October 19, 2024 • 29 mins
Joe Escalante's weekly exploration inside the business end of showbiz. This week: Joe reminisces about the days of his youthful innocence, running around Disneyland.. Be like Joe... Don't do drugs at Disneyland. Also, the latest numbers from the Box Office (Wild Robot is still running wild), Joe's obsession with the Netflix series about the Menedez Brothers, and how he would have litigated the case against them.
Needless to say, don't let your kids watch The Menendez Brothers...
Needless to say, don't let your kids watch The Menendez Brothers...
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Joe Sclante live from Hollywood. If by Hollywood you mean Burbank.
This is two hours of the business, end of show business,
not two hours right now. Though, this is a special
podcast episode because it is the dol drums of the
NFL season where we are preempted almost every week, so
it's going to be podcast only most of the time
(00:28):
until oh, you know, I'm around the holidays. So we
are today going to talk about mainly the Menendez thing
on Netflix. I didn't go to an actual theater this week.
Some people did. The people that saw Terrifier three made
(00:49):
it number one, and a lot of people listened to
my advice and saw Wild Robot, but not enough to
keep it at number one. Wild Robot. It just can't
beat it. You just cannot beat it. It's a perfect movie.
Some people have said, well, I've seen the storyline done
better or whatever. I don't care. This is a beautiful film,
(01:12):
you know, and you're gonna love it. The animation is great,
and animation is just killing it right now. So congratulations
to Universal for making a better an animated product than
anything I've seen out at Disney in quite some time.
And I'm the biggest Disney fan there is, maybe not
(01:33):
the bigness I biggest. I'm not one of those Disney adults. Okay,
I'm not a pin trader. I'm just you know, I
grew up in near Disneyland. I went there a lot.
I used to get in for free early in my youth,
just hanging out there like it was a you know,
like the back alleys of the Bowery Boys and just
causing mischief. Never got kicked out, got in trouble once,
(01:57):
but never got kicked out, even though I wrote a
I guess you could call it a hit song, one
of the Vandals hit song hit song in punk rock
Pirate's Life, about taking LSD and going on the Pirates
of the Caribbean ride and being trapped in there because
you it was an interdimensional experience that was spurred by
(02:23):
a drug induced fantasy that went wrong. But I never
did that. I'm just reporting what's out on the streets,
what's going on in the streets. People are doing that.
I don't recommend it. You don't need drugs at Disneyland,
and you shouldn't take drugs at Disneyland because there's a
lot of heavy machinery and children. So come on, Okay,
(02:50):
so wild row About. You should see it, and maybe
they'll have a wild Rowbout ride at Universal Studios that
might get me to go there. I just went to
the Universal Studios in Orlando, but in Orlando like ten times,
kind of Disney World over and over. I love Epcot.
Never went to Universal. Finally went and I'm like, yeah,
it's not for me. I mean it's cool, Harry Potter's amazing,
(03:11):
but I don't know. Okay. So number three is The Joker.
People say it sucks. I'm not gonna watch it. There's
no way in hell I'm going to sit down and
watch The Joker. Beetlejuice. Beetlejuice. Great movie. You should see it.
Saturday Night Live documentary. A lot of people are going
to see it from Sony Pictures. But I'm I couldn't
get myself motivated to go and watch a documentary about
(03:32):
a TV show in a theater. I couldn't do it.
I'm not saying it. It's not gonna happen. Number six
is Piece by Piece. I'm not really interested in that one.
Transformers one again. No Nightmare Before Christmas comes back every year. Great,
The Apprentice, you don't care, Okay, let's move on to
(03:56):
what I was going to talk about. First. I'm going
to talk about, Uh, there's a couple of things. Chapel roone.
You know her, Do you know who she is? She's
a transgender queer artist or she's not transgender because she's
dresses like a girl and she is a girl, but
(04:17):
her influences are transgendered people and that's her aesthetic. It's
like I dressed like a dry queen. It's not bad.
I mean, you know, I think if you're a performer,
I think that's a pretty good one. It's a good one.
You know, it's theatrical. And yeah. One times I made
(04:40):
the mistake of like I had an old girlfriend and
like she'd ask me, oh, do you think that girl's pretty?
Do you think that girl's pretty? You know? And then
I made the mistake of answering yes or no. What
she just shouldn't do You should just say no, one's
a pretty as you dear. Anyway, after I I told
her a couple of girls I thought were pretty, one day,
(05:01):
she goes, you just like girls who look like drag queens.
And you know you don't want that because then next
time you're around a girl that looks like a drag
queen or worse at drag queen, then your girlfriend is
gonna be suspicious of you. You don't need that, so
(05:21):
you can't give him information like that. You just can't.
I only like girls that look like my wife. That's
problem too, because then there are girls that look like
my wife, and then she sees them. She goes that
girl likes me, looks like me. Why he's staring at her.
But she's not really like that, So I don't have
to worry about it. But Chapel Roane. I saw her
at Coachella. She was good. She's an underfire right now
(05:44):
because Bill Maher is criticizing her, and I'm wondering if
what happens to her career. Does this help hurt her
career help her career? I don't know, because it has
to do with Israel and Gaza and all that stuff.
And I'm not smart enough to understand what's going on
over there, and I'm not gonna try. But I do
know what Bill Maher said. He said, if you were
(06:05):
in the Mid East, they would throw you off a
building because that's what they do to queer people. So
he's trying to tell her give her a fraternal correction.
Don't get on the Palestinian bandwagon because it makes you
look like you don't know what they do there to
queer people. So entertainers always better off just kind of
(06:30):
being like, hey, you know, I'm next question. Hey, what
do you think Chapel of what's going on in Israel
and Gauza? I think all people should be free and
I'm against war in the end. That's your entertainment advice
for today. Now there's an actual legal case which is
(06:52):
kind of fascinating right now. Have you heard of it?
