
that I'm not going to go through all of them.

(24:47):
So it's okay that we talked about it.
And it provides Gladiator 2, provides a really nice segue into my topic because before Gladiator
2, and I don't know if I told you this, Mike, we sat down.
And this is theater specific.
So I don't know why this theater chose to do this.
But before the movie, you know, they do those animations where it's like, go drink Coca
Cola, silence your phones.
Here's the upcoming attractions.

(25:07):
So they had a 50 year old hipster guy just on camera, I guess.
And he's like, okay, before the main movie starts, we're going to watch some trailers.
And what these are, they're previews for movies that are coming up soon.
So don't worry.
The main feature is going to start in about 10 minutes.
And I turned to my buddy and like, are people that dumb now?
They don't know what a trailer is?
Like, we have to have somebody explain to us like, I thought we paid for Gladiator 2.

(25:32):
I'm seeing I'm seeing something else up here.
This is not Gladiator 2 up there.
That's whatever.
Like, I don't what?
Maybe because it's a blockbuster, you know, like we went to the showing of Fifth Element.
Yeah, which I thought we were going to talk about today.
So that's what I that was my, I watched we watched that.
I was invited by my buddy to go, but I couldn't go.
And it was one of the few days my wife was off work until we wanted to do family time

(25:55):
and we couldn't both go because we didn't have a sitter for the kids.
So we just watched it on Blu-ray and I think it was my first time seeing it on Blu-ray.
Sure.
Which was amazing, by the way.
Leon the Professional is still my favorite Luc Besson film, I think.
Leon the Professional is a great film.
I think that I like the Fifth Element more, but that's more my style of movie anyway.
Fifth Element is great.
Fifth Element is great.
Yeah, yeah.
There's no there's no wrong answer.

(26:16):
No, no, no.
There's no wrong answer is what I'm saying here.
And we talked about that off air a little bit.
But anyway.
Yeah.
So before so one of these trailers, this foreign concept to me, nobody had ever explained it
to me before.
I had no idea why we're watching other mini movies before the main movie.
That's sarcasm.
One of the trailers was for the new Nosferatu.
Oh, which by the time this episode comes out, we'll be out because it comes out December

(26:41):
where it came.
I'm sorry.
Travel back in time.
Nosferatu came out December 25th of last year.
And we're recording this beforehand.
So neither of us have seen the new one.
But the trailer for Nosferatu is fantastic.
Oh, I really enjoyed the trailer for Nosferatu.
And I had never seen the original 1922 film.
And I managed to find one of the best restorations of this film is the BFI British Film Institute

(27:04):
Restoration of the film.
And what Nosferatu did was they would they colorized the scenes so you could tell it's
a black and white film 1922.
But you could tell when it was when it was daytime and nighttime, which is important
when you're dealing with vampires.
Right.
But Nosferatu is an unauthorized retelling of Bram Stoker Stoker's Dracula, which was
published in 1897.
This movie came out in 1922.

(27:26):
And what ended up happening, and this is going to lead us into our into our thing.
What happened was Bram Stoker's widow went after the filmmaker for making a film and
profiting off of her late husband's work.
Right.
Which makes sense.
And she won.
Oh, I did know that she won because they did hide the film.
I watched Nosferatu on AMC movie channel when they released it.

(27:50):
Sure, it was like 80 year, 100 year, something like that anniversary.
So I watched it live on TV.
Yeah.
Part of the settlement was all copies of the film were to be destroyed.
And so they did.
But it had wide release, I guess, for the time 1922.
And they ended up finding copies of it to restore it and come back.
So I thought what a fun topic would be would be if we talk about other films that were

(28:15):
either lost or thought to be lost and then found because Nosferatu is one.
Another one that I heard of was there's this movie that was only ever viewable as a Mystery
Science Theater 3000.
And it's called Manos, the Hands of Fate.
And it was the original print was thought to be lost.
Everything was thought to be lost.

(28:36):
There was no HD version of it.
It was only some like, I don't know, crappy VHS copies maybe.
Or maybe there was only what the Mystery Science Theater 3000 people used.
But some film student found from Florida State, Ben Solovee in 2011, found a work print of
the film in a 16 millimeter film collection that he had bought.

(28:59):
And then he restored that for high definition.
So that one was another one that was thought to be lost.
It's a terrible, terrible movie.
It's one of those sharks of the corn ask right movies.
It's from 1966.
Okay.
Now, I am well over halfway done with my cigar.
Nate is not.
I don't know how I'm smoking so much faster than you were live in person.
And I am just miles ahead.