Limp Biscuit files a lawsuit against Universal alleging they owe
them to one hundred million dollars in royalties, And you say,
to yourself, how could that be? I say that to myself,
how could we How could Limp Biscuit earn two hundred
million dollars in royalties? Ever, they're big, but wow. Then
(07:15):
they kind of went away. But then as this nineties
thing comes back, they have a resurgence. I think last
time we played the Vandals played with them on a festival.
They were on one day, We're on the other day.
The Vandals outdrew them. But since then the nineties thing
has come back in a big way, and they're the
poster children for the nineties, so they're I think what happened.
(07:39):
So they're saying that their their royalties were done wrong,
and they're they're of course, the lawyer is going to
say they're purposely calculated to cheat people. I don't know
if I believe that, but deliberately designed to conceal artists
royalties so it can pocket the profits. That's a little
extreme of a charge to make against a the largest
(08:02):
music company in the world that other people are not suing.
But so what they were getting, they were getting statements.
Here's what you get. When you're in the music business
and you have a record out, you get these statements. Now,
if you have a sleazy label, they don't even send
you the statements. But a good label, we're going to
send you statements either quarterly or bi annually or monthly sometimes,
(08:26):
and you get these statements and it says mainly you're
looking at these statements if you're a young rock band,
to say like are you recouped or not? Are you
close to getting royalties? Because there's two kinds of royalties
you would be looking for in your statement. There would
be a statement for publishing and a statement for album sales.
We'll call it that now you're publishing. Is the amount
(08:48):
of money that the record label must pay composers when
they're mechanically reproducing their copyrights onto a tangible met or
even a digital medium. A that's caught. Why they call
it a mechanical royalty. It would be something like just
I'll just tell you, like I'd be like, let's call
(09:10):
it seventy cents a record, an album sex six cents
a song or something like that. They've got to pay
that to somebody. They pay it to whoever owns the
composing rights. Who the composer, Maybe he sold his rights,
maybe he's got a partner. They there's a company called
Harry Fox that collects that from most people. I don't
let them collect my money because I can collect my
(09:32):
own money and I don't want to give them a cut.
But you were going to if you're a record label,
every time you mechanically reproduce a record, you got to
pay that six cents a song. Okay, So you look
at that, and that goes directly to the band. You
can't you cannot touch that. You can give it to,
you give it to the publisher or the band. Sometimes
a publisher came about and said, hey, fred Durst, let
(09:53):
me give you a million dollar advance on your publishing.
Now you're paying it to that guy until it recoops.
And then it recoops, then you're that guy's got to
collect the money and start giving it to Fred Durst
or half of it or or three quarters of it,
depending on the deal you made and how much money
of an advance you took. I hope this is not
(10:14):
putting you to sleep. So that's publishing. That's for songwriting. Now,
sometimes it goes to a different person because like, if
you're Elvis, you didn't write your songs, maybe some of them.
If you're Frank Sinatra, you didn't write any of them.
So on a Frank Sinatra album, all that money's going to,
you know, Paul Anka, whoever wrote things like New York,
New York. That's where that money's going. It's not going
(10:37):
to Frank Sinatra is only getting the album sales royalties.
So those are two different things. So when but when
the Biscuit looks at their statements, their statements all said,
you're not recouped yet on your album sales, or you're publishing. Actually,
let's leave publishing a side. Let's just deal with album sales,
because you're not recouped yet, so we're not paying you anything.
(11:00):
And then they just kind of got used to that,
and because well they took says here in this article
that they got like forty two million dollars in advances
over their career. Okay, think about that, staggering number. Two
forty two million dollars. Lord, the Vandals probably got one
million dollars worth of advances over their entire career. I'm
(11:23):
going to say five hundred thousand. And we are recouped everywhere,
everywhere in town, so we get when we get a statement,
we get actual royalties because we're recouped. Now, if they
get an advance of one million dollars for their album
sales from Universal, forget about publishing. They've got to earn
out that advance before they get a cent. And that
(11:48):
would be about a dollar to a dollar thirty five
in Fred durstday, probably a dollar thirty five for each
CD that was sold. So they got to sell a
million to recoup a one point three five million dollar advance.
How many millions of records did they sell? Well, if
they got a forty two million dollar worth of advance.
As some of that's probably in publishing. That's a lot
(12:10):
of records you gotta sell. But over time the streaming
income started to come in. You know, probably sold some
songs to some films and evidently the money piled up.
They were owed a bunch of money and they didn't
and then finally when they complained about it at all,
it looks like, according to this article, Universal sent them
(12:31):
a million dollars to them to fred Durst, and a
million or to the band, then three million dollars to
the record label that fred Durst started to put out
his own records. Because remember for a while he was
like I got my own record label and directing movies,
all that kind of stuff. He was a big player.
So he's getting a good royalty rate because he owns
a record label. And they did pay him. It's like
(12:52):
they paid him maybe four million dollars or something like that.
But his lawyers say, you got two point three million
to Flawless Records, his company, and one million to him
in last August. But they filed the lawsuit last week
and they say there owe two hundred million dollars as
(13:15):
a lawyer. I heard his name is Quantinets or something
like that, and he's very colorful and he polls stunts
and things like that, and he gets in the in
the public eye and forces things to happen with public pressure.
That kind of guy. So we're all gonna watch this
(13:38):
very closely, except for bands, I mean, especially bands that
have deals with Universal and have had him through the nineties,
like some bands I won't mention that I'm very interested in.
So we'll see how that goes. That is limp biscuit
versus Universal, hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, theoretically,
(14:03):
we'll see. All right, now, we're gonna get to the
Menendez thing, because that's the only thing. I mean, I
just kind of watched it obsessively and didn't go to
a movie theater and the did you watch it? What
did you think of it? Put it in my Facebook comments.