(29:19):
Well, you're trying to correct your issue, your burn issue.
So you're adding more flame and stuff.
That is true.
I'm doing more talking because up until now, I've been the one that's seen these movies
that we're talking about.
Gladiator 2.
That is true.
So I'm over halfway and I really like the cigar.
I think it's exactly what I want it to be.
It's got the flavor profile of a spicy dark cigar.

(29:42):
It's got that undertone still of the more mellow Connecticut.
I think it's working for me really well.
It is also working for me.
I like this one a lot and it's tasty.
I like it.
I'm going to try and catch up with Mike, I guess, but not too much because I don't want
to ruin the flavor of anything.
But right now, let us very smoky, not as smoky as the Corojo, but very small or any Nika

(30:07):
Roostika.
Yeah, not that smoky.
Those are real smoky, which I love.
Those are insanity.
Those are awesome.
Yeah, they are insanity.
So yeah, I don't know.
We can go through the Lost films.
Did you see Alien Romulus yet?
Okay, well, we can talk.
Maybe we'll just do a movie review on Alien Romulus.
We can because I want to get Sarah to watch the Alien series, which I believe is now available

(30:28):
on Disney+.
Yeah, Alien Romulus is on Disney+.
Yeah, I think all of the Alien movies are now.
You mean all of them being Alien, Aliens, and Alien Romulus?
Yes.
Okay.
Yes.
Three and four, they didn't happen.
Specifically four.
Four did not happen.
Specifically four.
Yeah, yeah.
Alien Romulus is the new one and I haven't seen that.
Yeah.

(30:49):
Alien Romulus takes place between Alien and Aliens in the chronology.
Okay, interesting.
So maybe we'll do an Alien, Aliens, Alien Romulus review.
Yeah, we can definitely do that.
So I want to talk more about Lost films.
And so there's a whole bunch of films, according to Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation, they
claimed in 2017 that half of all American films made before 1950 and over 90% of films

(31:12):
made before 1929 are lost forever.
And now they used a very volatile substance, the nitrate film, stock.
So you just had to look at that and think about fire and they would catch fire.
Yes, I did.
I was aware of that issue, surprisingly enough.
Which was used to great fanfare in Gloria's Bastards, Quentin Tarantino's in Gloria's

(31:34):
Bastards where they burned down the film house that has Hitler and all the people in it.
Yeah, not to stay on the subject, but have you seen those AI videos of Hitler in English?
It's very interesting.
No, I haven't.
Very interesting.
Because yeah, like our perception of his speeches are very violent, of course.
But they're not.
Because they're in German.
Yeah, but they're in German and he's like screaming and yelling and we're not really

(31:55):
accustomed to that style of oration in this country.
But he's talking about standard economic issues.
It's very not like, yeah, let's go and commit a genocide.
It's more like, oh yeah.
You can't bill it as a genocide.
It's a picnic and oh, it got out of hand.
Yeah, it's all about economic issues and bringing Germany back from the brink and things that

(32:16):
were arguably true.
You know what I mean?
You could make the argument.
Well, if you do any research and I'm not trying to say Hitler's a good guy, but if you do
the research on how he kind of came to power as he was saying things that people were thinking
and he found a scapegoat to blame all their problems on and then he went after them.
Basically that.
I mean, you know, watered down very like simplistic view of how it happened.

(32:39):
I'm sure there's more.
People were dumb then just like they're dumb now.
The nuances of political reality were discussed in that public forum.
Yeah, yeah.
There weren't internet videos and AI and stuff like that back then either.
So what do you do?
I will say that I have noticed a little bit of an uneven burn, not terribly uneven on
this and I wonder if it's just if that's how barber poles typically are.

(33:00):
We didn't have that issue with the ogre.
I don't think.
No, no, I didn't have that issue with the ogre.
I haven't found that to be an issue overall.
Yeah, it might just be the way we're smoking because we're in person and talking and having
a good time.
Yes, as we always do.
Yeah.
So there's some some notable ones that I had not really ever heard of, but they have cultural
importance.
So the second film ever directed by Alfred Hitchcock is Lost, The Mountain Eagle.