That's the only place you can really get a hold
(14:24):
of me, or I might respond, Okay, it's nine episodes.
Nobody's getting nine episodes to do a true crime story.
But Ryan Murphy. Ry Murphy's one of the most successful
producers in television, and he's got you know, hits everywhere,
(14:44):
and he made this huge deal with Netflix and it's
kind of starting to pay off for Netflix. He did
the Dammer one, now he's doing this one nine episodes,
so they really dragged out the story, gave him an
opportunity to be very artistic with it and to tell
every side of the story, you know, all these different angles.
So I some of the parts of it I didn't
(15:07):
enjoy at all, but in the for the most part
was I was hooked to I was hooked to it,
and I enjoyed a lot of it. Is like my
era of the nineties, you know, when I'm like twenty
seven in nineteen ninety and this is going on at
that time, and I'm in law school, and it was.
(15:27):
It was fascinating back then, still fascinating now if you
don't know the story. They killed their parents and then
they seem to have gotten away with it, mainly because
the Beverly Hills police at that time weren't doing the
thing that you could pull anyone off the street. Right now,
(15:48):
there's so much true crime on TV and ask them, Hey,
if two parents got murdered in Beverly Hills or anywhere,
who's their and they had two kids. Who's the who's
the first person you're gonna look at? Well, I look
at and see if they had any affairs, you know,
going on, and then I'd look at the kids, you know,
(16:10):
do they stand again? Who's stand again? Who stand again?
Of course these kids stood to gain. I mean there's
some complications about whether they were cut out of the
wheel or not. But if you're a cop who stands
to gain, go investigate them. They didn't do anything. They
let these guys are run around for months selling or
buying roll x'es and cars, and of course they did
because they're stupid. And the whole uh the upshot of
(16:33):
the all the Menendez you know documentaries. There's a documentary
I watched. First, I thought there's a Menendez thing. I
went on Netflix and I watched. I thought it was
everyone was talking about this documentary. I watched that. That
was pretty good. The Netflix went then I realized, oh,
there's a narrative, scripted drama here. Let me watch that,
yep shot of it. These are just two stupid people,
(16:55):
stupid spoiled chemacos. These guys never had to do anything
for themselves, and they're there their dad. It seems like
their dad pretended to say like, I'm gonna be tough
on you, okay, And then but he's so worried about
his ego and that these these kids will be show
(17:17):
pieces for him, and they will go to the best
schools and they'll be the best tennis players and all
that stuff. He has to fund it all, and you
got to worry that. I think, you know one thing,
if you're a kid like that, you can worry. You
know what, I don't really need all this stuff. I'm
gonna dress like a homeless person and see how you
like that. I'm gonna embarrass you. No, no, no, no,
don't dress like a homeless person. Here's an unlimited clothing budget,
(17:39):
you know, that kind of manipulation. So he gave him everything,
yet he was cruel to them, seems like now, but
you know, defind cruel when you're trying to raise kids
who are spoiled brands. I think it comes down to
his ego. His ego is not letting him raise the
(18:00):
kids in a normal way. But I don't know how
to raise kids. Who does. But he raised them in
a way where they shot him in the face of
the shotgun. So he obviously I think I can say
he did a really crappy job. Whatever's method was, it
didn't work. But after they're arrested, then after a while
they come up with a story said we killed them
(18:22):
because we were molested, because they came up with a
theory where they could argue self defense and avoid the
death penalty and maybe get out of prison. Because if
you have an honest, good faith belief that your life
was in danger and you shot them for that honest,
good faith belief, you don't get out of jail, but
you do get to plead to like an involuntary manslaughter
(18:42):
or a voluntary manslaughter. I think that's what it would be,
and they cannot charge you with first durg murder if
you had a good faith belief that your life was
in danger. So they concocted a story where they had
a good faith belief that their life was in danger
because their parents were going to kill them. They basically
that was part of their thing. They have been molested
(19:03):
forever and their parents are going to go to kill them,
that we're going to kill them, And they didn't have
a very good support for why their mom would kill them.
And I think that is what the that's one of
the problems with their case. But in the movie, let's
talk about the movie. The movie. You watch it, it might
make you mad sometimes, you know, you say, people never
say stuff like this or that would never happen. Why
(19:25):
would they believe this? These people are spoiled brats. But
you're really seeing this in a Roschmann type scenario where
different versions of the same story are being told over
and over and over again, gets a little repetitive. The
worst is that they keep talking about details of the
molestation which probably didn't occur, over and over and over
(19:48):
and over again, the same details over and over and then.
And my wife at one point was going, Wow, these
are such detailed molestation stories. How would they even know
to make this stuff up? And then someone pointed out
that they were reading all these books about molestation stories,
(20:08):
so they got really good at it and their life
was on the line and they put on a performance
and Okay, no one bought it, and they're in prison
for the rest of their life. So that's But when
you're watching this now, you wanna hang Ryan Murphy for
trying to depict what happened. And sometimes you're mad at him.
You're like, oh, come on, this why do you do this?
(20:30):
Why do you do that? But hey, it's an epic
nine hours. He's got to fill the time, and he
made I think he did a great job, except for
repeating the child the pedophile stuff over and over because
it didn't happen. Most likely it just did not happen.
They made it up so they could. That's their defense. Hey,
(20:50):
how we get out of this. Let's make up the story.
That's the story they made up. It's no different than saying, well,
I wasn't there, I was over here. I have an alibi.
It was like, well, I did kill him, but I
had to because I thought they're going to kill me,
and you know, they were molested me in my whole life. Okay,
it's no one bought it, so we don't really have
to worry about it. But I think you can make
(21:12):
an argument that if your dad was so mean, you
had to kill him because you're so freaked out by it.