(33:22):
It was a 1926 film.
There's a silent melodrama that has been described by the British Film Institute as their most
wanted lost film.
It's called London After Midnight starring Lon Chaney from 1927 and, oh no, The Mountain
Eagle was BFI's most wanted and then London After Midnight is a kind of the holy grail

(33:44):
of lost films by film collectors worldwide.
There was a 1923 silent comedy film that featured over 30 cameo appearances from major stars
of the day, but no footage exists.
That film was called Hollywood.
And then there's other and that one included Roscoe, Fatty Arbuckle, Charlie Chaplin, Mary
Astor and Pola Negri.
There's no footage left remaining of that film unless somebody has it in their wine

(34:07):
cellar and has been preserved for decades.
Right.
That's always a possibility, especially with these older films, you know, rich people back
in the day with rat hole things.
Yeah.
And then we have here from Screen Rant is a list of 10 lost movies and how they were
rediscovered.
So we're going to try and end the episode on them being rediscovered.
Sure.
And there's more lost movies we could go through, but again, they go by era and I'm not overly

(34:30):
familiar.
I'm a film graduate film student, not overly familiar with kind of obscure slash lost films
from the 1910s, 1920s.
Yeah.
That's like a doc.
I'm sure there's a professor somewhere that has a doctorate in this subject.
Yeah.
That's a specialist.
You know, that's a specialized thing.
I'd be more interested in the 1950s and beyond sci-fi, you know, like that's, you know, like

(34:52):
was it Barbarella?
Right.
Yep.
You know, like stuff like that.
Forbidden Planet.
Yeah.
Show me those classic like...
What is it?
Something from Planet Nine.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's the stuff I'm interested in.
Not necessarily lost films from the 19 whatever.
Right.
So the first one on this list is The Passion of Joan of Arc from 1928.
I guess it's one of the must watch movies from the silent film era.

(35:15):
I really like Charlie Chaplin's Gold Rush, but it's important because he kind of, he
pulled a George Lucas on it.
He kept re-editing it and he added sound to it.
One sound was a thing.
If you get the Criterion or Kitterin, however it's pronounced, Criterion collection.
Criterion collection.
We had that for a while.
Yeah.
It's a special feature on the DVD, the, or on the Blu-ray.

(35:36):
The main one is the sound version.
Oh, that's cool.
So watch the one that's the original one with the title cards and the silence.
It's very well done and it's not as much a comedy as one would think.
I mean, of course there's the comedic stuff cause it's Chaplin.
Right, right.
So Joan of Arc, the last existing copy of The Passion of Joan of Arc was lost in a fire
and everybody thought it was done.

(35:57):
It was gone, gone for all time.
And the Archbishop, the movie drew a lot of controversy.
So I guess the Archbishop of Paris called for a ban of the film.
But in 1981, so 20, what, 20, 28 to 1981, a full cut of the movie was discovered in
the Dykemark Mental Hospital in Oslo, Norway in a janitor's closet.

(36:18):
That sounds about right.
Yeah.
So now it's back and now you can watch it.
Nice.
And I think there was some weird, there's some weird history in the film world where
there are pre-ban films and post-ban films.
Haze Code.
Yep.
Yep.
It's a film noir, pre-Haze Code, and it is extremely adult.
Yes.

(36:38):
Yes.
Like as adult as an 80s sci-fi film.
Yes.
Right.
Which were notoriously like dark and...
Well, and basically in some cases, soft-core porn.
Yeah.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
It was like the era of the NC-17 feature film for sure.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay.
What if we build this great set and then you guys just bang?

(37:00):
Yep.
We'll film it.
I love it.
Why don't we just see your bush and titties with blood on them?
Yeah, yeah.
Let's do that.
All right.
Awake in Fright from 1971.
I guess it's adapted from a 1961 novel, the same name.
It's a psychological thriller.
A teacher who loses all his morals getting stranded in a strange town.
Upon release, 15 minutes were cut due to being too graphic.

(37:22):
It's an Australian film, but it was a lost film.
So I don't know.
It doesn't say how it got lost, but they've been searching for the movie because a lot
of people wanted to see it because people had seen it and then it disappeared from the
popular view or whatever.
Nobody knew where any cuts were of it.
And they found it in 2004 when a producer found the negatives in a shipping container

(37:43):
with the label Ford Destruction.
And the container was found in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania of all places.
Oh, hey.
So just a shipping container that maybe had been at sea for all those years.
I don't know.
Well, you get these big shipyards and I'm sure there's corners.
Sure, yeah.
There's corners that just-
Yeah, you just put stuff back there.
The one guy retires and that section wasn't on the tour for the new foreman or whatever.