And I think the jury could have said, Okay, so
you killed your dad, we're going to go easy on
you in that voluntary manslaughter. You were so freaked out
(21:32):
and so you know, your poor thing. The problem is
they killed their mom. Okay, so for killing your mom,
you get the death penalty. No, I'm not really for
the death penalty, so I'm glad I wasn't around then.
But you get the maximum penalty for killing your mom,
which is death. So why are we even talking about it?
(21:54):
Why coming up with all these excuses about why you
killed your dad when you killed your mom. No excuses
for killing your mom. So you get maximum for your mom.
We can only kill you once. So you killed her,
you get killed, and we're done. But back then, I
don't know. I don't know why someone didn't come up
with that argument. But there's two trials. First trial, they
(22:22):
give them the benefit of the doubt and they let
all this stuff in. You're gonna let you plead this
child molesting thing or whatever, and enough of the jury
buys it, so they have a hung jury, and so
they're going to try them again. Second trial, the judge,
same judge, says, well, I don't want that to happen again,
so let me manipulate how much evidence comes in, and
then I know I'll get a guilty verdict, which I
(22:44):
don't know if that's fair either. So the first one
was let them say anything and put on a show.
And the ladies and the jury believed it. The men
said no way, and then that was unfair because they were,
you know, just crucifying their parents. There's no evidence for
(23:05):
this molestation at all. None. There's a couple like people
that said, well, yeah, I heard, and he told me
there was something going on. But they also have letters
of the Menendez kids writing letters to people and telling
them to come and testify and tell the following lie.
They call him on the phone, tell the following lie.
(23:25):
So they have that, so you can't really believe anything
they say. So basically you have to approach this so
you can't believe anything they say. But the one funny
thing is the prosecutor in the first trial says she
could not find one person to testify favorably for Jose Menendez.
(23:48):
Could not find one person that would come in and
say he was a very good guy. Lick, he's been
murdered in his living room while you're sleeping. No one,
despite all that sympathy that you might have, she couldn't
find one person that would come in and say he
was a nice guy. So that's a problem, and that's
the problem, you know, that's I guess one of the
(24:09):
reasons why the trial went on and on and then
the second So the second one, you know, they didn't
they weren't allowed to argue the molestations, so they were
just already it was over before it started, and they're
serving life sentences without the possibility of parole. Very interesting
article about Ryan Murphy's version that Eric Menendez has commented
(24:32):
on it and he said he thinks it's bad. Problem
is he didn't see it. This is an Entertainment weekly,
so he's making this big statement about it, but he
hasn't watched it. So and I go, this is what
I say to that too. Yeah, TV producers exploit murders
and victims and all this horrible stuff and they make
(24:56):
money off it and et cetera. And I think there's
a lot lot of people that could complain, which are
you know, victim's families members and things like that. And
if you have disdain for Ryan Murphy because you think
he's exploiting your death, okay, fine, valid, valid complaint. But
for Eric Menendez and Lyle Menendez, once you kill your
(25:19):
mom for no reason, you don't get to complain about anything.
So that's just now I don't know if you know this,
but there's an appeal or a request being made for
a new trial, because one of the main things is,
I mean, there's so many there's so many Menendez products
now on all these streaming service it's literally reigning Menendez
(25:45):
at the moment. And one of the documentaries shows a
letter that was written by Eric to his friend a
couple of weeks before the murders that supposedly proves that
he was being molested and by his father, and so
that would change everything. So, I mean, here's what I
(26:13):
would do, and I would face that if you want
a retrial, and this is the way I would have
done the original trial. And I don't know why, and
they never called me. This would have solved everything. There
would have been one trial, not two trials, and went over.
It would have been over in five seconds. I would
have said, Okay, your dad molested you. All right, I'm
(26:33):
the DA. I'm gonna I'm not even gonna charge you
with your dad's murder. Okay, I'm not gonna charge you.
You're innocent, self defense. I believe you. Good, good for you. Now,
I'm just gonna put you on trial for your mother's murder. Okay,
did she molest you? No? She didn't. Okay, why did
(26:59):
you kill her? Oh? Because of this and that that
she couldn't live without my dad, and she was a
prisoner too, so we put her out of her misery. Okay,
that's really bad. That's not a defense. Now you have
since I let you off for your dad. They were
convicted anyway of two consecutive there were sentence to two
(27:22):
consecutive life sentences. All right. Now each of you get
one life sentence without parole. The other was two without parole.
Now you get one without parole. Why would the DA's
office be so interested in convicting them for both murders.
Just declare them innocent of the father's murder and get
(27:44):
a life sentence without parole for the mother's murder. No
one's going to argue with that. And you could do
the same thing when they come up for appeal. If
you have half a brain, you would do that. And
forget trying to convince people that Jose Menendez did not
molest the two kids. Just throw that one out. They
(28:07):
only have one life. You have one life sentence without parole,
and it's done. But nobody calls me. It's just the
way it goes. But anyway, do I recommend it, Yes,
I do. Once you see them interviewing them about there,
they're describing their child abuse, I would just fast forward it.
I did. You didn't get anything out of that, Ryan
(28:29):
Murphy maybe did. There's a lot of you know, topless
men in this thing, a little gratuitous topless bodies in
this thing. So there's that, you know, and maybe Ryan
Murphy gets something out of that, or his audience does.
I don't know. But describing your how you're getting raped
and stuff when it probably didn't happen, you don't need that.
(28:51):
So I would fast forward through all that, which you
can do because the Netflix fast forward thing, the technology
they are improving it, it gets better and better and better,
easier to fast forward. It used to be impossible. It's
just terrible, but it's better. So, like I said, I
recommend it. But it's uh, it's not for kids, that's
for sure. All right. I think that's about it. I
(29:14):
will I'm just brief putting news. The Vandals Christmas Show
is on sale now December twentieth at the House of Blues,
San Diego. December twenty, first Saturday Night at the House
of Blues and I and it's gonna be a lot
of fun. I hope you will come. It's a big
tradition for a lot of people. It sells out of
a year, so get your tickets soon, and I will
(29:36):
now leave you with just the taste of the greatest
song I ever written. All O.
Joe Sclante live from Hollywood. If by Hollywood you mean Burbank.
This is two hours of the business, end of show business,
not two hours right now. Though, this is a special
podcast episode because it is the dol drums of the
NFL season where we are preempted almost every week, so
it's going to be podcast only most of the time
(00:28):
until oh, you know, I'm around the holidays. So we
are today going to talk about mainly the Menendez thing
on Netflix. I didn't go to an actual theater this week.
Some people did. The people that saw Terrifier three made
(00:49):
it number one, and a lot of people listened to
my advice and saw Wild Robot, but not enough to
keep it at number one. Wild Robot. It just can't
beat it. You just cannot beat it. It's a perfect movie.
Some people have said, well, I've seen the storyline done
better or whatever. I don't care. This is a beautiful film,
(01:12):
you know, and you're gonna love it. The animation is great,
and animation is just killing it right now. So congratulations
to Universal for making a better an animated product than
anything I've seen out at Disney in quite some time.
And I'm the biggest Disney fan there is, maybe not
(01:33):
the bigness I biggest. I'm not one of those Disney adults. Okay,
I'm not a pin trader. I'm just you know, I
grew up in near Disneyland. I went there a lot.
I used to get in for free early in my youth,
just hanging out there like it was a you know,
like the back alleys of the Bowery Boys and just
causing mischief. Never got kicked out, got in trouble once,
(01:57):
but never got kicked out, even though I wrote a
I guess you could call it a hit song, one
of the Vandals hit song hit song in punk rock
Pirate's Life, about taking LSD and going on the Pirates
of the Caribbean ride and being trapped in there because
you it was an interdimensional experience that was spurred by
(02:23):
a drug induced fantasy that went wrong. But I never
did that. I'm just reporting what's out on the streets,
what's going on in the streets. People are doing that.
I don't recommend it. You don't need drugs at Disneyland,
and you shouldn't take drugs at Disneyland because there's a
lot of heavy machinery and children. So come on, Okay,
(02:50):
so wild row About. You should see it, and maybe
they'll have a wild Rowbout ride at Universal Studios that
might get me to go there. I just went to
the Universal Studios in Orlando, but in Orlando like ten times,
kind of Disney World over and over. I love Epcot.
Never went to Universal. Finally went and I'm like, yeah,
it's not for me. I mean it's cool, Harry Potter's amazing,
(03:11):
but I don't know. Okay. So number three is The Joker.
People say it sucks. I'm not gonna watch it. There's
no way in hell I'm going to sit down and
watch The Joker. Beetlejuice. Beetlejuice. Great movie. You should see it.
Saturday Night Live documentary. A lot of people are going
to see it from Sony Pictures. But I'm I couldn't
get myself motivated to go and watch a documentary about
(03:32):
a TV show in a theater. I couldn't do it.
I'm not saying it. It's not gonna happen. Number six
is Piece by Piece. I'm not really interested in that one.
Transformers one again. No Nightmare Before Christmas comes back every year. Great,
The Apprentice, you don't care, Okay, let's move on to
(03:56):
what I was going to talk about. First. I'm going
to talk about, Uh, there's a couple of things. Chapel roone.
You know her, Do you know who she is? She's
a transgender queer artist or she's not transgender because she's
dresses like a girl and she is a girl, but
(04:17):
her influences are transgendered people and that's her aesthetic. It's
like I dressed like a dry queen. It's not bad.
I mean, you know, I think if you're a performer,
I think that's a pretty good one. It's a good one.
You know, it's theatrical. And yeah. One times I made
(04:40):
the mistake of like I had an old girlfriend and
like she'd ask me, oh, do you think that girl's pretty?
Do you think that girl's pretty? You know? And then
I made the mistake of answering yes or no. What
she just shouldn't do You should just say no, one's
a pretty as you dear. Anyway, after I I told
her a couple of girls I thought were pretty, one day,
(05:01):
she goes, you just like girls who look like drag queens.
And you know you don't want that because then next
time you're around a girl that looks like a drag
queen or worse at drag queen, then your girlfriend is
gonna be suspicious of you. You don't need that, so
(05:21):
you can't give him information like that. You just can't.
I only like girls that look like my wife. That's
problem too, because then there are girls that look like
my wife, and then she sees them. She goes that
girl likes me, looks like me. Why he's staring at her.
But she's not really like that, So I don't have
to worry about it. But Chapel Roane. I saw her
at Coachella. She was good. She's an underfire right now
(05:44):
because Bill Maher is criticizing her, and I'm wondering if
what happens to her career. Does this help hurt her
career help her career? I don't know, because it has
to do with Israel and Gaza and all that stuff.
And I'm not smart enough to understand what's going on
over there, and I'm not gonna try. But I do
know what Bill Maher said. He said, if you were
(06:05):
in the Mid East, they would throw you off a
building because that's what they do to queer people. So
he's trying to tell her give her a fraternal correction.
Don't get on the Palestinian bandwagon because it makes you
look like you don't know what they do there to
queer people. So entertainers always better off just kind of
(06:30):
being like, hey, you know, I'm next question. Hey, what
do you think Chapel of what's going on in Israel
and Gauza? I think all people should be free and
I'm against war in the end. That's your entertainment advice
for today. Now there's an actual legal case which is
(06:52):
kind of fascinating right now. Have you heard of it?
Limp Biscuit files a lawsuit against Universal alleging they owe
them to one hundred million dollars in royalties, And you say,
to yourself, how could that be? I say that to myself,
how could we How could Limp Biscuit earn two hundred
million dollars in royalties? Ever, they're big, but wow. Then
(07:15):
they kind of went away. But then as this nineties
thing comes back, they have a resurgence. I think last
time we played the Vandals played with them on a festival.