(38:05):
Yeah, it's just like, oh yeah, this is kind of our junk pile.
When we slow down, we'll take care of it.
We'll get to it.
40 years later, oh, okay.
It's time now.
Pretty slow now.
Pretty slow now.
The next one is Incubus and it looks like it's a William Shatner film from 1966.
It's a remote village and there's a well in this remote village that can heal the sick
people and make people more beautiful.

(38:27):
So a little bit of like kind of fountain of life, fountain of youth type of thing.
It's a unique film and everybody mourned its loss.
It was one of the few movies ever to be filmed in the constructed auxiliary language of Esperanto,
but it came without subtitles.
So they made up a language, didn't give subtitles, so the audience had to figure it out what

(38:47):
was going on for themselves.
But a copy was found at the Cinematheque in Paris in 1966.
So that one was missing for 30 years.
I know one person that speaks Esperanto and he went to school for Russian.
So it was like-
Of course you know one person.
Yeah.
I went to college with a guy who was my roommate for like a year and he was an Esperanto speaker.

(39:11):
He felt for sure when we were 19 and high, for sure Esperanto was going to take off.
And now nobody in America speaks anything other than English and poorly at that.
Right.
It's like automation because being a Russian speaker, this is like not a job anymore at

(39:32):
least.
And you list your accomplishments.
I'm fluent in Esperanto.
I'm fluent in Esperanto.
So and of course nowadays I'm sure if you found this movie, you could find the subtitles
online that would translate to English.
And that's one of the great things now is you can watch all these foreign films and
find these subtitles for these films even though sometimes these subtitles fall outside
of into like a gray area in the law.

(39:54):
Like is it legal to download subtitles for a movie?
There's some concerns around that as well.
So interesting.
A Japanese film wouldn't exist without subtitles.
That's for sure.
Well, not the subtitles on the thing, but if you don't buy it from them, but the other
issue is up until pre Blu-ray and some films are still currently only on VHS, Far and Free

(40:15):
Between or DVD and a lot of them haven't been upscaled for 4K or you know, 1080 Blu-ray
and DVDs all had different region codes.
Yes.
So you couldn't play a Chinese DVD even if you bought it legitimately, you couldn't play
it on an American player unless you modded your player, which avoided your warranty and
that's legally questionable as well or bought a Chinese DVD player that would play that

(40:38):
region or region free player or something.
So it was a whole kind of thing to try and get this stuff and to consume this media,
which is kind of a shame because you know, most books are translated into many different
languages and you can pick the translation of the book you want like Marcus Aurelius
is meditations to go back to the beginning of the episode.
There's countless translators out there and translations that are a hundred years old.

(41:04):
So anyway, cool thing is if you want to watch it and you want to know what's going on and
not make it up yourself, although I'd probably watch it as intended without subtitles to
try and figure out if I can figure it out.
That's weird, huh?
Filmmakers trust the audience to be smart enough to figure out what's going on without
subtitles.
That's a very antiquated.
I had to go and have some 50 year old hipster tell me what a trailer was before I watched

(41:24):
the movie.
The next thing you know, somebody is going to be trying to put a triangle into a square
hole and shielding their answer from me.
Well you know, some of us have an IQ of 150 in the year 2500.
That's true.
All right.
The next film is from 1916.
It's a propaganda piece called Zept and Charlie Chaplin, Charlie Chaplin propaganda movie.

(41:49):
It's not particularly a good movie, they say here, but it chronicles a German zeppelin
World War I attacks in Britain.
So I guess even if it's not a good movie, it's a propaganda film of course, so it's
going to be heavily slanted.
Interesting historically.
But you know, I mean, seeing any kind of zeppelin attack film would be amazing I think.
Yeah, especially from the era, they'd have insights that we would lack obviously.

(42:10):
Probably used real fucking zeppelins.
I don't know where CGI was in 1916, but it was likely better than Ridley Scott's Gladiator
2 from 2024.
Well, it's, I don't remember because there was a Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton
and it was Buster Keaton.
There's a movie called, I think it's called Little General and he's a train engineer running

(42:33):
a train and they actually did a, the finale of the film was the train does a jump off
of a bridge into a river gorge and they literally did it and the train stayed in the river gorge
until they needed to pull it out to make ammunition for World War II.
That's crazy.
So, you know, of the era they really did things.

(42:54):
Some of Harold Lloyd's stuff where he's crawling on a clock tower was filmed in front of a
mat and stuff, but you know, Buster Keaton did more of the crazy mathematical stunts
where he'd build a house and then he'd walk away from it.
There's a tiny little window up top and the whole wall would fall down.
Very famously.
Yes.
Very famously.
Yes.
So they all had their own little like silence picture schtick or whatever.

(43:16):
Harold Lloyd would do crazy dangerous, like climbing stunts and other things and you know,
chaplain and anyway, great.
If you find like I have the DVD packs of like each one of those.
Oh, sure.
I watch a lot of those in film class and it just, they're fun and they're kind of amazing
how they planned everything out and.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They should show stuff like that to kids when they don't want to learn math.

(43:37):
Yeah.
There's a lot of cool things you can do with math.
Yes.
I realize that it's very esoteric sometimes.
Not showing my kid that and telling her she can do that with math or him that he can do
that with math.
I don't want you to put yourself at risk, but if you're going to do something, you need
to know math.
So anyway, a lot of people didn't even know the zept movie existed, but there was an English
citizen who bought a can of film on eBay for $5 in 2009.

(43:59):
And what was in there?
This 1916 Charlie Chaplin film zept.
Nice.
So you can sometimes have good finds like that.
The trouble with a lot of these older films and stuff that's actually shot on film.
And this is kind of a little PSA for anybody out there who has home videos on particularly
VHS and other stuff or like the mini eight or the high eight, any kind of those magnetic

(44:19):
tapes, get those converted as soon as humanly possible.
Even on VHS when they had the big VHS camcorders.
Oh yeah.
Get those converted as soon as possible because those magnetic tape degrades so fast and it
degrades every single time you watch it.
So there are services out there.
I'm not going to go into all that.
I had a, I think it was 16 millimeter film of my grandpa doing something before he was

(44:43):
fire chief even at the, at the fair in Oshkosh.
And it was, I don't know, two and a half reels of film.
And I was like, well, I could buy a projector, but if the projector fucks up, it's going
to burn a hole through the thing.
So I went and spent the money and had it scanned to 4k.
Sure.
And yeah, it was like 500 bucks, but now I don't have to worry about it.
Right.

(45:03):
It's there.
It's preservation.
I'm trying to find the script.
I've been trying to, cause you know, the program or whatever, cause they obviously were doing
like they did a whole like clown show and burning buildings and stuff like that.
Kind of like not quite like the scenes in Dumbo where the clown fireman come out of
the car and try and put out the burning house and the elephant flies.
I didn't see any flying elephant.
Grandpa, you let me down.
I'm just kidding.

(45:23):
But that stuff all degrades, you know, and I was like, I could run it through a projector
to watch it, but I run the risk of scratching it, damaging it, burning it.
Cause those lamps are hot for those old projectors and they don't make new projectors.
So, okay.
So the next movie is Tarzan and the golden lion from 1927.
Nice.
It was one of the earliest ever on screen portrayals of Tarzan.
It was a box office success, but after it dropped out of circulation around the theaters,

(45:47):
no copies could be found.
The star was James Pierce and that was like his career defining role.
He spent most of his life trying to find a copy of it, but he couldn't.
In the 1990s, a stack of silent films was found of all places inside a French asylum.
And one of them just happened to be Tarzan and the golden lion.
So that's like what, two or three like French asylum films being found.

(46:08):
Yeah.
They must've had a pretty extensive system back in the day.
And that is, uh, Burroughs.
That's what I thought.
I looked it up.
He wrote the John Carter series as well.
The Barsoom series, which I've read all of, which are fascinating.
I haven't had time to read Tarzan yet.
I'm going to get there.
I'm going to get like the old pulp fiction sci-fi novels.

(46:30):
My wife and I were camping and we went into the town, a small, small town.
There's a garage sale on for like 50 cents.
I got two like, I don't know what you would call it, like the golden era sci-fi books.
Like one was like steps of the sun or something.
And it was like, sure.
Not overly anything fantastic, but interesting to read, you know, like that old of a vision
of what the future and sci-fi might be like.
So, oh, I love the hokeyness and having read all the Barsoom, like it's racist.

(46:55):
You know, it's like the character is a southerner from the civil war and he meant it.
Yeah.
It was not states rice issue for him.
All right.
The next one is the sentimental bloke from 1915.
I guess it's considered the greatest Australian silent film of all time.
Follows a man who vows to quit gambling so he can focus on his factory job.