They were on one day, We're on the other day.
The Vandals outdrew them. But since then the nineties thing
has come back in a big way, and they're the
poster children for the nineties, so they're I think what happened.
(07:39):
So they're saying that their their royalties were done wrong,
and they're they're of course, the lawyer is going to
say they're purposely calculated to cheat people. I don't know
if I believe that, but deliberately designed to conceal artists
royalties so it can pocket the profits. That's a little
extreme of a charge to make against a the largest
(08:02):
music company in the world that other people are not suing.
But so what they were getting, they were getting statements.
Here's what you get. When you're in the music business
and you have a record out, you get these statements. Now,
if you have a sleazy label, they don't even send
you the statements. But a good label, we're going to
send you statements either quarterly or bi annually or monthly sometimes,
(08:26):
and you get these statements and it says mainly you're
looking at these statements if you're a young rock band,
to say like are you recouped or not? Are you
close to getting royalties? Because there's two kinds of royalties
you would be looking for in your statement. There would
be a statement for publishing and a statement for album sales.
We'll call it that now you're publishing. Is the amount
(08:48):
of money that the record label must pay composers when
they're mechanically reproducing their copyrights onto a tangible met or
even a digital medium. A that's caught. Why they call
it a mechanical royalty. It would be something like just
I'll just tell you, like I'd be like, let's call
(09:10):
it seventy cents a record, an album sex six cents
a song or something like that. They've got to pay
that to somebody. They pay it to whoever owns the
composing rights. Who the composer, Maybe he sold his rights,
maybe he's got a partner. They there's a company called
Harry Fox that collects that from most people. I don't
let them collect my money because I can collect my
(09:32):
own money and I don't want to give them a cut.
But you were going to if you're a record label,
every time you mechanically reproduce a record, you got to
pay that six cents a song. Okay, So you look
at that, and that goes directly to the band. You
can't you cannot touch that. You can give it to,
you give it to the publisher or the band. Sometimes
a publisher came about and said, hey, fred Durst, let
(09:53):
me give you a million dollar advance on your publishing.
Now you're paying it to that guy until it recoops.
And then it recoops, then you're that guy's got to
collect the money and start giving it to Fred Durst
or half of it or or three quarters of it,
depending on the deal you made and how much money
of an advance you took. I hope this is not
(10:14):
putting you to sleep. So that's publishing. That's for songwriting. Now,
sometimes it goes to a different person because like, if
you're Elvis, you didn't write your songs, maybe some of them.
If you're Frank Sinatra, you didn't write any of them.
So on a Frank Sinatra album, all that money's going to,
you know, Paul Anka, whoever wrote things like New York,
New York. That's where that money's going. It's not going
(10:37):
to Frank Sinatra is only getting the album sales royalties.
So those are two different things. So when but when
the Biscuit looks at their statements, their statements all said,
you're not recouped yet on your album sales, or you're publishing. Actually,
let's leave publishing a side. Let's just deal with album sales,
because you're not recouped yet, so we're not paying you anything.
(11:00):
And then they just kind of got used to that,
and because well they took says here in this article
that they got like forty two million dollars in advances
over their career. Okay, think about that, staggering number. Two
forty two million dollars. Lord, the Vandals probably got one
million dollars worth of advances over their entire career. I'm
(11:23):
going to say five hundred thousand. And we are recouped everywhere,
everywhere in town, so we get when we get a statement,
we get actual royalties because we're recouped. Now, if they
get an advance of one million dollars for their album
sales from Universal, forget about publishing. They've got to earn
out that advance before they get a cent. And that
(11:48):
would be about a dollar to a dollar thirty five
in Fred durstday, probably a dollar thirty five for each
CD that was sold. So they got to sell a
million to recoup a one point three five million dollar advance.
How many millions of records did they sell? Well, if
they got a forty two million dollar worth of advance.
As some of that's probably in publishing. That's a lot
(12:10):
of records you gotta sell. But over time the streaming
income started to come in. You know, probably sold some
songs to some films and evidently the money piled up.
They were owed a bunch of money and they didn't
and then finally when they complained about it at all,
it looks like, according to this article, Universal sent them
(12:31):
a million dollars to them to fred Durst, and a
million or to the band, then three million dollars to
the record label that fred Durst started to put out
his own records. Because remember for a while he was
like I got my own record label and directing movies,
all that kind of stuff. He was a big player.
So he's getting a good royalty rate because he owns
a record label. And they did pay him. It's like
(12:52):
they paid him maybe four million dollars or something like that.
But his lawyers say, you got two point three million
to Flawless Records, his company, and one million to him
in last August. But they filed the lawsuit last week
and they say there owe two hundred million dollars as
(13:15):
a lawyer. I heard his name is Quantinets or something
like that, and he's very colorful and he polls stunts
and things like that, and he gets in the in
the public eye and forces things to happen with public pressure.
That kind of guy. So we're all gonna watch this
(13:38):
very closely, except for bands, I mean, especially bands that
have deals with Universal and have had him through the nineties,
like some bands I won't mention that I'm very interested in.
So we'll see how that goes. That is limp biscuit
versus Universal, hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, theoretically,
(14:03):
we'll see. All right, now, we're gonna get to the
Menendez thing, because that's the only thing. I mean, I
just kind of watched it obsessively and didn't go to
a movie theater and the did you watch it? What
did you think of it? Put it in my Facebook comments.
That's the only place you can really get a hold
(14:24):
of me, or I might respond, Okay, it's nine episodes.
Nobody's getting nine episodes to do a true crime story.