(47:16):
But he falls in love with a woman and it's just about to become happy.
And he faced his competition for the same woman from another man.
There's a fire that destroyed the Melbourne film library.
The sentimental bloke was considered to be a lost film.
And the original negative was discovered in 1973 at a film archive in Rochester, New York.
Nice.
That one is a makes sense story.

(47:37):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like there's more sense of finding it in the toilet of a...
French Assain asylum or whatever.
But it took so long to rediscover this because bloke wasn't a popular word, or maybe still
isn't in America.
And so they assumed that somebody titled it, instead of writing the sentimental bloke,
they labeled it the sentimental blonde.
Oh.
Because they just maybe use all hand, you know, they don't type out printed things for

(48:00):
these, they just hand label them back then.
And they must've...
Hand writing is notoriously...
Yeah.
Different.
Prone to interpretation of the reader.
Oh yes.
The next one here is Outside the Law from 1920.
You know, most of these have something in common.
Most of these have been from the 20s or the teens.
Some have been from the 60s, but it's always cool.
Like the longer it's lost, the cooler it is when you find it, I guess.

(48:22):
Not that people are waiting to like for likes or something online, but you know, it's just
like some of this stuff.
I mean, film collectors, I got so many slides and photo albums and stuff from my dad, from
his dad and their stuff in there from like early 1900s even, because my grandpa was born
in like 1926 or something.
So it's like, there's stuff from the early 1900s in there.

(48:44):
He took pictures and my dad took pictures and they had other family members that take
pictures and so I'm going through and like taking all the slides out of the carousels
because they were all in carousels, which is the least space efficient way to store
slides.
But it's good if you're going to watch them.
I remember seeing those carousels.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm getting quite near the end.
They're all in little slide boxes and then eventually when I'm doing nothing in the winter,

(49:05):
I'll start scanning them in and a lot of them are notated, which is great, but the ones
that aren't notated, then I can like send the digital to my dad or make a shared album
and say, dad, put in notes if you know these people or what they are and then kind of preserve
the family history, you know?
Not much to do with the film, but again, it's just, you know, if you have a film collector
and they buy, I mean, they were pumping these movies out back then, you know, like the studios,

(49:26):
like just pump them up, pump them out.
You've got so and so on contract for X number of years.
Let's just make as many films with this person, the star as we can.
And you know, some of them were box office hits and some weren't.
And then, you know, in the, I don't know, probably the 50s, 60s, they started having
home video recorders and things and people could do their own home movies on eight millimeter
and 16 millimeter and eventually VHS.

(49:49):
And you know, you could potentially have, you know, a major film director that made
a bunch of films before he was backed by any studio or he or she.
Absolutely.
That makes all the sense.
It's kind of like the iPhone film craze of the tens.
Yes.
So the next one here is Outside the Law from 1920.
It's a gang picture, which are always popular.

(50:09):
And this was in the 1920s.
So what year is Prohibition?
1919.
So I'm sure it had Prohibition undertones.
This one had Lon Chaney, who was in one of the other films that's lost for all time as
of today.
Right.
Lon Chaney was very famous back in the day.
I even recognize that name and I'm not a film enthusiast like Nate is.
But it was a very popular star.

(50:30):
So it was a surprise that the original copies got lost in the first place.
And Universal Pictures delivery person happened to have left some copies with his friends
in the 1920s.
But it wasn't until 1975 that the house's new resident noticed the stash of movies in
the barn and invited historian Bob DeFluores to take a look at them.
And one of them happened to be Outside the Law.

(50:52):
So that tracks with film collectors that buy these films or what does the studio do with
them when they're out of theaters back then?
There wasn't really the preservation or collecting or re-releasing it.
That wasn't a thing back then.
Right.
Yeah, the film was new.
They didn't have the established protocol.
Even the early TV shows and sitcoms and things like that, they had no idea there was going

(51:14):
to be reruns.
Even as recent as Friends, where they did recap episodes every season, kind of.
Every once in a while they do a recap episode to keep you up to speed on everything that
happened, never anticipating that home media would be a thing and people could just watch
it in their homes when they wanted or binge watch it.
Right.
Well, even as recently as the late 90s, Deep Space Nine has no high definition because

(51:40):
the high definition versions got destroyed.
You can only ever get Deep Space Nine television in standard definition, which is they didn't
foresee the at home Blu-ray, 120 inch TV geek market.
It just didn't exist at the time.
We're watching through scrubs right now and the first four seasons, I believe, were shot
in standard definition because HD wasn't a thing.