But Ryan Murphy. Ry Murphy's one of the most successful
producers in television, and he's got you know, hits everywhere,
(14:44):
and he made this huge deal with Netflix and it's
kind of starting to pay off for Netflix. He did
the Dammer one, now he's doing this one nine episodes,
so they really dragged out the story, gave him an
opportunity to be very artistic with it and to tell
every side of the story, you know, all these different angles.
So I some of the parts of it I didn't
(15:07):
enjoy at all, but in the for the most part
was I was hooked to I was hooked to it,
and I enjoyed a lot of it. Is like my
era of the nineties, you know, when I'm like twenty
seven in nineteen ninety and this is going on at
that time, and I'm in law school, and it was.
(15:27):
It was fascinating back then, still fascinating now if you
don't know the story. They killed their parents and then
they seem to have gotten away with it, mainly because
the Beverly Hills police at that time weren't doing the
thing that you could pull anyone off the street. Right now,
(15:48):
there's so much true crime on TV and ask them, Hey,
if two parents got murdered in Beverly Hills or anywhere,
who's their and they had two kids. Who's the who's
the first person you're gonna look at? Well, I look
at and see if they had any affairs, you know,
going on, and then I'd look at the kids, you know,
(16:10):
do they stand again? Who's stand again? Who stand again?
Of course these kids stood to gain. I mean there's
some complications about whether they were cut out of the
wheel or not. But if you're a cop who stands
to gain, go investigate them. They didn't do anything. They
let these guys are run around for months selling or
buying roll x'es and cars, and of course they did
because they're stupid. And the whole uh the upshot of
(16:33):
the all the Menendez you know documentaries. There's a documentary
I watched. First, I thought there's a Menendez thing. I
went on Netflix and I watched. I thought it was
everyone was talking about this documentary. I watched that. That
was pretty good. The Netflix went then I realized, oh,
there's a narrative, scripted drama here. Let me watch that,
yep shot of it. These are just two stupid people,
(16:55):
stupid spoiled chemacos. These guys never had to do anything
for themselves, and they're there their dad. It seems like
their dad pretended to say like, I'm gonna be tough
on you, okay, And then but he's so worried about
his ego and that these these kids will be show
(17:17):
pieces for him, and they will go to the best
schools and they'll be the best tennis players and all
that stuff. He has to fund it all, and you
got to worry that. I think, you know one thing,
if you're a kid like that, you can worry. You
know what, I don't really need all this stuff. I'm
gonna dress like a homeless person and see how you
like that. I'm gonna embarrass you. No, no, no, no,
don't dress like a homeless person. Here's an unlimited clothing budget,
(17:39):
you know, that kind of manipulation. So he gave him everything,
yet he was cruel to them, seems like now, but
you know, defind cruel when you're trying to raise kids
who are spoiled brands. I think it comes down to
his ego. His ego is not letting him raise the
(18:00):
kids in a normal way. But I don't know how
to raise kids. Who does. But he raised them in
a way where they shot him in the face of
the shotgun. So he obviously I think I can say
he did a really crappy job. Whatever's method was, it
didn't work. But after they're arrested, then after a while
they come up with a story said we killed them
(18:22):
because we were molested, because they came up with a
theory where they could argue self defense and avoid the
death penalty and maybe get out of prison. Because if
you have an honest, good faith belief that your life
was in danger and you shot them for that honest,
good faith belief, you don't get out of jail, but
you do get to plead to like an involuntary manslaughter
(18:42):
or a voluntary manslaughter. I think that's what it would be,
and they cannot charge you with first durg murder if
you had a good faith belief that your life was
in danger. So they concocted a story where they had
a good faith belief that their life was in danger
because their parents were going to kill them. They basically
that was part of their thing. They have been molested
(19:03):
forever and their parents are going to go to kill them,
that we're going to kill them, And they didn't have
a very good support for why their mom would kill them.
And I think that is what the that's one of
the problems with their case. But in the movie, let's
talk about the movie. The movie. You watch it, it might
make you mad sometimes, you know, you say, people never
say stuff like this or that would never happen. Why
(19:25):
would they believe this? These people are spoiled brats. But
you're really seeing this in a Roschmann type scenario where
different versions of the same story are being told over
and over and over again, gets a little repetitive. The
worst is that they keep talking about details of the
molestation which probably didn't occur, over and over and over
(19:48):
and over again, the same details over and over and then.
And my wife at one point was going, Wow, these
are such detailed molestation stories. How would they even know
to make this stuff up? And then someone pointed out
that they were reading all these books about molestation stories,
(20:08):
so they got really good at it and their life
was on the line and they put on a performance
and Okay, no one bought it, and they're in prison
for the rest of their life. So that's But when
you're watching this now, you wanna hang Ryan Murphy for
trying to depict what happened. And sometimes you're mad at him.
You're like, oh, come on, this why do you do this?
(20:30):
Why do you do that? But hey, it's an epic
nine hours. He's got to fill the time, and he
made I think he did a great job, except for
repeating the child the pedophile stuff over and over because
it didn't happen. Most likely it just did not happen.
They made it up so they could. That's their defense. Hey,
(20:50):
how we get out of this. Let's make up the story.
That's the story they made up. It's no different than saying, well,
I wasn't there, I was over here. I have an alibi.
It was like, well, I did kill him, but I
had to because I thought they're going to kill me,
and you know, they were molested me in my whole life. Okay,
it's no one bought it, so we don't really have
to worry about it. But I think you can make
(21:12):
an argument that if your dad was so mean, you
had to kill him because you're so freaked out by it.
And I think the jury could have said, Okay, so
you killed your dad, we're going to go easy on
you in that voluntary manslaughter. You were so freaked out
(21:32):
and so you know, your poor thing. The problem is
they killed their mom. Okay, so for killing your mom,
you get the death penalty. No, I'm not really for
the death penalty, so I'm glad I wasn't around then.
But you get the maximum penalty for killing your mom,
which is death. So why are we even talking about it?
(21:54):
Why coming up with all these excuses about why you
killed your dad when you killed your mom. No excuses
for killing your mom. So you get maximum for your mom.
We can only kill you once. So you killed her,
you get killed, and we're done. But back then, I
don't know. I don't know why someone didn't come up
with that argument. But there's two trials. First trial, they
(22:22):
give them the benefit of the doubt and they let
all this stuff in. You're gonna let you plead this
child molesting thing or whatever, and enough of the jury
buys it, so they have a hung jury, and so
they're going to try them again. Second trial, the judge,
same judge, says, well, I don't want that to happen again,
so let me manipulate how much evidence comes in, and
then I know I'll get a guilty verdict, which I
(22:44):
don't know if that's fair either. So the first one
was let them say anything and put on a show.
And the ladies and the jury believed it. The men
said no way, and then that was unfair because they were,
you know, just crucifying their parents. There's no evidence for
(23:05):
this molestation at all. None. There's a couple like people
that said, well, yeah, I heard, and he told me
there was something going on. But they also have letters
of the Menendez kids writing letters to people and telling
them to come and testify and tell the following lie.
They call him on the phone, tell the following lie.
(23:25):
So they have that, so you can't really believe anything
they say. So basically you have to approach this so
you can't believe anything they say. But the one funny
thing is the prosecutor in the first trial says she
could not find one person to testify favorably for Jose Menendez.
(23:48):
Could not find one person that would come in and
say he was a very good guy. Lick, he's been
murdered in his living room while you're sleeping. No one,
despite all that sympathy that you might have, she couldn't
find one person that would come in and say he
was a nice guy. So that's a problem, and that's
the problem, you know, that's I guess one of the
(24:09):
reasons why the trial went on and on and then
the second So the second one, you know, they didn't
they weren't allowed to argue the molestations, so they were
just already it was over before it started, and they're
serving life sentences without the possibility of parole. Very interesting
article about Ryan Murphy's version that Eric Menendez has commented
(24:32):
on it and he said he thinks it's bad. Problem
is he didn't see it. This is an Entertainment weekly,
so he's making this big statement about it, but he
hasn't watched it. So and I go, this is what
I say to that too. Yeah, TV producers exploit murders
and victims and all this horrible stuff and they make
(24:56):
money off it and et cetera. And I think there's
a lot lot of people that could complain, which are
you know, victim's families members and things like that. And
if you have disdain for Ryan Murphy because you think
he's exploiting your death, okay, fine, valid, valid complaint. But
for Eric Menendez and Lyle Menendez, once you kill your
(25:19):
mom for no reason, you don't get to complain about anything.
So that's just now I don't know if you know this,
but there's an appeal or a request being made for
a new trial, because one of the main things is,
I mean, there's so many there's so many Menendez products
now on all these streaming service it's literally reigning Menendez
(25:45):
at the moment. And one of the documentaries shows a
letter that was written by Eric to his friend a
couple of weeks before the murders that supposedly proves that
he was being molested and by his father, and so
that would change everything. So, I mean, here's what I
(26:13):
would do, and I would face that if you want
a retrial, and this is the way I would have
done the original trial. And I don't know why, and
they never called me. This would have solved everything. There
would have been one trial, not two trials, and went over.
It would have been over in five seconds. I would
have said, Okay, your dad molested you. All right, I'm
(26:33):
the DA. I'm gonna I'm not even gonna charge you
with your dad's murder. Okay, I'm not gonna charge you.
You're innocent, self defense. I believe you. Good, good for you. Now,
I'm just gonna put you on trial for your mother's murder. Okay,
did she molest you? No? She didn't. Okay, why did
(26:59):
you kill her? Oh? Because of this and that that
she couldn't live without my dad, and she was a
prisoner too, so we put her out of her misery. Okay,
that's really bad. That's not a defense. Now you have
since I let you off for your dad. They were
convicted anyway of two consecutive there were sentence to two
(27:22):
consecutive life sentences. All right. Now each of you get
one life sentence without parole. The other was two without parole.
Now you get one without parole. Why would the DA's
office be so interested in convicting them for both murders.
Just declare them innocent of the father's murder and get
(27:44):
a life sentence without parole for the mother's murder. No
one's going to argue with that. And you could do
the same thing when they come up for appeal. If
you have half a brain, you would do that. And
forget trying to convince people that Jose Menendez did not
molest the two kids. Just throw that one out. They
(28:07):
only have one life. You have one life sentence without parole,
and it's done. But nobody calls me. It's just the
way it goes. But anyway, do I recommend it, Yes,
I do. Once you see them interviewing them about there,
they're describing their child abuse, I would just fast forward it.
I did. You didn't get anything out of that, Ryan
(28:29):
Murphy maybe did. There's a lot of you know, topless
men in this thing, a little gratuitous topless bodies in
this thing. So there's that, you know, and maybe Ryan
Murphy gets something out of that, or his audience does.
I don't know. But describing your how you're getting raped
and stuff when it probably didn't happen, you don't need that.
(28:51):
So I would fast forward through all that, which you
can do because the Netflix fast forward thing, the technology
they are improving it, it gets better and better and better,
easier to fast forward. It used to be impossible. It's
just terrible, but it's better. So, like I said, I
recommend it. But it's uh, it's not for kids, that's
for sure. All right. I think that's about it. I
(29:14):
will I'm just brief putting news. The Vandals Christmas Show
is on sale now December twentieth at the House of Blues,
San Diego. December twenty, first Saturday Night at the House
of Blues and I and it's gonna be a lot
of fun. I hope you will come. It's a big
tradition for a lot of people. It sells out of
a year, so get your tickets soon, and I will
(29:36):
now leave you with just the taste of the greatest
song I ever written. All O.
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