(52:03):
And then the later seasons are all HD.
So the first four seasons I found somewhere, somehow it showed up on my system at home.
Somebody had used AI to upscale first four seasons.
Oh, that's pretty cool.
So you get really crisp pictures.
Allegedly, I don't know.
I don't have them because I don't download that sort of thing.
Well, yeah, there's no law breaking going on.
No, it's preservation of history.

(52:25):
One day somebody is going to come and say, we're looking for HD versions of scrubs because
somebody back in 2017 or whenever they did it, this guy with the AI, this is a now sought
after piece of film history.
So it's collecting.
Yeah.
It's preservation.
Yeah, somebody somewhere on there.
It's funny if you're a film critic or film collector, you can have whatever you want,

(52:46):
but if you're just trying to consume media, then you're the bad guy.
Well, yeah, you're the villain until you're not.
Yes.
You're the villain until you have enough money to not be.
Then that'll just get written right over.
It's fine.
Yes, yes.
In a great bout of foresight, spice induced foresight, he collected these things and now

(53:08):
they're worth something and now we want him.
All right.
The next one is The White Shadow, 1923.
We're getting quite close to Mike's fingertips here on the cigar.
We are, we are.
And that's fine.
So this one here, Twin Sisters or The White Shadow, sorry, White Shadow.
It's about twin sisters, one who's introverted, one who's extroverted and they compete for
the same man and the man doesn't know he's dating sisters.
Alfred Hitchcock was an assistant director on this movie and there was a film collector

(53:32):
in New Zealand, Jack Murtaugh, and it took 22 years for an American archivist to discover
Jack's collection and he realized that a videotape labeled as twin sisters was actually The White
Shadow because the movie's about twin sisters.
So when you record something on VHS from the TV or whatever.
Absolutely.
You write down whatever it is.

(53:53):
You write what you think it was, but you're not really sure because you didn't have the
printout from the newspaper of the play times.
I think most of our listeners are old enough to remember the VHS rack, the wall.
It was a library, but it was all VHS tapes and then you'd have the eight hour tapes and
three movies to be on it.
And if you had the dedicated parents, they would pause the recording when the commercial

(54:15):
came on and then resume it when it came back.
Absolutely.
At home, if you were savvy and you had more than one forehead recorder, you could edit
it into a new version.
Yeah, degrading the quality significantly, but still a new version without commercials.
I would take low quality over commercials almost any day.
Oh, absolutely.
All right.
The next one is a really old one from 1911 and it's called Their First Misunderstanding

(54:39):
and it stars Mary Pickford and Owen Moore.
And it's about a silent film about newlyweds arguing for the first time.
Oh.
Then this is why you date and cohabit before you marry.
So you can have your first argument before that.
That's why you don't get married until you're 30.
Because you can just fucking leave.
Yeah.
And it's no big deal.
Don't get married until you're 30.
They work on their emotional issues.

(54:59):
Don't get married until you've had an argument.
Yes.
So I guess this movie kind of served as a tutorial on how to handle marital arguments.
And there was a carpenter, Peter Massey, who found a copy inside an old New Hampshire barn.
The farm had previously served as a summer camp, hence it was likely the movie was filmed
for the teenagers who spent time there.

(55:19):
So this is one where maybe didn't go full release in theaters, but it starred some big
people and maybe it was a summer camp film only.
Sure.
You know, you get stories like that sometimes where it's like an instructional video happened
to feature Harrison Ford or something and it's like your Forklift certification video
and there's Harrison Ford pre-Star Wars.
I'm sure he was Forklift certified back in the day.

(55:42):
I'm sure they didn't have that certification back in the day, but he could still do it
anyway.
Right.
Yeah.
He was famous before OSHA, so probably not.
The next one is The Old Dark House from 1932.
It's a group of five travelers seeking shelter in a decaying house and a bunch of horror
stuff.
I don't know who looks like Wolfman or something.

(56:02):
It was one of the best Gothic, most talked about being one of the first Gothic horror
movies, best Gothic horror movies of all time.
But a lot of people, then there's people that just love Gothic things, Victorian things,
Edwardian things.
Oh yes.
I might even be talking with one right now.
But a director found a clean copy while going through the vaults of Universal Studios.

(56:24):
So the fresh budget, they re-edited it, restored it and yada yada and released it.
So and that's the other thing too is like the one that was found in a shipping container,
it just sat there and this was in the Universal Studios vaults.
And you hear about the Disney vault all the time where back when they used to do these,
I don't know if they still use that model, but they would put movies out on DVD and Blu-ray

(56:44):
and then they'd say, this is the first time it's been on Blu-ray.
It's out of the vault.
It's out of the Disney vault.
Yeah, the fourth, the Diamond edition.
After this, after this like 12 month run, it's going back in the vault and you won't
be able to get a copy of it again.
And so all these film studios have vaults where they have all the films ever made.
But then it's like the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where they go put the Ark of
the Covenant in this like warehouse full of boxes that are tenuously labeled.

(57:08):
When I was a little boy, I asked my dad, lifetime government, I'm like, how realistic is that?
And he's like, that is more real than you would care to imagine.
They're as like-
More real than any of the action you just watched.
Yeah, this is the most real part of the film.
This is the most real thing in the film.
They legit found that it would just go into a shelf somewhere.
Yep.
Yeah, so that's it for, you know, kind of the ones that have been refound.

(57:32):
I mean, Nosferatu was refound.
Man of Sands of Fate was refound.
And some other ones.
It kind of depends on what your focus is.
For the Lost Films, and I was excited because Nosferatu is coming back as a remake.
Right, and that's a classic.
Or has been back.
That's a classic.
It's creepy.
If you haven't seen it, listener, the one listener we have, go and watch it.
Yeah, you should check it out.
And the good news, Keith, is you don't need headphones for it.

(57:54):
It's a silent film.
That's right.
Yeah.
But it's really well done.
It's good.
And they changed, this was, I think this, I think Nosferatu was the first instance of
a vampire being light allergic because the vampire Count Orlok dies in sunlight because
he stays out too late trying to get the heroin of film.

(58:17):
Yes.
Heroin, heroin.
Whatever.
I don't think it matters.
It's the figure of the addict trying to shoot heroin into his vein and Jesus standing behind
him and the caption on the bottom for the meme is, fuck off, Jesus, get your own heroin.
He's trying to save him from addiction, right?
But it's like, fuck off, Jesus, get your own heroin.
No, I have not.
That is great.
Happy Thanksgiving, everybody.
Hey, man, this is March, dude.

(58:37):
It is March.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
We're recording this on Black Friday for those that want to know the behind the scenes of
the show.
Not too bad.
It's our traditional Black Friday recording.
Yeah, yeah.
Sometimes we do the season finale and this year we're doing the season premiere of season
four.
So get ready for next Thanksgiving.

(58:57):
Go on your diets, which I'm...
Basically, all of your New Year's resolutions have been abandoned, so congratulations returning
back to normal life, but eat a little less over the year so you can eat extra next Thanksgiving.
That's right.
What do you think of the cigar, Mike?
Are you going to bring up the sheets or are you going to add my score in?
I got the sheets here.
I'll add your score in.
Perfect.

(59:17):
I'm putting it as a five.
Solid five.
It's changing, but it is everything I wanted it to be.
Yes.
What I expected.
It did not disappoint.
Did not disappoint.
It was as good as I wanted it to be.
The Rocky Patel Edge series is legendary in my household.
I cannot recommend any Rocky Patel Edge enough, and if you happen to come across this cigar
in your travels, I would pick one up.

(59:39):
I'd pick up more than one.
Throw them in the box.
You can bring them out for a special occasion.
They look cool.
They're going to smoke perfectly.
I would say it's a slightly more complex smoke than we normally do because of the barber
pole.
Yeah.
Oh, it's not.
But it's very good.
It's not one of those yardsticks that we talk about.
No, it's not a yardstick.
This is something that you'd bring to a party, give to somebody as a gift.

(01:00:01):
It's a very good cigar.
Yeah.
Very good cigar.
It's a very good cigar.
That's great.
Thanks for listening to our season four premiere episode, first episode.
Keep listening.
We've got a spicy pick of Mike and his cigar for the Instagram, so check that out.
If you haven't followed us there, our Patreon's going strong.
Check that out.
Even if you don't financially contribute, we'll post things on there for everybody sometimes.

(01:00:24):
I'm thinking about getting some more polls going maybe, like some polls from the listeners,
what we should smoke or what they want to hear about, or if there's something cigar
wise you might want to learn about.
We can definitely talk about it and yada yada.
Give us a review on one of the platforms, please, even if you hate us, because that
will help the algorithms, because really in life all we're doing is fighting AI all day,

(01:00:46):
every day.
Be safe, have fun.
Thanks for listening.
We'll see you next time.